Will Sommer: The Reporter Tracking the Right's Post-Kirk Civil War
Will Sommer, a senior reporter at The Bulwark and author of its False Flag newsletter, has covered the internal conservative movement's fracturing in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination, describing a level of anger and desire for revenge among right-wing figures that he says exceeds reactions even to the earlier Trump assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Sommer traces much of the ongoing division to Candace Owens, a former Charlie Kirk associate turned independent commentator, whose conspiracy theories about Kirk's death he says gained enough traction that figures including Tim Pool and Kirk's own widow, Erika Kirk, eventually spoke out against her directly, without visibly slowing her audience growth. In a separate discussion, Sommer and commentator Tim Miller examine Owens's claim that French President Emmanuel Macron and Israel dispatched an assassination squad to target her personally, a theory Sommer treats as illustrative of how far Owens's Kirk-related claims have drifted from verifiable fact while continuing to draw large audiences. Sommer, who had covered Kirk professionally for years before his death, has written separately about his complicated legacy from a perspective that neither dismisses nor celebrates it uncritically.