'The Great Debate': A Logical Analysis of Candace Owens vs Andrew Wilson

“The Great Debate” has now happened. Candace Owens and podcaster Andrew Wilson sat down for an exchange moderated by Patrick Bet-David.

Interestingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly in this age of internet drama, it’s not entirely clear as to what exactly the topic of this debate was supposed to be. It certainly didn’t materialize, as one might expect, a debate over who murdered Charlie Kirk. If anything, it was more a disagreement over who did not murder the founder of Turning Point USA, with Owens claiming that it was not Tyler Robinson and Wilson claiming that it was not any of the myriad of agents whom Owens has implicated.

None of this, however, stopped Owens’ and Wilson’s fans from insisting that their favored personality “destroyed” the other.

The truth of the matter is that neither interlocutor came even remotely close to “destroying” anyone. And both were forced by the other to considerably soften the assertions they made in advance of their meeting.

Owens is by far and away among the highest-profile media influencers today. Since the cold-blooded murder of her former colleague and friend nearly one year ago, she has repeatedly identified what certainly appear to be inconsistencies and anomalies in the official narrative that Tyler Robinson, and he alone, is the culprit. In this respect, Owens’ skepticism toward government claims is to be commended. As she pointed out in her exchange with Wilson, just during the last handful of years alone, the political orthodoxy on one issue after the other has proven to be, at the very least and to put it mildly, incorrect. A methodological skepticism toward all government-approved narratives is imperative. Wilson, in contrast, and without having acquainted himself as thoroughly as Owens with the details of the case that have heretofore been made publicly available, claimed that the prosecution’s case is “overwhelming.”

At this juncture, he has no logical basis for making that strong of a claim. And Owens made that point.

But what Wilson didn’t explicitly articulate (unless he did and I missed it) is that his judgment that the evidence for the official account is “overwhelming” is really just the determination that it is far more plausible than Owens’ alternative account that implicates as co-conspirators in the murder of Charlie Kirk the Trump administration, the Israeli government, the French Foreign Legion, Turning Point USA, and Erika Kirk herself. It is this particular heterodoxy of hers, after all — and not her challenges to the official theory — that has made Candace Owens as divisive and controversial a figure within the right as she’s become since Kirk’s assassination.

And Wilson did indeed reveal that Owens did not logically justify her inference from the premise that the government narrative lacks cogency to the conclusion that the governments of three countries conspired with each other, the organization that Kirk founded, and Kirk’s widow to murder him.

Logically, none of this means that Owens’ theory is false. There very well could be a cover-up, and some, if not all, of the actors whom she implicates could be culpable for the murder of Kirk. Yet there is no epistemic warrant, by any canons of basic logic, to move from the former proposition to the latter.

Nor do any other considerations that Owens has so far cited substantiate such an ambitious hypothesis. While she may well have anonymous contacts that she’s consulted to reinforce her theory, unless they can be independently corroborated, they may as well not even exist.

Owens and Wilson make similar mistakes.

That the Tyler Robinson-as-lone-assassin theory, from what we know about it as of this juncture, is problematic does not mean that the other parties to whom Owens alludes are guilty, as she insinuates. It doesn’t even prove that anyone other than Tyler Robinson himself is guilty as charged. That one theory is questionable is not grounds for the truth of any others.

This means that it is logically possible that both the State’s account and Owens’ account are false. In principle, any number of other possibilities could be true.

This being so, that the orthodox account may be more empirically defensible, or at least not as indefensible, as the alternative theory that Owens has espoused does not mean that it is true, much less “overwhelming,” as Wilson insisted.

The verdict is that while neither participant in “The Great Debate” can be said, logically, to have scored a decisive victory over the other, each did get the other to admit that neither had adequate evidence to bear out, with the certainty expressed, their respective positions: Owens forced Wilson to concede that the evidence for the orthodox view of the Kirk assassination was at least not quite as “overwhelming” or “compelling” as he initially believed. At the same time, though, Wilson forced Owens to grant that even on the assumption that Tyler Robinson is the “patsy” that she made him out to be, this is no rational ground for her theory as to what occurred.

Given the phenomenon that is Candace Owens; given that it is primarily her alternative account of the shooting death of Charlie Kirk that gave rise to this debate in the first place; and given that, until now, no one has been able to challenge her directly on this account, that Andrew Wilson was able to extract this concession from her is no small feat.

This exchange was a victory for logic — even if logic isn’t exactly what appeals to internet audiences who are more interested in seeing their favorite celebrities “destroy” those celebrities whom they despise.

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