A 71-year-old man who falsely claimed to have shot conservative activist Charlie Kirk and distracted police immediately after the shooting has been charged with possessing child sex abuse material.

The bizarre twist was reported by the Utah County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday after police searched George Zinn’s phone during an investigation following the scene he caused at the shooting.

‘Agents did see several images on the phone of prepubescent girls scantily dressed.’

Video from the shooting showed Zinn being dragged away by police as he yells, “Shoot me!” as his pants fall to the ground.

He later allegedly admitted to investigators that he was trying to distract the police to help the real shooter escape. Zinn is known for crashing numerous political and entertainment events in the Salt Lake City area.

The Utah Department of Public Safety had said he was released but charged with obstruction of justice.

On Monday, police said they discovered more than 20 “graphic” images of child sex abuse on his phone. He was allegedly sharing the images with other parties.

“Those agents did see several images on the phone of prepubescent girls scantily dressed,” the sheriff’s office said.

Zinn was charged with four counts of sexual exploitation of a minor.

RELATED: Explosive alleged text messages between suspected Kirk killer and his transgender roommate obliterate liberal narrative

Law enforcement officials arrested Tyler Robinson for the killing of Kirk and released evidence that included text messages allegedly made by the suspect confessing to the crime.

Funeral arrangements for Kirk are scheduled for Sunday at State Farm Stadium.

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Surveillance footage of the murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, NC, reveals that the other passengers on the train didn’t help her until some time had passed — and Blaze media co-founder Glenn Beck doesn’t believe it’s his place to judge.

“I’m torn about how I feel about the people on the train because my first instinct is, they did nothing. They did nothing,” Glenn says.

“What would I have done? What would I want my wife to do in that situation?” Glenn asks.

However, after Glenn and BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere imagine their wives in the same situation, they realize it’s not their place to judge.

“It’s tough to put yourself in that situation. It’s very easy to watch a video on the internet and talk about your heroism. Like, everybody can do that very easily on Twitter,” Stu says.

“When you’re in a vehicle that doesn’t have an exit with a guy who just murdered someone in front of you, has dripping blood off of a knife that’s standing 10 feet away from you, 15 feet away from you, there is probably a different standard there that we should all kind of consider,” he continues.

“When I’m thinking of my wife, my advice to my wife would not be to jump into the middle of that situation at all costs,” Stu says.

While Glenn agrees, he does hope he himself would have taken action.

“I would hope that I would have gotten up and at least tried to help her, you know, help her up off the floor, at least be there with her as she’s seeing her life, you know, spill out in under a minute,” Glenn says.

“And that’s the other thing we have to keep in mind. This all happened so rapidly,” he adds. “A minute will seem like a very long period of time in that situation, but it’s a very short period of time in real life.”

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Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin — 22-year-old Tyler Robinson — made his first court appearance Tuesday afternoon in Utah.

During the virtual hearing, Robinson was briefly seen on video wearing what appeared to be a bulletproof vest. The only words Robinson spoke were his full name in response to the judge’s request for him to state it: “Tyler James Robinson.”

‘I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I’m going to take it.’

The judge noted that he reviewed Robinson’s financial status declaration, found the defendant “indigent,” and would assign an attorney to represent him. The judge also said Robinson would remain in custody with no bail.

A trial team representative stated that a pretrial protective order was submitted on behalf of Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk; the judge granted that request. The trial team representative added that it had just submitted to the court a notice of the state’s intent to seek the death penalty against Robinson.

The judge then read the charges against Robinson, which Utah County Attorney Jeff Gray formally brought against the suspect just two hours prior.

Those charges include aggravated murder and felony discharge of a firearm causing serious bodily injury. Gray in his earlier news conference Tuesday said the state is alleging in regard to the latter two charges “aggravating factors” because it’s believed that Robinson “targeted” Kirk because of the TPUSA founder’s “political expression” and knew that children were present at the scene and would “witness the homicide.”

RELATED: Utah County attorney formally charges Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin

Photo by Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images

The other charges include:

One count of obstruction of justice, a second-degree felony, for “moving and concealing the rifle used in the shooting.”One count of obstruction of justice, a second-degree felony, for “disposing [of] the clothing he wore during the shooting.”One count of witness tampering, a third-degree felony, for directing his roommate to “delete his incriminating texts.”One count of witness tampering, a third-degree felony, for directing his roommate to “stay silent if police questioned him.”One count of commission of a violent offense in the presence of a child, a Class A misdemeanor, for “committing homicide knowing that children were present and may have seen or heard the murder and did so” based on Kirk’s “political expression.”

RELATED: Explosive alleged text messages between suspected Kirk killer and his transgender roommate obliterate liberal narrative

After the judge read the charges against Robinson, he soon declared the hearing in recess. The judge earlier stated that the next hearing — which also will be virtual — is set for 10 a.m. Sept. 29.

Blaze News previously reported that Gray also stated that Robinson texted his transgender roommate and told him to drop everything to look at a note he had left under his keyboard. According to charging documents, the note read: “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I’m going to take it.”

Gray also confirmed that Robinson had begun to date his biologically male roommate, who had begun transitioning to female. An alleged text chain between Robinson and his roommate also appears to undermine a left-wing narrative about a possible motive that painted Robinson as right-wing due to his family connections.

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A senior national security analyst for CNN is being criticized heavily for misleading her followers about the possible motivation for the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Law enforcement officials continue to investigate what led Tyler Robinson to allegedly shoot and kill Kirk while he spoke at one of his campus events at Utah Valley University. Some of the evidence released supports the suspicion that Robinson was motivated by political animus against Kirk’s conservative beliefs.

‘Suggesting she’s knowingly lying is more creditable than the fact she’s this dumb.’

Juliette Kayyem said that her reading of the evidence led her to conclude nothing about the possible motive for Robinson’s alleged actions.

“I have read a lot about Charlie Kirk’s killer’s family, his history and writings. A partisan can find what they are looking for,” she wrote. “But to date, from what we know, there is no dominant political ideology. Instead it’s a stew of irony, violence, gaming fetish and Discord.”

Kayyem was immediately assailed for what many saw as a dishonest and biased assessment of the available evidence.

“This is blatantly false. Killing a leading voice in the conservative movement because you hate what he stands for is a clear statement of leftist ideology for anyone not living in a George Orwell novel,” Fox News columnist David Marcus responded.

“He assassinated a conservative, and his family and friends say he embraced leftist ideology. His boyfriend is trans. There is no evidence that he was aligned with the right; only wishcasting,” reporter Chuck Ross replied.

“Dear @CNN, yet again your senior analyst is spreading misinformation online,” talk radio host Erick Erickson said.

“I’d like to believe she’s delusional; but suggesting she’s knowingly lying is more creditable than the fact she’s this dumb,” responded Mark Hemingway of RealClearInvestigations.

“We just may never know what motivated this furry-chasing gay with a trans boyfriend who used anti-fascist messaging during his assassination of a figure hated by the Left because they consider him an anti-LGBTQ fascist,” reads one popular response with 4.7K likes.

“Reading this made me feel dumber,” communications director Jeremy Redfern joked.

RELATED: ‘You woke us the f**k up!’ Greg Gutfeld fires off message on Fox News after assassination of Charlie Kirk

Many suspect that Robinson was motivated by support for the transgender movement, as he was dating a biological male who identified as transgender. Since Kayyem’s post on social media, prosecutors have released damning texts allegedly from Robinson that point to his leftist political motivation.

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Just a couple of months ago, Steve Deace spoke at an event at Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, where Charlie Kirk regularly worshipped and collaborated on initiatives. Right before he walked on stage, Charlie leaned down and whispered a word of encouragement in his ear.

“Go hard,” he said.

Today, as we continue to wrestle with the loss of Charlie, we all need to take that advice to heart. It’s time to go hard.

But what does that look like? How do we “go hard” in a way that hits at the root of this violence and culminates in positive change?

At a recent event for Conservative Partnership Institute, Steve answered that question with three bold initiatives that we all bear the responsibility of ensuring come to fruition.

1. Punish evil

Steve beseeches all of us, but especially elected officials, to treat evil as such. Enough with leniency and delay. Either we punish evil, or we welcome it through the front door.

“The scriptures say the only reason God permits government on this Earth is to be an avenging angel, a sword of righteousness against evil,” Steve says.

“The people in this room who hold elected office and the ones who [do] not, you must punish evil. … You must!” he urges.

Failure to do so will have one outcome, he warns: “more evil.”

To the dissenters who argue that to meet evil with fitting consequences will backfire because Democrats will only return the favor, Steve has a sobering message: “They’ve already done it all! They’re all going to do it all over again. 2005 called, and it wants its talking points back. That’s not where we are right now. My friend’s body is cold to testify to that truth.”

But it’s not just Charlie’s tragic death that demands justice. There are many atrocities in this country that have yet to be addressed, Steve says. Whether it’s the deliberate invasion of illegal immigrants perpetrated by the Biden regime or the fact that the American people were lied to about Joe Biden’s mental acuity while a cabal of shadowy Democrats ran the country in his stead, justice has yet to be served on a number of iniquities.

“Who’s gone to prison for this? Who’s been referred to prosecution? Who’s been arrested?” Steve asks.

“We have to punish evil. If we don’t punish evil, there will be more evil. I promise you,” he reiterates.

2. Stop the contagion of political sadism

“We have a social contagion, and I’m not talking about trannyism. … This is actually worse. I will call it political sadism,” Steve says.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s near assassination and Charlie Kirk’s murder, the radical leftists have shown their true colors. Their brazen celebration of the attacks on people they consider their political enemies reveals just how sick and twisted they’ve become. They are reveling in “the physical suffering and debasement of people,” Steve laments.

It’s not even taboo anymore. “Now teachers, nurses, public officials, financial advisers just post this stuff under their names, and they’re proud to do it,” he says.

“It’s like a macabre carnival of ghouls fetishizing, turning the death of, I think, our best general into a kink that they cannot wait to satiate and rub in your faces and share with others.”

So what do we do? We employ one of the left’s favorite weapons: “cancel culture.”

“We have to publicly shame this out of existence. That’s the only antidote,” Steve says.

“I kind of like cancel culture when my side’s doing the canceling,” he admits.

“We have to [employ cancel culture] in return because they’re already doing all those things to us right now. This stuff has to be shunned. There should be a graveyard of lost jobs, lost careers. The social stigma to this should be overwhelming.”

3. Redden the red states

“Our red states have to be every bit as red as the blue states are blue,” Steve says.

He explains that blue states never eased up on their progressivism after Donald Trump became the president. If anything, they doubled down because “they have complete and total control of the governing infrastructure … [and] the policy-making” in their states.

So why aren’t red states doing the same?

“It needs to be inconceivable that they could propose these [liberal] policies in the places where we have total control,” Steve says, urging states like Wyoming and Idaho to become the right’s California and Massachusetts.

The attitude we need to have toward progressive voters moving into red states is this, he says: “You’re not going to move here because Google gave you a job and come here and vote communism and cultural Marxism into my state. … There’s more to life than a balance sheet, and part of that calculus needs to be the moral one.”

We need to adopt the bold stance Ronald Reagan took when he declared an arms race against the Soviet Union: “Do not launch on us, [or] we will launch on you.”

“We have to immediately establish that mutually assured destruction deterrent. We have to. If we don’t, I’m telling you right now, we’re going to bury more Charlies,” Steve says. “Well, we won’t bury any more Charlie Kirks because there’s nobody like him. The void he has left is immeasurable. But we’re going to bury more of us because they’re unbowed.”

The debate is no longer Republican versus Democrat or even conservative versus liberal. The debate is now: “Do I still get to be an American or not?”

How we respond to the death of Charlie Kirk will determine the answer to that question, Steve says.

“Don’t sentence your children and grandchildren to have to settle these disputes in unpeaceable means because we weren’t aggressive enough to defend them with the peaceable means we still have,” he pleads.

This is the fight Charlie was fighting until his last breath. That’s “why I am confident the next words he heard after that bullet ripped through his neck were, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant,’” he says.

We should all live our lives so that we, too, can hear these words when our time comes.

So “go hard,” Steve says.

Our future depends on it.

To hear his full speech, watch the video above.

Want more from Steve Deace?

To enjoy more of Steve’s take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

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