Everybody has a microphone now. A podcast, a livestream, a phone and a ring light. At the root of it, every one of those platforms is doing the same thing a newspaper used to do: taking information and handing it to the public. That makes it journalism, whether the person behind the mic likes the word or not. And journalism comes with a responsibility.

Officer Brandon Tatum said as much himself. In his recent interview with Frank Turek, Tatum told his audience that as a responsible journalist he researches things first. He dots the I’s and crosses the T’s before he presents anything, so he doesn’t put confusion “in the ether.” Amania Saluste agrees with every word of that. That’s why Episode 19 of The Amania Show asks a simple question: did he?

The timeline matters
Utah Valley University released its independent review of the September 10, 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk on Friday, September 25, 2026. The document runs 158 pages. According to reporting on its release, the review team conducted more than 70 interviews and examined thousands of pages of policy, training and operational records. It identified ten significant shortcomings, from line-of-sight planning to emergency alerts to staffing.
Tatum’s interview with Turek premiered on October 4. That is roughly nine days with the document in the world. And Turek is not a casual guest. He was in the courtyard, in the vehicle, at the hospital. If you have an eyewitness like that across the table and a fresh 158-page review in your hands, Amania says, you should have a long list of questions.

Tatum did bring the report up. He described it as a “cover y’all butt” report, an attempt by UVU to protect itself as the Kirk family moves toward litigation. The family has filed a notice of claim signaling its intent to sue. Nobody wants to be sued, Amania grants. But a review that spent a year interviewing police, firefighters and witnesses, and that, according to reporting, repeatedly sought interviews with Turning Point security and event representatives without a response, is not something pulled out of thin air.

The “complex question” argument
Turek spends part of the interview arguing that Candace Owens and others aren’t really “just asking questions.” They’re asking complex questions, the kind with an accusation packed inside, like asking a man when he stopped beating his wife.

Amania calls that a fair point. A question can carry an accusation. So take the accusation out. Turek has said that on the way into the venue, Charlie showed him drone footage of the crowd. Security chief Brian Harpole, as Amania recounts his interview on The Shawn Ryan Show, described drone use and restrictions differently. Strip the loaded framing away and the clean questions are still sitting there. Who recorded the footage? What told you it came from a drone? If drones could fly that day, why weren’t any used for security?
Those are the questions Amania says a journalist would have asked. Tatum didn’t.

Not every gap is an orange jacket
Turek’s next move is to say that Owens “has receipts for stuff that doesn’t matter.” Eyewitnesses always differ, he says. One remembers an orange jacket, another remembers red.

Amania’s answer is the heart of the episode. Some details fade under stress. Whether you performed CPR on a man in the back seat of a moving vehicle is not one of them. As Amania describes it, Turek has said CPR was performed and Harpole’s account says otherwise. One of those memories is wrong, and in an investigation, that matters. “Everything goes on the wall so we can see what sticks,” she says. You don’t get to decide which puzzle pieces are irrelevant before the puzzle is finished.

What the roof texts actually say
The most important stretch of the episode is the text exchange. On Tatum’s show, Turek describes the message from Dan Flood of Charlie’s security team to UVU Police Chief Jeff Long as a request for somebody on the roofs, answered with “I got you covered.”

Amania read the exchange on air as it has circulated publicly. Flood relays a student group’s warning about roof access near where Charlie would be set up, asks that it either be controlled or that one of his own people be allowed up there, and Long replies, “I got you covered.” The independent review describes the request the same way: a warning that people could reach the walkway directly above where Kirk would speak. According to reporting on the review, UVU officers cleared that walkway the morning of the event, taped off portions of it, and stationed two officers there.

That is a specific request about a specific spot. It is not a promise to cover every rooftop on campus. Amania’s point is not that anyone is lying. It’s that the interviewer had the document that clarifies the exchange and never put it on the table. “You could have pulled it up side by side,” she says. That’s the job.

Coordination broke down on more than one side
Tatum and Turek land on a conclusion: UVU police “got caught with their pants down.” Amania doesn’t let the university off the hook. Six officers for a crowd of roughly 3,000 is a staffing question the review itself raises. But she asks why the conversation stops there.

According to the review, a planned 11 a.m. walkthrough between Chief Long and Turning Point’s security supervisor did not happen. Turek’s own retelling has Long saying Charlie’s team arrived the day of the event rather than the day before. And Charlie, by Amania’s account and as the show has covered before, allegedly told his own team the night before that he feared for his life. Charlie had a private detail. Amania asks what that detail was doing, and why nobody pressed that question on a show that claims to do its homework.

Culture Corner: the light and the bottle
The second half of the episode turns personal. Amania shares her first meme made with Grok, built on a simple picture: you flip on the light and the roaches scatter. The report is the light. Watch who runs from it.
Then she turns to the set of the Tatum interview itself. Between the two men sat a bottle that looked, to her, like it had been placed on an altar. She assumed it was a sponsorship. Then she looked it up. Verdict Bourbon is Tatum’s own brand, and his store sells “Fear God” shirts, bottles and coasters alongside “I Love Jesus” hats and Bible verse merch.

Amania is careful here. She has tangled with the bottle herself and says so plainly. No judgment on anyone’s past. Her question is about what a professing believer puts his name on and sells to his brothers. She recalls Charlie Kirk telling young men to stay away from liquor because it clouds the mind. “If you love me, keep my commandments,” she says. Fear God on one hand, pass the bottle in the other. That, she argues, is exactly why the world laughs at the faith.

The takeaway
Platforms are power. If you tell your audience you research first, your audience deserves the research. Ask the clean question. Put the document on the screen. And when someone shows you who they are, believe them.
Watch the full episode of The Amania Show on YouTube, Rumble, Facebook and X, or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio and Amazon Music. Grab a “We Live at Allegedly, Potentially and Possibly” mug at AmaniaSaluste.com.

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