Back in November I wrote about the strange case of ‘Galen Hallcyon’. Galen is a YouTube blogger with over 15,000 subscribers. In October he posted a Facebook statement claiming to have conversed with Chapel Hill triple murderer Craig Hicks before his crimes. In this statement, he also claims the contents of his interaction with Hicks kept him ‘up at night’ because Hicks revealed himself to be a ‘highly dangerous’ individual motivated by the views of anti-theistic video bloggers. The Chapel Hill murders took place in February and why Galen Hallcyon only decided to share this information eight months later remains unclear – as do most of the details.

Regardless, a vocal gaggle of the usual regressive suspects began amplifying Hallcyon’s words as though they were conclusive proof of Craig Hicks’s hatred towards religious people.

I tried to politely contact Galen Hallcyon publically and in private to attempt to verify his claims, namely:

When did he have a conversation with Craig Hicks, and in what form did this take? What did Hicks say that concerned him?

Given the undeniable public interest in this case, will he be making his conversation with Hicks available to the public?

And most importantly – did he pass this conversation/information on to the police?

I received no response from Galen Hallcyon so released my email as an open letter. His response? He simply blocked me from his Twitter and Facebook pages (and anyone else who asked about Hicks) and posted the below comments:

I’d submit that this is not the response such a serious issue deserves. Galen has maintained a steady online presence since my open letter was published in November. He was also able to find the time to review movies, appear on YouTube video chats and fundraise for his medical bills – but unfortunately could not find the time to answer a number of simple, yet important questions. Did he make the whole thing up? Or does he genuinely not think that clarifying information (that may be valuable in a triple murder case) is a worthy use of his time? I’d suggest such an unserious response indicates a very unserious individual.

It’s rather telling that those who spread this information with such excitement did so not out of a desire to obtain truth and justice for the victims, but to gleefully take a swing at ‘new atheists’. Did these individuals try to verify this information with Hallcyon before spreading it? Of course not. Did they pass this information on to the people investigating this crime, or even bother to spare a moment to ask whether Galen Hallcyon had? You must be joking. They don’t care about the victims of this horrific crime, they care about scoring points for their identity politics.

Well, I did pass this ‘information’ on to the Chapel Hill Police Department back in November and I’ve since received confirmation that they will be looking in to it. Galen Hallcyon seems to think that if he ignores this then it will just go away. Well, it won’t. So long as people keep using his public comments to denigrate ‘new atheists’, I will continue to demand he take responsibility for them and clarify his claims.

If it is the true that Craig Hicks’s rabid anti-theism played a role in the slaughter of three innocent Muslims, I very much want that truth to be known – regardless of how ‘inconvenient’ that may be to my own ‘worldview’. We shall wait and see whether or not any of this information comes up in the official investigation, then draw our conclusions on how credible it was from there. For now – if Galen Hallcyon isn’t going to take this seriously, there’s no good reason to take him and his claims seriously.

Stephen Knight is host of The #GSPodcast. You can listen to The Godless Spellchecker Podcast here, and support it by becoming a patron here.

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