Everybody Hates Candace
Right-wing media figures join together to counter her conspiracy theories about the killing of Charlie Kirk.
ERIKA KIRK WENT ON FOX NEWS on Wednesday to mark the three-month anniversary of her husband Charlie’s assassination.
But her goal wasn’t just to commemorate that tragic moment. It was to staunch the cataracts of conspiracy theories that have been promoted by Candace Owens, who’s earned tens of millions of YouTube views for her wild, unfounded speculation about Kirk’s death.
Without naming Owens, Erika Kirk jabbed at an unnamed person making “hundreds and thousands of dollars every single episode going after the people that I love.”
“My message to them is to stop—to stop,” Kirk said, turning directly to the camera.
As the segment ended, Kirk held up her late husband’s new, posthumously published book and said its title, giving it an imperative intonation to reinforce the apparent message to Owens: “Stop, in the Name of God.”
If the message rang familiar that may be because two days earlier, podcaster Tim Pool had launched his own, somewhat less rousing salvo against Owens.
Fuming after an unidentified person allegedly fired shots at his rural West Virginia compound, Pool blamed Owens for injecting a new level of mania into MAGA media, even slamming his hand on his table for emphasis.
Describing in detail what he believed to be Owens’s own minimal security setup, Pool raged that he, by comparison, is forced to live in the middle of nowhere in West Virginia to deter assailants.
“Candace Owens is a fucking evil scumbag,” Pool said. “She is a degenerate cunt. She is burning everything down, and she’s gloating and smiling while she does it.”
Pool and Erika Kirk are parts of a broad new coalition coalescing on the right with the goal of stopping Owens and her conspiracy theories, many of which have targeted Charlie Kirk’s friends and the organization he founded, Turning Point USA. Their efforts are a testament to the tremendous clout Owens now wields. But timing is a major factor, too: TPUSA’s big annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix is kicking off next week, and prominent conservative figures have been open that they fear the proceedings could go sideways because of Owens’s claims.
Personalities as disparate as pro-Israel commentator Ben Shapiro, antisemitic and white-nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, and even the Internal Revenue Service have all attempted to debunk Owens’s claims this month. The groypers and the evangelical tradmoms have united in distaste for her.
It’s hard to understate how broad the stop-Candace coalition has become. Conservative pundit Will Chamberlain dubbed her “the single most evil person” on the right. Multiple media figures, including one former member of the Pussycat Dolls, have suggested Owens may be a victim of demonic oppression. Alex Clark, a TPUSA host prominent in the Make America Healthy Again movement, has dubbed Owens’s ideas “psychosis” and “Q anon level mind rot.”
But so far, Owens has been undeterred. In the eyes of her fans, she is the only person asking real questions about the assassination. Efforts to debunk her are only further proof that there is a conspiracy to hide the true nature of Kirk’s death. And Owens can defend herself, too—she was unmoved by Pool’s diatribe, for example, quipping on her own show that the perpetually beanied podcaster was merely making a “display of estrogen.”
THE BACK-AND-FORTH has some parallels to how Democrats have long struggled to find the proper way to push back against Donald Trump, oscillating among direct confrontation, dismissiveness, mockery, and just trying to ignore him. And it raises a troubling question, in the modern media age, especially on the right: Can you stop a charismatic charlatan?
And Owens certainly has charisma, albeit with a heavy heap of recklessness added on top. Less than a week after Kirk’s death, she started putting forward conspiracy theories about the assassination, implying that Israel was somehow behind his murder. Numerous red herrings followed—that there were too many attendees at Kirk’s Utah Valley University event in military-esque maroon shirts, or that an Egyptian plane had been tracking Erika Kirk’s movements.
Since late November, though, the storyline she’s promoted has converged on the real star of this story: Owens herself. Owens is already being sued by French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte over Owens’s claims that Brigitte is transgender and both Macrons are part of a centuries-old criminal cabal. In late November, Owens started to claim that, actually, it was a multinational team of assassins dispatched by the Macrons who were involved in Kirk’s death—and further, that the team was now out to kill Owens.
Owens claimed she notified the Trump administration about the attempts on her life. The FBI, the White House, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to my requests for comment. A Pentagon spokeswoman was oddly noncommittal when asked whether France, a NATO ally, was trying to murder a high-profile American media figure on American soil.1
And Owens has lately turned her focus on yet another supposed culprit in the Kirk assassination: the organization he founded and led. Charlie Kirk was “betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA,” she tweeted last week. Owens also launched numerous attacks on specific TPUSA employees, claiming that one senior employee was having gay relationships with younger men and alleging that Charlie Kirk was concerned about how the organization’s finances were being managed. Last week, the Treasury Department took the unusual step, at Erika Kirk’s request, of issuing a letter confirming that TPUSA and its affiliates are not under IRS investigation.
Owens at first shied away from explicit attacks on Erika Kirk. (In fact, she said early on that the widow was the only person, aside from Owens’s own husband, who could tell Owens to stop looking into Charlie Kirk’s murder.) But after Erika Kirk slammed her on Fox News on Wednesday, Owens made clear on her own show that the widow would now be fair game, too. She compared Erika to Meghan Markle—a reviled figure on the right—and said “You don’t just get to be widowed into the position of chairman and CEO.”
“It feels elite,” Owens said of Erika Kirk’s refusal to answer theories about the assassination. “‘I don’t have time for the little people, I don’t have time for small-pocket donors.’”
ONE GROWING WORRY on the right now appears to be that Owens’s rantings won’t just harm TPUSA but could hurt Republicans’ chances in the midterm elections by depressing voter turnout. After Pool voiced this concern, Owens shrugged it off. “They killed Charlie Kirk in broad daylight, and we don’t care about your stupid midterms,” Owens said on a December 4 episode of her show. “We just don’t care.”
Geoffrey Martin, a far-right ideologue who posts on X under the name “Captive Dreamer,” approvingly posted a message from an unnamed friend blaming Owens for channeling “literally generational hatred towards the left” away from real political goals and toward momentum-killing speculation and nonsense.
“When you say ‘Who cares about the midterms,’ you’re saying ‘Who cares about Charlie’s vision?’” said conservative business-bro podcaster Patrick Bet David.
“Truly pathetic stuff,” moaned TPUSA contributor Savanah Hernandez. “We deserve to lose.”
OWENS’S CAVALIER ATTITUDE—and the audience she has grabbed with it—has been a green-light signal to others of that ilk. Provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has also begun raising questions about the Kirk assassination, including where he was buried. It prompted Erika Kirk to acknowledge in her Fox News appearance that decisions about her husband’s body are being kept private—an understandable disclosure, but one that could end up fueling even more conspiracy theories.
In an effort to stop Owens’s conspiracizing once and for all, TPUSA challenged her to an in-person broadcast meeting this coming Monday in Phoenix. But Owens is, for now, unwilling to appear in person.
The coordinated TPUSA backlash to Owens may not convince grassroots Republicans of the official FBI narrative of the shooting, but it could still serve to warn conservative media elites that associating with Owens will carry heavy penalties, much as Charlie Kirk did when he tried to blacklist Fuentes years ago.
If that’s the measure, there’s already been one victory. On Tuesday, Tucker Carlson made comments on comedian Theo Von’s show that seemed broadly supportive of Owens’s conspiracy theories. That was a surprising move, since Carlson is still set to speak at AmericaFest. But on Wednesday, just a few hours after Erika Kirk’s Fox News appearance essentially put Owens’s theories beyond the pale of acceptable discourse, Carlson walked back his support for Owens’s theories.
IF THE TPUSA SHOWDOWN doesn’t demolish Owens, Fuentes—a one-time Owens fellow traveler who has so far stayed away from her conspiracy theories about Kirk’s killing—has vowed to “put [Owens] in a coffin, metaphorically speaking.”
“If they don’t do a good enough job, I think I’m going to have to step up,” Fuentes said on his show. “And I think I’m going to have to expose Candace Owens for what she really is.”
There are a lot of reasons to think this won’t work. For one, Owens may have a bigger audience than Fuentes, and almost all her other critics. For another, pushing back can be difficult because many of Owens’s conservative critics do not always operate in the realm of reality themselves. As Pool raged against Owens on Monday night, his guest was Gary the Numbers Guy, a sort of manosphere numerologist who provides astrology readings for macho far-right figures.
Pool asked Gary the Numbers Guy for his thoughts on Owens.
“I think Candace Owens is born in 1989, the Year of the Snake,” Gary said. “And 2025 is the Year of the Snake. And I think that’s why she’s Number 1 right now.”
Thanks, Gary. That explains it!
Horoscopes aside, there is another explanation for why Owens is causing so much trouble for MAGA right now: Charlie Kirk himself platformed her within TPUSA and at its conferences, and allowed her irrationality, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories to flourish within the Republican party.
Last week, Rochel Leah Boteach Taktuk, the daughter of celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach (himself a longtime Owens nemesis), dared to raise this uncomfortable point when she called Kirk’s alliance with Owens his “fatal flaw.” Now, she said, TPUSA was paying for Kirk’s mistake.
“When you don’t stop the evil immediately—call it out, say it’s wrong—that evil will eventually come to you, too,” she said. “And that’s what we’re seeing now.”
This could be because that spokeswoman, Kingsley Wilson, rarely actually deals with the press in public and was uncomfortable in the moment.
Who knew that delving into conspiracism-as-a-service political entertainment models would eventually turn conspiracy theories back at the practitioners? Fuck em, let them taste their own medicine.
I mean… what? This line had me cracking up “Gary the Numbers Guy, a sort of manosphere numerologist who provides astrology readings for macho far-right figures.”. This can’t be real. Lol All of this is so stupid, but delicious to see them go at each other. Thank you for reporting this stupidity. I specially love the videos you do with Sam and Tim on this idiocy.