Candace Owens Gets Inside TPUSA’s Head
Her nutty theories about the killing of Charlie Kirk have won over some of his organization’s employees.
TURNING POINT USA COMMUNICATIONS staffer Aubrey Laitsch was called into a meeting last month and abruptly told she was being fired, according to a video she posted online last week.
In her telling, the reason Laitsch was given for being let go involved a convoluted story about an Uber ride. It went like this:
A TPUSA executive had taken an Uber and asked his driver what he thought of the organization. The driver replied that he had heard it was in chaos in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination—and that no one inside TPUSA liked Erika Kirk, Kirk’s widow and now TPUSA’s CEO. Then the Uber driver revealed to the TPUSA executive that the source of his information was Laistch, who the driver claimed was a high school friend of his daughter’s.
A strange story, and one Laitsch said she didn’t buy. She then offered up another explanation—one she said didn’t come up during her discussion with TPUSA executives but which she sensed was a factor in her termination.
Laitsch, as she outlined in her video, seems to genuinely believe that her own organization had something to do with its founder’s murder or an ensuing coverup.
The unfounded claim that Charlie Kirk’s assassination was some sort of inside job is growing in popularity on the right after being promoted by YouTuber and former TPUSA employee Candace Owens. Laitsch claims that others at TPUSA are suspicious about Kirk’s murder too—and that they had been discussing among themselves how they couldn’t raise the issue internally.
“I just have a gut feeling that I was terminated from Turning Point because I am questioning the narrative of what happened to my role model and CEO, Charlie Kirk, on the day of his assassination,” Laitsch said in the video.
Laitsch did not respond to a request for comment.
Neither did TPUSA. But in fairness to the group, there aren’t many jobs where you’d still be employed if you started telling people you thought your bosses murdered someone.
In that regard, Laitsch’s firing—for whatever the reason—isn’t noteworthy. What is, though, is how widespread Owens’s ideas around Kirk’s death have become.
Laitsch is just one of several Turning Point staffers who has been fired amid what’s been dubbed a “purge” of employees. While it’s not clear how many have been let go, Owens has played audio on her show of another staffer who claimed to have been fired without explanation. Owens also claimed that a TPUSA executive showed up at a third staffers home to fire her and demand the immediate return of her company devices. A GoFundMe for staffers booted in the “TPUSA Purge” has raised more than $71,000 as of Thursday morning.
It’s hard to say if these firings are being driven by the (very sensible) disapproval of staff talking about their company killing its founder, or paranoia about Owens having credible information about internal TPUSA activities—or both. But clearly, someone within the organization is leaking to Owens. Just this year, the highly controversial podcaster posted videos of Erika Kirk on internal videochats in the wake of Kirk’s assassination that were interpreted on the online right as insufficiently mournful.
Owens already received a cease-and-desist order from TPUSA in January, for spreading conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death. But she seems undeterred by it. Nor does she seem tripped up by the nondisparagement agreement she signed with the organization (from when she was employed there) that could make her theories even more legally perilous. On her Tuesday show, Owens quipped that, if Erika Kirk had been killed instead of Charlie—and if Charlie then acted as Erika Kirk is acting now in the wake of his assassination—he would be on trial for his wife’s murder.
“Erika Kirk should be dragged into a police precinct for questioning,” she said.
OWENS’S CONSPIRATORIAL IDEAS ideas have become so widespread, they’re even starting to derail Trump administration task forces. On Monday, the White House Religious Liberty Commission convened what should have been a mild-mannered meeting on fighting antisemitism. But the gathering went off the rails when one panelist, former Miss California USA Carrie Prejean Boller, chastised Babylon Bee satirist Seth Dillon for calling Owens an antisemite.
“I would really appreciate it if you would stop calling Candace Owens an antisemite,” she told Dillon. “She’s not an antisemite. She just doesn’t support Zionism. And that really has to stop.”
As panelists as august as Dr. Phil McGraw shifted uneasily in their seats, Prejean Boller echoed Owens’s attacks on Israel, and cited her own conversion to Catholicism just ten months ago to explain why she couldn’t support the country.
“Catholics do not embrace Zionism, just so you know,” she said. “So are all Catholics antisemites?”
On Wednesday, Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick (R), the head of the commission, announced that he had decided to fire Prejean Boller. But in a twist, Prejean Boller responded on X that she didn’t consider Patrick’s move legally valid, and planned to show up at the next meeting anyway.
Meanwhile, Laitsch’s story has taken a turn of its own. On Wednesday, she posted a video of her husband confronting a man near their house who Laitsch claims was photographing the property and their cars. The man, whose face isn’t shown in the video, appears to be a private investigator or process server taking the photos to aid in some kind of potential legal action against Laitsch.
In other words: Expect plenty more fuel for these Charlie Kirk conspiracy theories coming soon.
Bad boy Elijah Schaffer is back!
TRAD-DAD PUNDIT ELIJAH SCHAFFER took a serious blow to his reputation last week when right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos posted an audio recording that seemed to show Schaffer had an affair with fellow trad right-wing personality Sarah Stock. After all his talk about being a reformed family man, Schaffer’s critics wondered, was the former Glenn Beck protégé back to his dissolute old ways?
Stock posted an X message admitting broadly to some wrongdoing, then vanished from the internet. But Schaffer is trying something different: pivoting back to the bad-boy persona that defined his earlier career in MAGA media.
In an X post made shortly after last week’s False Flag on the scandal, Schaffer vowed to get revenge on “fucking snake bitch” Yiannopoulos. He posted a suave picture of himself inexplicably overlaid with Matrix-style green code:
Then Schaffer effectively said that he did have an affair—and that everyone should get over it.
“I have a dick and it works,” Schaffer wrote. “Everyone can go cry about it.”
What a way to put it! Could Schaffer’s pivot from trad-dad back to shameless manwhore work? Not if his former cohost at Beck’s the Blaze, Sydney Watson, has anything to say about it. After once sharing a show with Schaffer, then suing the Blaze for tolerating Schaffer’s alleged harassment of her, Watson put out a video Tuesday saying she won’t let Schaffer rehabilitate his image once again.
“I think he’s just gotten worse, honestly,” Watson said. “Because of that, he’s gone on not only to victimize more people, but hurt the people closest to him.”
While her settlement with the Blaze prevented Watson from revealing much of anything about Schaffer, beyond what was already in her 2023 lawsuit, Watson did publish a whole new swath of unsourced, anonymous allegations about Schaffer’s sex life that she said came from other MAGA media personalities.
“Welcome to hell!” Watson said, summing it all up nicely.
It has to be EXHAUSTING to be MAGA
"I have a dick and it works," Schaffer wrote.
What can I say? The man is a poet.