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The official story of Charlie Kirk’s death is that the leader of the conservative group Turning Point USA was fatally shot in September during a campus event by Tyler Robinson, who is accused of killing Kirk out of loathing for his anti-trans views. This story is backed by text messages from Robinson’s phone, a police investigation, and the fact that it happened on camera in front of thousands of people.

Then there’s the story of what happened that comes from Candace Owens, a highly influential voice on the far right whose podcast consistently pulls several million listeners. Owens’ story of Kirk’s death involves possible betrayal by Kirk’s own wife, Erika. It also involves a shadowy cabal of billionaires and government agencies and possibly even future-bending technology from ancient Sumeria. And, inevitably, nefarious involvement from Israel and the Jews. Owens’ story is backed by innuendo, exaggerations, outright falsehoods, and, in several instances, messages delivered through Owens’ own dreams.

That story is front and center this week, after Owens released the first two episodes of her new series Bride of Charlie. The episodes suggest that Erika Kirk is not the sympathetic grieving widow she appears to be—and that something sinister is going on with the new leader of Turning Point USA.

The series’ two-minute trailer, released Monday, landed to outrage from much of the rest of the conservative pundit class, which balked at the idea of inflicting such pain on a grieving widow. Elsewhere on X, where so many of Owens’ supporters tend to operate, the documentary was hailed as a powerful strike against Zionist-controlled elements of the Republican Party and its affiliates.

For the rest of America not versed in the internecine fights of the online right, this situation may seem baffling—or even trivial, given the ludicrous nature of Owens’ claims. But Candace Owens’ declaration of war against the rest of the mainstream right actually matters for all of us. Because ultimately, the Owens–TPUSA rift is the story of an identity crisis that has brought the right to its current inflection point. It may very well have ramifications of that for the country’s future: for its relationship with Israel, for the future of the conservative movement, and for whether the modern GOP opts to work within the existing system or tries to blow it all up.

To get to the biggest question: What is Owens claiming here?

Well, only the first couple episodes of this series have come out, and she hinted in the show that she could do one to five more episodes. (To be clear, this “investigation” is not a slick documentary, as the trailer teased, but just special branding of her regular show, consisting of Owens talking to the camera.) In the first episode, she mostly discussed reasons she thinks Erika is a suspicious character: biographical details that, to Owens, don’t seem to line up, such as Erika’s claims about her father’s involvement in her life and her birth date on official documents.

That being said, the trailer teased the claims she’s likely to make, rehashing arguments she has made in recent months. In episodes that followed Charlie’s assassination, Owens has implied that Erika Kirk conspired with other Turning Point USA leaders and even foreign governments to have Charlie killed. She suggested that this had to do with Erika’s own personal ambitions, as well as larger geopolitical schemes to do with Charlie’s ideology. She also suggested that Erika’s work with a charity in Romania was actually a cover for child sex trafficking. And she speculated that Erika groomed and sexually harassed a 15-year-old girl.

Foreign governments? Betrayals? Grooming? What exactly is Owens getting at?

There’s no tidy, unified theory here. Owens is maximalist in her approach, tossing out anything that to her seems funky or confusing or too coincidental, even when they lead to theories that contradict one another. It seems she thinks that she can retain her credibility by never stating things definitively but instead simply looking for answers.

She likely won’t come out and state, point blank, that Eirka had Charlie killed. Instead she’ll point out what’s “weird” and “doesn’t add up” about Erika’s behavior. When people inevitably express outrage, she’ll respond by asking them why it’s so bad to raise questions. Don’t they want to figure out the truth about what happened to Charlie? Isn’t it fair to ask questions about Erika, given that she’s now in charge of a massively powerful organization? 

Is there any kernel of truth to anything she’s saying?

Absolutely not. Any discrepancies in Erika’s biography can be explained by the normal messiness of human life and memory, plus mundane bureaucratic issues. The Romanian claims are based on coincidences and tangential connections—Erika’s (legitimately criticized) appearance alongside a pastor accused of enabling a missionary to traffick children in Romania, plus speculation about both figures operating in Romania. The grooming claims have to do with an uncharitable reading of social media posts that reflect a kind of millennial style of joking among women. And, most importantly, there’s zero evidence Erika had anything to do with her husband’s assassination.

OK, but you mentioned time travel and ancient supertech? Where does that all come in?

In case there was any question of how outlandish this all is, the first episode teased the theory that Erika is a time traveler or was trained from childhood to be an agent of the U.S. government’s top-secret program to use ancient Sumerian technology to alter the course of history.

This isn’t new for her. In January, she spoke of a CIA-run “Project Looking Glass” in which the “deep state” stole a device produced by an ancient Sumerian civilization that allowed them to peer into the future and see different potential outcomes. Owens is pulling from an older conspiracy theory here, one that involves different branches of reality and justifies a feeling that our reality is somehow fundamentally wrong. In her version of the theory, Project Looking Glass agents had used the device to see that Charlie was significant in some way and had him marked, monitored, and followed since his youth in an effort to control the outcome. (Owens, too, had a government handler who followed her, she said.) Charlie told her he was a time traveler, she said. Streetlamps magically turned off when he walked by. It was clear to her that he was cosmically important and that when Charlie started to resist the path his handlers wanted—when he started to reject Jewish money and influence, in other words—the agents panicked and had him killed.

In this first Bride of Charlie episode, she expanded the theory. She revealed that Erika had attended a private “Tesseract School” in Arizona and that the school (which she said was run by Jews) had rented a building from a Jewish school with “Looking Glass” in the name. Owens was excited. “Looking Glass” like the secret CIA program! “Tesseract” like the bridge in space-time in the book A Wrinkle in Time! The proof was there all along! She didn’t spell out what this all meant, but it seemed to imply that Erika was raised to be a Project Looking Glass agent assigned to handle Charlie. On the episode, which was titled “A Wrinkle in Time,” she was triumphant: The critics had laughed at her for talking about ancient magic technology and time travel, but they were actually deflecting rising panic, she said.

Time travel? Is it possible she’s trolling?

She doesn’t seem to be. She claims that she and Charlie often spoke not just of politics but of more intimate matters, including shared, shall we say, spiritual capabilities—third eye, astral projecting, that kind of thing. She has always treated supernatural matters seriously, and they routinely factor into a lot of her theories. She has a fixation with MKUltra, the CIA’s mind control experimentation program, and she believes that the government continues to engage in mass mind control and human engineering experiments. (Where she can, she blames this on the work of Jewish mystics practicing the occult.) That being said, she may see timeline-altering technologies as no more or less plausible than governments having Charlie killed for straightforward political schemes. She’s just putting some theories out there! You can pick the ones you find most compelling.

OK, let’s back up. What’s Owens’ whole deal?

Candace Owens entered politics as a content creator in 2017, after she was radicalized by an incident related to Gamergate, the politically charged harassment campaign against women in the video game industry that served as an early rallying point of the online misogynist far right. Before that, Owens had no interest in politics. She became an overnight success on social media, however, and Charlie Kirk hired her as communications director for Turning Point USA after seeing her speak. Owens is compelling as a communicator, speaking with absolute conviction. It’s also, it has to be said, thrilling for a lot of conservatives to hear a Black woman reject complaints of white supremacy and police brutality. Plus, she has a trad wife thing going on, emphasizing her deference to her husband’s decisions.

Owens pretty quickly carved out her space as being on the edgy, just-asking-questions end of the spectrum. In 2019, she had some kind of falling out with Charlie, had a stint hosting a show for PragerU, and joined the Daily Wire as a podcast host in 2020. At that point, she already seemed pretty fringe, and her relationship with Ben Shapiro and other Daily Wire personalities deteriorated over her antisemitic comments; she left in 2024 after liking a social media post about blood libel, a centuries-old antisemitic conspiracy theory. So there have long been signs of who she really is.

But now on her independently produced show, she has truly gone off the rails. She claimed to have “left the cult of science” and called dinosaurs “fake and gay.” She dabbles in Holocaust denial. She defended Harvey Weinstein. She was sued by Brigitte Macron for running a multiepisode investigation “proving” the French first lady was secretly a man. She devotes a lot of air time to talking about Israel and the Jews’ control of American institutions. Critics tend to debate whether she is a vulture or just losing her grasp on reality, but there’s no question she’s hit on a successful formula. Every nonsensical or offensive thing she says seems to only strengthen her following.

And the leading conservative voices weren’t concerned she made their movement look ridiculous?

Thanks to the “no enemies on the right” mantra that has been drilled into this movement for years, few openly challenged her for most of her time in the spotlight. It didn’t help that she had been praised by President Donald Trump and other major Republicans. It wasn’t until recent weeks that people began really vocalizing their animosity. Even in December, during a Turning Point USA event after Owens was already deep in Charlie Kirk conspiracy theories, Erika Kirk reminded the audiences to be tolerant of views they disagreed with—in reference partly to Owens’ antisemitic, conspiracy theory–peddling allies.

Has Owens always been a Charlie Kirk assassination truther?

It did indeed take virtually no time for Owens to declare that the official narrative around Kirk’s assassination was wrong. Her own audience, primed to look for conspiracy theories in the wake of a high-profile murder, had been hungering for Owens to challenge the widely accepted version of events. It may seem strange that a conservative podcaster would seek to blame fellow conservative activists rather than a young man with a transgender partner, but this tactic made sense for her paranoid brand and for her need to create engaging content for her show. And audiences beyond her regular listeners were eager to hear her take: Owens seemed to have had a genuinely close friendship with Charlie, thanks to her time at TPUSA. Many saw her as speaking with real authority.

At the beginning, though, Owens expressed love and sympathy for Erika, describing her as a loving wife. Her initial suspicion was focused on other TPUSA figures. This ruffled feathers in a way none of her previous campaigns had, and the pushback she received only fed her beliefs about vast conspiracies. She doubled down. And as she continued to need more content as the weeks went on, the theories expanded to include foreign governments, the U.S. government, and, ultimately, Erika Kirk.

What does she base her claims on?

Speculation and minor discrepancies in stories about the incident or things that just seemed weird to her. Such as Erika mentioning Charlie putting his wedding ring on on the morning of his killing. (Does that mean they had a big fight the night before??) A lot of it has involved anonymous tips and other dubious sources claiming to have secret intel. Some had to do with general suspicion about Erika’s behavior: her pained, tear-less facial expressions; the fireworks and glittering pantsuit at a Turning Point USA event; the strange video of her stroking Charlie’s arm in his coffin. Owens is one of those people who expects grief to look a certain way.

But for a full understanding of how far from legitimate inquiry Owens has strayed, you should know that she has based her beliefs partly on her dreams. Charlie told her, in a dream, that he had been betrayed. She saw the face of another TPUSA figure in that same dream. QED, that man helped kill Charlie.

How does Israel fit into all this?

Owens has repeatedly suggested that the Israeli government was somehow involved in Kirk’s death. And indeed, Charlie really did start to grow disillusioned with Israel in the last months of his life. For most of his life, Kirk was a standard pro-Israel Republican. But in October, Owens released leaked text messages showing Charlie had complained about “Jewish donors” playing “into all the stereotypes” and leaving him with “no choice but to leave the pro-Israel cause.” There was also a meeting of influencers in June in which Charlie expressed some frustration with Republican taboos against criticizing Israel. Owens has portrayed this June event as an “intervention” in which the billionaire Bill Ackman threatened and blackmailed Charlie to force him to support Israel publicly. (Ackman and others who were there denied this.)

So, to Owens, it seemed plausible that Israel and Zionist Americans had Charlie Kirk assassinated to prevent him from voicing those doubts aloud. Owens has suggested two different ways to explain Erika’s involvement in this plot. It’s possible, Owens said, that Erika has always secretly been an agent of Zionist forces. Or, she has been so laser-focused on growing her own personal power and wealth that she agreed to turn against Charlie when he threatened their standing and risked losing revenue by speaking against the Zionists.

So this is just about her personal vendetta against Israel and American Jews?

Well, Owens may have had something of a political motivation, as well. Owens is a major figure in the Israel-skeptic, conspiracy-theorizing antisemitic right that is growing in power in the party. Consider Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and countless internet trolls. This is creating a major rift in the party, with people such as Ben Shapiro fighting to maintain the conservative movement’s traditional pro-Israel views. The tensions bubbled up to the surface at a Turning Point USA event in December when Shapiro blasted Owens, Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Steve Bannon as “frauds and grifters” posing an existential threat to the conservative movement. After Kirk died, the two different camps scrambled to claim him for their side, given his gigantic symbolic stature. In this podcast, Owens is certainly making a play for Charlie on the anti-Jewish right.

But, in Owens’ reality, there were other governments mixed up in this, too?

Yes, Owens does like to just throw out ideas and see what sticks. She has asserted that TPUSA had been courting a deal with a French donor and from there suggested the French Foreign Legion had been involved in Kirk’s assassination. She has also argued that Egyptian-owned airplanes that overlapped with Erika’s locations at times had connections to Israel, pointing to Egypt’s involvement in the plot. Maybe, she argued, the French, Israeli, Egyptian, and American governments were all trying to do some sex trafficking together, in the vein of QAnon theories. And maybe Charlie threatened that by planning to speak out against the Zionist deep state. Alex Jones walked so Candace Owens could run.

How has the rest of the right responded to all this?

Mostly with disgust. Owens is considered enough of a powerhouse, though, that some tried to bring her back into the fold. Notably, Megyn Kelly tried to broker a kind of peace between her and Erika. On Dec. 15, Erika and Owens met for four and a half hours, but the meeting didn’t do anything to sway Owens. She continued to make her outlandish claims, and Erika started publicly begging Owens to stop.

Erika clearly has the right’s sympathy. She was invited to Tuesday night’s State of the Union address as a special guest of the president. When the trailer for Bride of Charlie was released, conservative influencers called Owens “demonic,” “the spawn of Satan,” “evil,” and “sick and twisted.”

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Owens, for her part, has said all these responses were coordinated and paid for. It was further proof that the Zionists saw her as a threat and were trying to shut her down. And some of her followers are trying to outdo Owens herself, claiming the show proves that Erika is actually a man. (This is based on some tomboyish photos in a yearbook from Erika’s childhood that Owens shared.) Owens won’t put a stop to that—to her mind, anything could be possible, and she wants her audience pushing the narrative forward, no matter how ridiculous.

Possibly! This sure does seem defamatory. TPUSA has already sent Owens a cease-and-desist letter. Owens seems to know this puts her in legal danger. But Owens has also survived a lawsuit from the Macrons. She doesn’t seem afraid of any repercussions.

It seems like this whole episode just serves to make conservatives look stupid. You promised me that this had repercussions for all of us. Can we really not just laugh this off as a fun show of infighting on the too-online right?

Well, not really. Yes, Owens seems like a cartoonish character, but she’s working hard to mainstream conspiracy theories about powerful Zionists. She has a huge and highly engaged following. We’re not talking about QAnon deep-end weirdos who are spending all their time on internet forums. We’re talking about millions of listeners, regular people with a general sense that the world is run by corrupt and morally bankrupt elites. With the recent revelations of Epstein’s vast network of friends among the powerful and wealthy, that’s a potent argument. And with her charisma and sense of righteous indignation, presented by a well-connected woman speaking through a highly professional operation, it’s easy to see how otherwise grounded people can start to question some pretty foundational ideas and find themselves open to some pretty wild—and deeply unfounded—explanations.

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Owens, like other far-right influencers, has succeeded in expanding what audiences consider legitimate discussion. Just a couple years ago, talk of “the Jews” could kill careers; antisemitism was the most dangerous taboo in political discourse. But when, for years, Owens faced no real consequences for spouting conspiracy theories about evil American Jews, other quiet antisemites were emboldened to emerge. Shapiro and other standard-bearers of the right now have no choice but to accept that their movement contains factions that make no secret of despising Jews.

But Owens’ faction isn’t just tearing apart the right; it’s wearing away at the foundations of our entire political system. If her followers can’t believe basic facts of reality even when other conservatives support them, there’s little hope of taking action to support any social or political problem. If every event is met with automatic suspicion and conspiracy theory, we’ll spend all our time debunking nonsense, and nothing will ever get better.

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