For the past week, Erika Kirk has been on a media tour to promote the final book by her late husband, Charlie Kirk—a press blitz that has included no fewer than six appearances on Fox News television and radio shows, as well as a high-profile town hall with CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss. But despite the press attention, the Turning Point USA founder’s death is still being overshadowed by conspiracy theories spread by independent conservative pundit Candace Owens. Erika Kirk herself addressed those theories in her conversation with Weiss. “Stop. That’s it,” Kirk said. “That’s all I have to say. Stop.”
Kirk, the new CEO of Turning Point, did not mention Owens by name during her talk with Weiss. But on Sunday night, she changed tactics. In a post on X, Kirk announced that she planned to speak with Owens. “Candace Owens and I are meeting for a private, in-person discussion on Monday, December 15,” Kirk wrote. “@RealCandaceO and I have agreed that public discussions, livestreams, and tweets are on hold until after this meeting. I look forward to a productive conversation.”
This tête-à-tête comes more than a month after Owens began pushing outlandish theories about Charlie Kirk’s killing. In the weeks after the assassination, she said that she had a sense of “doom” about “an underground that has emerged at schools,” which she claimed communicates through messages about bees and is represented by a “Polish communist underground symbol” and the Utah state flag. Because the podcaster is just asking questions, it’s hard to parse exactly what she thinks happened, but she recently alleged that the French and Israeli governments stood to gain from Charlie’s death—and she thinks they are coming after her too. (Owens is currently being sued by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, and his wife, Brigitte, over her long-running claims that the first lady is transgender.) She has even named a specific French brigade.
Owens has made some of these allegations in declarative sentences, without even a hint of hedging. “French foreign legionnaires were involved in Charlie Kirk’s assassination,” she wrote on X. “They were not the only ones, but they were involved.” On a Thursday livestream, she added that nothing “feels right to me about…the way that some of [Charlie’s] employees and friends have been behaving since that assassination,” though she exempted his widow from that criticism.
Though Owens seems to be increasingly detached from reality, her theories continue to have sway in the broader right-wing ecosystem. She currently has 5.68 million subscribers to her YouTube channel, and her most recent broadcast about Charlie Kirk’s killing, titled “UH-OH! Erika Kirk Goes Off On ‘Conspiracy Theorists,’” has netted 2.7 million views since streaming on December 10. During that episode, Owens compared Erika Kirk to Meghan Markle, a hated figure in right-wing media. “We are dealing with the subject of Erika Kirk and what transpired immediately following Charlie’s assassination,” Owens said. “This is going to be read as Meghan Markle syndrome—where you want privacy when you want it, but you want publicity whenever you want it. And that just doesn’t work.”
