“Candace Owens is an evil, twisted human being.” —Ben Shapiro, February 24, 2026. (The same Candace Owens he hired for his publication, The Daily Wire, in 2022.)
Owens is currently launching a new salvo in her feud with Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie Kirk. If you’re not following this current iteration of the “Bold and the Banal,” following Kirk’s murder, Candace Owens started “looking into” the event, seemingly concluding—and certainly teasing—that Erika could have been, somehow, involved in his assassination along with a coterie of sinister forces. She has provided no concrete or indeed anecdotal evidence to this effect.
Yesterday, Owens launched a “documentary” entitled Bride of Charlie, which promises to… what, exactly? The trailer for the YouTube series is high on innuendo, suggesting grooming, human trafficking, Zionist conspiracies, and financial shenanigans impacting Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s former political organization, which Erika now runs.
This is the same Candace Owens currently being sued for defamation by the First Lady of France, Brigitte Macron, after Owens released a “transvestigation,” concluding that Macron is actually a biological man. That lawsuit then expanded after Owens claimed Brigitte is in an incestuous relationship with her son, that son being—wait for it—her husband, the President of France, Emmanuel Macron. Left unexplained is how a biological male could give birth, but I suppose we’ll have to wait for the deposition to figure that one out.
In other words, Candace Owens is an attention-seeking trash bag so far up her own butt that she’s become, perhaps, unable to disentangle truth from what she wishes to be true. Which begs the question: is she too trapped in her own grift to fall victim to her own lies? More likely, she’s somebody who simply doesn’t care about the truth at all if the truth stands in the way of her getting another click. In this way, she’s the perfect avatar for the entire MAGA movement.
As for why Candace chose to set her sights on Erika Kirk, I have no idea. Owens has described her relationship with Charlie Kirk as “brother and sister.” It was Charlie Kirk who brought Candace into Turning Point USA in 2017, as “director of urban engagement,” which, presumably, meant her job was to find Black people who didn’t hate conservative provocateurs. Owens was, to be fair, apparently good enough at this that she was promoted to Communications Director, a job she held until 2019, when she left the organization after basically doing her version of “Actually, Hitler had some good ideas…”
But to my knowledge—and I have conducted over three minutes of research on this topic, which is time I will never get back and quite frankly I resent that—Owens and Erika Kirk did not have much of a relationship before Charlie’s murder.
So why has Owens decided to go after her? Why the vitriol? Why the “exposé”? I have no idea, but I ain’t hating it, because there’s no catfight like a MAGA catfight. To her credit, Erika Kirk has kept the fight largely one-sided, refusing to comment on Owens’ constant attacks other than by asking her, in the debacle of a CBS News town hall hosted by Bari Weiss, to stop.
That request prompted a four-hour-long meeting between the two women, which both called “productive” at the time. With hindsight, though, the only thing it seems to have produced is more fuel for Owens’ bloodlust.
What’s illustrative about the brouhaha isn’t so much the deliciousness of Owens salting the earth as it is the way it demonstrates the biliousness at the heart of MAGA. A movement founded on hatred will, inevitably, turn on itself, particularly when that hatred is identity-based.
Of course Candace Owens is an antisemitic conspiracy theorist—she has been for years, and no one like Erika Kirk was mad about it until, wait, the proverbial leopards started eating their proverbial, cosmetically-altered faces. The issue/indignity of it all is that Owens’ current conspiracy theory targets them instead of the undesirables (Somali-Americans, transgender people, Bad Bunny) they prefer. Her sin is bringing her performative hatred inside the family.
Which ought to concern the rest of us because Owens is creating a kind of mini-referendum on the post-Trump MAGA movement. Does MAGA owe its continued existence to the hate at its core or will it be able to eventually shed its snakeskin and molt into something a little less toxic? In case it’s not clear, Erika Kirk represents the “little less toxic” side of that referendum, although anybody familiar with her late husband’s work will recognize that, in MAGA, one measures toxicity by the ton.
(And yes, the MAGA “establishment” seems to be taking Erika’s side, which makes a lot of sense considering Charlie Kirk’s value. At his State of the Union on Tuesday night, Trump called Kirk a “martyr,” and brought Erika as his guest. We know she’s close to J.D. Vance too. At the same time, administration officials have yet to condemn Owens, likely because they don’t need her gaze trained on them.)
I was about to question what she’s getting from all this, but the answer is laughingly obvious: money. Candace Owens is a podcasting phenomenon. Her YouTube page alone has 5.6 million subscribers. That reach is growing, as her softer-kinder version of kooky authoritarianism has made inroads with the mommy bloggers and the MAHA-sympathetic crowd. One might think that a growing audience might encourage Owens to tamp down the cray-cray, but Candace only seems to be doubling down. The more acidic and colorful the better; “I will again state that the French Legionnaires were involved in Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but they did not act alone” is an actual quote of hers.
Maybe I should have waited until viewing the first episode of Bride of Charlie to write this piece, but what’s the point? I already know what it’s going to be: an amateurish potpourri of half-truths, full lies, and debunked bullshit. I have no love for Charlie or Erika Kirk, or for Turning Point USA, but the facts of this case seem pretty clear: some loser killed Charlie.
That’s it.
What we need, in this moment of American unraveling, are fewer byzantine conspiracies and more honest accounting of how the most successful nation of the last hundred years ate itself alive. What we need is an exposé on why one of our major political parties groomed somebody as poisonous as Candace Owens to become so influential. What we need more than another YouTube documentary is a damned mirror to hold up to the nation—and the Frankenstein who created Bride of Charlie will be the face staring back.
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