The conservative movement credited with propelling Donald Trump to victory is tearing itself apart with claims of “satanic” influence and paid smear campaigns over an upcoming “investigative series.”
On Monday, Candace Owens, 36, teased a multi-part YouTube series on Erika Kirk, 37, the widow of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated at Utah Valley University in September, aged 31.
The trailer for “Bride of Charlie,” which will premiere this Wednesday, opens with coverage of Charlie’s killing before pivoting to his wife—now CEO of Turning Point—and ends with Erika wearing a crown.
The trailer immediately detonated on the right.
Donald Trump-linked influencer Laura Loomer said on X that it was “depraved” and “total harassment of a woman trying to be graceful and carry on her husband’s legacy.”
Veteran conservative talker Mark Levin, 68, joined the pile-on with a post contrasting Owens with Kirk. “Candace Owens will never have the class, intelligence, decency, kindness, or beauty of Erika Kirk. And she knows it,” Levin wrote, adding that Erika’s children would grow up “loving and respecting” their mother, while it was “highly unlikely in Owens’ case.”
On his podcast, former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, 51, went even further and unleashed a deranged and expletive-filled rant at Owens and anyone backing the doc.
“F–k you. Go f–k yourself, you demonic f—–g scum,” he told viewers, before adding that those encouraging criticism of Erika “deserve to feel the little licks of the flames of hell on every inch of your body.”
Bongino, who told fans “we have to excise this cancer” and urged anyone supporting Owens to “just get the f–k out” of his audience, was accused by one prominent influencer of provoking violence by depicting a fellow conservative as a demonic threat.
Far-right podcaster Stew Peters—a conspiracy-peddling shock jock—said: “He’s trying to get Candace Owens killed.”
Social media has been flooded since Monday with conservatives branding Owens a “demon,” among them popular right-wing account @catturd2—which has 4 million followers—who declared Tuesday that she was “pure evil” and “a demon straight from the bowels of hell.”
The near-identical wording used across dozens of posts sparked allegations of a coordinated anti-Owens smear campaign, with some influencers claiming people had been paid to bash her online. Hard-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, 41, who posts under the handle @Nero, went so far as to claim he had a “list” of people involved.
The Daily Beast could not independently verify whether any such list exists. Yiannopoulos was contacted for comment.
The fury is all the more striking because much of it is coming from longtime ideological allies of Owens. Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro, 42, branded her “evil trash” for “making money off the murder of Charlie Kirk by literally implicating his widow and everyone else at [Turning Point USA] in that murder.”
The “Bride of Charlie” project is the latest escalation in a feud that began when Owens launched her own “investigation” into Kirk’s murder, spinning theories about security failures and suggesting powerful forces may have wanted him dead.
She has since accused Erika of suffering “Meghan Markle syndrome,” implied she had a “strange relationship” with a 15-year-old girl, and leaked audio of the new TPUSA boss sounding upbeat on a staff call days after her husband’s death.
Erika, who was appointed Turning Point’s CEO days after her husband’s killing and is raising their two young children, has tried to stay above the fray.
In a December town-hall conversation with CBS News, she urged conspiracy theorists to “stop… that’s all I have to say. Stop.”
Days later, she held a four-and-a-half-hour private summit with Owens that both later described as a “very productive” meeting, even as their disagreements over Kirk’s assassination have lingered.
That appears not to have quelled Owens’ determination to plow on in her vendetta.
In the trailer, Owens promises to probe questions about Kirk that others “won’t touch,” suggesting this is merely the opening salvo to this latest MAGA war.
The Daily Beast has contacted representatives for Owens, Kirk, Bongino, Levin, and Peters for comment.
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