Right-wing influencer and conspiracy theorist Candace Owens is lobbing her latest “truth bomb” at the heart of the conservative movement that made her a star.
Late Wednesday, Owens released the first hour-long episode of a new video series focused on Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie Kirk, who took over his role as CEO of Turning Point USA after his killing last September. The series, titled “Bride of Charlie,” promises to unearth secrets from Erika Kirk’s past relevant to her stewardship of the powerful conservative nonprofit — though the first episode delivered little in the way of concrete allegations.
The series is Owens’s latest broadside against a conservative establishment that once welcomed her as a young Black woman who vocally opposed both the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements.
During President Donald Trump’s first term, Owens worked as communications director at Turning Point and became one of Trump’s most prominent Black supporters. Now she’s stoking divisions within Trump’s MAGA base that have been simmering since Charlie Kirk’s grisly assassination by taking on his widow, who has been lionized by the political right — including by Trump at this week’s State of the Union address.
In the process, experts say, Owens is all but guaranteeing herself a surge of exposure in a political attention economy that increasingly rewards explosive claims and personality-driven drama.
“You can absolutely grow an audience by people being mad at you,” said Casey Fiesler, a professor of information science at the University of Colorado.
Trump invited Erika Kirk to the State of the Union on Tuesday and asked her to stand as he credited her late husband with helping to reinvigorate Christianity and belief in God among young Americans. “Thank you, Erika,” Trump said after hearty applause died down. “You’ve been through a lot. In Charlie’s memory, we must all come together to reaffirm that America is one nation under God and we must totally reject political violence of any kind.”
Owens did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Turning Point USA did not immediately offer a comment on Owens’s project. Her new video reached more than 1 million views a few hours after it was posted.
Leading conservatives began to condemn Owens’s latest project even before the first episode was released, after she posted a trailer on Monday that led with Charlie Kirk’s assassination and then showed Erika Kirk taking control of Turning Point and holding high-profile fundraisers in his honor.
The trailer suggested that the series might delve into Kirk’s ties to a Romanian charity that was allegedly associated with a human trafficking scandal — a conspiracy theory that at least one misinformation research group has previously found to be unsupported by evidence.
One of the strongest denunciations of Owens in response to the trailer came from Ben Shapiro, founder of the conservative media outlet the Daily Wire, who called her an “evil, twisted human being.” Owens worked for the Daily Wire until 2024, when she left amid a conflict over her criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza, in which she used rhetoric widely considered antisemitic.
Dan Bongino, the conservative influencer who recently returned to podcasting after a brief stint as deputy director of the FBI, also attacked Owens in an episode Tuesday. “This just can’t be what this [conservative] movement is,” Bongino said in his podcast on Rumble, a conservative video platform. “And if it is, I don’t — I just don’t want any part of it.”
Owens is among a handful of right-wing, anti-Israel influencers whose profiles have risen since Charlie Kirk was shot dead while speaking at a college in Utah on Sept. 10, amid a struggle over the future of the movement to mobilize young conservatives.
Nick Fuentes, a far-right podcaster who has spoken admiringly of Adolf Hitler, also drew rebukes from Shapiro and other conservative pundits after he was interviewed by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in October.
In the video episode Owens published Wednesday, she read aloud from a lengthy letter that suggested Erika Kirk might be a psychopath, before pivoting to a detailed examination of her family tree.
Owens also addressed some of the criticism she received for the trailer, suggesting that it was appropriate to place Kirk under scrutiny because of her powerful position.
“A young woman with absolutely zero professional qualifications has been inserted at the top of a charity organization that pulled in over a quarter-billion dollars last year, and the media is telling you you have no right to know or to ask anything about her,” Owens said.
“These talking heads are claiming that the public simply wanting to ensure the person who is running that organization is, I don’t know, at a bare minimum moderately honest about who she says she is — no, that inquiry makes you a monster,” she added.
Owens did not elaborate on her trailer’s implication that the series might seek to connect Kirk to a human trafficking scandal.
Renée DiResta, a research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, said Owens has proven herself skilled at connecting with online audiences by positioning herself as a truth-seeking champion for her viewers.
“Candace built her following by branding herself as a straight talker willing to pick fights,” DiResta said. “She uses that now to package even baseless theories in an entertaining way, and her audience gets to feel that they’re insiders learning the ‘hidden truths’ about people they also distrust or see as villains.”
While some prominent online conspiracy theorists amplify claims that originated with others, Owens has been known to advance novel theories, citing unnamed, highly placed sources, said Lea Marchl, a news verification researcher at NewsGuard, a company that tracks misinformation and rates news sites’ credibility.
“Often she’ll lean on conspiratorial language, like, ‘Isn’t it interesting that so-and-so person was close to the scene that day,’” Marchl said. Owens’s tendency to rely on “innuendo” rather than “outright false claims” can make her theories difficult to debunk, even when they seem outlandish, she said.
In the trailer that suggested Erika Kirk was linked to a disgraced Romanian child adoption center, however, Owens appeared to be drawing on a conspiracy theory that NewsGuard has previously researched and found to be baseless, Marchl said.
In a debunking last September, the company looked into claims spreading online among conspiracy-minded liberals that an Evangelical youth ministry called Romanian Angels, which Kirk founded in 2012, had been kicked out of Romania over allegations of human trafficking. NewsGuard said at the time it found “no evidence” that the group had been accused of human trafficking or asked to leave the country.
Political commentators with divisive messages can thrive on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram because the angry responses their videos generate can boost engagement and lead algorithms to place them in more users’ feeds, University of Colorado’s Fiesler said. And when people like Owens criticize the right, their videos can get traction across a wider political spectrum as liberals join conservatives in sharing and arguing about them.
More than 5.8 million people subscribe to Owens’s YouTube channel — fewer than Shapiro’s 7 million subscribers but more than Tucker Carlson’s 5.2 million. She tops both on Instagram, where 6.4 million people follow her, and where she sells hats, shirts and mugs with slogans like “Conspiracy Girlie,” “Candace Intelligence Agency” and “We don’t know-know, but we know.”
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