On her way to becoming one of the most prominent voices in right-wing media, Candace Owens has suggested that abortion is a plot to exterminate Black babies, blamed school shootings on the LGBTQ+ movement and dismissed the moon landing as “fake and gay.”
But it is her recent foray into conspiracy theories about the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk — including suggestions that it might have been an inside job undertaken with the support of French or Israeli government agents — that has some of her longtime allies in the conservative movement drawing a line.
“Candace Owens is a [expletive] evil scumbag,” the conservative podcast host Tim Pool shouted on his show last week, in a clip that has gone viral among the online right. “She is burning everything down and she’s gloating and smiling while she does it.” In an interview with The Washington Post, Pool said the MAGA movement is “splintering” as Owens and others like her target a new audience with mushier politics.
Pool is one of several pro-Trump commentators who have accused Owens of sabotaging the MAGA movement in recent days, with Owens returning fire by accusing them of colluding with “Zionists” to discredit her. Her comments have set off the latest in a string of internecine feuds over the future of conservatism as the right struggles to fill the void left by Kirk’s death and chart its course for a post-Trump future.
Among those Owens has irked with her theories is Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, who succeeded her late husband as chief executive of his powerful conservative advocacy group, Turning Point USA. The two women said they met privately Monday for four and a half hours in what observers were viewing as a bid by Kirk to bring Owens back onside. In separate X posts Monday night, both called the meeting “productive,” with Owens adding that “tensions were thawed,” though neither offered details.
“We’re seeing right-wing media at war with itself,” said Jared Holt, senior researcher at Open Measures, a platform for tracking online trends and threats. “There’s a sense that the future of this political movement is up for grabs.”
Owens, 36, who referred comment for this article to a spokesman, rocketed to prominence during President Donald Trump’s first administration as a young Black woman who railed against the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. Kirk’s Turning Point USA organization hired her as its director of urban engagement in 2017, rapper Kanye West endorsed her as an emerging voice of Black conservatism, and in 2018 Trump met with her in the Oval Office and hailed her as “so good for our Country.”
In the years since, Owens’s penchant for shocking claims and high-profile confrontations has earned her millions of followers on YouTube and Instagram, where she peppers her political commentary with celebrity gossip and fringe theories. Last week, her podcast “Candace” ranked among the top five shows in the news category on Apple’s podcast charts, behind the New York Times’s show “The Daily” but ahead of the Wall Street Journal’s flagship offering.
Her views have also led to her ouster from leading conservative media organizations, earned her enemies on both the left and the right and prompted a defamation lawsuit by France’s president and first lady. And now they have landed her at the center of the latest tempest to roil the online right.
After months of dabbling in conspiracy theories about Kirk’s public shooting onstage at a campus event in Utah in September, Owens began suggesting in a series of recent posts and podcast episodes that someone inside Turning Point USA may have been involved. In a Dec. 2 post on X, she called for the organization’s supporters to pull their donations.
Owens taking aim at TPUSA, mainline MAGA and Israel is winning her unlikely supporters as influencers on the left endorse Owens or pick up her talking points. For some on the right, it has struck a nerve that was already raw from infighting in the wake of Kirk’s death.
In October, two of conservative media’s titans clashed when Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro blasted former Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson for hosting far-right influencer Nick Fuentes, who has spoken admiringly of Adolf Hitler, on Carlson’s influential YouTube show. Last month, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), a longtime MAGA stalwart, announced that she would step down from Congress in January after falling out with Trump over health care policy and the disclosure of files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Owens, Fuentes and Greene have all been critical of Israel.
Owens is “not really a political persona anymore,” Pool said of his rival content creator. “She’s a celebrity, true crime, drama, soap opera kind of show.”
Owens’s spokesman Mitchell Jackson said Pool is “lashing out because his business is failing” as audiences lose interest in his more conventional conservative point of view.
“For a man hiding his bald scalp behind a beanie, Tim is exhibiting markedly elevated estrogen levels in his behavior,” Jackson said. “We will pray for him this holiday season.”
As one of the right’s few high-profile Black female commentators, Owens has stood out among a homogenous roster of talking heads while frequently taking aim at Black Americans, particularly in her condemnation of the Black Lives Matter movement.
That wasn’t always her brand. As a teenager, she brought a lawsuit against her Connecticut high school for failing to protect against racial discrimination. As a young adult, she launched a website dedicated to unmasking the identities of online bullies. When that project was condemned by some prominent progressives as a tool for doxing and harassment, Owens “became a conservative overnight,” she told conservative podcaster Dave Rubin in 2017.
How could Elmo do this?! #Candace
Her career since has been marked by alliances with high-profile conservative activists and subsequent rifts when her rhetoric veers off script. Less than two years after becoming a spokesperson for TPUSA, the nonprofit Kirk founded as a teenager to promote conservative thinking on high school and college campuses, Owens left in 2019 after comments she made during a live event — including naming “globalism” as Adolf Hitler’s primary political mistake — prompted some TPUSA chapters to call for her resignation.
Owens later collaborated with the Daily Wire, the right-wing media network home to major voices including Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh. On her talk show “Candace,” Owens juggled standard cultural criticism and celebrity gossip with unfounded theories about unseen forces behind Hollywood, the pharmaceutical industry and the CIA.
“I like conspiracy theories because I view them as mind yoga,” Owens said during a 2023 episode. “It’s very important to bend your mind like a pretzel sometimes to make sure that you actually have a mind.”
Owens went too far for Daily Wire management after a public showdown with Shapiro in late 2023 over Israel’s war in Gaza, which Owens called a genocide. Fuentes, who has described Hitler as “awesome,” praised Owens’s “war against the Jews.” Days later, the Daily Wire announced she was no longer employed. The outlet didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Owens’s profile has only grown since she went independent. She live-streams her eponymous podcast to more than 5 million followers on YouTube, uploads it to millions more on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and posts clips and short videos to more than 6 million followers each on Instagram and TikTok. Earlier this year, she published an eight-part “investigative” podcast series titled “Becoming Brigitte,” in which she alleged that French first lady Brigitte Macron was secretly born male. That prompted a defamation lawsuit by the Macrons, who say the claim is not only false but amounts to a “campaign of global humiliation.” Owens has filed a motion with a Delaware court to dismiss the case.
“In recent years she has turned into an almost Alex Jones-esque conspiracy theorist,” Open Measures’s Holt said. “She does it loud, does it proud and seems completely unable or unwilling to correct herself.”
Owens’s latest break with conservative media power players began after Kirk’s assassination, when she quickly drew connections between the activist’s killing and what she claimed were his growing doubts about U.S. support for Israel. (Kirk never advocated publicly for the U.S. to stop supporting Israel.) Through a series of posts on X and videos in which Owens offered unfounded accusations against TPUSA and foreign governments, a narrative started to take shape — one where a shadowy cabal had targeted Kirk and was coming for Owens next.
On Nov. 22, Owens posted on X that an unnamed “high-ranking employee of the French Government” had told her that President Emmanuel Macron and his wife had ordered Owens killed. In the same lengthy post, she said her “brave” informant also told her that France and other governments were involved in Kirk’s Sept. 10 killing.
On Dec. 2, Owens posted, “I can now say with full confidence that I believe Charlie Kirk was betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA and some of the very people who eulogized him on stage. Yes I will be naming names and providing evidence for my claims.”
I received information last night that put the final pieces together for me. I now can say with full confidence that I believe Charlie Kirk was betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA and some of the very people who eulogized him on stage. Yes I will be naming names…
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) December 2, 2025
In a teaser posted Thursday for an hour-long “town hall” discussion that aired Saturday on CBS, the network’s new editor in chief Bari Weiss asked Erika Kirk about Owens and her conspiracy theories about her husband’s killing: “What do you want to say to her and the other people that are putting these lies out into the world right now?”
“Stop,” Kirk replied. “That’s it.”
Owens last week slammed the widow’s media tour and what she called Kirk’s refusal to answer questions about TPUSA’s financial connections to political power players. Then on Sunday, Kirk posted on X that she and Owens had scheduled a “private, in-person discussion” and would hold off on public commentary in the meantime.
Neither Owens nor TPUSA responded to requests for further comment Monday as to the meeting’s outcome.
Some popular left-leaning commentators have spoken positively about Owens’s latest turn.
“I find what she has to say about the investigation into the assassination of Charlie Kirk both fascinating, and I think what she’s doing is justified,” Ana Kasparian, a host on leftist news and politics show “The Young Turks,” said last month. Another liberal podcaster, Loren Piretra, has also echoed Owens’s statements that the Kirk investigation is being suspiciously mishandled.
Pool, for his part, said Owens’s defection on Israel and claims about Kirk are a “nihilistic” grab for attention from a person with a history of shifting her opinions to propel her career. Owens is adopting the conventions of true-crime storytelling, Pool said — foreshadowing, cliff-hangers and questions that never get answered — to tap into an appetite for conspiracy thinking on the right and the left.
It shows how Owens is drawing a new, less explicitly political audience of gossipmongers and conspiracists, he said. For the last decade, the wildest conspiracies were largely the purview of people on the right, “for whatever reason,” Pool said.
“Now she’s kind of just taking all of that energy and putting it into a weird space that doesn’t really align with anything.”
This type of internet barb-trading can benefit everyone involved, said Casey Fiesler, a professor of information science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Americans are keen to draw lines in the political sand and identify with one side or the other — which incentivizes conservative content creators to whip up engagement and reach new audiences by ideologically differentiating themselves from the pack.
“Nothing goes viral like conflict,” Fiesler said.
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