How Candace Owens Became Tpusa’s Worst Enemy

Less than one month after Charlie Kirk’s death, Candace Owens made an incendiary claim: Kirk came to her in a dream and told her he had been betrayed.

Owens, a conservative podcaster who worked for Turning Point USA from 2017 to 2019, had taken it upon herself to investigate Kirk’s death, homing in on potential betrayers. On her popular podcast, she denied that Tyler Robinson, the troubled Utah teenager who is standing trial for allegedly murdering Kirk, had acted alone. She suggested Israel somehow played a role. And she said Kirk’s former colleagues at Turning Point — including his wife, Erika Kirk — should face scrutiny.

“Everything Turning Point is doing is wrong,” Owens said on her podcast a little over a month after Kirk died. “I want war with all of you, OK? All of you.”

At first, Turning Point did little to push back. Then Owens dialed in on two of Charlie Kirk’s confidantes who were present when he was killed: Turning Point chief of staff Mikey McCoy and contracted camera operator Terryl Farnsworth. McCoy had appeared on video holding his hands to his ears moments after Kirk’s death — something Owens found suspicious. And Farnsworth drew her attention over a selfie video he recorded in shock as Kirk’s body was whisked away. Owens said she found their actions “to be quite strange”: “There is no way you are going to convince me and the rest of the world that all of this is normal.” On a late October episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, producer Blake Neff called claims that Turning Point staffers were part of some sort of conspiracy “utterly vile.” (McCoy declined to comment.)

It was one of the first times Turning Point acknowledged the conspiracies publicly. But privately, mayhem was unfolding inside the organization.

Following Owens’ conspiratorial videos, staffers received a series of threats, and Turning Point ramped up security at its Phoenix headquarters and the homes of several employees, according to three people with direct knowledge of the arrangements, who — like others in this piece — were granted anonymity to discuss private matters. One of those people took their family into hiding multiple times and eventually moved into a rental property so their name would not appear on public documents; the home they own is now rented out. This person also told POLITICO Magazine they spent thousands of dollars scrubbing their children’s images from the internet.

Several others who work for or with Turning Point received death threats after Owens mentioned them on her show; out of concern for their safety, they hired private security. Farnsworth, the contracted camera operator, feared for his life: After multiple death threats, he and his wife pulled their kids out of school and went into hiding for over a week, according to the three people familiar with Turning Point’s security arrangements, as well as a fourth person with direct knowledge of the situation. (Farnsworth declined to comment.)

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Turning Point and Erika Kirk pointed to the Kirk family’s public statements on Monday and Friday this week, and motions their attorney filed in court on Thursday and Friday.

Now, nearly 10 months since Kirk’s death, Owens’ campaign against Turning Point is being waged in public. She regularly spars with Turning Point staffers online and livestreams with updates on her “investigation” multiple times a week. Some of her videos about Turning Point have surpassed 9 million views on YouTube, and other podcasters in the MAGA universe are lending their microphones to her cause.

In response to a list of questions from POLITICO Magazine, Mitchell Jackson, a spokesperson for Owens, said that she has received threats of her own. “Erika Kirk personally named Candace Owens in her address to the nation following the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting. TPUSA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet and Charlie Kirk show producer Blake Neff have singled Candace out for months — going so far as to once refer to Candace as a ‘psychopathic predator’[.]”

“Candace’s family has received many threats — why do you think it is that the media seems only to be concerned about Erika’s safety?” Jackson continued.

Inside Turning Point’s headquarters, the hope is that Robinson’s trial will “answer a lot of questions,” said Tyler Bowyer, who runs Turning Point’s political arm and was a close friend of Kirk’s. “There’s some people who just need to get out of their house and off the internet for a few minutes.” (Robinson’s pretrial hearings, which will determine whether the prosecution has sufficient evidence to bring him to trial on an aggravated murder charge, began on Monday.)

What will be harder to tamp down is the broader internet-era craze over conspiracies. As public trust in major institutions has declined and voters increasingly get their news from social media accounts, misinformation and conspiracism have entered the mainstream. The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the trend. President Donald Trump secured reelection without ever dropping the false claim that the 2020 election had been rigged against him. Conspiracy theories exploded over the shooting at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files. And in the aftermath of the attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, conspiracies on both the political left and the right emerged, suggesting it was staged. 

The Turning Point that Kirk built flourished alongside the same online media ecosystem that rewards independent personalities, viral controversy and skepticism of official narratives. Kirk himself publicly questioned the narrative of what occurred at Butler and said there were “very good questions” about the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Some of Owens’ supporters say it’s exactly that kind of “question everything” ethos that is driving her inquiries into Kirk’s death. “It is from my own experience that you can’t question the narrative and work at Turning Point,” said Aubrey Laitsch, a former TPUSA spokesperson, in a video announcing her departure. “It goes against everything that Charlie ever stood for,” she added. (In the video, Laitsch claims she was fired for “questioning the narrative of what happened to my role model and CEO Charlie Kirk on the day of his assassination”; Turning Point’s Alex Clark says Laitsch was fired after “hiding a second full-time job from TPUSA,” and Turning Point spokesperson Andrew Kolvet posted screenshots of Laitsch leaking information to Owens.)

But others warn Owens’ conspiracies have real-world consequences. “She’s so reckless,” said the Turning Point staffer who moved into a rental property to protect their family. “She’s going to get somebody killed.”

In an age of conspiracism, some believe the truth is whatever gets the most views.

“If you are looking for a way to gather an audience or to build clout on the internet, one way to do that is to post a lot of provocative or shocking content, and conspiracy theories can certainly fill that void,” said Matthew Hannah, an associate professor of digital studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The most dramatic conspiracy theories prey on a natural psychological bias: Big events, we assume, should have big, dramatic causes. “A lone gunman or a random virus mutation just don’t feel like satisfactory explanations,” said Katherine Ognyanova, an associate professor at Rutgers who studies misinformation. “People find it easier to believe that powerful social groups are secretly orchestrating events.”

The theories gain widespread appeal, and independent creators who peddle them find fame and fortune. Ognyanova’s research found that within a week of the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024, between one-quarter and one-third of Americans found conspiracies about the event — that it was planned by Democratic operatives, or that it was staged — to be plausible. The share was even higher among strong partisans, regardless of party affiliation.

Some of Kirk’s longtime followers have embraced the same conspiratorial currents that now permeate much of the online right — and have directed them at Turning Point itself.

On the Charlie Kirk Show, official responses to Owens’ and others’ allegations have become frequent programming. “There is a cost for free speech, and the cost is that sometimes stupid people say stupid things,” said Kolvet, who now hosts the show, during an episode in March. “But hopefully courage and wisdom, prudence, will rush in and fill the void, so it’s not just one side winning the day.”

The number of Turning Point’s on-campus chapters exploded after Kirk’s death — thanks in part to some red states facilitating high school chapters — from around 2,000 chapters nationwide to over 6,000. But at campus chapters across the country, leaders found themselves having to refute Owens’ theories.

“It’s really frustrating,” said Nathan Lutz, who founded a Turning Point chapter at his high school in Trumbull County, Ohio. “The only problem that I have with Candace Owens is she says a lot of stuff, but really just says it, and doesn’t have the stuff to support it.” 

Owens has “caused a lot of pain among the students,” said Arizona State University professor Owen Anderson, who serves as adviser to the campus group that sits in the backyard of TPUSA’s headquarters. He has seen a major influx of interest since Kirk’s death, but Owens’ conspiracies have led to security concerns among the student’s leaders, some of whom feel “unsafe.”

“If she had some proof, people would listen,” Anderson said. “But then when it turns into, ‘Hey, I think she’s just attacking a widow,’ it gets kind of disgusting.” 

At AmericaFest in December, Turning Point’s premier winter conference, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro called out Owens by name. “Erika Kirk and TPUSA never ... should have been put in the position to have to defend themselves against such specious and evil attacks, particularly in a time of mourning,” Shapiro said.

Eventually, Erika Kirk agreed to meet with Owens. “Erika would like me to stop lying, and I would like to honor that,” Candace said on her show. “I can only honor that if Erika is more explicit in terms of what I have lied about.” Kirk obliged, and the two met privately in early December in an undisclosed location. Erika, in a brief tweet, called it a “productive conversation”; Owens said it was a four-and-a-half-hour meeting and debriefed in a subsequent podcast episode. During the meeting, Erika and another Turning Point staffer went point-by-point through Owens’ allegations and contradicted her public statements, according to the TPUSA staffer who moved into a rental property. (That staffer was briefed on the meeting with Owens.)

“Every morning I wake up to a new headline lying about me,” Erika Kirk said in an April 29 video. “I have people saying I’m not fit to be CEO, and I have Candace Owens claiming I murdered my husband, and the list goes on and on and on.”

In January, Turning Point served Owens a cease-and-desist letter, according to a copy Owens displayed on her show, suggesting that she had violated a non-disparagement agreement she’d signed when she left Turning Point years earlier. Specifically, Turning Point ordered Owens to stop suggesting the organization “knew about the assassination beforehand, participated in the assassination day-of, or covered up the truth about the assassination after the fact.” (TPUSA did not respond to questions about the cease-and-desist letter or the NDA.)

Owens doubled down. She published private audio of Erika Kirk mourning her husband in closed-door staff meetings. She released a multi-part biographical series, called “Bride of Charlie,” casting suspicion about Erika’s ambitions and disputed she is a “grieving widow.” At one point, she suggested Erika Kirk herself should be a suspect in her husband’s death. “I’ve seen enough,” Owens said in February. “Erika Kirk should be dragged into a police precinct for questioning.”

In May, Charlie Kirk’s former bodyguard filed a defamation lawsuit against Owens. But the Turning Point organization itself has taken no further legal action, resigning itself to combatting Owens’ accusations during episodes of the Charlie Kirk Show. “This is one of the reasons we don’t play Whac-A-Mole with this stuff, because like every day it’s like something new that I, or the organization, or Erika has been alleged of plotting,” Kolvet said during the May 15 episode. “It's so outlandish that I don’t even know where to begin.”

The threats have continued. In May, a man was arrested for threatening to kill Erika Kirk ahead of a Turning Point event in Texas. A Network Contagion Research Institute report found that Owens’ rhetoric “caused a measurable, statistically significant surge in death threats and calls for violence against Erika Kirk.”

“The entire world has noted the bizarre influencer campaign and media assault against Candace since September,” said, Jackson, the spokesperson for Owens. “Why have there been no institutes like the NCRI dedicated to producing reports about online threats against her? Do threats only work one way?”

On Monday, as the pretrial hearings for Kirk’s murder case began in Utah, Erika — alongside Charlie’s parents and sister — released a statement, saying that the “support, prayers, and kindness” they’ve received since Charlie’s death have “sustained us during the darkest days of our lives.”

“Charlie was a beloved husband, son, brother, friend, and father,” the family wrote. “Every court proceeding serves as a painful reminder of his death and the loss that has irrevocably impacted our lives and the lives of his children.”

Meanwhile, the organization clasps onto hope that the trial will quell the storm. Erika Kirk’s attorney filed a motion that all evidence presented in the preliminary hearing be public, noting that “in the absence of transparency, speculation and conspiracy theories” will “continue to proliferate.”

“Charlie’s assassination was extraordinarily public, and it only follows that we would have a public trial where sunlight is the best disinfectant,” Kolvet said on the Charlie Kirk Show on May 11. “I want to see everything, I think it’s good for this entire conspiracy cottage industry that’s emerged around this case, for them to have to confront the actual evidence, the physical evidence. And I want everybody to see that.”

“People who are kind of crime-junkie hobbyists, you know, I think that’s fine, but I think when people become obsessive, [they] start to create all these own deranged illusions in their head, and attack other people,” Bowyer said in an interview. “You’ve either got to detach from it, or you let it engulf your life.”

But it may take months — or even years — for Robinson’s case to be put to bed. In the meantime, Owens will be watching.

“Today the Tyler Robinson show trial begins,” she posted on Monday. “Sit back and watch the predictable show. The real trial will come later.”