Even After the Erika Kirk Summit, Candace Owens Is Still Being Candace Owens

For someone who gets her information from dreams and is guided by her hunches, Candace Owens is apparently very in touch with her own comments section. Before sitting down to discuss the results of her four-and-a-half-hour conversation with Erika Kirk—widow of Charlie Kirk and CEO of Turning Point USA—Owens used her Tuesday livestream to make a noxious joke for members of her audience who worried she was selling out to the Israeli government.

“Okay, everybody, Shabbat Shalom,” Owens said. “Happy Hanukkah to our greatest friends and allies. And, you know, this is a good time to mention that Israel does have a right to defend itself.” She kept going: “Tucker Carlson is Adolf Hitler, and TikTok does need to be purchased by the Mossad. It’s just how I’m feeling today. I am not different. Maybe you are different. Welcome back to Candace.” The independent conservative podcaster danced when, instead of her normal Kanye West theme song, she played “Hava Nagila.” The entire performance, of course, was sarcastic; afterward, she ribbed her audience for worrying that she might have been flipped by her time with Kirk. “I keep telling you guys, I am not governable.”

For the last month, Owens has used her YouTube channel—on which she has nearly 5.7 million subscribers—to spin fanciful theories about Charlie’s killing. She has claimed that Israel and France had something to gain from his death and has suggested that other employees of his right-wing organization might have played a role in it too. At first, Owens and Kirk’s Monday summit in Nashville looked like a sign that Owens might ease off the conspiracies, just in time for AmericaFest—TPUSA’s annual summit, which started Thursday and runs through December 21.

But ultimately, Tuesday’s livestream, titled “Erika And I Sat Down. Here’s What Happened,” proved that Owens had no intention of changing. The opening display was her shtick in a nutshell: luridly antisemitic and very online, with a complete disregard for the seriousness of the subject at hand. If you didn’t know the backstory, how could you ever predict that the next 30 or so minutes of the show would be a discussion of a public assassination?

So far, Kirk has remained quiet about the substance of the conversation, aside from publishing a post on Monday night that said it was “very productive.” If Kirk watched Owens’s Tuesday livestream, it’s hard to imagine that she’s sticking with that assessment.

At the beginning of her career, Owens was a close friend of Charlie’s; from 2017 to 2019, she worked for TPUSA, which the late activist founded as a teenager. Her initial response to his killing was kooky—in late September, she speculated that it might have had something to do with a bee-related “underground”—but sympathetic to the people closest to him. That changed last month, when Owens began attacking TPUSA employees by name and dissecting their public comments on her YouTube channel.

Eventually, Owens’s theories expanded to include more of her bugbears, with the commentator alleging that France had ordered a small squad to assassinate her. (France’s president and first lady, Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron, are currently suing Owens over her repeated claims that Brigitte is transgender.) Owens has also noted the supposed presence of “Israeli cell phones” at Utah Valley University on the day Charlie died.

The theories are ludicrous, but Owens’s reach means that they continue to spread—to the point that Kirk first addressed them during her CBS News interview with Bari Weiss, which aired last Saturday. By Sunday, it was clear that her message to Owens—which seemed to reference the title of Charlie’s posthumously published book, Stop, in the Name of God—hadn’t had the desired effect. So Kirk announced that she was putting her schedule on hold to speak directly to Owens.

According to Owens, her husband, George Farmer, joined her for the Monday meeting in Nashville, while Kirk brought TPUSA’s chief operating officer, Justin Streiff. Farmer apparently had another obligation and had to leave early; he was replaced by Owens’s cousin Mia. (“The one that has a really bad attitude,” Owens said on her livestream Tuesday. “I just bring her there for vibes.”)

Owens said that Kirk had emphasized the damage she was doing to TPUSA by attacking the organization. “Erika was very clear that they were sort of most upset with—obviously a bit of a fever pitch—what I tweeted: that it was a godforsaken company and people should not give money to it,” Owens said, admitting that in this case she might have gone a bit too far. “I have to own that. That’s aggressive.” Owens seemed relatively satisfied by her time with Kirk, but she nevertheless devoted a chunk of the episode to rehashing her criticisms and suspicions of people in Kirk’s orbit.

A large part of the Monday meeting was apparently devoted to giving Owens an explanation of how legal and investigatory processes work. She noted Tuesday that a “lawyer” said even Kirk hadn’t seen evidence beyond the charging documents, because “they don’t actually share that information with the victim…in this part of the process.” Charlie’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is still awaiting trial in Utah, and the state is unlikely to share more information until a probable cause hearing takes place in May 2026. (Robinson has not yet entered a plea.)

Nevertheless, Owens wasn’t convinced that everything was aboveboard. “With that in mind, I’m sitting here going, Why are you signaling? Why do I feel the public’s being gaslit on this? There’s been nothing that’s convincing,” she said Tuesday. The key text message evidence isn’t enough for her: “That, to me, feels really fake and gay,” Owens said. (“Fake and gay” is Owens’s term of art for anything she doesn’t believe in. In April, she went viral for saying that the moon landings weren’t real and that space missions have always been “fake and gay.”)

If Kirk hoped to seek discretion or solemnity from Owens, her mission clearly failed. Ultimately, the incident shows the challenge facing anyone who tries to wrangle the online right—even conservatives. The antisocial personalities that made pundits like Owens into stars also make them liabilities—and when streamers like her can reach a vast audience without relying on the help of corporate gatekeepers, everyone is at their mercy.

By Wednesday’s livestream, Owens had stopped talking about her meeting with Kirk, instead devoting much of an hour to both an odd tweet from TPUSA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet about his late boss’s bone density and photos of Charlie’s SUV. That same day, Owens appeared on Piers Morgan’s Uncensored, where she reiterated her belief that a widespread Charlie Kirk cover-up is still underway. “I haven’t seen one piece of compelling evidence that Tyler Robinson scaled the rooftops like Spider-Man on a college campus that he didn’t go to and fired one shot, a magic bullet shot, and killed Charlie Kirk,” she told Morgan. “I have not seen one piece of compelling evidence. In fact, I’ve seen more compelling evidence to the contrary.” And finding evidence to the contrary remains something of a Candace Owens specialty.