By Caroline Downey
Thursday, December 11, 2025
Erika Kirk has had enough. And who can blame her?
For almost three months, right-wing influencers have
trafficked in outlandish conspiracy theories about her slain husband and his
assassination for engagement-bait.
This week, Erika stepped out for a press tour to promote
Charlie Kirk’s last book — and to excoriate those who have forgotten that their
family is the collateral damage of their irresponsible rhetoric. In graceful
fashion, a tone she owes to no one (least of all the online agitators), Kirk appeared
on Outnumbered on Fox News on Wednesday appealing to the tinfoil
battalion to summon their better angels, leave Charlie Kirk’s colleagues and
family out of it, and let the legal process do its work.
“I want to be able to have one thing left that is sacred
to our family, to my in-laws, to my babies, and to my parents,” she said.
When Erika Kirk noted the “hundreds of thousands of
dollars every single episode” that have been generated on content related to
Charlie’s killing, everyone knew whom she was talking about.
Candace Owens has dragged Charlie out of the grave
repeatedly to dissect his assassination under the pretense of caring about her
“friend.” She’s gone from accusing Israeli intelligence of playing a role in
Charlie’s assassination, to now implicating TPUSA’s upper management and the
U.S. military. Her latest video is about a tipster, a military man under the
pseudonym Harry Meyers, and how he claims to have spotted the suspicious scene
of a dozen lieutenant colonels meeting in Arizona, where the Kirks live and
Turning Point is headquartered, two days before Kirk was murdered. She
attempted to keep painting the picture, however unclear, that the feds were in
on it.
And Erika, saintly woman that she is, still gives Owens
and other conspiracy theorists the benefit of the doubt.
“You know what I thought?” she said on air Wednesday. “I
thought, ‘These people are all human, and they are trying to find the answer to
something that happened that is so evil.’ They are trying so hard, and I get
that. We are doing the same. Anytime we hear a lead, or anytime we hear
anything, we send it to the authorities, ‘Please dig into this.’ No rock will
be unturned. I want justice for my husband, for myself, for my family more than
anyone else out there.”
Except Owens’s search for the truth is not earnest. In
this age of independent journalism, anyone can play private detective,
collecting sources and chasing scoops. But Owens entertains the most outlandish
theories without substantiation, posing her declarative judgments as mere
musings. For having such a loose evidentiary standard, she should welcome
challenges, but she responds to those who question her theories by turning
herself into the victim. Commentators who have identified the holes in her argument
have been labeled complicit and profiteers, from right-wing podcaster Tim Pool
to Allie Beth Stuckey to Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon. She’s sown a
pundit civil war that gets uglier by the day.
Her trick is to make the audience think there is a huge
revelation coming in every episode. She’s leaving them breadcrumbs, kernels of
international intrigue, and supposed whistleblower testimonies, with a dramatic
delivery that makes listeners feel like this is a James Bond movie. It’s a
highly lucrative enterprise, if nothing else.
Talking about Harry Meyers’s supposed story, Owens wrote
on Instagram, “I genuinely cannot see this as anything other than an
immediately answered prayer. A story from a man in the military that is about
to blow this case open.”
This is the podcast version of reality TV. It’s the Real
Housewives of the Right. And it will go on forever if people with a moral
backbone don’t band together, condemn this noxious shtick, and heed Erika
Kirk’s words.
“This is a duty to my husband, and it is an absolute
honor, and I will never back down,” Kirk said. “And so my message to them is to
‘stop.’ To ‘stop.’”
And yet, while online grifters have so readily weaponized
Kirk’s public courage, forgetting that healing after tragedy is a complicated
and non-linear process, she continues to petition for their understanding and,
undoubtedly, their souls.
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