Right-wing podcaster Candace Owens has peddled a number of conspiracy theories about the 2025 assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. Among other things, Owens, who once worked at TPUSA, has suggested that the FBI, the French Foreign Legion, the Israeli government and even Turning Point staff could be among those involved in Kirk’s death. Now her unsubstantiated claims appear to be sowing discord at TPUSA itself — and, in the process, revealing how right-wing disinformation can hurt the right just as much as any other sector of American society.
The Bulwark recently reported on how Owens appears to be getting “inside TPUSA’s head.” TPUSA has fired several employees recently, and one of them said she believes she was fired in part due to her apparent rejection of mainstream news accounts of how Kirk was killed.
In a video posted on X in February that was shared widely, former TPUSA public relations manager Aubrey Laitsch said she has “a gut feeling that I was terminated from Turning Point because I am questioning the narrative” of Kirk’s death and that “what is being told to us in the mainstream media just really doesn’t add up to me.”
Owens isn’t a fluke. She’s a natural outcome of what the right has wrought with its abandonment of truth.
Laitsch noted that TPUSA did not say or insinuate that her termination had anything to do with her views about Kirk’s death, but that it was a belief based on working at the organization. She also implied that some other colleagues shared her view. “I have a lot of concerns and a lot of questions about what took place that day and the events leading up to that day,” Laitsch said. “It is from my own experience that you can’t question the narrative and work at Turning Point. That is how I feel, that is how other people I’ve talked to feel.”
Laitsch did not attribute her apparent interest in conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death to Owens — but Owens is the most influential disseminator of those theories.
It also appears that TPUSA staffers are leaking internal material to her. Owens obtained recordings of video chats of Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, who now runs Turning Point USA, and used them on her show as fodder to advance the conspiracy theories. Last week, Owens even said that police should be questioning Erika Kirk.
We don’t know why Laitsch lost her job. But her insinuations illustrate how the right is being hobbled by its abject distrust in institutions. The very fact that Laitsch believes that considering conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death is what got her fired — and wants to share that information publicly — shows how the right is at risk of being cannibalized by its own brain rot. Premier MAGA organizations are being riven by an inability to achieve consensus reality even within their side of the political spectrum. (TPUSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
This isn’t the first sign that Owens’ conspiracy-mongering causes splits within the right. As my MS NOW colleague Brandy Zadrozny reported in December, conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death surfaced at TPUSA’s flagship AmericaFest event in December. “In his opening-night address, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro accused Owens and [right-wing commentator Tucker] Carlson of poisoning the movement with conspiracy theories and antisemitism,” Zadrozny reported. “Owens, he said, was ‘vomiting hideous and conspiratorial nonsense’ about Kirk’s death.”
In a parallel to the turmoil that right-wing institutions such as the Heritage Foundation are in about just how much racism the right is willing to tolerate within its ranks, TPUSA’s broader scene is divided over how much disinformation is acceptable. The political and intellectual epicenter of the contemporary right is President Donald Trump, whose political project largely depends on extinguishing the distinction between truth and falsehood. Politically convenient fabrications such as “the 2020 election was rigged” aren’t the kind of political speech that a group can use only in “moderate” doses and control purely for the benefit of its authors. If normalized, it will infect an entire movement, rendering truth less important than who can win battles for attention using any claim that affirms the group’s basest instincts. Owens is a clear winner in that attention economy, with almost 8 million followers on X and more than 5 million subscribers on YouTube, and she’s getting called out by the biggest names in right-wing media. This is in part because her approach to disinformation is particularly outlandish and bigoted compared to many of her peers on the right. Here’s a summary of some of her views from Current Affairs, which described her claims as “so bizarre, they seem better described as ‘symptoms’ than ‘ideas’”: She has said that the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz are performing a “satanic ritual” when they celebrate the death of the Wicked Witch. She says Justin Trudeau, Barack Obama, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Emmanuel Macron are all gay. (And that this is “not a coincidence.”) She has cast doubt on the crimes of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, saying his ghoulish experiments sound “absurd” and would have been a “waste of time and supplies.” Naturally, she believes we faked the moon landing (in fact, all of our space programs were both “fake and gay”). Owens isn’t a fluke. She’s a natural outcome of what the right has wrought with its abandonment of truth. As wild as Owens’ stories sound, there isn’t a categorical difference between her disinformation and Trump’s. Once a group renders truth irrelevant, there is nothing keeping its members from mining the world and the historical record for an infinite number of things to make up, even if they sound particularly absurd or heinous, toward the end of claiming power. And there’s no way to control whom those lies will be directed at.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer for MS NOW. 
