“These people are frauds and they are grifters and they do not deserve your time.” That’s conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro at the December 2025 Turning Point USA conference anchored by the conservative student organisation’s new leader, Erika Kirk, who took over after her husband Charlie Kirk was assassinated. 

Who are these frauds and grifters to whom Shapiro refers? Far-left progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cory Booker, who don’t seem to know what a woman is? Democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani, who want to eliminate billionaires and radically alter capitalism? No. In fact, Shapiro was referring to two of his  fellow conservatives and former friends, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, whom he went on to describe as “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.”

Owens was once Shapiro’s colleague at The Daily Wire. But then, during an interview with Piers Morgan in December 2024, discussing the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, she suggested that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had prior knowledge of the Hamas attack and—in 9/11 conspiracism parlance—Let It Happen On Purpose (LIHOP) for political reasons that include the “ethnic cleansing” of Gazans, which she describes as the “real holocaust.”

But well before this incident Owens was already trafficking in antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories, alleging Jewish involvement in 9/11 and the assassination of JFK, hinting that Jeffrey Epstein might have been working for the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad and referencing “a cabal of Jews in Hollywood” whom she thinks control Kanye West, after the rapper tweeted that he was going “death con 3 on Jewish people.” 

The fall out from Owens’ comments led to her departure from the organisation to start her own independent show. On that show, she blamed the move to ban TikTok on “powerful Jews” like the members of the Anti-Defamation League; accused George Soros (who is Jewish) of funding the Black Lives Matter movement to destabilise the United States; described Israel as an “occult nation” that shields “child abusers”; and has expressed doubts about the Holocaust. Josef Mengele’s medical experiments were so extreme, she mused, that “it sounds like bizarre propaganda” because “it would be a tremendous waste of time and supplies.” Most recently, she floated the idea that Charlie Kirk was murdered by factions within Turning Point USA—maybe even at the behest of his wife—under the influence of elements within France, Egypt, and (of course) Israel.