The media trope of pitting two women against each other is almost always hackneyed, but especially when a feud only goes one way. Such is the unrelenting crusade of Cluster B bimbo Candace Owens against Erika Kirk, the widow of Owens’s supposed former friend Charlie Kirk.
Unlike Owens, who has spent her entire life trying on new personalities in pursuit of achieving public notoriety, Erika Kirk has not asked to become an internationally recognized household name. Kirk, a former beauty pageant star and real estate agent who largely transitioned to supporting her husband’s stewardship of Turning Point USA after marrying in 2021, did not ask to become the ambassador responsible for carrying out Charlie Kirk’s legacy. She did not ask to become the chairwoman and CEO of a multimillion-dollar nonprofit organization and one of the Right’s highest-profile activists overnight, just as she did not ask to become a single mother supporting a toddler and a preschooler on her own. She did not ask to lose her husband before he turned 32 years old, and she certainly did not ask to lose him in a graphic execution that was streamed to the entire world in real time and, almost as tragically, celebrated by degenerate tankies and communists.
But in the face of an unspeakable tragedy, Erika Kirk has taken ownership of her family, her husband’s organization, and his own extensive chapter of the conservative movement with the grace and dignity most of us would find unimaginable if we were in her shoes. In a culture that valorizes women for succumbing to their basest histrionics, Erika Kirk’s stoicism and serenity is truly heroic.
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Naturally, Owens has escalated her long-running campaign of petty conspiracy theorizing and cattiness against Erika Kirk into what James Lindsay described best as “the worst cyberbullying … that has ever been seen in the history of man.” In a trailer for her new video series, Bride of Charlie, Owens teases elaborate hoaxes that Erika Kirk was somehow colluding with the Israeli government to murder her husband and baseless accusations that she was involved in international child trafficking.
Owens’s equally depraved defenders have claimed that critics correctly lambasting her latest stunt as “demonic” are being paid to parrot some shadowy (read: Jewish) party line. Alternatively, critics are calling Owens demonic because the synonymous ways to describe her behavior are not suitable for print.
President Donald Trump of all people has drawn a decisive line in the sand. He invited Kirk to his first State of the Union of his second term, singling her out for a standing ovation from the entire GOP (and shamefully few members across the aisle). Trump, who is busy trying to prevent nuclear war and launch an AI revolution, will not degrade himself by getting in the mud with the dregs of the alt-right, but in putting Erika Kirk in the center of Congress and photographed forever for the history books, he has made his diktat clear: disrespect or defame the dignified Mrs. Kirk at your own political peril.