Political commentator Candace Owens has launched a direct assault on the media ecosystem surrounding the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
The outspoken podcast host is accusing the media in the United States of deploying a modern-day “Operation Mockingbird” to stifle investigation and discredit questioners.
Operation Mockingbird is an alleged large-scale program of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that began in the early years of the Cold War and attempted to manipulate domestic American news media organizations for propaganda purposes.
Owens’s allegations frame the public discourse since Kirk’s September 2025 murder not as organic debate, but as a coordinated psychological operation.
“Deep state assassinations require deep state solutions,” Owens stated on her show, Candace Owens Show on YouTube, drawing a direct parallel to the alleged CIA media manipulation program following President John F. Kennedy’s death in 1963.
She added: “They spent an offensive amount of money to control the press and to control the narrative… Fast forward to 2025 and they’re running the exact same playbook. Charlie Kirk was assassinated in broad daylight and they immediately deployed their troops to criminalize asking questions.”
The core of Owens’s claim is that any attempt to probe inconsistencies in the official narrative—particularly her own focus on mysterious Egyptian military planes in Provo, Utah, on the day of the killing—is met with a manufactured, synchronized backlash. She characterized this response as “gaslighting” designed to make the public “stop asking questions.”
She presented what she described as evidence of this campaign: a wave of criticism from figures like Steven Crowder and Ben Shapiro, which she alleges deliberately misrepresented her comments to suggest she had accused Kirk’s widow, Erica Kirk, of involvement in his murder.
“They manufactured that claim out of thin air and then they made it go viral,” Owens asserted. “Those were talking points that were delivered to them… Why were they specifically trying to… strongly suggest somebody’s guilty of something for which you have no evidence?”
This narrative of suppression, she argues, extends to religious appeals for silence. She played a clip of Pastor Rob McCoy urging unity and mourning over speculation, which Owens dismissed as a “naval psychological intelligence” campaign.
“They are using biblical passage to tell us why it’s not moral,” she countered. “Do they think we are this soft and persuadable?”
A New Axis of Investigation
While the “Mockingbird” thesis formed the philosophical backbone of her broadcast, Owens pivoted to a new, explosive claim: that the Egyptian planes were not tracking Charlie Kirk, but his wife, Erica.
Citing research from a viewer she dubbed a “pregnant mommy sleuth,” Owens displayed data purporting to show two Egyptian aircraft had “73 overlaps” with Erica Kirk’s locations between 2022 and 2025.
“The person the planes were actually tracking for years was Erica, not Charlie,” Owens claimed, stating the probability of this being random was less than 0.000000001%.
This shift intensifies the pressure on Turning Point USA, the organization Kirk led and which his wife now runs as CEO. Owens challenged the organization to answer a single, pointed question: “Were these Egyptian military planes familiar to Charlie Kirk? It is a simple yes or no question.”
The commentary surrounding Owens’s claims highlights a deep schism in modern media consumption.
For her supporters, it is a brave stand against a monolithic, corrupt system. For her detractors, it is a dangerous descent into baseless conspiracy that compounds a family’s grief.
Owens, however, remains defiant, positioning herself not as a provocateur but as a truth-teller facing down a powerful machine.
“Silence is not kindness. Silence is consent,” she declared. “And right now, the greatest silence surrounds the topic of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.”
