Right-wing commentator Candace Owens, who has made repeated conspiratorial claims about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, has claimed that his widow, Erika, was lying about skipping a Turning Point USA event in Georgia over security threats.
“This is exhausting,” she wrote on X. “You pulled out because of bad ticket sales…Were there actually a viable threat, the Vice President would not have continued the event.”
Videos posted on social media showed vast rows of empty seats in the arena where the event took place.
Erika Kirk was set to appear alongside Vice President JD Vance after receiving “very serious threats,” according to event organizers. Vance still appeared at the event, despite the alleged threats.
Kirk’s late husband was fatally shot in September during an appearance at a campus event in Utah.
“It’s a terrible reflection on the state of reality and the state of the country,” Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet said onstage at the Akins Ford Arena in Athens, sitting beside Vance.
“I was so looking forward to tonight’s event at the [University of Georgia] with our Vice President [JD Vance], but after all our family has been through, I take my security team’s recommendations extremely seriously,” Kirk wrote on X.
Vance said the threats ahead of Tuesday’s event left Kirk, Turning Point’s CEO, “worried.” He also lashed out at those he said had been unfairly criticizing her in the wake of her husband’s death. Erika Kirk has become the subject of conspiracy theories in some corners of the right.
“Everybody is attacking her over everything, and they’re lying about her, and it’s one of the most disgraceful things that I’ve ever seen in public life,” Vance said.
The Independent has contacted Turning Point USA for comment.
Vice President Vance is close with the Kirk family.
During a December speech, Erika Kirk said the organization would back Vance’s long-rumored 2028 presidential campaign and get the Republican elected “in the most resounding way possible.”
In September, shortly after Kirk was killed, Vance hosted a memorial episode of Kirk’s podcast from the White House. Vance, joined by the second lady and Erika Kirk, flew on Air Force Two as it carried Kirk’s remains to the activist’s home state of Arizona.
Erika Kirk and Vance provoked speculation when they shared an affectionate hug during an October appearance together at a Turning Point USA event in Mississippi, where Kirk said she saw “similarities” between the vice president and her late husband.
Vance addressed the general scrutiny of Erika Kirk during Tuesday’s event, though he did not specifically mention the gossip about his interactions with her.
“This desire to go after her for the way she’s grieving her husband, that’s the most preposterous thing I’ve seen in a long time,” he said.
“Why don’t you stay in your own lane and mind your business,” he added. “Grief is complicated.”
Second lady Usha Vance has dismissed insinuations of a relationship between the two as an ungrounded “fever dream” created by the media and has said the Vances consider such talk a joke.
“I’d rather just sort of live in my marriage and in the real world and less in kind of the fever dreams that surround it,” she told USA Today in December. “So I mean, it is kind of a family joke, but also not something that I spend very much time thinking about.”
Erika Kirk has also downplayed the speculation, describing the hug as a benign expression of her “love language.”
“Whoever is hating on a hug needs a hug themselves,” Kirk told podcaster Megyn Kelly. “My love language is touch, if you will.”
Vance’s appearance in Georgia comes after a string of controversies and setbacks on the world stage, including abortive negotiations in Pakistan to end the Iran war, the ongoing White House feud with the pope, and Vance’s unsuccessful bid to boost GOP ally Viktor Orban’s reelection campaign in Hungary.
The vice president, who is currently promoting Communion, a forthcoming memoir about his Catholic faith, used the Turning Point event to address the clash with the Vatican. The pope has criticized the Trump administration over the ongoing war with Iran, telling a gathering of bishops in Iraq last week that “God does not bless any conflict.”
Vance, who previously said the Vatican should “stick to matters of morality” instead of policy following the pope’s comments, spoke onstage about how he respected the pope and welcomed good-faith dialogue but suggested the Catholic leader was mistaken.
“I like that the pope is an advocate for peace,” Vance said. “That’s certainly one of his roles. On the other hand, how can you say that God is never on the side of those who wield the sword?”
The vice president said such views contradict “more than 1,000 years” of Christian just war theory, and he argued by way of example that American soldiers had God on their side during WWII as they fought the Nazis and liberated concentration camps.
As the vice president spoke about the administration’s back and forth with the Vatican, a heckler criticized Vance over Israel’s recent war in Gaza, calling the conflict a genocide and yelling out, “You’re killing children!”
Vance responded by taking credit for the end of the conflict, which United Nations investigators concluded last year was a genocide against Palestinians.
“We’re the administration that solved that problem,” Vance said of the war.
“Right now, you see more humanitarian aid coming into Gaza than at any time in the last five years because we have taken that situation seriously,” Vance added.
Hecklers weren’t Vance’s only challenge during the Georgia event.
Photos of the event showed major portions of the 8,500-person capacity arena with empty seats.
The venue appeared about 25 percent full during the event, a reporter for MS NOW estimated.
Despite the less-than-perfect turnout at the event, Vance sounded an upbeat note about the 2026 midterms, where Republicans are expected to lose at least the House to the Democrats.
“The idea the midterms are gone is preposterous,” Vance said, calling grim predictions of a GOP wipeout “cynical, pessimistic garbage pushed by people who want us to completely give up.”
The vice president framed the election as a life-or-death battle against a violent political left and said the Republican Party needed to focus on turning out low propensity voters in battleground districts to win.
“The people who want to kill Donald Trump, the people want to throw Donald Trump in prison, the people who murdered our friend and then then people who celebrated it afterwards, those people are trying to achieve political power,” Vance said. “We cannot let them.”
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