Candace Owens accuses Erika Kirk of skipping TPUSA occasion over low ticket gross sales not a safety menace | EUROtoday

Right-wing commentator Candace Owens, who has made repeated conspiratorial claims about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, has claimed that his widow, Erika, was mendacity about skipping a Turning Point USA occasion in Georgia over safety 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 confirmed huge rows of empty seats within the area the place the occasion happened.

Erika Kirk was set to seem alongside Vice President JD Vance after receiving “very serious threats,” in line with occasion organizers. Vance nonetheless appeared on the occasion, regardless of the alleged threats.

Kirk’s late husband was fatally shot in September throughout an look at a campus occasion in Utah.

“It’s a terrible reflection on the state of reality and the state of the country,” Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet stated onstage on 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 stated the threats forward of Tuesday’s occasion left Kirk, Turning Point’s CEO, “worried.” He additionally lashed out at these he stated had been unfairly criticizing her within the wake of her husband’s demise. Erika Kirk has turn into the topic of conspiracy theories in some corners of the fitting.

“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 stated.

The Independent has contacted Turning Point USA for remark.

Vice President Vance is shut with the Kirk household.

During a December speech, Erika Kirk stated the group would again Vance’s long-rumored 2028 presidential marketing 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 girl and Erika Kirk, flew on Air Force Two because it carried Kirk’s stays to the activist’s house state of Arizona.

Erika Kirk and Vance provoked hypothesis once they shared an affectionate hug throughout an October look collectively at a Turning Point USA occasion in Mississippi, the place Kirk stated she noticed “similarities” between the vp and her late husband.

Vance addressed the overall scrutiny of Erika Kirk throughout Tuesday’s occasion, although he didn’t particularly point out the gossip about his interactions along 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 stated.

“Why don’t you stay in your own lane and mind your business,” he added. “Grief is complicated.”

Second girl Usha Vance has dismissed insinuations of a relationship between the 2 as an ungrounded “fever dream” created by the media and has stated the Vances take into account such speak 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 instructed 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 additionally downplayed the hypothesis, describing the hug as a benign expression of her “love language.”

“Whoever is hating on a hug needs a hug themselves,” Kirk instructed podcaster Megyn Kelly. “My love language is touch, if you will.”

Vance’s look in Georgia comes after a string of controversies and setbacks on the world stage, together with abortive negotiations in Pakistan to finish the Iran struggle, the continued White House feud with the pope, and Vance’s unsuccessful bid to spice up GOP ally Viktor Orban’s reelection marketing campaign in Hungary.

The vp, who’s at present selling Communion, a forthcoming memoir about his Catholic religion, used the Turning Point occasion to handle the conflict with the Vatican. The pope has criticized the Trump administration over the continued struggle with Iran, telling a gathering of bishops in Iraq final week that “God does not bless any conflict.”

Vance, who beforehand stated the Vatican ought to “stick to matters of morality” as an alternative of coverage following the pope’s feedback, spoke onstage about how he revered the pope and welcomed good-faith dialogue however instructed the Catholic chief was mistaken.

“I like that the pope is an advocate for peace,” Vance stated. “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 vp stated such views contradict “more than 1,000 years” of Christian simply struggle concept, and he argued by the use of instance that American troopers had God on their facet throughout WWII as they fought the Nazis and liberated focus camps.

As the vp spoke concerning the administration’s forwards and backwards with the Vatican, a heckler criticized Vance over Israel’s latest struggle in Gaza, calling the battle a genocide and yelling out, “You’re killing children!”

Vance responded by taking credit score for the tip of the battle, which United Nations investigators concluded final 12 months was a genocide towards Palestinians.

“We’re the administration that solved that problem,” Vance stated of the struggle.

“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 solely problem through the Georgia occasion.

Photos of the occasion confirmed main parts of the 8,500-person capability area with empty seats.

The venue appeared about 25 p.c full through the occasion, a reporter for MS NOW estimated.

Despite the less-than-perfect turnout on the occasion, Vance sounded an upbeat word concerning the 2026 midterms, the place Republicans are anticipated to lose not less than the House to the Democrats.

“The idea the midterms are gone is preposterous,” Vance stated, calling grim predictions of a GOP wipeout “cynical, pessimistic garbage pushed by people who want us to completely give up.”

The vp framed the election as a life-or-death battle towards a violent political left and stated the Republican Party wanted to give attention to 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 stated. “We cannot let them.”