Candace Owens

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Sept. 11, 2025 - Candace Owens

23:02

To My Friend, Charlie Kirk.

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candace owens ▲ ● ▼		Well, that has never happened before.
		Uh, I guess we could say Charlie broke the internet one more time, a hundred and fifty thousand of you guys were watching, and uh the the system just sort of crashed.
		And uh it makes me it just really makes me happy that that happened, actually.
		Uh it was already very difficult for me to do this for a lot of reasons, but I knew it was important because I didn't want the last thing that people had in their minds about Charlie to be the moment he lost his life.
		That was what was especially hard because uh he's just had so many amazing moments throughout his career.
		And as I was saying, I was having this discussion with George this morning, obviously through a lot of tears about not wanting Charlie's caricature to survive when the actual Charlie Kirk individual who Charlie Kirk actually is so much more important.
		The caricature of the cartoon is that Charlie's this young, smart guy, made a career out of debating college kids, decided not to go to college, started Turning Point USA.
		Uh, and I think a lot of people thought that Charlie must take himself a bit too seriously, and I want you guys to know that that could not be further from the truth.
		Charlie and me were always laughing.
		Yes, he was ambitious.
		Everybody knows Charlie's ambitious.
		I met him back in two thousand and seventeen when Turning Point was this very young organization.
		Nobody knew who I was, nobody knew who Charlie Kirk was.
		I mean, they looked like they were hand-me-downs from three generations because he was focused on the ideas.
		He didn't care about his appearance.
		He was laser focused on what he knew turning point could become, not could become, but would become.
		He hired me on the spot, we were at this conference in Florida.
		And he and I used to always say, we never said the rest, the rest was history.
		The rest is history.
		We say the rest is future.
		We were, we were totally locked in.
		And I want you guys to know about our first planning sesh.
		Okay.
		It was in the middle of Chicago, O'Hare Airport.
		There is this restaurant that's called the Macaroni Grill.
		And I sat down with Charlie on our first trip together.
		He flips over this little paper menu as we're waiting for our flight.
		And he takes out this pen and he just starts drawing a map of what he wants to happen into the future, what the turning point organization will become.
		It was spastic.
		It was unhinged.
		It was the absolute best.
		It was true Charlie.
		He was a visionary.
		Charlie was a visionary.
		If he could envision it, it was going to happen.
		He knew that I knew that.
		And what he had envisioned was for Turning Point USA to become the biggest conservative student organization, not just in the nation, by the way, but in the world.
		He kind of squabbled and swiveled and wrote that his structure is currently a 501c3.
		And he's sitting there talking to me, but here's what we can do in the future.
		And here's how, and then I'm going to probably take control of the RNC.
		I mean, he's 23 years old, right?
		And he's talking to speaking to me about how he's going to take over the RNC.
		The person that he adored the most, like really uh, and never in a million years did he think that he was going to meet him.
		And of course he did was Rush Limbaugh.
		He was really raised on Rush Limbaugh, listening to Rush Limbaugh day in and day out.
		And he told me through many conversations that if he could have a show like Rush Limbaugh one day, he would be very happy.
		That was, I think, his ultimate goal.
		And it happened.
		We had a bunch of rules.
		Charlie's rule was never say no to Fox News.
		So even if the show was at 4 a.m. in the morning, crack of dawn, I cannot tell you guys how many hits we did on Fox News.
		I'm talking four hits a day, up at 4 a.m. for Fox and Friends first, and then doing whatever the evening program was because he believed this is the way that we're gonna get our names out there.
		You know, we have to work harder.
		My rule was like I was like, we shouldn't drink.
		Everybody in politics is drinking, they're drunk all the time.
		If we're passionate, we have to understand that it's a disadvantage.
		People are always uh made weaker.
		It doesn't make anybody stronger to be drunk after an event.
		And so we didn't drink.
		And we had a motto, a couple of mottos, but Charlie's was, we can always outwork our opponents.
		I can't tell you how many times we looked at each other and we said, we can outwork them.
		Everyone was bigger than us, but not working harder than us.
		I came really directly from Charlie.
		It was the thing that he said we could always control.
	And I totally agreed with that.
	Work ethic meant everything.
	I think it's very obvious to everyone.
	I was the culture, Charlie was the politics.
	Charlie needed a little bit more culture.
	I needed to learn the rules of politics.
	I mean, he could tell you every office in the White House and what this person does, things I had never even heard before.
	I was just passionate about Black Lives Matter.
	I just I knew it was going to be harmful for black Americans.
	And I wanted to share that message.
	And Charlie showed me how to do that in the best way possible.
	I learned very quickly with Charlie that politics breeds unnecessary enemies.
	It is incredibly uh, it's disheartening industry.
	You know, you're lucky if you have one friend.
	You're lucky if you have two friends.
	There are so many people that will test your character along the way.
	Like I said, I was a nobody.
	I it was funny going through text messages yesterday.
	And I'm like, Charlie, my goal is to have 50,000 followers on Instagram.
	I think we can do it by the end of the year.
	And after he hired me, he had been working already really hard on doing this campus tour throughout California.
	He called it the big three.
	UCLA, we're gonna do Stamper, we're gonna do Berkeley.
	And there was somebody who was a lot bigger than me at the time, who was going to be kind of the face of it, because like I said, people were not gonna buy tickets to hear me and Charlie Kirk speak.
	And he had someone that they definitely would hear speak.
	And for whatever reason, and this was just my luck.
	Charlie was pumping gas.
	He was inside of the inside of the gas station, and I'm sitting in the car, and I see this person, his phone is sitting in the car, and the messages are lighting up on the screen, and this individual saying, I don't want to do this event with that new girl you hired.
	Like I don't want to share the stage with her, essentially.
	Just mean, I mean, just mean spirited, no reason.
	I'm bigger than her.
	I should do this by myself.
	And then if she wants to come on and be an auxiliary, that's fine, but I don't want to share the stage with her, this newbie.
	I remember Charlie gets in the in the car and he um he looks at the message and he looks at me and he knows I've looked at the message.
	I saw I'm like, Charlie, I I said, I have no idea like where this is going.
	Obviously, I understand that the sensible you doesn't want to lose this person on the ticket, that this uh means a lot to you and you've worked hard on it, but you're gonna have to learn that you have to make the right decision and not the easy decision.
	And this is only gonna work if we keep making the right decisions, you know.
	And I could just see uh the struggle within him.
	And then he just he did the right thing.
	He said, Okay, if you don't want to do this event with this newbie Candace, then we're not gonna do the event, and Candace and I will do it alone.
	And we did.
	We went, we went at it alone.
	Actually, I think for that particular event, Dave Rubin hopped on and the rest was future.
	For two years straight, Charlie and I flew around the world together on very little sleep.
	We were always exhausted.
	I'm not kidding.
	We took hundreds of flights together.
	We slept in the crappiest hotel rooms.
	I mean, walls so paper thin.
	I could you just hear everything.
	And when you're in that capacity with someone, two years straight, just traveling nonstop, you really get to know them.
	You really see them in every condition.
	You start bickering like an old married couple.
	And Charlie, this is not how you pack a suitcase.
	I say to him, Charlie, you can't just like put your dirty running shoes on top of your clean shirts.
	Okay, you just can't do that.
	Charlie, you can't, you need to eat something, okay?
	You're running on things, you gotta eat something.
	Okay, this is not this is not a full meal.
	Backforth.
	Charlie, you gotta buy yourself some suits that fit.
	That conversation.
	I was like, Charlie, okay, I get it.
	You're like, boy, wander, you gotta buy some suits that fit.
	I wasn't the only one that was hammering him on that.
	It was also Don Jr.
	Um, and eventually him and I think it was actually him and Eric.
	They're like, you know, Charlie, I know you're very frugal.
	We know that you're very aware that your salary comes from donors.
	He always wanted to be a really good steward of their capital.
	But eventually, Don and Eric got him a gift certificate.
	I think it was for his birthday, to a fancy suit place to go get fitted.
	And um, the rest, the rest is future, right?
	I it is so important for me to make sure that you guys understand how absolutely hilarious Charlie was.
	Charlie was hilarious, okay?
	He did not take himself too seriously.
	He was so good at doing imitations and accents.
	Anybody, any imitation, any accent, he was just on the money.
	And all we did was laugh.
	It's all you can do and laugh.
	People were just so crazy all the time.
	Uh reading through the chat today, I was just laughing with just tears in my eyes, thinking of the many road trips that we took, so many hours spent just talking trash to one another, making fun of one another.
	Uh, one of the best moments that I can think of, and there's so many to choose from, was we were driving through Colorado, and I um I put on a Kanye song, you know, on my playlist.
	And Charlie goes, is this Jay-Z?
	I almost made him pull over the vehicle.
	I was like, Are you kidding me?
	Okay, I understand that you don't do culture, but like, come on.
	You don't know the difference between Jay-Z and Kanye.
	And he didn't.
	And I explained to him the difference.
	I was like, okay, no, you gotta, you gotta get into some Kanye West music.
	Next thing you know, Charlie's really getting into some Kanye West music.
	He's running 10 miles a day.
	He got really into running.
	And he's texting me about how great it is.
	Like, there's this uh this text, Charlie.
	He's like, yes, it's my new fate, it's my new favorite song.
	And he he just loved it.
	Kanye's power kind of became our our theme song for the tour.
	I have no idea why, but that was our hype song before we went on stage.
	So you can only imagine when just a couple of months later, we've been listening to Kanye's old albums on repeat.
	Suddenly, Kanye West tweets, I love the way Candace Owens thinks.
	The excitement.
	Okay, we were certain that we had manifested it.
	We were 100% we manifested this by listening to power on repeat.
	Actually, I found a clip of us backstage on that day when that tweet happened, and we were doing what I used to refer to as like the Charlie dance.
	Here it is.
unidentified		Don't understand like the divinity of the tweeting that Charlie dance.
candace owens ▲ ● ▼		The era of Kanye.
		I can't even explain it because um you really did have to be there.
		Charlie was my overly bright and sometimes really annoying kid brother.
		I was smiling going through my chat of how many times he would text me a picture and say, Does this look cool?
		Does this look cool?
		Do I look cool?
		This is like just a screen recording of us talking about a pair of sunglasses.
		He's just sending me, and I'm like, nah, that's not good.
		Nope, that's not no, no, send.
		Okay, that one's okay.
		That'll work.
		And um, this is actually one of my favorite photos of him, where he's I can just hear him when I look at this photo.
		I can hear him saying, Does this look cool?
		He was wearing a pair of Yeezys that uh Kanye gave him, and he looked really cool.
		I thought they really suited him.
		I was like, Yeah, you look, you look really cool, Charlie.
		Um the reverse of that, obviously, was him constantly hammering me on debates.
		I mean, Charlie was like, look, you gotta you gotta know the arguments of your opponents backward and forward.
		I remember I had note cards, like I was in high school, just memorizing every statistic and being strengthened by, you know, just day in and day out.
		We he was just pretending to be a protester, pretending to be a radical.
		Uh, and he used to always say iron sharpens iron, and we spent so much time practicing debating and really thinking through what our ideas were.
		Charlie never missed a meeting that he had.
		He wouldn't do that.
		He took that very seriously, doesn't matter what the circumstance was, even if it was a hurricane.
		And one day there was literally a hurricane.
		I think we were in North Carolina, South Carolina at the time.
		I don't remember, but all the flights got canceled, and we needed to be in DC by morning.
		And Charlie looks at me, he's like, we gotta rent a car.
		We gotta drive eight hours.
		Totally insane.
		And one of the most fun uh road trips I've had in my life.
		Every single song was sung.
		We were always, me and Charlie were always singing in cars to show you this is from that road trip.
unidentified		My eyes.
		There's a lot of cars.
		They sing into our favorites.
		Thank you.
candace owens ▲ ● ▼		And then, of course, there was always some hip-hop mixed in, ignition, remix.
unidentified		And we can make him about to have me so far.
		Bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce.
		Lace like murder, she wrote me once I get you out the clothes.
		Prophecies.
candace owens ▲ ● ▼		You look cool, Charlie.
		You look cool.
		We really did go everywhere.
		I mean, all 50 states, Canada, down to the border, the United Kingdom, Israel, you name it, we were there, and there was always uh a new t-shirt to print out.
		Justice for Brett Kavanaugh sent to me.
		How's this one?
		I love it.
		We just loved the t-shirts.
		That was a thing.
		The him to one, that was controversial.
		That was a controversial moment, one of those character forming moments.
		I won't forget it.
		Because that me too hashtag, it just started going viral, and people were emotional.
		And right away, I was like, me too's awful.
		This is terrible for women, it's terrible for men.
		You know, just me being Candace saying the thing, and left and right, people were hammering me.
		They could it was like, how dare you say that we need due process?
		We're talking about rape.
		And I remember he had young women at Turning Point who were threatening to quit, crying in the office.
		How could she not support me too?
		Us women who young women who did quit.
		And then we had at the same time the YWLS conference.
		So the reporters who already hated us just completely just swooped in there and they were like, Oh, do you support her statements?
		And I just remember just being behind Charlie and Andrew Colva, and he just held the line.
		He held the line because he agreed with me and he knew it was gonna be a bit of fire.
		People, you've got to fire her.
		How could she say this?
		And he didn't.
		He held the line.
		And uh, yeah, it just it was one of those moments where Charlie he had good character.
		But the prep for every one of those events, like even the him to event, it was always Kanye.
		Here it is.
unidentified		Here it is.
candace owens ▲ ● ▼		Just through my image coming up, just literally me, Charlie, and uh Sarah, who was his assistant at the time, just playing the hype music.
		Charlie and I fought a lot of battles together.
		I mean, of course, who could forget the Infamous day that we got chased out of a Philadelphia restaurant by Antifa, and they threw water and they threw an egg on Charlie.
		We were just amazed at how quickly they had assembled once they found out what restaurant we were at.
		But I want you to watch him here.
		Like even in this moment of shock and adversity, he finds a reason to smile, and it's incredible.
		Take a look at this.
		That was Charlie.
		That was Charlie, man.
		That was always his main thing.
		Be a happy warrior.
		And he was a happy warrior.
		And we were happy warriors.
		And we laughed a lot at the protesters, the absurdity of the protesters always.
		I personally think some of the protesters liked that Charlie and I were making light fun of them.
		I don't even know what campus event this is, but I I love this video of me just playing with the protesters, sitting in front of one of their signs, and Charlie speaking over my shoulder.
		Take a listen.
unidentified		If you aren't wealthy, white and male, Charlie Kirk is not your friend.
candace owens ▲ ● ▼		What do you think?
unidentified		Are we not friends?
candace owens ▲ ● ▼		Is that right?
unidentified		So I'm gonna find out a sign outside of a thing and an event that we just did, and you're not my friend.
unidentified		Go figure.
candace owens ▲ ● ▼		Looking back at too many photos, I just have too many photos with Charlie.
		It's uh it really is incredible to see how many times he's just right behind my back.
		Charlie always had my back, and I always had his.
		Charlie was right by my side when I started Blexit, obviously.
		Um there the night that I met my husband, uh, which was absolutely uh an incredible night.
		And uh in the UK, which I didn't expect to happen.
		And I gotta tell you initially, Charlie ever the analytical mind.
		When I told him, I'm like, oh, if I think I'm gonna marry this guy first, he's like, wait, well, wait, like it's just gonna be good for your brand.
		Like, Charlie, this is love.
		This is not a brand decision.
		And then he sat down and he spent um just one evening with George, and he Charlie was just the most supportive of everything.
		And this is our text chain speaking about that moment.
		He's like, his heart is wonderful, you guys are meant for each other.
		I see it brilliantly and clearly.
		And um, he gets it.
		He isn't afraid of you being you, and he he's been through hell.
		And it was uh, yeah, Charlie was by my side the day that I got married, of course.
		He was by my side, um, you know, when I got married to George.
		And of course, uh Charlie fell in love with Erica.
		Uh that entire journey to me when I was reading Kuatex is so funny because uh it was exceptional.
		I was always leaning into Charlie's analytical mind and making fun of him, like, oh, all we need to do is get a plan.
		You love Erica?
		Okay, what's the plan?
		What are we gonna do?
		What's step one?
		What's step two?
		And the plan that I came up with instantly was all we have to do is convince her that her last name is terrible.
		Her last name, oh, she's gonna she's gotta marry you because it's practical.
		Kirk is gonna it Mrs. Erica Kirk sounds so much better than Mrs. Eric, Miss Erica Francy.
		What is that last name?
		It's a practical decision.
		This is the tech chain from that.
		Charlie and Erica Kirk.
		He says it's gonna be the power couple of a century.
		I need to continue to pray about it.
		I said, her last name's dumb.
		She literally needs you to repose.
		It's way too complicated.
		He said, and he said, I'm gonna tell her it sounds like a sneeze, it's horrible.
		And then I wrote, Marry me, it's a logistics thing.
		That's just who we were.
		Always making fun and always wanting to know what the plan was.
		And obviously it worked, you guys.
		All it worked.
		Our plan worked.
		We broke Erica down.
		First came the name shame, then came the wedding, and then came the children.
		You know, Charlie really loved, really, really loved Erica from a time reading through the text today.
		Um just loved her.
		He loved his family.
		He really did.
		And uh, I just want to say that Charlie and I, because I think this is important.
		Never for a single minute ever did Charlie and I stop being friends.
		Even when the world demanded that from both of us, uh our relationship was it was real.
		We were we're brother and sister, you know, it was we were fortified.
		Our relationship was forged in fire, the fire of politics.
		I knew him.
		I knew Charlie, the real Charlie.
		And Charlie knew the real Candace, you know, and people knew.
		I didn't like a lot of people in politics.
		I didn't like a lot of people calling me and doing the political dance.
		Of course, people guessed it correctly when they said, Oh, the person who probably was the intermediary when Trump called about Brigitte was Charlie Kirk of course it was Charlie it would never send anybody else to call me with anything because they knew that Charlie was a brother to me and there was um so many things that were said that were wrong uh and we laughed at how wrong it was when people thought that when I had made up my mind about Israel that Charlie and me fell apart.

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