(LifeSiteNews) — Outspoken conservative influencer Candace Owens gave a heart-stirring tribute to longtime collaborator Charlie Kirk on a recent podcast.
“Charlie was a visionary.” He was “an amazing person” who “I think in the end … was going through a spiritual transformation,” Owens said. “He loved his family. He loved his wife. He loved his country. And he didn’t deserve that ending … we will carry the torch.”
Kirk, who was born in 1993, hired Owens in 2017 to work for Turning Point USA, an organization he founded five years earlier to promote conservative principles on college campuses. Raised Evangelical, Kirk had recently begun urging Protestants to have a stronger veneration for Mary, the Mother of Christ. Kirk called the Blessed Virgin the “solution” to toxic feminism.
It is not clear if Owens, who converted to Catholicism in April 2024, was hinting that Kirk was considering the Catholic faith, but Kirk’s wife Erika was born and raised in the Church. Images surfacing on social media recently seem to confirm Kirk was attending St. Bernadette Catholic Church in Scottsdale, Arizona this summer on a semi-regular basis.
Candace Owens talking about how Charlie Kirk was praying the rosary and attending Mass pic.twitter.com/VGffZQVy1u
— Pray The Rosary (@PrayTheRosary12) September 15, 2025
Kirk’s purported assailant, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, is now in custody though is not cooperating with investigators. Social media users have expressed doubts with the FBI and mainstream media narrative that Robinson acted alone.
Owens herself cryptically said in an X post that “all lies will be revealed.” She also revealed on her podcast that Kirk was under “a lot of pressure” and that “it’s hard for me to watch the people who were pressuring him” now expressing sympathy. “Something about it that just feels really fake.”
Owens hosted her livestream on September 11 when it crashed after more than 150,000 viewers tuned in. “Charlie broke the internet one more time,” she joked.
Owens recalled how she and Kirk would travel “non-stop” to college campuses for two years and that they would often bicker like an “old married couple” on the road but that they were “happy warriors.”
“We laughed a lot at the protesters,” she said. We were “chased out of a Philadelphia restaurant by Antifa and they threw water and they threw an egg on Charlie.”
Owens explained that she and Kirk would relentlessly prepare for their encounters with liberal-minded audience members. She said they were like “brother and sister” and that they also confided in each other about their future spouses. She explained that she and Kirk never stopped being friends even when she received massive blowback for questioning Israel’s war in Gaza.
“When people thought that I had made up my mind about Israel that Charlie and me fell apart — nope. Never,” she said. “Not for a second. I said, ‘It’s the easiest decision ever,’ because Charlie knew who I was and I knew who he was. I said, ‘Charlie, this is this is where I’m at, and there’s no room for movement, and you tell whoever that needs to hear it, whatever you need to tell them because we’re always going to be brothers and sisters.’”
She continued, “And we would talk about things and debate things behind the scenes. And I think my perspective was as it’s been throughout our relationship: ’You might not get it now, Charlie, but you will. I’m only a few years older than you, but I think you’re going to see things my way.’”
Owens sang Kirk’s praises for many years. While appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast in 2018, she remarked, “In my opinion, he’s going to be a future president of the United States. Everyone (who meets him) says that.”
Candace Owens praising Charlie Kirk on Joe Rogan in 2018:
“In my opinion, he’s going to be a future president of the United States. Everyone [who meets him] says that.”pic.twitter.com/d7A7NBrSjY
— Joe Rogan Podcast News (@joeroganhq) September 12, 2025
Owens’ former Daily Wire colleague Michael Knowles, who is godfather to one of Owens’ children, echoed those sentiments. “Charlie Kirk would have been president. His friends knew it. His admirers knew it. And his enemies knew it,” Knowles said in an X post.
Notably, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted at a vigil at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. this past weekend that it was Kirk who proposed merging the Make America Healthy Again movement with the Trump campaign.
“I owe my unification with President Trump to Charlie,” Kennedy said. Kirk was the “primary architect.”
Kirk was killed last week during one of his “Prove Me Wrong” events at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. After his passing, prayer vigils were held not just across the U.S. but throughout the world. Leading religious and political leaders have issued statements expressing their sympathies.
“I join in the condolences of the family of Charlie Kirk, husband and father, who was barbarously murdered yesterday. May the Blessed Virgin, toward whom he repeatedly showed devotion, receive his soul and present it to the divine Son,” former U.S. Apostolic Nuncio Archbishop Carlo Mario Vigano said in an X post.
Owens said during her show that she “will never allow the memory of Charlie to be forgotten, obviously because there is no Candace without Charlie.”
