Charlie Kirk’s Producer Debunks Candace Owens’s Anti-Israel Conspiracy Theory
Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk at Centennial Institute’s Western Conservative Summit in 2018.
Andrew Kolvet, the executive producer of the The Charlie Kirk Show, debunked an anti-Israel conspiracy theory about the late conservative activist being promoted by Candace Owens.
During a Monday monologue, Owens declared that “my friend was shot in the neck, and I’m just not really in the state right now to be polite when it comes to the answers that I am demanding,” adding that billionaire activist, Bill Ackman, a supporter of Israel staged “an intervention” because “Charlie’s rational thoughts about Israel were a no-no.”
“Bill Ackman was very upset and threats were made. That is what I am told, and I will tell you that I am very happy for Bill Ackman to dispute this narrative,” claimed Owens.
She continued:
It was at this time that Bibi Netanyahu was called, and Charlie was invited to Israel. This was an under duress situation I would say, because I’d been in these situations before. When I started asking very sensible questions about Israel as someone who had dedicated her political life to supporting Israel, many times alongside Charlie Kirk, I was met with the very same pressure. And just like Charlie was being invited to Israel, I was invited somewhere else. And when this arrived to me, it felt like a threat. You know, I got to tell you that. It felt like threat, like not like, “Hey, come here and we can educate you because you’re my friend,” more like, “This is your last chance.” That’s how it felt to me. I can’t speak to how it felt to Charlie.
And I know that Charlie was offered a ton of money in this moment, a ton of money. Bibi would fund it, you know, spend tons of money and Turning Point, I guess, if it needed to go to a higher level, would have gone to an even higher level than it already was at. And I for a fact that Charlie denied that funding. That Charlie denied, and what Bibi didn’t include there, he declined to go to Israel for, I would describe this as like, you know, re-education camp, you know, we’ve seen it. “You made an, uh-oh, but we can help you. You know, we just need you to come out to Auschwitz and take a picture, yeah? We just need to come to the Holocaust museum and take a photo. We just need you to go Israel and we can make this better.” Charlie said no to Bibi, okay?
Before that, she quote-tweeted a post about Tucker Carlson criticizing Netanyahu on an episode of Kirk’s show hosted by Vice President JD Vance on Monday, captioning it “All will be revealed.” She went on to warn her followers to “Be very wary and suspicious of the people who are already telling us to stop asking questions about the Charlie Kirk assassination,” and speculated that authorities had intentionally allowed Kirk’s killer to evade capture.
After her monologue, she submitted that she had “in no way” implied “that Israel had anything to do with Charlie’s assassination. What it does demonstrate is that they inexplicably moved to misrepresent his shifting viewpoint on Israel and the EXTREME pressure it put him under.”
Naturally, Ackman saw fit to respond to Owens’s accusations, which he did in a longform X post that read:
This afternoon @RealCandaceO slandered me by accusing me of ‘staging an intervention’ with Charlie Kirk in which ‘threats were made’ with respect to his supposed ‘evolving stance’ on Israel at an event I hosted in the Hamptons. Candace also intimated that I ‘blackmail[ed]’ Charlie.
On the show, Candace said that she ‘would be very happy for me to dispute this narrative.’ While it pains me to drive more traffic to her program, I am responding here to clear my name. It saddens me that we live in a society where social media influencers seek to monetize the tragic death of Charlie Kirk.
For the record, at no time have I ever threatened Charlie Kirk, Turning Point or anyone associated with him. I have never blackmailed anyone, let alone Charlie Kirk. I have never offered Charlie or Turning Point any money in an attempt to influence Charlie’s opinion on anything. In fact, my interactions with Charlie Kirk have been extremely cordial, albeit limited, regretfully so, as I was very impressed by him and his work and I will sadly never see him again.
In an effort to clear the record, I share the following:
I have followed @charliekirk11 on @X for some time and greatly admired him. While I didn’t agree with Charlie on every issue, I had enormous respect for his intelligence, vast knowledge about religion, and his willingness to take on all comers in open mic sessions on campus and otherwise. Periodically, I would repost some of his posts and video clips.
I connected with Charlie when he DM’d me in late May of this year and expressed interest in meeting me. In light of our respective schedules, we were unable to find a time to meet in person so we scheduled a zoom on June 11th.
On the zoom, he explained to me that conservatives, in particular, young conservatives were getting tired of defending Israel, and this was very concerning to him. I asked him how I could learn more, and he suggested that it might be useful to convene a group of young conservative influencers on a host of topics that could include Israel to get a better sense of how the conservative community was thinking about Israel and other relevant issues of concern to young people.
On the zoom, Charlie also said that his open mic conversations on campus were very effective in addressing issues on the minds of students, but he was only one person with limited bandwidth. He suggested that recruiting a group of junior Charlie Kirk’s who could host open mic sessions on college campuses would be an effective way to encourage debate on a host of issues, an approach he believed to be worthy of consideration, and better enable students to get to the truth.
I expressed interest in learning more and we thereafter scheduled a series of conference calls and zooms with Charlie, Turning Point staff and members of my team in an effort to assemble a diverse group of influencers who we could convene for a day and a half session. In addition to getting a better sense of what and where young conservatives were on various issues, Charlie thought doing so might enable him to identify potential candidates who could launch their own campus tours and carry forth his approach to dialogue.
We chose the afternoon of August 4th to the afternoon of the 5th for the convening, and Charlie and members of my team worked to put together an invitation list. I offered to host the sessions in Bridgehampton (and cover the costs) so that I could attend some of the sessions as I was working from there at that time.
Charlie sent out the invitations and about 35 or so influencers accepted. Charlie estimated that the influencers who attended collectively had more than 100 million followers.
Charlie and Turning Point put together the agenda for the meeting and the topics were:
The Economic Future of America
The Cultural Landscape of Dating and Marriage
The Convergence of East and West
Mamdani, the New Threat to AmericaCharlie asked me to moderate the Economic Future discussion which I did, and I thereafter hosted a Q&A session with the participants.
The Convergence of East and West included a discussion of immigration, value systems, the U.S. approach to foreign policy and Israel. While I had wanted to attend the Convergence panel, I had a board meeting that conflicted with this session.
Those that attended this session said that the Israel discussion was similar to the other sessions with the attendees expressing varying points of view as well as explaining the views of their followers. Some participants were critical of Israel and U.S. support for Israel, and others were supportive.
The sessions were punctuated by meals. I attended one group lunch and a group dinner where I sat with Charlie and others.
I found the sessions I attended interesting and I really enjoyed meeting the influencers. It gave me considerable perspective on what is on the mind of young Americans on a wide range of issues.
At the end of the event, I sat with Charlie and members of my team and we discussed the events of the convening. Charlie believed that he had identified a number of potential Turning Point ambassadors who could launch open mic events on campus and that he would follow up with them. We agreed to keep in touch thereafter.
We corresponded by text thereafter over the next few weeks on a range of topics that did not include Israel, and the next thing I knew, he was gone.
In short, this was not an ‘intervention’ to ‘blackmail’ Charlie Kirk into adopting certain views on Israel. It was nothing of the sort.
But you don’t have to take Ackman’s word for it, Kolvet confirmed Ackman’s account of his relationship with his old boss.
“I have been asked about the Bill Ackman event more than a few times now so I asked our staff who were traveling with Charlie to find out what’s true and what’s not. His team was with him ‘100% of the time when he wasn’t in his hotel room,'” began Kolvet. “Here’s what they told me: ‘Bill never yelled at Charlie, never pressed him on Bibi, never gave him a list of Charlie’s offenses against Israel.’ There was concern raised about having Tucker at SAS (we don’t believe this came from Bill) and Charlie’s reply was: ‘Honestly, people telling me not to have Tucker makes me want to have Tucker, and I am going to lock him in for AmFest too.’ Charlie personally told me he had a very cordial relationship with Bill, and the event was productive.”
“FWIW, I spoke to all three team members, not counting security, who were with him, because I wanted to make sure one person hadn’t missed the alleged incident etc.,” he added.
Kirk was often confronted by anti-Israel activists — many of them peddling anti-Semitic theories — during his travels to campuses around the country, and he did not take kindly to them.
“Don’t look at your phone, look me in the eye,” he instructed one interlocutor who criticized the Talmud. “You cherry-picked something off the internet that makes Jews look bad.”
During a debate with a student at Cambridge University, Kirk mounted a vehement defense of Israel’s war against Hamas, and shared a clip of him doing so in which he decried the “chilling” dearth “of moral clarity on this topic.”
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