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Welcome back to False Flag! I have good news: Arizona prosecutors have dropped fake-ID and drug possession charges against infamous “looksmaxxer” Clavicular, whose epic highs and crushing lows I catalogued on Monday.
The pending charges were poised to keep Clavicular stuck in Arizona until the case was resolved. But now the nation’s bonesmasher-in-chief can mog moids in nightclubs across the country—maybe even one near you! With that said, given Clavicular’s penchant for creating spectacle and driving under the influence of drugs, it seems unlikely he’ll stay out of trouble for long.
Speaking of online spectacles, today we’ve got a look at how a phenomenon known as Candace Owens Brain has infested even some employees at the YouTuber’s archrival organization, Turning Point USA. Executives at the conservative group are now grappling with staffers believing they killed their own founder, Charlie Kirk. It makes for some odd HR meetings. It also speaks to the popularity of this kind of conspiracy thinking on the right, even among the people Owens is portraying as villains.
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Candace Owens Gets Inside TPUSA’s Head
Her nutty theories about the killing of Charlie Kirk have won over some of his organization’s employees.
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TURNING POINT USA COMMUNICATIONS staffer Aubrey Laitsch was called into a meeting last month and abruptly told she was being fired, according to a video she posted online last week.
In her telling, the reason Laitsch was given for being let go involved a convoluted story about an Uber ride. It went like this:
A TPUSA executive had taken an Uber and asked his driver what he thought of the organization. The driver replied that he had heard it was in chaos in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination—and that no one inside TPUSA liked Erika Kirk, Kirk’s widow and now TPUSA’s CEO. Then the Uber driver revealed to the TPUSA executive that the source of his information was Laistch, who the driver claimed was a high school friend of his daughter’s.
A strange story, and one Laitsch said she didn’t buy. She then offered up another explanation—one she said didn’t come up during her discussion with TPUSA executives but which she sensed was a factor in her termination.
Laitsch, as she outlined in her video, seems to genuinely believe that her own organization had something to do with its founder’s murder or an ensuing coverup.
The unfounded claim that Charlie Kirk’s assassination was some sort of inside job is growing in popularity on the right after being promoted by YouTuber and former TPUSA employee Candace Owens. Laitsch claims that others at TPUSA are suspicious about Kirk’s murder too—and that they had been discussing among themselves how they couldn’t raise the issue internally.
“I just have a gut feeling that I was terminated from Turning Point because I am questioning the narrative of what happened to my role model and CEO, Charlie Kirk, on the day of his assassination,” Laitsch said in the video.
Laitsch did not respond to a request for comment.
Neither did TPUSA. But in fairness to the group, there aren’t many jobs where you’d still be employed if you started telling people you thought your bosses murdered someone.
In that regard, Laitsch’s firing—for whatever the reason—isn’t noteworthy. What is, though, is how widespread Owens’s ideas around Kirk’s death have become.
Laitsch is just one of several Turning Point staffers who has been fired amid what’s been dubbed a “purge” of employees. While it’s not clear how many have been let go, Owens has played audio on her show of another staffer who claimed to have been fired without explanation. Owens also claimed that a TPUSA executive showed up at a third staffers home to fire her and demand the immediate return of her company devices. A GoFundMe for staffers booted in the “TPUSA Purge” has raised more than $71,000 as of Thursday morning.
It’s hard to say if these firings are being driven by the (very sensible) disapproval of staff talking about their company killing its founder, or paranoia about Owens having credible information about internal TPUSA activities—or both. But clearly, someone within the organization is leaking to Owens. Just this year, the highly controversial podcaster posted videos of Erika Kirk on internal videochats in the wake of Kirk’s assassination that were interpreted on the online right as insufficiently mournful.
Owens already received a cease-and-desist order from TPUSA in January, for spreading conspiracies about Kirk’s death. But she seems undeterred by it. Nor does she seem tripped up by the nondisparagement agreement she signed with the organization (from when she was employed there) that could make her theories even more legally perilous. On her Tuesday show, Owens quipped that, if Erika Kirk had been killed instead of Charl