The company’s chatbot has said Kirk’s killing was ‘motivated by right-wing ideology.’ Owens calls it a ‘military hit that involved foreign actors.’
AI chatbot Perplexity is a sponsor of Candace Owens’s podcast, including a Wednesday episode in which Owens implied that conservative commentator Josh Hammer was involved in the killing of Charlie Kirk.
Owens, who has said she believes Kirk’s assassination was a “military hit that involved foreign actors,” repeatedly floated theories that Israel and its supporters were somehow connected to the Turning Point USA founder’s death.
“I do not accept, and nor do you guys, that Charlie Kirk lost his life because he really pissed off the trans lobby,” Owens said on the episode sponsored by Perplexity. While Owens said she “can’t prove” that Israel killed Kirk, she did claim supporters of Israel are “not acting right” and her “gut [feeling] means something.”
“I am uncomfortable with how many lies people that support Israel have been telling me in the wake of his death,” she said. “That has been almost the only compelling argument that Israel had anything to do with it is the way they’re acting right now.”
Owens spent much of the episode parsing social media posts that Hammer wrote the day before Kirk’s death, including a retweet of an old post from President Donald Trump supporting “public executions.”
While Hammer said his repost was in reference to the killing of Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska that week, Owens argued that the post was suspicious and could indicate that Hammer, a friend of Kirk’s, had foreknowledge of Kirk’s assassination.
Owens had quoted a post on X the day before that accused Hammer of having known Kirk would be assassinated. When journalist Yashar Ali pointed out that Hammer’s post was about Zarutska’s killing, Owens accused Ali of lying, saying, “You are just covering for him and it won’t work.”
On her show, Owens repeated her claim that Kirk was changing his mind about his pro-Israel position—a claim contradicted by a conversation Kirk had about pro-Israel messaging just before his assassination—and implied once more that Hammer’s post on X had something to do with the killing.
“What could have been going on that Josh Hammer decided to dig through the 2013 Twitter archives and retweet someone calling for public execution?” Owens asked. “Well I’ll let one of the many Zionist PR agents explain it first. Yashar Ali, who, like I said, is quite literally paid to do PR for Zionists—I know this personally—on the right and on the left, tried to explain it away by kind of lying, I would say. He tried to claim definitively that Josh was referring to the criminal who horrifically murdered the Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in North Carolina.”
Owens went on to imply that Hammer, “a lawyer by training,” must have been referring to something else and described him as an “incredibly angry little man” who “views himself to be a separate race, Jewish.”
Owens later claimed that the “Zionist lobby” is “sinister, it’s evil” and is “trying to destroy me,” and suggested that unnamed evil forces were also trying to assassinate her and fellow opponent of Israel, Tucker Carlson.
“It terrifies me to think that on the day that Charlie died, I got multiple phone calls from people who said that me and Tucker should lay low, because we’re also on the list,” Owens said.
The episode’s description includes a plug for Perplexity’s web browser.
“Download Perplexity’s new AI-web browser, Comet, by heading to https://pplx.ai/Candace and let your browser work for you,” the description reads. “Plus, right now when you download Comet – you get a month of Rumble Premium for free!”
Perplexity, as the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this month, has itself echoed conspiracy theories about Kirk’s killing. The chatbot said a “recent prominent assassination in the U.S. motivated by right-wing ideology is the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.”
Prosecutors say Kirk was assassinated by Tyler Robinson, an alleged left-wing extremist, whose gun was found near the scene and who turned himself into authorities after confessing to his parents. Robinson also admitted to the shooting in text messages to his transgender lover, saying he killed Kirk because he opposed his political views, according to charging documents.
Utah governor Spencer Cox (R.) said after the shooting that it was “very clear to us and to the investigators that this was a person who was deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology.”
Perplexity did not respond to a Free Beacon request for comment.
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