While Turning Point USA has been boasting about the millions of viewers its halftime show attracted Sunday night, Candace Owens is calling them out for that claim and says the organization is scamming its viewers. Let’s get into it.
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As we’ve reported, TPUSA has been teasing its MAGA-friendly Super Bowl halftime show for months, and Sunday night it finally happened. With performers such as Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice and Kid Rock, along with multiple dedications to Charlie Kirk, TPUSA brought out all the MAGA stops. If you want a full rundown of how the show went, you can read one here.
At its peak, the halftime show attracted 6.1 million views, according to The Root. After the show ended, Kirk’s widow and CEO of TPUSA, Erika, got on X to thank the millions who tuned in and exclaimed that her husband would have loved it.
“The @TPUSA All-American Halftime Show was so incredible. Charlie would’ve absolutely loved it. Thank you to the millions that tuned in. I’m so proud of our entire team, staff and the artists who believed in the vision and mission,” she posted.
The archived livestream now sits at 20 million views at the time of writing.
However, Owens did not hold back on her less-than-complimentary words for the halftime show and their allegedly false claim of six million views. Since Charlie Kirk’s passing, Owens has often thrown shade at the TPUSA organization, and Monday (Feb. 9) was no different.
On X, Owens posted that while she hated Bad Bunny’s show for its lack of English, she hated TPUSA’s show for “paying platform advertisers to pretend they broke records.”
“On the one hand, we have a half-time show presented without a word of English spoken. On the other hand, we have an organization that scammed its views by paying platform advertisers, followed by influencers, to pretend they broke records,” she wrote, adding, “The left vs. right grift is actually boring now.”
On her live YouTube podcast, “Candace,” Owens dove further into the alleged scamming. First, she stated that TPUSA is using its money to buy a fake reality. “They want to believe that they can afford to outright purchase reality.”
Then, after playing a clip of TPUSA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet stating that the show got “at one point over 10 million concurrent views,” Owens said that as a YouTuber, she knew that claim was false.
“If you know YouTube at all, that’s just not true,” she said. To prove her point, Owens used her own viewership to show that the video platform often boosts viewership at the end of a livestream. “Right now, we have 95,000 people watching this show. As soon as this show concludes, I want you to see how many viewers YouTube is going to instantly give it right away. It’s probably going to be like 200,000, 300,000 views right away.”
To validate her claim further, Owens referenced a screenshot of Playboard, a ranking database for YouTube viewership. The screenshot showed the highest-ranked YouTube livestream to be at 8 million views, with the 10th highest being 4.1 million views; the TPUSA show was not on it.
But, it’s important to note that at the time of writing, TPUSA’s halftime show has been added to the list of most-watched YouTube livestreams on Playboard, ranked fourth with 5.3 million views at its peak.
To finish her exposé, Owens said the reason she felt the need to speak on the halftime show was because it is the “perfect analogy” of what TPUSA has become.
“This is what this organization has become. Wealthy, corrupt and dishonest. Just to our faces,” Owens said. Continuing,she stated Charlie Kirk would have hated it. “This is everything that Charlie Kirk hated. When we were hitting the ground, we were talking about the need for free markets. This is not an example of free markets. This is an example of corny capitalism. It’s corny capitalism, and you’re going to take it.”
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