By: Rich Lowry – nationalreview.com – November 11, 2025

This is next-level lunacy.

THERE’S been a lot of conversation about Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes lately, but everyone should spare a thought for Candace Owens.

On her eponymous podcast, Candace, the crackpot influencer has been conducting an “investigation” into what happened to Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University that is another symptom of how far off the rails a segment of the right-wing media ecosystem has gone.

(Owens is too foolish even for Fuentes, who says she defines “low-IQ antisemitism,” although Carlson has her on his podcast for friendly interviews.)

The Owens probe is about as serious and likely to bear fruit as O. J.’s attempt to find the real killer of Nicole Simpson.

According to Owens, who once worked with Kirk at Turning Point USA, what obviously didn’t happen is that Tyler Robinson shot Kirk in the neck with a rifle at relatively close range from the roof of a building with a clear line of sight to Kirk after fulminating about the activist and podcaster being a hater.

No, in episode after episode, day after day, for an hour or more, she claims that things just don’t feel right, invests enormous significance in minutiae, asks for help from listeners in tracking down supposedly crucial information, casts aspersions on TPUSA, attacks anyone who pushes back against her accusations, claims that things are getting weirder and weirder, makes dark insinuations about Jews and Israel, and suggests that
she could be killed at any time by the same shadowy forces that took out Kirk.

Give Candace Owens this: It takes considerable talent to take an open-and-shut murder case and turn it into a whodunit and you’ve-got-to-listen-to-every-episode true-crime mystery.

The only drama in the Kirk case is whether Robinson will get the death penalty or not, yet Owens has made it so much more based on the sheer power of her storytelling. She could give Orson Welles a run for his money.

It is often said of people who have embraced some kooky theory that they have “lost the plot.” Here, Owens has lost the plot and made up a plot, both in the sense of a page-turning work of fiction and dastardly, multifaceted conspiracy.

Another way to think of Owens is as the podcasting equivalent of Jim Garrison, the reprehensible New Orleans prosecutor valorized by Oliver Stone, who ruined the life of Clay Shaw, whom he falsely accused of being involved in the assassination of JFK based on preposterous conspiracy theories. As George Will wrote of Garrison, he “staged an assassination ‘investigation’ that involved recklessness, cruelty, abuse of power, publicity mongering and dishonesty, all on a scale that strongly suggested lunacy leavened by cynicism.”

Newsweek’s judgment at the time on the Shaw trial — a “parody of conspiracy theories, a can-you-top-this of arbitrarily conjoined improbabilities” — applies equally to the podcasting of Candace Owens.

When Alex Jones was at his height (and he hasn’t gone away), it felt as though he was in it for the entertainment. He was like the WWE announcer who knows the wrestling is fake, and knows that we know the wrestling is fake, but imbues his play-by-play with a sense of great import all the same.

Owens is different. To be sure, she is entertaining too. Who wouldn’t chuckle at least a little at the notion that Emmanuel Macron’s wife, Brigitte, is really a man? But Owens is more alluring and sinister than an Alex Jones. She wants followers, and not just to sell them the equivalent of supplements but to gain influence and turn MAGA in a direction hostile to Israel, Jews, and Judaism.

Now, it is true that Owens is ignorant of basic things and makes embarrassing elementary factual mistakes all the time. Yet, she’s very glib, and her credibility as a talker is bolstered by the near-sociopathic self-confidence of someone who believes that her saying something must make it true.

Her riff about the moon landing’s being faked is characteristic. She kind of knows something about the Van Allen radiation belt, which is more than most people can say, but overstates its potential as an obstacle to getting a spacecraft to the moon, and she misunderstands how temperature works in space, among other things.

The upshot is that she apparently thinks a few Google searches are enough to establish, to the satisfaction of any halfway-aware person, that Stanley Kubrick filmed a fictionalized moon landing for NASA in his best work outside of A Clockwork Orange.

Or consider her contention that dinosaurs are “fake and gay.” This apparently stems from her wholly erroneous belief that only paleontologists have ever found dinosaur bones, so there must be a conspiracy among them to fabricate fossils to undermine faith in God. QED.

The Jews have a special place in her conspiracies. Harvard is a Mossad base (highly convenient, one assumes, if Israel wants to carry out an operation against Tufts or Bowdoin). Israel was involved in the September 11 attack. The Holocaust is exaggerated or fake, and Elie Wiesel is a liar. The Jews carried out the Bolshevik Revolution in order to exterminate Christians. The Jews killed JFK and, for some reason, also Michael
Jackson. Stalin was a secret Jew, and so was Atatürk. Jeffrey Epstein was, of course, doing Israel’s bidding.

She hasn’t yet accused the Jews of poisoning the wells, but give it time.

About the Kirk assassination, she says that it was a military operation and that it is likely that there were two shots, with the rifle shot used only to cover up another shot from an unknown assassin at even closer range. Robinson’s role was to drive around campus assisting in “costume changes.”

Elementary, my dear Watson.

Of course, there’s no evidence for any of this whatsoever, while the evidence for Robinson’s guilt is overwhelming.

Owens dismisses all the facts implicating Robinson by saying, for instance, that Robinson has never confessed — when withholding his guilty plea is the only leverage he has to try to avoid the death penalty.

She says she has heard that Robinson is “bewildered” by the idea that he carved messages in bullet casings, but what is he supposed to say? That he did it?

She also doubts the authenticity of his text exchange with his boyfriend after he shot Kirk, because he denies sending the messages. Again, unless he’s going to plead guilty right now (he may plead at some point in exchange for a life sentence), of course he wouldn’t take ownership of the texts.

She believes that the texts aren’t credible because there’s no way Robinson would use a fancy word like “vehicle” instead of “car.” Not only is “vehicle” not a particularly uncommon word, Owens messes up what she considers to be evidence that cinches the point. In sleuth mode, she says that police body cam footage of Robinson after a car accident shows him using the word “car” instead of “vehicle.” But in the course of the encounter, he also says “vehicle.”

She also thinks that because Robinson is intelligent, he never would have written self-incriminating texts, but smart people sometimes commit terrible acts. Once you believe that Robinson, irrationally, killed Kirk, it’s not a leap to believe that he, irrationally, confessed to someone close to him, which is actually a common impulse in such cases.

Waving off everything that is clear and simple in the matter, Owens instead piles up “just asking questions” innuendos one after another.

What accounts for minor discrepancies in eyewitness accounts? Why is TPUSA so compliant regarding the official account of “the feds,” a phrase that, for her, is as venomous as “the pigs” was for the New Left. Why are people grieving so weirdly? Who was this or that person who can be seen in a video or who talked to the media right afterward?

Everything is the Zapruder tape.

Her “investigation” has led her to obsess over a call that Michael McCoy, the TPUSA chief of staff, made in the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s shooting that she finds suspicious for any host of reasons; over valve-manufacturing company Caldera Engineering, because someone who lives in a neighborhood where Robinson showed up works for the firm (it turns out that Caldera once hired a gay actor as an employee and was founded by an Israeli — hmmm); over the NatCon commentator Josh Hammer — who is conveniently Jewish — for a tweet about public executions the day before the
public execution of Kirk (never mind that Hammer was referring to the killer of Iryna Zarutska) and for all sorts of other allegedly nefarious reasons; and over an Egyptian plane. This is just a small sampling.

She goes into granular detail on every branch of her so-called investigation, and inevitably, if someone doesn’t answer her questions, it’s suspicious; if they do answer, the answers are suspicious; if they reject her insinuations, that is especially suspicious; and if something she says is debunked, that’s suspicious, too.

She addresses whoever allegedly killed Kirk as “you,” as if they are listening to her show in fear that she is closing on them, lending extra drama to the proceedings. She says they could be after her and Tucker Carlson — in fact, shooting Kirk in the throat may have been a message to her and Carlson to shut up.

Who are these people? Well, she’s not going to say that Israel did it, but Israel sure is acting guilty, not like the Mormons (who don’t, to be fair, have popular right-wing podcasters accusing them of being part of nefarious plots). “There was nobody more psychotically insistent that people stop asking questions about Charlie’s death immediately,” she observed the other day, “I mean, early hours, than the people that are
dedicated to the Israel lobby.”

Owens has made much of legitimate behind-the-scenes contention over Kirk’s position on Israel and whether he should give a platform to Tucker Carlson.

It is universally the case, though, that donors will feel vested in the position of any advocacy-type organization that they fund, and if they aren’t happy with its direction, perhaps pull their funding. What they don’t do is immediately launch a clandestine effort to kill the leader of the organization that they’ve decided not to fund, which is what Owens is implying happened here, surely because Jewish donors were involved.

“It’s looking to me like the apparent plan was to assassinate Charlie Kirk, who had at long last faltered on the pro-Israel cause,” he explained on a recent show. “Then, to stage a hostile takeover of his brand and of his legacy.”

Inevitably, she has become more hostile to TPUSA and the Trump administration — in fact, a comment from Don Jr. expressing confidence in the FBI investigation has her wondering, inevitably, “how deep this thing really goes.”

And, regarding TPUSA, she’s suggesting that Kirk’s killing “reeks of an inside job.” (It’s never an outside job for these people.)

Needless to say, this must be causing great pain to Erika Kirk (and everyone else at TPUSA). Here is someone with a large platform and with inside information, as a friend of Erika’s late husband, suggesting that the organization that he built and that she wants to keep running is undamentally corrupt — guilty in the assassination of its founder and the father of her children.

Nonetheless, Candace routinely congratulates herself on her own courage and faithfulness, showing pathological levels of self-involvement and callousness. She says Charlie would have done the same thing for her — if she’d been the one taken out in a shadowy military operation falsely portrayed as the work of a lone pro-trans gunman.

Now, it may be that Owens is fundamentally a marginal figure. Her cracked programming doesn’t break through into the mainstream conversation the way Carlson’s interviews often do, and obviously, she doesn’t have the prosecutorial powers of that long-ago conspiracy theorist Jim Garrison. She can’t, on her own, get a good Dreyfus or Clay Shaw case going. But it’s not for lack of trying. She’s doing what she can to turbocharge conspiratorial thinking, with a special focus on the Jews, who are capable of almost any infamy.

It’s a very online, 21st-century contribution to a rancid tradition with a long pedigree, from which nothing good has ever come.

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Source: The Malevolent Brilliance of Candace Owens | National Review