Candace Owens, Great American Basket Case

With a set of boulders bigger than Brigitte Macron's, Candace Owens is single-handedly restoring pride in American conspiracy-theory craftsmanship

Was no one else bothered by this? Observe the following pair of videos, one from this past weekend:

Steve Kornacki has a neat on-air vibe. If I owned NBC I’d up his airtime, but rename his segment Nerd on Speed or give him a stand-alone show, instead of shoehorning him into both Meet the Press and Sunday Night Football. The poor guy must worry all the time if he’s degrading political news by comparing it to sports, or vice versa. It’s gaslighting audiences who’ve already suffered.

Life was confusing enough when we only had to worry about advertisers and the government pressuring three networks. In the new Internet multiverse, Fox is seen as a proxy for Republicans, CNN/MSNOW are Democrats, CBS is the IDF, podcaster A a mouthpiece for billionaire Y, influencer B funded by Middle East country Z, and so on. No one believes anything, a problem because it’s in the nature of people to need to believe something. A vacuum of belief makes prime hunting ground for any voice that projects the right combination of suspicion and conviction, while selling stories tailored to audience fears.

No one tops podcaster Candace Owens at this game. She’s a force of nature. It’s rare for a pure pundit to have deep impact on international politics, and even rarer for one to trigger lasting change of the sort now taking place in the Republican Party. Fighting through this week, she’s turned the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk into an epic that makes QAnon seem small-time. An underrated South Park episode from 2003 tried to make fun of conspiracy theorists by inventing a story too ridiculous to believe. The Matt Stone/Trey Parker idea was metrosexuality as an attempt to control the world by “crab people.” That was a laugh, but how about real-world applause for the Owens theory, Charlie Kirk blown away by bee people:

Owens showed the text messages she sent to friends about an “underground related to bees” with a September 1st time stamp, to prove she had concerns about “imminent danger” involving schools nine days before Charlie Kirk was killed at a school. (This brand of conspiracy lunacy — “Israel is full of garages, while Lee Harvey Oswald was shot in one.* Coincidence?” — was once parodied even by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, but Owens has few comics on her tail.) Her story involves cops, Egyptians, FBI personnel, the French Foreign Legion, mysterious rich people in Orem, an airline services company a few miles from my house in New Jersey, Bibi Netanyahu, and Erica Kirk all engaged in a “psychological war” of the utmost sophistication, only planned in bee-speak maybe.

If you gave me a thousand takes I couldn’t deliver that theory with a straight face, but Owens is the LeBron James of deadpan. Her certitude is blowing a hole in the hull of the Republican Party, and that’s probably just for starters. That ability to impact world events with sheer balls and 100% Grade-A All-American Bullshit will someday give her a place among national legends like P.T. Barnum and Colonel Tom Parker. Pausing to express awe for America’s Outpatient-in-Chief:

I’m aware there are people who subscribe to this site who take Owens seriously and were insulted when I laughed at a recent interview she gave to Piers Morgan, in which she admitted there was “no concrete evidence” behind her Kirk claims. There are people who similarly become furious if I question her assertion that French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife put a “hit” out on her, wanting her “executed upon.” That little piece of business has been viewed 45 million times, yet people still plead as if she were a lost waif, demanding to know why I don’t offer to “help” her uncover the truth instead of chuckling on the sidelines.

I’ve reached out. I fought through the forest of studio portraits on her site and the ads for her “supercharged skincare” products and links to her book and merch store and found a contact button that led to a note from an employee directing me to send questions for comment to an email address, which I’ve done more than once, of course getting no answer. Meanwhile bystanders like Duncan Aviation, the Morristown-based aviation company that rented cars for visiting Egyptians whose license plates Candace read over the air as if they were the secret to the International Communist Conspiracy, was more than happy to finally get a chance to comment.

“Duncan Aviation is a business aircraft service provider that performs maintenance, refurbishment and upgrades for business aircraft operators worldwide,” they said. “As part of its services, the company provides access to hotels and rental cars for aircraft crew, who often stay near the facility while major maintenance is being performed. All international crew members apply for entry to the country and are screened through the US Customs and Border Patrol prior to entry…”

The cars Candace implied were here for sinister reasons (her initial suspicions about a Kirk plot were tied to the presence of an Egyptian plane in Utah, whose passengers rented cars) were, according to the U.S. partner, really for “aircraft crew” performing maintenance on business aircraft. Why not explore that boring possibility before running with “Operation Mocking-Plane” videos? That’s what I’d do, which is why the last thing Candace Owens wants is someone like me “helping” with anything (I’m also way too low-profile for her). If she wanted help with her Macron situation she’d similarly have listed a source less vague than “a high-ranking employee of the French government” (read: “According to myself”), and she wouldn’t subsequently have sent a packet about the plot to “both the White House and our counterterrorism agencies,” claiming it was proof of sorts when they “confirmed receipt.”

That’s an old trick. Short-sellers will send a packet about a company they’ve bet against to the FBI or SEC, then call a pal at a New York paper as soon as they accept the letter, allowing media to then claim the firm is “under investigation,” which tanks the stock. Another old media trick is luring a high-profile target into a humiliating self-defense, which she’s done by claiming Brigitte Macron is a man. “I want you to know that Brigitte Macron probably stands peeing up [sic]… pees standing up… Brigitte Macron has a penis,” she recently told Piers Morgan, who in an otherwise excellent interview missed a chance to seize on the word “probably”:

Whether or not Morgan is right and Owens loses the lawsuit the Macrons filed against her, she’s already scored a massive accomplishment in the annals of online provocateurs, securing headlines like “Brigitte Macron to show court ‘scientific proof’ she is a woman” and “The ‘Transvestigation of Brigitte Macron.” The Macrons should read a few books about American gamesmanship and specifically that of Lyndon Johnson, who (the story goes) once instructed an aide to spread a rumor that a campaign opponent had sex with pigs. We can’t get away with that, the aide supposedly said, and many Americans know LBJ’s famed punchline: “I know, but let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

Owens is a great believer in the PR stunt, and often takes the nasty shortcut of repeatedly leveling reputation-mangling accusations without foundation, pushing targets to eventually take the bait and try to talk to her out of desperation. After spending most of the last few months implying that Erika Kirk somehow had guilty knowledge of the plot to kill her husband, a four-hour meeting with the widow was arranged, after which some expected a cessation of hostilities.

No luck. Last Thursday she ran a show interviewing a man named “Mitch” who claimed to have seen Erika at an Army base called Fort Huachuca the day before her husband died. Afterward, Ben Shapiro gave a speech blasting her, which of course led to a) a tweet saying Shapiro is “invested in Charlie’s murder,” and b) an Owens video the next day titled, “What does Ben Shapiro know about Erica Kirk and Fort Huachuca?” (Note the cross-marketing of the new theory with the Shapiro news. This person is a content machine.)

She began by saying, “Ben Shapiro is terrified,” then explained that “Personally, I think he knows something about her. That is what I am sensing, that he knows something about Erica Kirk. And every time he speaks, I grow more certain that Israel might be involved with 9/10,” referencing the date of Kirk’s murder.

I reached out to Candace to confirm the neat sourcing, that she “is sensing” that Ben Shapiro is part of a murderous plot. Again, no comment. “I sense” is a thing with her, she used it in her “underground related to bees” speech. Not to overdo the cultural references, but “I’m sensing” was such a constant trope of post-WWII comics of the X-Men type and sixties/seventies entertainments that the Stone/Parker duo went after it again in Team America, World Police, through the character Sarah, a telepath whose superpower is “sensing” whatever’s in her head. Owens echoes the same schtick:

She also occasionally dresses in a shawl, recalling another satirical broadcast empath (“Sybil the Soothsayer” from Network), and frequently intuits about things that don’t “add up,” another storied tactic in this world. She uses them all, from “History suggests it could happen” to “Person X lacks an alibi for my unsourced accusation” to “I’m just asking questions.” That’s not what she’s doing, by the way: “I believe Charlie Kirk was betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA and some of the very people who eulogized him on stage” is a smear, not a question. Every media person knows what this is — in every mania there’s always a person whose willingness to spread the unconfirmable theories is silently embraced on the fringes — but it usually comes with mainstream condemnation.

That’s not happening in this case, or at least not much, surely a reflection of the current unpopularity of Israel. She’s always been giddy on this topic (one video that stood out involved her belief that the Georgian author of the anti-cosmopolitan purges, Josef Stalin, was Jewish), but now finding Israel under every manhole is eminently retweetable, and so is she. As such, her ruminations find many supporters to stand behind her against Shapiro, “Tel-Aviv Mark Levin,” and other pro-Israel villains. There’s also quasi-endorsement among left-leaning commentators who’ve begun siding with what they call the “America First” side of the MAGA movement over the “Israel First” crowd. I get criticizing Israel, but I don’t understand letting a parody of a conspiracy theorist lead the charge, especially one that blows off the fig leaf terminology about Zionists and just blasts “the Jews” instead. She direct-tweets the whole religion, demanding “you” apologize not just for the slave trade, but the clever historical frame-job on white men:

Simultaneously bonkers and one of the most-followed voices on earth! May we find find our way back to duller times.

*A previous version of this story incorrectly used the name of Jack Ruby.