The plot in MAGA-ville is thicker than a holiday fruitcake, but far-right influencers are still stirring in more intrigue.
On Tuesday, the demagogue podcaster Candace Owens, who has some nine million followers across X, YouTube, and Instagram, posted the 2025 equivalent of a Q drop: “Today will be the day that the government can no longer deny it. Charlie Kirk was assassinated and our military was involved.”
This j’accuse moment was inevitable.
For months, Owens, whose forte is antisemitic hatemongering, has claimed that President Trump, a “chronic disappointment,” is sold out to Israel, which is blackmailing him over the Epstein files. Kirk, she alleges, was killed in a Pentagon-Mossad plot because he had privately turned on Israel. As part of this farrago, Owens alleges that Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s right-wing activist organization, played Judas to Kirk’s Christ, was complicit in his murder, and is thoroughly corrupt. The corruption allegation got a boost last month when a former senior TPUSA official was convicted of election fraud.
Coming in for Owens’s particular enmity is Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow and now TPUSA’s chief executive. Owens, who has called herself Charlie’s best friend and sister, now believes Erika is covering for TPUSA and “this is why” people doubt “women are equipped to lead companies.” Last week, Owens seemed to troll Erika by reminiscing about Charlie’s single days, which led right-wing influencer Scarlett Johnson to call Owens a “cruel Jezebel.” This might sound like Hunting Wives–worthy sniping, except that Trump’s Treasury Department took the time last week to assure Erika Kirk that it would not investigate TPUSA, and TPUSA invited Owens to a much-hyped livestream scheduled for next Monday to discuss her allegations against … the entire world.
Oh, but the Hunting Husbands would like a word. Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes is beefing with Owens, whom he has called, with unexpected gender fluidity, an “Uncle Tom.” Though Fuentes shares Owens’s hatred of Jews, he believes his Hitlerian views are intellectually superior to Owens’s: “Low-IQ antisemitism has a name, and its name is Candace Owens.” Also on Tuesday, Fuentes told Piers Morgan that “women are very difficult to be around,” and thus he has never had sex. “No, absolutely not,” Fuentes told Morgan. Far-right pepperpot Tucker Carlson recently told Theo Von, another podcasting pepperpot, that, while he’s not saying the FBI killed Charlie Kirk, he is saying the FBI lies, manufactures evidence, and somehow ran January 6 as a political op.
While Trump, as he approaches 80, struggles with late-life cognitive challenges, and seems to have made a permanent home in the mumbletank, younger agitators like Owens, Fuentes, Carlson, and Von are doing more to lay waste to MAGA than any Democrat could have dreamed of.
But if liberals see Owens, in particular, as exposing MAGA’s fault lines, the right seems to turn to her for catharsis. As host of Candace, Spotify’s fourth-biggest news (yes, news) podcast—solidly ahead of The Wall Street Journal, Pod Save America, and Ben Shapiro—she serves as a release valve for the pent-up narrative hysteria that was last seen in the salad days of QAnon, when a woolly demonology fractalized into worldwide madness. The madness, you’ll recall, climaxed with the January 6, 2021, insurrection, after which QAnon’s shadowy leader, “Q” (widely thought to be Ron Watkins, co-owner of hate site 8chan, which hosted child porn, and son of Jim Watkins, who ran other child porn sites), mostly vanished. What were amped crusaders against cannibalistic child molesters to do with their righteous fury?
Kirk’s assassination on September 10 gave them an angle. Fuentes, who considered Kirk his sworn enemy, was at first relieved at the Owens fearmongering, as it (1) was rabidly antisemitic and (2) got the target off his own back. Carlson, by contrast, who has platformed Nick Fuentes and agrees with him on many antisemitic points, said on his own show Wednesday, “I love Candace Owens.” (He further professed love for TPUSA executive Blake Neff, an Ivy grad who once worked for Carlson before he was fired for saying racist things too racist for Fox News.) An important part of world building for these influencers involves populating their conspiracy galaxy with telegenic influencers so they can beef, form alliances, and comment on each other’s beefs and alliances.
It’s been three months since Kirk’s assassination. From day one, it would have stood to reason if Kirk’s supporters had focused their ire on the actual suspect in the murder, a single white male of muddy politics and muddier motives. But no. They seem to have blown right past Tyler Robinson, who to little fanfare made his first in-person court appearance Thursday. Instead, to the fevered mind, someone else, someone much more powerful and exciting than Robinson, must have done it. Go big or go home: It’s the military, the FBI, Trump himself.
The culprit has thus become a hyperobject, a miasma that encompasses everything except the actual suspect. It has implicated whole governments, of course, but also the Macrons of France and Erika Kirk’s jewelry. It’s murder on the Orient Express, then, where the train is the Trump train and its tracks are an infinity, crisscrossing the known galaxy.
Dip into even one of these mind-blowingly popular podcasts by Owens, Fuentes, Von, Carlson, or TPUSA, where Americans now get their news, and you’d have a hard time telling that Fox News is still on the air and Trump is still in the White House. (Fox & Friends, the Fox News showpiece, has about 1.3 million viewers, while each episode of Candace gets more than twice as many downloads: 3.6 million.) Some very insane people have formed an informational junta, spinning far-reaching folklore that will continue to beguile vulnerable minds long after Trump is gone.
For liberals who like democracy and fret about the state of journalism, the good news is that Trump-worshipping MAGA media is on the wane. The bad news is everything else.
