Add National Review Editor in Chief Rich Lowry to the conservative pile-on aimed at podcaster and conservative influencer Candace Owens, who is trying to whip up alternative theories about why Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was murdered.
Owens, who is already mired in a lawsuit filed by French First Lady Brigitte Macron over a “relentless and unjustified smear campaign” that alleges Macron is secretly a man, is now courting more controversy with her Kirk allegations that National Review’s Lowry claims add up to nothing more than “next level lunacy.”
In a column on Tuesday, the editor reported, “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.”
As he noted, Owens, who used to work with Kirk, has turned her podcast into a daily "whodunit," pointing out that she makes“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.”
As he notes, there seems to be no bottom for her as she ramps up conspiracy theories, comparing her to disgraced Alex Jones, but in many ways worse.
Admitting that she can be entertaining, he added that her brand of anti-semitism is intended to alter the course of the MAGA movement.
Writing that she is “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,” he added she has turned the obvious facts of the Kirk murder into a fog of "'just asking questions’ innuendos one after another.”
With Owen’s suggesting the shooting “reeks of an inside job,” Lowry wrote that she is doing damage to current TPUSA officials as well as the Jewish community.
“She’s doing what she can to turbocharge conspiratorial thinking, with a special focus on the Jews, who are capable of almost any infamy,” he accused and insisted, “It’s a very online, 21st-century contribution to a rancid tradition with a long pedigree, from which nothing good has ever come.”
