Soon after, Owens had on her show a man who claimed to have seen Erika Kirk at an army base the day before Kirk’s assassination, implying that Erika was somehow part of the plot against her husband. That plot also involves, in Owens’ telling, the French Foreign Legion, the federal government and leaders of Turning Point, Kirk’s organization, all somehow masterminded by demonic Zionists.
Owens musings are unhinged, but Erika Kirk’s trip to Nashville, brokered by conservative star Megyn Kelly, demonstrates that they’ve become too influential for right-wing leaders to ignore. Kelly herself — a former Fox News host who’d never been known for her outré views — has refused to denounce Owens, insisting her ideas are legitimate.
On her podcast, Kelly said that she buys the official story that Kirk was killed by Tyler Robinson, the Utah man charged with the crime. But, she added, “many people believe there’s more to this story, that we’re being lied to by our FBI, that there are too many inconsistencies around the official story. And those people are more than entitled to that belief.”
Kirk’s death has divided
The aftermath of Kirk’s assassination should have been a unifying moment for the right. The facts of the case — Robinson is said to have had a trans partner and was angry about Kirk’s demonization of sexual minorities — would have been easy for conservatives to exploit in their fight against gender nonconformists. But Robinson evidently wasn’t a grand enough enemy for some on today’s right, which is increasingly built on conspiracies and the content they generate. So Kirk’s killing, far from knitting the movement together in grief and anger, has precipitated a bitter, squalid internecine feud.
“Today the conservative movement is in serious danger,” Ben Shapiro said in a blistering speech on the opening night of Turning Point’s AmericaFest conference Thursday, the first since Kirk’s death. That danger comes not just from the left, Shapiro said, but “from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” He went on to denounce Owens by name, as well as his fellow Turning Point speakers Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.
Shapiro, however, doesn’t have the power to excommunicate Owens. Maybe no one does. Her audience is simply too big. As of this writing, she is ninth on Spotify’s podcasts charts, ahead of every other right-wing podcast except Carlson’s.
(Shapiro is at 48, right behind Oprah Winfrey.) A TikTok video she posted after her meeting with Erika Kirk was viewed over 14 million times. Her fandom extends beyond political junkies; on TikTok, you’ll find Owens followers who otherwise post mostly about celebrities and wellness, both subjects she talks about often. In a world where traditional gatekeepers have lost most of their power, she’s a star.
This is partly a story about conservatives creating a monster they can’t control. Owens, after all, has been saying nutty things for a long time. In 2019, she left her job as communications director of Turning Point not long after arguing that Adolf Hitler’s real sin was globalism, not nationalism. (“If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great,” she said, it would have been fine.) Rather than ostracize her, however, powerful conservative organizations cultivated her. Republicans invited her to testify before Congress about why white nationalism wasn’t a problem. In 2020 Shapiro hired her at the Daily Wire, his media company, which is where she began her podcast. (They split in 2024 over her increasingly antisemitic rhetoric.) Having elevated her in large part for her willingness to say outrageous things about her opponents, people on the right are now surprised by her willingness to say outrageous things about them.
Owens’ rise, and the damage she’s done to her erstwhile allies, also offers a warning about the danger of the influencer politics that conservatives have excelled at. Since the 2024 election, Democrats have lamented the advantage Republicans have gained in new media, including long-form podcasts, webcasts and vertical video platforms like TikTok.
Clearly, liberals should try to figure out how to become competitive in all these mediums, since many Americans rely on them to learn about the world.
Perverse incentives
The problem is that the influencer ecosystem rewards those who promise access to suppressed, esoteric truths, making viewers feel as if they’re part of real-life melodramas. The algorithms are optimized for illiberalism.
I was struck by a stray reference in Owens’ podcast this past week to the “mommy sleuths and investigators” in her audience. She was announcing plans to provide these amateur digital detectives with photos of Charlie Kirk’s rental car, which somehow, in her telling, point to problems with the investigation of his death. It demonstrated one of her chief innovations: She packages her conspiracy theories in the slick conventions of true crime, allowing people following along on their screens to participate in the search for answers.
QAnon once offered its adherents a similar sense that they were taking part in solving a great mystery. Lately, however, that movement’s energy seems to have dissipated. There was always a strange optimistic streak to QAnon, since it posited that heroic “white hats” were working behind the scenes to set the world right. As one popular meme put it, “Patriots are in control.” But now, Donald Trump is firmly back in power, and no golden age is at hand. Rather than the cathartic unmasking of deep state pedophile networks, we’ve seen Trump struggling to keep the case files of his friend Jeffrey Epstein secret.
For at least some former true believers, disillusionment is setting in. Marjorie Taylor Greene mournfully referenced the QAnon movement’s tropes when she announced her resignation last month. “There is no plan to save the world or a 4D chess game being played,” she said.
If patriots aren’t in control, it raises the question of who is. Unsurprisingly, some entrepreneurial figures on the right have settled on a tried-and-true answer: the Jews. Owens especially has taken this most elemental of paranoid fixations and turned it into something between a soap opera and a live-action roll-playing game. “It’s necessary for people to recognize how greatly evil these Zionists are,” Owens said on her podcast, describing them as “Trotskyites” who employ Soviet techniques of mind control. The implication is that if you reject her, you’re falling into their trap.
“Just asking questions, positing vague conspiracies, raving like Alex Jones about secret confederacies that control your life, none of it makes your life better,” Shapiro said in his AmericaFest speech, a cri de coeur against the direction of the movement he’s dedicated his career to. Unfortunately, when it comes to people trying to build an audience, he’s wrong.
Michelle Goldberg is a New York Times columnist.
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