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Few would have guessed that Erika Kirk would have to spend energy these last few, heart-breaking months fending off a right-wing influencer bent on implicating her slain husband's own organization, TPUSA, in his assassination.

Here we are, though. Influential voices on the right have become more and more conspiratorial in recent years, and now, the paranoia is being wielded against its own.

In the aftermath of the Kirk assassination, the talk was of an energized MAGA movement picking up his baton. Instead, TPUSA has been slandered nearly every single day by one of the loudest right-wing voices on the internet for allegedly carrying out a murderous coup against its own leader.

Candace Owens, a former TPUSA employee and a friend of Charlie Kirk, has been the primary author of this libel. She's taken an open-and-shut murder case and turned it into a whodunit.

In episode after episode, she invests enormous significance in minutiae, asks for help from listeners in tracking down supposedly crucial information, attacks anyone who pushes back against her accusations, and suggests that she could be killed at any time by the same shadowy forces that took out Kirk.

And it all comes back to TPUSA, whose leaders were allegedly in on the crime in order to elevate themselves once Charlie Kirk was out of the way.

This is fantastical, vile stuff, but no one can say: "Oh, we're so disappointed in Candace. What happened to her?"

She believes the moon landing was a fabrication (Stanley Kubrick filmed the whole thing) and dinosaurs are "fake and gay."

The Jews have a special place in her conspiracies. Harvard is a Mossad base. 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.

Tucker Carlson, Owens' friend and ally, is adopting a judicious, wait-and-see attitude about whether TPUSA killed its own leader or not. But he, too, is a fount of conspiracies, most recently promoting the idea that the government is seeding the sky with toxic "chemtrails."

Whereas once conspiratorial thinking was a guarantee of marginality, now it is no bar to obtaining a huge audience, or may even help. Outlandish theories generate passion and interest, and they are rewarded by social-media algorithms.

It can all be very profitable, making it difficult to distinguish between genuine irrationality and rank profit-making.

A Candace Owens lacks conventional influence. Officeholders aren't seeking her favor or asking for her advice. But she has single-handedly defined the debate in the aftermath of Kirk's death in a way few other media figures could.

Its a symptom of the state of the influencer eco-system that many of the MAGA figures now -- thankfully -- denouncing Owens for her crackpot Charlie Kirk theories have plenty of crackpot theories of their own. It was telling that when Tucker Carlson interviewed white nationalist Nick Fuentes, each confessed that he thought the other was a "fed," or working undercover for federal law-enforcement.

Now, of course, we should insist that anything the government or any other official body tells us is backed up by reliable evidence. And sometime conspiracies are real. There were indeed attempted cover-ups of the likelihood that covid emanated from a Chinese lab, and of the senescence of President Joe Biden.

There's a difference, though, between a healthy skepticism and runaway paranoia; the former requires a careful adherence to facts, the latter dispenses with them. The Candace Owens take on the Kirk assassination is supposed to be hardheaded in rejecting the official "narrative." In actuality, it depends on the credulousness of her listeners, who are asked to buy into a fanciful counter-narrative that depends entirely on one cynical podcaster's say-so.

In this regard, maybe her audience isn't conspiratorial-minded enough, and should consider the possibility that even Candace Owens isn't on the up-and-up.

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(Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry)

(c) 2025 by King Features Syndicate