The disgraceful ravings of Candace Owens

Joe McCarthy was famously undone by the rhetorical questions at a 1954 congressional hearing: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" If the same queries were directed to Candace Owens at such a forum, she'd sail on unperturbed — since she has no idea what "decency" means. The conspiratorial podcaster has embarked on an investigative series on Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk. In this context, "investigative series" means a loosely stitched together collection of sewerish falsehoods and innuendo smearing Erika Kirk. Perhaps Owens can follow up with a franchise devoted to sullying the reputations of the widows of assassinated husbands throughout U.S. history. Are we sure that Mary Todd Lincoln was as innocent as she seemed? Didn't Jackie Kennedy act kind of weird in Dallas? What did Ida Saxton McKinley know and when did she know it? The narrative and commercial logic always suggested that this is where Owens was headed. It didn't make any sense to libel TPUSA as being connected to the murder of its leader and founder — as Owens has for months now — without implicating its new leader, Erika Kirk. And, as the shock value of her anti-TPUSA campaign wore off, Owens had to stoke outrage and interest anew with something even more perverse. And what is more demented than portraying the wife of the victim of a shocking assassination as a black widow? Whereas most of have seen in Erika Kirk a Christian woman bearing up under an intolerable burden and stunningly forgiving the alleged murderer of her husband, Owens purports to see Clytemnestra, the mythical Greek figure who betrayed her husband Agamemnon upon his return from the Trojan War. The title of her series is "Bride of Charlie." Get it? Like the "Bride of Frankenstein." As a so-called investigator, Candace Owens is like Perry Mason if the fictional attorney had been a schizophrenic high on crack. Her method is to pile will-o'-the-wisp connections one on top of another, often buttressed by flagrant factual mistakes, and insist that if she's debunked, it just shows how she must be on the right track. Her mantra is that "we don't know-know, but we know" — in other words, her malicious, irrational intuitions are superior to actual knowledge backed by facts. She now says that "Erika Kirk should be dragged into a police precinct for questioning," and anyone who disagrees is "a full-blown fraud." According to Owens, "the amount of evidence that is now piling up, I would say, against Erika Kirk, is almost akin to an NBC Dateline episode." Usually, conspiracy theories spring up around assassinations that are hard to fathom, or have some ambiguity about them. It is clear that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing JFK, but it's understandable that there have been questions about the event. It is the depraved achievement of Candace Owens to make a bonkers true crime drama, with all sorts of mysteries and twists, out of an open-and-shut murder case. Kirk's accused killer, Tyler Robinson, had a motive, left a trail of damning evidence and confessed to multiple people. To dismiss all this and call for Erika Kirk to be frogmarched into a police station is so mad it makes Owens' conviction that both the moon landing and dinosaurs are fake look well-grounded by comparison. It is a symptom of our time that such malevolent buffoonery is rewarded with a huge audience. It is impossible to discredit Owens because she is not in the credibility business to begin with. In the attention economy, denunciations are just as useful as praise, especially if a media figure is posing as a brave truth-teller — so brave that, in this case, she's willing to drag through a mud a mother of two who saw her beloved husband murdered less than six months ago. It's not just that decency is not necessary in the Candace Owens business model, it would be an obstacle.