Even After the Erika Kirk Summit, Candace Owens Is Still Being Candace Owens

For someone who gets her information from dreams and is guided by her hunches, Candace Owens is apparently very in touch with her own comments section. Before sitting down to discuss the results of her four-and-a-half-hour conversation with Erika Kirk—widow of Charlie Kirk and CEO of Turning Point USA—Owens used her Tuesday livestream to make a noxious joke for members of her audience who worried she was selling out to the Israeli government.

“Okay, everybody, Shabbat Shalom,” Owens said. “Happy Hanukkah to our greatest friends and allies. And, you know, this is a good time to mention that Israel does have a right to defend itself.” She kept going: “Tucker Carlson is Adolf Hitler, and TikTok does need to be purchased by the Mossad. It’s just how I’m feeling today. I am not different. Maybe you are different. Welcome back to Candace.” The independent conservative podcaster danced when, instead of her normal Kanye West theme song, she played “Hava Nagila.” The entire performance, of course, was sarcastic; afterward, she ribbed her audience for worrying that she might have been flipped by her time with Kirk. “I keep telling you guys, I am not governable.”

For the last month, Owens has used her YouTube channel—on which she has nearly 5.7 million subscribers—to spin fanciful theories about Charlie’s killing. She has claimed that Israel and France had something to gain from his death and has suggested that other employees of his right-wing organization might have played a role in it too. At first, Owens and Kirk’s Monday summit in Nashville looked like a sign that Owens might ease off the conspiracies, just in time for AmericaFest—TPUSA’s annual summit, which started Thursday and runs through December 21.

But ultimately, Tuesday’s livestream, titled “Erika And I Sat Down. Here’s What Happened,” proved that Owens had no intention of changing. The opening display was her shtick in a nutshell: luridly antisemitic and very online, with a complete disregard for the seriousness of the subject at hand. If you didn’t know the backstory, how could you ever predict that the next 30 or so minutes of the show would be a discussion of a public assassination?

So far, Kirk has remained quiet about the substance of the conversation, aside from publishing a post on Monday night that said it was “very productive.” If Kirk watched Owens’s Tuesday livestream, it’s hard to imagine that she’s sticking with that assessment.