Candace Owens, Great American Basket Case

With a set of boulders bigger than Brigitte Macron's, Candace Owens is single-handedly restoring pride in American conspiracy-theory craftsmanship

Matt Taibbi

Dec 23, 2025

No one tops podcaster Candace Owens at this game. She’s a force of nature. It’s rare for a pure pundit to have deep impact on international politics, and even rarer for one to trigger lasting change of the sort now taking place in the Republican Party. Fighting through this week, she’s turned the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk into an epic that makes QAnon seem small-time. An underrated South Park episode from 2003 tried to make fun of conspiracy theorists by inventing a story too ridiculous to believe. The Matt Stone/Trey Parker idea was metrosexuality as an attempt to control the world by “crab people.” That was a laugh, but how about real-world applause for the Owens theory, Charlie Kirk blown away by bee people:

Owens showed the text messages she sent to friends about an “underground related to bees” with a September 1st time stamp, to prove she had concerns about “imminent danger” involving schools nine days before Charlie Kirk was killed at a school. (This brand of conspiracy lunacy — “Israel is full of garages, while Jack Ruby was shot in one. Coincidence?” — was once parodied even by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, but Owens has few comics on her tail.) Her story involves cops, Egyptians, FBI personnel, the French Foreign Legion, mysterious rich people in Orem, an airline services company a few miles from my house in New Jersey, Bibi Netanyahu, and Erica Kirk all engaged in a “psychological war” of the utmost sophistication, only planned in bee-speak maybe.

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