MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Even if you don't pay close attention to the conservative movement, you might know the name Candace Owens. She's an African American influencer who was once embraced by groups like Turning Point and The Daily Wire for her harsh critiques of social justice movements like Black Lives Matter. But in recent years, she split with these groups for pushing increasingly wild conspiracy theories on her popular YouTube channel. Now Owens has widened the split further with a new series that takes aim at Erika Kirk, the widow of the slain Turning Point leader, Charlie Kirk.
We wondered what this is all about. So we've called Molly Olmstead, a staff writer for Slate. She covers MAGA and the right, and she published a piece called, "Candace Owens' New Documentary About Erika And Charlie Kirk Is Baffling. We Can Help." She's with us now. Molly, thanks so much for joining us.
MOLLY OLMSTEAD: No problem. Happy to be here.
MARTIN: OK, so help (laughter). First of all, say a little bit more about who Candace Owens is.
OLMSTEAD: Yeah. So Candace Owens is someone who entered the political scene in 2017, a media figure. She went big with these sort of takedowns of the progressive movement. She was pretty quickly snapped up by Turning Point USA, where she became close friends with Charlie Kirk. And at this moment, she has 6 million subscribers on YouTube - almost 6 million.
MARTIN: Wow, 6 million subscribers. That's like a - that's a very large city of people following her - right? - if you were to put that in geographic terms. So tell us about this new YouTube series "Bride Of Charlie." She's portrayed it as an investigative series. Like, is it?
OLMSTEAD: You know, she hasn't produced anything that I think you or I would consider to be legitimate. It's all sort of speculation and things that she sort of says just doesn't make sense to her. But she and her followers are portraying this as this sort of big revelation that Erika Kirk comes from a shady family, is herself a sort of devious character.
MARTIN: This is one of those questions that may be sort of unanswerable, but why? Why would she do this?
OLMSTEAD: There are competing ideas about this. One of the most compelling is, of course, that she needs content for her podcast. She has one of the most popular shows in the political world in America, and she's becoming wealthy off of this. But there is this growing political divide within the conservative movement over those who support Israel in a traditional sense, people like Ben Shapiro and a lot of the leadership of the Republican Party, and then the people who are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with that, who are skeptical of Israel, often in an antisemitic way, who believe that Jews control American society and are doing it in sort of a deep state way. And she is one of the biggest voices of this along with Tucker Carlson and some other more fringe characters who are really trying to pull, especially young people in their direction.
MARTIN: How have other elements of the right reacted to this?
OLMSTEAD: It's been pretty much universally outraged. It's a matter of a full public break from Candace Owens. Previously, I think people had been nervous to step on her because she is such a powerful and influential voice of the right. It's now just sort of full war between her and the other parts of the right.
MARTIN: What do you think the impact of all this might be? I mean, the fact that she has millions of people who are interested in this, who you would assume were at one point also supportive of the aims of Turning Point, the Trump administration, et cetera. What does this tell you about the movement itself?
OLMSTEAD: This is sort of a moment - a turning point, really - at which these two elements of the right - this traditional pro-Israel side and this new antisemitic side - are in a full battle for the future of the conservative movement.
MARTIN: And I wonder if the attraction of this group of people to Candace Owens' kind of conspiracy theories is causing any of these other groups on the right to question their role in stoking this kind of discourse?
OLMSTEAD: I do think we're starting to see some people who are waking up to this reality right now. That being said, this is a discourse that's still largely taking place on social media. We have not seen a lot of sort of leading political figures who have spoken up about this at all. So the question is, you know, when will this jump from social media to the actual leadership of the Republican Party and the MAGA movement? And that's a question that's left to be answered.
MARTIN: That is Molly Olmstead. She's a staff writer for Slate. Thanks so much for talking to us.
OLMSTEAD: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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