Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes: What Could Go Wrong?

Oh, but the Hunting Husbands would like a word. Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes is beefing with Owens, whom he has called, with unexpected gender fluidity, an “Uncle Tom.” Though Fuentes shares Owens’s hatred of Jews, he believes his Hitlerian views are intellectually superior to Owens’s: “Low-IQ antisemitism has a name, and its name is Candace Owens.” Also on Tuesday, Fuentes told Piers Morgan that “women are very difficult to be around,” and thus he has never had sex. “No, absolutely not,” Fuentes told Morgan. Far-right pepperpot Tucker Carlson recently told Theo Von, another podcasting pepperpot, that, while he’s not saying the FBI killed Charlie Kirk, he is saying the FBI lies, manufactures evidence, and somehow ran January 6 as a political op.

While Trump, as he approaches 80, struggles with late-life cognitive challenges, and seems to have made a permanent home in the mumbletank, younger agitators like Owens, Fuentes, Carlson, and Von are doing more to lay waste to MAGA than any Democrat could have dreamed of.

But if liberals see Owens, in particular, as exposing MAGA’s fault lines, the right seems to turn to her for catharsis. As host of Candace, Spotify’s fourth-biggest news (yes, news) podcast—solidly ahead of The Wall Street Journal, Pod Save America, and Ben Shapiro—she serves as a release valve for the pent-up narrative hysteria that was last seen in the salad days of QAnon, when a woolly demonology fractalized into worldwide madness. The madness, you’ll recall, climaxed with the January 6, 2021, insurrection, after which QAnon’s shadowy leader, “Q” (widely thought to be Ron Watkins, co-owner of hate site 8chan, which hosted child porn, and son of Jim Watkins, who ran other child porn sites), mostly vanished. What were amped crusaders against cannibalistic child molesters to do with their righteous fury?