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This summer, the podcaster Candace Owens says, she had a pair of dreams about one of the most significant moments of 21st-century political history. The first dream came on September 1, and by morning the details were foggy: she remembered being swarmed by bees; the setting was, for reasons she didn’t understand at the time, a school. When she woke up she was convinced that “something very dangerous” was about to happen, so much so that her husband joked she was going insane. Ten days later, Owens’s friend and onetime colleague Charlie Kirk was murdered at a school in Utah, whose nickname is the Beehive State. Distraught over his death, Owens put her podcast on hiatus and, soon after, had a second dream. “Charlie was sitting in a chair, and I won’t say where he was or where we were, but he said he was betrayed. And then I said, ‘By who?’ Then the dream did that thing” — Owens started mumbling to me, as if underwater. “I saw one person who I recognized in that dream, who is at Turning Point. I woke up and I texted him immediately, and I said, ‘I just had a dream and Charlie told me you betrayed him.’” He never responded, she says, but so began her latest crusade.

“It’s very weird. It’s like the universe is shouting at me,” Owens told me one afternoon this November. “There’ve been moments in my life where something comes on and it’s so overwhelming that I have to act.” She described them as her “That’s So Raven moments,” the Spidey-sense inklings that have led her to publicly claim, among other things, that Charlie Kirk’s murder is a cover-up; Kamala Harris isn’t Black; Zionists and pedophiles control, well, everything; and the First Lady of France, Brigitte Macron, is a biological man — a conspiracy theory that has gained so much traction that the French president is currently suing Owens for defamation in the U.S. (Australia, meanwhile, recently denied her a visa, citing concerns she would “incite discord” in the country.) Conspiracy theories, Owens has said, are “mind yoga,” mental exercises that make you question “the narrative.” Owens is constantly talking about “the narrative.” By which she means: everything the government and mainstream media are telling us.

For safety reasons, Owens had requested we meet in the private dining room of a fusty steakhouse not far from her home in Nashville. She arrived in a Cadillac SUV with two bodyguards; one stayed in the car, and the other kept sentry at the exit, occasionally peeking into the restaurant to surveil all the diners. Owens wore a black turtleneck and jeans and carried her signature merch, a “Standace cup” that reads “CIA” (for Candace Intelligence Agency) on one side and “We Don’t Know-Know But We Know” on the other.

Though we were there to discuss, in part, her friend’s recent assassination, Owens was in a cheery mood. “You’re a wizard, Harry!” she cracked at one point, still talking about her pseudo-psychic hunches. There was reason to celebrate. The day before, her podcast had become the most downloaded show in the U.S., ranking above shows hosted by Joe Rogan and Oprah Winfrey. Her viewership spiked dramatically after she started talking about Kirk’s murder, which she does not believe was committed by the 22-year-old lone shooter Tyler Robinson. Her first show after Kirk’s death, titled “They Are Lying About Charlie Kirk,” has been watched over 9 million times on YouTube. Owens’s working theory of who actually did it is maddeningly convoluted, but at various points since September 10, she has accused Kash Patel, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Mossad, the Macrons, and Turning Point itself of somehow participating in or hiding the truth about Kirk’s death.

Over the past three months, Owens has fully devoted her life to this investigation, and it has alienated her from former allies. The night before we met, Megyn Kelly conducted a live interview with Owens’s onetime colleague Ben Shapiro, who said she was faulting Kirk’s widow, Erika, the newly installed CEO of Turning Point. (Owens had, at that time, never done so; lies often beget more lies.) Shapiro joined a growing chorus of right-wing influencers, activists, and commentators accusing Owens of opportunistically capitalizing, including financially, off Kirk’s murder and also exaggerating the nature of their friendship. Still, Owens’s reach is so large, her conviction so unshakable, that the whole news cycle soon torqued around her theories anyway. Robinson appeared in court early this December, but the eyes of the media and internet were trained not on the official investigation but instead on Owens’s informal probe. Erika Kirk has repeatedly been asked to respond to Owens. “Stop. That’s it. That’s all I have to say. Stop,” she told Bari Weiss on CBS this month. Within the week, Kelly, who’d largely been defensive of Owens, brokered a meeting between the podcaster and the widow. (“The meeting was calm,” Owens later told me. “That’s all I will say for now.”) It didn’t seem to stop Owens; the next day, on her podcast,........

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