We begin with a clip from the 2016 campaign trail in which presidential candidate Donald Trump discusses a Black supporter and invites rally-goers to “look at my African American.” At this point in MAGA history, influencer Candace Owens still identified as a liberal. By late 2017, she had transitioned to a conservative identity and become a leading voice in the MAGA movement.

And you will want to listen from the beginning for a special announcement from Neil!

Candace Owens speaking with the 2023 Young Women's Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Grapevine, Texas. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons.

In the News:

* This week, prices on the global crude oil market cracked $120 a barrel, an almost 90% increase since Donald Trump started a war on Iran. This is a shock to the global economy. At United States, gasoline pumps, prices have risen an average of .27 a gallon with states like California, Florida and Pennsylvania seeing much higher prices. Trump’s reassurances that U.S. oil independence will shield American consumers from higher prices are false. Because it is traded on a global market, the price of oil is the same regardless of where it is pumped. Americans should expect to see rising prices, from utility bills to food. And with 61% disapproval on Trump’s handling of the economy, Republicans may see their path to retaining a majority in the 2026 midterms extinguished.

* Speaking of the economy: in Maine and Ohio, where Democrats have targeted two Republican incumbents, recent polling suggests MAGA economic policies hurt voters. In Maine, Democratic Governor Janet Mills is polling even with Republican incumbent Susan Collins. Democrat Graham Platner also polls only two points behind Collins—and it is Platner who seems to have momentum. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown polls two points ahead of Jon Husted—Husted, although uncharged, is also enmeshed in a major corruption case.

* As Senator John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton gear up for their Republican primary runoff, a Democratic poll with a Trump +14 sample shows James Talarico in a statistical dead heat with either opponent. Are conditions ripe for Democrats to snatch a Texas Senate seat too?

* It looks like frenemies Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, fixtures in the Democratic House leadership for decades, will fight one last battle. Pelosi has endorsed Harry Dunn, a former Capitol Police officer who testified about the January 6 coup against a former Hoyer aide, state delegate Adrian Boafo, in the primary for MD-05 Hoyer will vacate in 2027. Dunn lost a previous congressional bid in 2024, also endorsed by Pelosi; there are currently 22 other candidates vying for the Democratic line on November’s ballot.

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Turning Point USA founder and Director of Communications Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens, then Director of Urban Engagement for the organization, during a visit to Texas State University in San Marcos On October 24, 2018. Photo credit: Carrington Tatum/Shutterstock

News focus: Who is Candace Owens, and why is she saying these terrible things about Erika Kirk?

* Candace Owens, who is only 37 years old, began life as a Connecticut liberal in Stamford, CT. She became locally famous for filing a lawsuit in federal court alleging that, as a senior in high school, she was not protected from racist bullying. The Stamford School Board settled the lawsuit for $37,500.

* After graduating from the University of Rhode Island, Owens worked in journalism, finance, and marketing. She founded SocialAutopsy.com, a web site where users could report bullies, in 2016. However, Social Autopsy was identified by internet activists as an asset for doxxing and trolling. Owens then waged an aggressive campaign against two of these critics, feminist gamers targeted in GamerGate. Owens claimed that Zoe Quinn, a GamerGate victim, targeted her with doxxing and racist hate mail and a Quinn ally undermined Social Autopsy’s fundraising efforts. This moment marks Owens’s conversion to conservatism and conspiracism.

* In 2017, Owens launched a site called “Red Pill Black,” marketed as a rebuttal to the Democratic party’s record on race. A frequent guest on Fox News, Owens described liberal policies as a long-term strategy to make Black Americans dependent, a perspective she elaborated on in a 2020 book, Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation.

* Also in 2017, after Turning Point USA was exposed as a cauldron of racism. She became a Trump supporter, Owens went to work for Charlie Kirk. Trump noticed her in 2018 after she and Kanye West appeared on TMZ to defend the right of Nazis to hold public demonstrations and assert that remaining in slavery was a choice that African Americans made.

* But Owens was also becoming increasingly antisemitic: she was forced to resign from TPUSA in 2019 after praising Adolf Hitler and defending Kanye West’s antisemitic statements.

* Nevertheless, Owens joined The Daily Wire in 2021 as editors Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boering defined the issues of the current right-wing culture war politics, most prominently anti-vaccine, anti-trans, and anti-DEI campaigns. But much of this is also nested in Owens’s allegations of longstanding CIA and state-sponsored conspiracies to destroy America. Owens’s antisemitic conspiracy theories, which intensified after October 7, 2023, caused Shapiro to break with her: her podcast is now on YouTube.

* Owens’s current campaign against TPUSA and its CEO, Erika Kirk, stems from new conspiracy theories that position Erika Kirk as an ambitious gold-digger who married Charlie to take control of the multi-million dollar nonprofit. Owens maintains that Kirk’s killer was in league with larger forces--the FBI, the Mossad, antifa, Egypt, France, Donald Trump or Kirk enemies within TPUSA itself—or that Charlie Kirk is still alive.

* In 2025, Owens broke with Trump over his support for Israel. Currently, she is also currently being sued by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte over her claims that Brigitte Macron is a trans woman.

* Owens sat down for a four hour meeting with Erika Kirk in December 2025 to iron out their differences. It didn’t work. Recently, Owens dropped a 6-episode YouTube series called “Bride of Charlie” in which she portrays Erika Kirk and her whole family as fraudulent.

What we want to go viral:

* Neil can’t stop thinking about Heath W. Carter, “Americans Should Stop Using the Term Christian Nationalism,” (The Atlantic, March 9, 2026), and book Carter reviews, Matthew Avery Sutton, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity (Basic Books, 2026). Weaving religious values into the nation’s policies and priorities is too often configured as backward looking and repressive, but the quest for a Christian America has, and still can be, one that attends to humanity and love.

* Claire wants you to read Sarah Weinman, Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime (Ecco, 2025), about Greta Rideout’s 1978 accusation that her husband had sexually assaulted her. This was a crime that could not even be charged in most states at the time, much less believed by many police and jurists—but because of Rideout’s courage, and the support of a feminist legal establishment, marital rape is now a crime in all fifty states.

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