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Welcome back to False Flag! All of the MAGA internet and much of the regular internet tuned in yesterday as Candace Owens debuted her anticipated hit on Erika Kirk. It was, as you might expect, an incoherent mess.
Still, I’m interested in how Owens is able to defy right-wing media’s gatekeepers, and what her popularity in face of their criticism says about the dismal state of MAGA media.
This is the definition of a False Flag story, which is to say it’s an important online thing most reasonable people can’t stomach to look at themselves. So I did it for you! To support my work and everything else we do at The Bulwark, sign up for Bulwark+.
–Will
Candace Owens’s Erika Kirk Docuseries Is, Predictably, NUTS
It’s also fairly humiliating for right-wing media’s biggest stars, who may abhor Candace but can’t seem to beat her at her game.
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FOR WEEKS NOW, CANDACE OWENS has been insinuating that Erika Kirk had something to do with her husband Charlie Kirk’s murder last year. Most recently, she began teasing a new series all about Erika Kirk that promised to reveal new insights into her rise, marriage and—perhaps—what really happened in the lead-up to her husband’s assassination.
And in the hotly anticipated debut episode, she delivered the goo… Who am I kidding? It was nonsense. It took forty minutes for Owens to lay out her most damning evidence, and it very much underwhelmed. To wit:
The divorce paperwork for Erika Kirk’s parents slightly misstated the year they were married.
One of Erika’s ancestors was arrested for working in an illegal numbers racket 85 years ago.
Erika Kirk was born in a civilian hospital that was started by the military in the Civil War.
Erika Kirk once dressed as a bee in a photo taken of her while she was in daycare.
It didn’t add up to much. It certainly didn’t support Owens’s insinuation about Erika’s involvement in Charlie’s murder. And it just got crazier. Further into the inaugural episode, Owens built to what she was really getting at: Might Erika Kirk be Jewish?
“Why does her onetime roommate Nicole Rothstein allege that half of their family, referring to her and Erika’s family, is Jewish?” Owens said, adding later that Erika Kirk went to an elementary school where “the teachers are all Jewish.”
It was, in short,...
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