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Michelle Goldberg

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

This week Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, traveled to Nashville to meet with Candace Owens, a podcaster who has become the premier purveyor of conspiracy theories about his murder. If the summit was meant to persuade Owens to back off her paranoid and fantastical speculations, it failed. On Thursday, Owens had on her show a man who claimed to have seen Erika Kirk at an Army base the day before Kirk’s assassination, implying that Erika Kirk was somehow part of the plot against her husband. That plot also involves, in Owens’s telling, the French Foreign Legion, the federal government and leaders of Turning Point, Charlie Kirk’s organization, all somehow masterminded by demonic Zionists.

Owens’s musings are unhinged, but Erika Kirk’s trip to Nashville, brokered by the conservative star Megyn Kelly, demonstrates that they’ve become too influential for right-wing leaders to ignore. Kelly — a former Fox News host who’d never been known for her........

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