Bulwark Takes - The Completely Bizarre Fight That’s Eating the Right

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

Candace Owens and Dinesh D’Souza are in the weirdest feud on the internet, and somehow it involves farm animals. Then Candace brings up a dream she had where she was visited by a ghost. JVL, Sarah, and Will try to make sense of MAGA’s new reality show.

Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with Will Summer of the bulwark and my best friend, Sarah Longwell, also of the bulwark. Guys, I got some bad news for you. Right now, today, as we are taping, Candice Owens and Dinesh D'Souza are having a fight on Twitter. It's one of the saddest things I've ever seen. These two people, they used to be such good friends. And here, Dinesh is saying that he doesn't even know what to say about Candace because I can't comment on Candice because it's quite obviously a freak show. It's like driving on the highway and seeing a farmer having sex with a sheep. You don't want to look, but you can't look away either. The problems begin when you try to analyze. Relatable. It is what it is. Super relatable. Candice replies, who openly admits they wouldn't look away

if they watched a person having sex with a farm animal? Why is everyone in politics so sexually perverse. She's making good points. At which point, Dinesh just starts going like, well, I was just trying to be. It was humor. It was humor. And then Candice just backhanding him again, we just put off the screenshots. I don't need to read it. And then finally ends with Dinesh posting a picture of he and Candace Owen saying, Candice and me from happier days when I spoke at her Blexit events, which is like the saddest ever um Sarah before we go to Will who is our resident right wing world expert do you have any thoughts on this? Do you know I have I have some funny Dinesh stories which I can tell you someday um but like how sad is this to you so here's what's important and why um so just

so everybody knows uh we're only talking about this because we're all in the office together, and this is what we were talking about, all in the office together. So we thought we're taping from separate rooms. We're taping from separate rooms, but we are all physically together in this space. And this is an important story, because it is about the humiliation of Dinesh D'Souza, which is very important. This is a guy who has been lying to Republican voters for a long time. He basically was one of the first people to go MAGA off the rails full conspiracy. Therist, he made an entire documentary. I think it was called, you know, it's called now that we're thinking about animal sex,

12,000 mules or something, 2,000 meals. I don't know how many meals they are. I'm worried. Dinesh couldn't look away from all the mules. He couldn't stop staring at them. But this is actually about Candace Owens' dominance. And she is cucking Dinesh so hard here. And the reason he's posting that picture is to say, not just

Please don't hurt me anymore, Candace. But I'm yours. Like, I recognize that you have all the power in this situation. You have the deranged fans. They are much more willing to, you know, respond to your sort of Pied Piper movements than they are to mine. And so he knows, like, she can put an end to him anytime she wants. The right-on-right MAGA influencer violence is a tough game. because if you get kicked out of the club, you will find yourself, like, on the outs.

And she is right now, like, she's the prom queen. Like, Megan Kelly won't announce her. Yeah, people are, like, kind of scared of her. Even though she's a raging anti-Semite and an idiot, she is now up some of the highest reaches of MAGA influence or dumb, but Will can correct me if I'm wrong about that. Yeah, Will, so tell me about it. Is she, why is she weirdly untouchable? Yeah, I mean, so obviously the backstory here is this kind of the Charlie Kirk of it all and the fighting over his legacy.

And she has been, even before the funeral, she was just sort of saying, you know, implying that Israel murdered him. And now at the point of saying, you know, maybe he was betrayed by someone in Turning Point USA. But in terms of her platform. We'll get to that in a minute. In a minute, people. Stay tuned for that because that is wild. Basically, she, she's very unique on the right. she has like a lot of issues that they're not that other people don't pick up like uh brigitte mccrone

being part of a trans criminal cabal uh and i think she's just a lot more entertaining than a lot of people and she's she's she's kind of more energetic i think she just puts out a better product um and she's willing like you'll watch her show i mean i talk to a better let's define better i i talked to run one right wing influencer and he said he's like i'm just entranced by her you know like that she's constantly willing to violate good taste but keeps being successful while doing it. And I think that's built her an enormous audience. I mean, she has a freak show, if you will.

Well, or, yes, a farmer pick or whatever. But the one thing I do want to note here about the Dinesha Sousa thing is he also said to Candace, I'll wash my mouth out with soap, which, you know, and Sarah beat me to it, but like I don't use the word like cuckolding lightly here. But this is a brutal humiliation. I don't even know this kind of language except for doing podcasting with JV. Tim for so long. But JVL, this feels like whenever you start talking about, like, bring out the gimp, put the ball gag in your mouth, Dinesh. Keep it there. But Denech is sleeping. Well, you best

go wake him up. It's, uh, it's, it's wild. So here's my question about it. So a bunch of the other right wing influencers are clearly uncomfortable with Candace. They would clearly like to read her out of the movement, but they can't. And Will, when you started talking about this with me off air, I said to myself, huh, that kind of sounds like how they approached Trump in 2015. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the exact right example. I mean, Megan Kelly is probably the most prominent figure here in terms of being someone with an enormous media profile who is clearly, I would say, terrified to take on Candace. I mean, people are saying to her, hey, you were friends with Charlie Kirk. you're, I would say, like, top five, top three, right-wing media personality in this country.

Do you think you might want to say something about all this anti-Semitism? Candace is pumping out and the way she's misusing his legacy. And she said very openly, I will not discuss that and has gotten very, she said, people asking me to weigh in on this. You're like BLM protesters saying, raise your fist. And, you know, I'm barely paraphrasing here. And I will not do it. And so, I mean, she's clearly, she's trying to stay out of it because she knows that Candace just has a way of obliterating people. People have come at her before, Jessica Reed Krause, who's a much smaller figure, kind of an RFK junior acolyte.

She started taking some pot shots of Candace, and Candace, like, blew most of her empire up. So, I mean, it's a brutal world, as Sarah said. I mean, it's a lot about, like, if you get owned and she's the best at owning people right now. I just want to ask, Will, something that's been on my mind, which is, you know, we are children of the 90s. And back then, 90s, early 2000s, I would say one of the. reasons that, you know, rap music, one of the ways that it sort of popped into mainstream culture was that there were feuds, right? And people could like engage in the feuds. They could pick a side. And they were really happening. Like there were real world consequences when people

died. And so, and it was in the music, right? You kind of knew who was aligning with who. And the right wing whatever influencer sphere seems to have an element of this where if if your main metric is not is what I'm saying true is what I'm saying useful is what I'm saying additive to humanity if it's all just about what's my clout level in this right they understand that there is there is both value for eyeballs in because people aren't a lot of people are engaging in the size. meaningfully, they engage in them like the way you do, like, it's a sport or like it's a musician, right? Something that's almost in pop culture. And so Megan Kell, and there's something, so there's one, that that has always struck me, the way that they use the feuds almost to boost themselves

and that it gets people who think they're crazy, invested almost, because you're like, oh, I can't stop looking away. I mean, Dinesh's original point is, it is a weird, telling on himself thing that he uses to illustrate it. But the idea, what most of us might have said is like a car crash or something where you're like, oh, no, what's happening, right? And I think as we become sort of acculturated to reality television and people flipping over tables, like there's a demand for that from the influencers in politics. And in order to stay relevant, you've almost got to like be in the gang and then have a side.

And Megan Kelly, the older generation, the Dinesh's, the Megan Kelly's, the Laura Ingrams, all of the people who changed their personality is a great deal for Trump. Now see this new class rising underneath them that is like really bonkers, really out on a limb. They took what that old guard did and they just ramped it up to 12. And now they've got to decide, do we try to reject them and be the gatekeepers, pull up the ladder for the crazy kids? Or do we just lean in and say, no, we're with you and like pick a side? What do you think? Well, I mean, Nick Fuentes is another example, white nationalist podcaster who's having an enormous kind of Candace-like surge.

And while he doesn't have the same platform that she does yet, you know, Megan Kelly has taken a similar approach where she had an interview last week where she said, I don't know, I hear he's an interesting guy, I've done someone savory things, I'm not going to look into him more. But, you know, like Candace, a year or two ago, Megan Kelly was, she was saying, I can't believe this guy was at Mar-a-Lago, this guy's a Holocaust denier, this guy's a scumbag. But now that these people are getting hundreds of thousands of more followers, I mean, she used to take shots of Candace, too. Now she's saying, oh, that person's off limits to me. And, you know, to pick up JBL's point about the Trumpism of it all, I mean, there is, this is exactly what happened in the Republican Party with Trump, where people look around and there's a majority of people who would really like someone to do a little gatekeeping on this person, at least in kind of the operative media class. And they're saying, but I don't want to risk my career. I don't want to be the one who gets incinerated for being the first one to put my foot down. So I'll just let someone else deal with it.

So I want to really puts a fine point on this with an example of what you guys, I think, are talking about. So with Trump, normal Republican elites elected, they had no way to deal with somebody who, like, would go on Alex Jones and just make up things, right? They were used to living in a world where what you said could be an exaggeration, but you couldn't just be like, yeah, I was with some aliens last night. right and uh with candace she uh is willing to go to a place as a matter of fact that i think no republican media figures traditionally that's not true Tucker has been a a he is a shotgun rider on the candace owen's train to insane town and so she's got a buddy in the cockpit but please sorry she did she does she does but what i want to do is is tee up a clip of Candace claiming a dream prophecy in which Charlie Kirk came to her.

And, uh, well, it's, I'll just let you guys listen. Had a vivid dream this weekend. And Charlie came to me and he told me that he was betrayed. And so for me, you don't have to believe that, but I do believe that. And, uh, it was the immediate sense I got actually. And I don't know who exactly it is that betrayed him. But I also felt in the dream that it is soon going to be revealed, that it's actually inevitable that it is going to be revealed, that there is nothing and no one that is going to stop the truth from coming out and it is going to have international consequences. Take that to the bank. Quote me on that. Take it to the bank. Women tend to have a stronger intuition about

people, I would say. Oh, it's women's intuition. That's so funny. Well, it's a combination of like women's intuition and it is like a throwback like 1850s America with the seances and, you know, oh, I hear them speaking from beyond. Like, I don't think a broadcast journalist like Megan Kelly has an answer for that. It's an interesting empirical approach, or maybe a non-empirical approach. I mean, in the broader, in the longer video, she argues, she says, when people are entering the world and leaving the world, they have a way of visiting people in dreams and spreading messages.

And I know this because my assistant was pregnant, and I got a visit by her baby, in utero visited me in a dream and told me it's gender, I think. And to prove this, I'm going to show you the text messages I sent my assistant about her baby visiting me. And so, okay, we've established that people, you know, entering and leaving the world, do visits. And then she also said, well, look, Tucker said that his wife has women's intuition about bad guys. And so as a result, that's how she doesn't. No, she doesn't. Let me talk. You want to talk about empirical proof? Tucker, Carlson's wife does not know how to know when a bad guy's there. There's one right next to you. He's in the house.

And this is why Megan Kelly has no answer for this, because she comes from a world of, like, fairly traditional, you know, you can be as grotesque as you want, but you don't talk about I was having a dream prophecy, you know, like it's Shirley McLean or something. She comes from a world where those sorts of, like, crystals and vibes and chakras are mockable. And Candace is just like, cool, I can roll with that stuff. It's new agey. I can be both super evangelical and Christ-focused and also supernatural. And it's all sort of, it all works together. And like you said, I just think they don't have the antibodies to understand how to handle someone like this, especially when that person finds an audience.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think she's interested in handling Candice. I think she's interested in keeping Candace and Tucker on side. And that's the only thing that matters because Megan Kelly's survival instinct is the strongest thing she has. And it is like, I speak no ill of fellow right-wing influencers, assuming they help. And my guess is, like, she goes back and looks at the audience. What's the audience overlap in the podcast world between Candace, Tucker, me? Oh, it's a lot of the same people. sorry, not going to denounce them, and also not going to get on the other side of this.

And that's just an indictment. It's obviously an indictment of kind of the old guard, but it's important. And this is why this whole thing is actually relevant. This is where the right wing is going, right? Like there is, there's nobody who's going to put up a gate for this. And in fact, your point about the crystals and this, that is the red-pilled phenomenon, right? This is not, they're not Republicans. They're not there for, there's not limited government and free markets and American leadership

in the world. Red Pilled and MAGA, they're like pretty, they're like siblings. And they've got this distant cousin, which is those old guard Republicans. And those guys like, but they're, but they're these, these influencers got famous. And so the cousins like still come to the family reunion to gawk at their famous. family members. They're not going anywhere. Will, is there a ceiling on Candace Owens?

Because I have a weird feeling that there isn't because she, correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm not a connoisseur of her over, but my sense is that she, she isn't all politics all the time. She's a lot of lifestyle with then, like, I don't know, 25% politics. That's right. I mean, I think part of her appeal is that it's not just sort of traditional Republican Ben Shapiro talking points. She does a lot of entertainment kind of gossip coverage. She was big into like Blake lively, Justin Baldoni stuff.

And those are real gateways to get people in. And I mean, she'll post these kind of random fans on Instagram all the time who were saying, you know, just doing my chores or like doing my commute and like rocking my Candace Owens. You know, and so I mean, I mean, there is some ceiling, you know, I would hope for the country. but I think it's at the level of like tens of millions of YouTube views per video. Sarah, I'm going to put you on the spot. You are a frequent conductor of focus groups. You spent a lot of time over the last like three years asking Republican voters who they would like to see run for president in 2024. The overwhelming response was always Donald Trump.

But could you tell the people who was frequently mentioned? Candice Owen gets mentioned a lot. She has a lot of young women as an audience because she does this sort of mix of politics and celebrity gossip. It has become almost just like where I don't even know that it's right wing. Like it is a, and this is why the red-pilled phenomenon is so pernicious. It is a mix of culture and politics that is kind of culture first and also with a mix of reality TV, funny, a freak show and

so you'd get these women in their like 20s and 30s it'd be like oh you know it would be great Candace Owens love to see that yeah that's great how does anti-vax fit in is that part of this in the same way a lot of there seems to have been

a lot of like yoga influencers from Instagram pushing people into Maha anti-vax space natural like is this all part of it Is it just anti-institutionalism or, like, I don't know. Do you have a grand theory? I think that's a lot of it.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's kind of this like political lifestyle and, you know, a lot of things that are, you know, sort of right-wing coded, but not necessarily traditional politics. And so, yeah, I mean, I think she's obviously been very successful. And, you know, we're seeing other people try to do this. I mean, certainly Megan Kelly tries to do the entertainment stuff too. but I think, you know, she just does it in a very sort of compulsively watchable way. And she's kind of a figure in it herself. I mean, she's getting sued by the McCrowns. She's kind of mixed up in the lively stuff.

I mean, and so that makes it even, I think, more fun, if you will, for people to watch. Imagine, like, in some ways, you got to give her credit. Like, she, nobody else thought of saying, you know what, his goat, Charlie Kirk's ghost visited me. Like, that is, that's, that is entrepreneurial in a way that I couldn't even begin to imagine. Who could think that, you know, there's, there's these kids out there trying to claim the Turning Point USA mantle by going to college campuses and speaking. If they just thought for five minutes, what if I just say, he's visiting me in my dreams and he has anointed me as his successor? guys, she's, I'm sorry, but she's, she's quicker than you guys are. She gets there first.

And someday in 2032, that sort of thinking is going to make her president. Guys, we're going to be on the Candace Owens watch. I have a feeling for a good long time. How's that for a sunny thought? Sarah, Will, thanks for being with me. Everybody else, hit like, hit subscribe, follow the feed. We will be back with more of America's train wreck. It's a little bit like driving past a farm.

And anyway, good luck, America. Ha ha ha ha ha.