A Kamikaze Mission to Finally Stop Candace Owens

Plus: Tim Pool won’t ham it up for the new ‘Animal Farm’ movie.

(Photo Illustration by The Bulwark/Photos Getty, X.com)

The right’s anti-Candace coalition is finally here

Instagram MAHA influencer and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. acolyte Jessica Reed Kraus has never been a fan of Laura Loomer. Over the past year, Kraus has repeatedly told her 1.2 million Instagram followers about the top administration officials who have blocked Loomer online, mocked Loomer for not getting access to the White House, and dubbed Loomer “insane,” “reckless and lazy,” and a “clown show,” among many other epithets.

Loomer, no shrinking violet when it comes to online vitriol, once called Kraus an “insufferable cunt.”

“We had a falling out last year that prompted her to text-call me a cunt more than a dozen times,” Kraus recalled to her readers earlier this month. She went on to call her combatant one of the Trump movement’s “most brutal ruffians.”

But in the vicious factionalism of the MAGA movement—where character assassination has become both theology and an art form—there is one thing on which even bitter enemies can find common ground: the need to take down Candace Owens.

In a post on Monday, Kraus revealed that she was letting bygones be bygones and falling firmly behind Loomer’s kamikaze campaign to destroy Owens.

“Only crazy can match crazy,” Kraus wrote. “No one besides Loomer is equipped for this battle.”

The unnatural alliance is the latest illustration of how worried MAGA and MAHA influencers have become that their movements are at risk of being fractured from within—and that one person above all others is chiefly responsible.

Owens has spent months spreading conspiracy theories and antisemitic bile, targeting fellow activists (chief among them Erika Kirk) and now President Trump himself (mainly over the war in Iran). Having exhausted all prior methods for trying to stop her, a consensus is emerging that only a fellow maniac like Loomer can get it done.

For weeks, Owens and Loomer have been trading insults on X. Owens has compared Loomer’s face to the malevolent puppet Jigsaw from the Saw movies. Last week, Loomer told Owens that “God hates you.”

“It’s why he gave Charlie [Kirk] to Erika and why you didn’t even get to say goodbye to him,” Loomer wrote.

Insults are par for the course for these two. But by even their venomous standards, the back and forth has been . . . a lot.

The latest twist: After weeks of Loomer and Kraus hyping up a court record in Owens’s home state of Tennessee suggesting that Owens’s husband, mega-wealthy British metals heir George Farmer, was arrested for drunk-driving in 2023, Loomer finally got the goods this week. She posted Farmer’s mug shot, a report saying his blood alcohol content was a whopping .261, and a picture of the busted-up truck Farmer allegedly plowed into a ditch. This incident came at a time when Owens was pregnant with their third child.

“We should figure out how to nominate Loomer for a Pulitzer,” tweeted Meghan McCain after Loomer’s document dump.

None of that, of course, has relevance to Owens’s bizarre theories about (for instance) Israeli involvement in Charlie Kirk’s murder. But that seems beside the point. The goal here is to inflict emotional pain. And Owens herself has already demonstrated that family isn’t off-limits in this fight, so goose, gander and all that.

Owens didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Loomer appears to have been drawn to the fight by Owens’s antisemitism and attacks on Israel, as well as the sheer pleasure she seems to find in bitter online feuding. For Kraus, it’s personal—she’s been clashing with Owens since last year, when Kraus tossed off a newsletter accusing Owens of ripping off her right-coded celebrity gossip beat. Owens responded with the same kind of ferocity she’d later bring to bear on Turning Point USA, and badly hurt Kraus’s image on the right. Now it’s Kraus’s time for revenge.

Loomer’s spitfire attacks seem to have provided fellow Owens critics beyond Kraus a new sense of zeal. TPUSA is also going after Owens more forcefully now. On Wednesday, Kirk lieutenant Andrew Kolvet posted a screenshot of a message Owens allegedly sent Aubrey Laitsch—a former TPUSA employee who came to suspect the organization was involved in Kirk’s murder—that showed Owens speculating that Erika Kirk murdered her husband. This was a potent blow against Owens and her defenders, since Owens has (at least publicly) only heavily insinuated that Erika Kirk was involved in the murder, without stating it outright.

Finally, former Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing has a new podcast where he’s spending a lot of time slamming Owens, whom he fired back when he ran the conservative site. This week, Boreing tried a new tack, claiming that Owens is a symptom of a sort of malignant feminism.

Yet there are some on the right who still seem utterly lost as to how to handle Owens. That includes Erika Kirk. After attending last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner that was canceled after an assassination attempt, Kirk appeared in an apparently pre-recorded appearance on her late husband’s show to denounce political violence, and her own critics.

“Every morning I wake up to a new headline lying about me,” Kirk said. “I have comedians dressing up in whiteface,” she said in an apparent reference to comedian Druski’s parody of her. “I have people saying I’m not fit to be CEO. And I have Candace Owens claiming I murdered my husband. And the list goes on and on and on.”

Kirk was dressed inexplicably in a black hat reading “FREEDOM” and what appeared to be a tracksuit, an outfit that drew comparisons to Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation era and rapper Chuck D.

Owens, naturally, says she’s undaunted. Appearing on her own broadcast, she suggested that Erika Kirk staged her tearful exit from the WHCA dinner, and offered a $10,000 bounty for anyone with more info about Kirk’s appearance at the affair.

---

Tim Pool refuses to oink for Animal Farm

The Animal Farm movie adaptation no one asked for is finally here, and it too is dividing the right.

For months, conservatives have fumed about how director Andy Serkis’s animated comedy-adventure adaptation of George Orwell’s classic was ditching the novella’s focus on Stalinism to instead critique a sort of Elon Musk–flavored capitalism.

That didn’t stop conservative commentator Riley Gaines, a former college swimmer who rose to prominence by attacking transgender women participating in women’s sports, from praising Animal Farm.

“They do a perfect job of reminding viewers that Marxism always has and always will fail,” Gaines wrote in what appeared to be a sponsored post Tuesday on X.

This was not well received by ardent anti-Stalinist Tim Pool, who saw an early screener of the film and concluded that Gaines had clearly not actually watched all of the movie.

“There is not a single criticism of Marxism in the whole film!” Pool said on his show Tuesday.

Pool, who once received millions of dollars in illegal payments from the Russian government, said that he could not possibly promote the CGI children’s film because it didn’t attack communism. That wasn’t a hypothetical offer either, he explained.

Pool claimed that Angel Studios—which is distributing the film and which previously built ties across the right wing with the QAnon-tinged human trafficking hit Sound of Freedom in 2023—was “offering a lot of money” to his show in an effort to promote the film. But, he added, the deal hit a snag because of his frequent criticism of the film after its trailer was released earlier this year.

Pool said he was asked to retract that earlier criticism with a pig-themed quip. Specifically, according to Pool, Angel Studios wanted something along the lines of: “Boy, was I a squealer! The film’s actually great!”

He passed. And, frankly, he probably made the right call. Animal Farm currently has a 24 percent Fresh rating among critics on Rotten Tomatoes.