Candace Owens to Trump: Save Me from the Macrons

The right-wing podcaster is staring down some hefty legal bills—and merch sales alone might not cut it.

Welcome back to False Flag! The Trump administration trotted out its latest effort to close the Jeffrey Epstein intrigue on Friday, publishing transcripts from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s interview with imprisoned Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. Naturally, Maxwell—angling for a pardon—said she never saw Trump act inappropriately.

It seems to have worked, at least within the confines of MAGA. Figures like Benny Johnson and Laura Loomer dutifully posted Maxwell’s exoneration of Trump, and have been silent since. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who had been aggressive by Republican standards on getting the Epstein files released, cited Maxwell’s transcript as proof that Trump was a “perfect gentleman.”

Three days later, the Maxwell transcript is out of the MAGA media news cycle. Is this the end of it? Probably not. But the heat is certainly less than a month ago. We’ll keep tabs on it for you. In exchange, we kindly ask that you consider joining Bulwark+. And if you’re already a member, please encourage a friend to join!

Now, on to the main course. . .

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages /Shutterstock)

IT’S BEEN A MONTH since French President Emmanuel Macron and First Lady Brigitte Macron sued right-wing podcaster Candace Owens over her claims that they’re involved in an elaborate criminal conspiracy to hide the supposed fact that Brigitte is transgender.

Things are starting to get real for Owens, who appears to have a dual strategy in responding to the Gallic leaders: Asking her fans to fund her enormous legal bills and demanding that Trump intervene to stop the Macrons’ “invasion.”

On an August 11 episode of her podcast, Owens admitted she didn’t have enough money to pay the enormous legal fees that her lawyers are predicting will come.

“This lawsuit—we got an estimate this weekend from a legal team,” Owens said. “It is going to cost us millions. I don’t have that money. I really don’t. So I thought we could actually sell some t-shirts.”

I’m not sure that that merch—$30 shirts that say “#FreeEmmanuel”—will get Owens very far in the courtroom, even if her fans buy the matching $30 hats as well. Which may explain why Owens is pressuring President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance to somehow block the Macrons’ lawsuit.

In an episode of her podcast earlier this month, Owens complained that Trump and Vance haven’t even put out statements defending her, calling the president’s silence “crazy.” Pointing to the Justice Department’s involvement in an altercation at Florida State University over the harassment of a student wearing an Israeli military shirt, Owens said the Justice Department should be focused on worthy victims, like herself!

“The job of the federal government is to defend us from foreign invaders,” Owens said. “And I would pretty much say Emmanuel Macron right now is being a foreign invader. But no, they are silent.”

Owens’s hopes for a presidential intervention have grown increasingly desperate. Last week, she claimed on her podcast that the U.S. military had pressured Trump to encourage her to drop the Macron story, implying that Trump is merely a puppet for a military junta.

Owens’s challenges have provided an opening for her detractors on the right, who have focused on whether she really needs to rely on fans to pay her lawyer. Her father-in-law, metals trader and British baron Michael Farmer, is reportedly worth roughly £150 million. This has prompted some of Owens’s foes, including Substack writer and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. acolyte Jessica Reed Kraus, to accuse Owens of bilking her fans to cover her legal fees when her husband’s father could easily afford top-flight talent.

On Friday, Owens explained that Baron Farmer, a member of the House of Lords, could not bail her out because the United Kingdom does not have a “feudal system” anymore. She accused Kraus of having a Renaissance Fair–level understanding of British politics in thinking Farmer could send his serfs to help with the Macron suit.

“When they learn that somebody is a lord, they think that lands have been bequeathed by a king and a queen, and somebody is a lord, and beneath that person there are vassals and knights that will fight for the lord,” she said.

In theory, Owens could try to reach a settlement with the Macrons that would alleviate the need to sell an ungodly amount of merch or facilitate a presidential intervention on her behalf. But, so far, she doesn’t seem interested in that option.

Owens has decidedly not toned down her conspiracy theories about the Macrons. If anything, they’re getting more baroque. Last week, for example, Owens asked her viewers whether Brigitte Macron, as a man, had participated in the infamous Stanford prison experiment. Why would that even matter? Because, she suggested, it might link the Macrons to a CIA mind-control program.

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Right-wing pundit takes stab at ethnic caste system

MAGA INFLUENCERS ARE KEEPING UP their efforts to argue that naturalized American citizens and even their descendants are not “real” Americans.

For years, Tucker Carlson has referred to Americans with older roots in the country as “legacy Americans”; other commentators on the right have dubbed them “heritage Americans.” (As one X user points out, the longstanding term that you would expect to apply here, “WASP,” appears to have fallen out of favor because of the predominance of Catholicism on the New Right.) This past June, the effort got a fresh update when conservative personalities like Charlie Kirk and Matt Walsh began calling for a moratorium on “third-world” (i.e. nonwhite) immigration.

And now, Trump supporters have started challenging each other to search for their surnames in a Civil War soldier registry to see if they’re really American.

Interestingly, very-online Vice President JD Vance referenced that same registry in a June interview. But Pizzagate-conspiracy-theorist-turned-MAGA-pundit Jack Posobiec, who frequently visits the Trump White House, may have gone too far Sunday when he straight-out endorsed a tiered list to codify who is “really” American.

“Imagine your parents moved to Italy in the 70s and you claimed you were ‘just as Italian’ as a centuries-long family from Sicily,” Posobiec wrote. “That’s what the American question is all about.”

Posobiec included a graphic from another account that rated Americans from “Grade A” (ancestors who arrived between 1607 and 1789) to “Grade D” (immigrants or those whose ancestors arrived after 1945). To make the graphic creator’s opinion of these different groups clear, the graphic becomes dimmer as it progresses down from the Jamestown settlers to more recent arrivals.

Posobiec himself might be on shaky ground here, since my search for “Posobiec” on the Civil War registry came up empty. Incredibly, Posobiec’s wife, a pro-Trump personality, agreed with her husband that she is indeed a lower-tier American. Tanya Tay Posobiec immigrated to the United States from Belarus.

As Posobiec continues his efforts to prove that natural-born American citizens deserve some kind of privilege or special consideration, there are some obvious political challenges.

How exactly are members of the populist MAGA movement—for example, the first lady—supposed to defer to someone whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower? Will Cuban-American Trump voters, like the secretary of state, really embrace the idea that they’re Grade-D Americans? What about the many Americans whose ancestry includes a mix of the different tiers? And can Americans who embrace the citizenship caste system really accept a President Trump, whose family history would make him a Grade-C American?

Fortunately for the fate of the country, the citizenship-tier list has provoked a lot of pushback on the right, where at least some people still believe America shouldn’t have a caste system based on your genetic tenure in the country. As conservative pundit Chris Loesch put it: “This is stupid.” Grade A stupid, one might say.