Read the full transcript of American political commentator Candace Owens’ interview: “Rising Above the Cancel Culture Machine” on Part Of The Problem Podcast #1325 with host Dave Smith, Premiered November 8, 2025.
Brief Notes: Dave Smith is joined by Candace Owens for a raw, in-depth conversation about the massive efforts to cancel her and why those campaigns have only supercharged her reach in conservative media. They dig into the backlash after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, his late-stage break with pro-Israel donors, and the explosive group chats and money pressures Candace says too many on the right are trying to bury. Along the way, they expose how establishment “Conservatism Inc.” really works behind the scenes, from donor leverage to media smears, and why audiences are rewarding voices who refuse to back down.
Introduction
DAVE SMITH: What’s up, everybody? Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem. Do we have a good one for you today?
Very quickly, before we get the show started, I do want to remind everyone—well, thank you so much, I should say, to everybody who’s already pre-ordered my amazing wife’s wonderful new children’s book, which was up at the top of the new releases for children’s books on the Amazon charts, Healthy Hibernation. My beautiful wife, Lauren Smith, just wrote it. It’s our first children’s book. It’s very sweet, and it’s all about just talking to kids about eating healthy and stuff like that.
So it’s not any of the controversial things that we’re about to talk about today. But I will say I saw this this morning and this really tickled me. Because I’ve promoted it on this show, now when you go on Amazon, it’s like if you click on my wife’s adorable children’s book, you know, Amazon does the thing where it goes, “People who pre-ordered this book also read…” And all of the books are like The Israel Lobby and By Way of Deception. Anyway, okay, that was funny to me.
Moving on from talking about one mother to another one, my good friend Candace Owens, who has been just on fire in a way that is hard, almost impossible to overstate over the last—I mean, really, look, you’ve been a huge force in conservative media for many years now. Over the last couple of years, after, you know, leaving, parting ways with the Daily Wire, you got even bigger. But now, just over this last stretch, you’ve really become the mover of the narrative, at least on the conservative side of the aisle.
And I really, you know, I’ve talked to Tucker this week and I really wanted to talk to you also about this massive kind of cancellation attempt. So, Candace Owens, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to see you.
CANDACE OWENS: I’m so excited to do it. One day we’re going to have to do it in person on your show. But I’m excited to be back.
DAVE SMITH: Well, next time, next time we’re in the same city, we’ll make sure that happens. Whoever’s show it’s on, maybe we’ll do it on your show. Seeing how big that show is these days, I should probably be focused on that one.
The Failed Cancellation Attempt
It has been—there’s been something that, you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about this because obviously there’s been this big cancellation attempt primarily against you and Tucker. Although by proxy, I guess I’ve been caught up in it a bit. Obviously, both you and Tucker—well, Tucker was fired from Fox News. You were fired from the Daily Wire. Both went on to be much bigger after getting canned.
And yet now there’s this attempt again to cancel you. And we’re all kind of wondering, like, from what? Like, what would you even cancel them from?
And I just thought, you know, I was very close friends with Joe Rogan when he was going through that major cancellation attempt in 2022, in the height of COVID insanity. I was the first one on his podcast after all that stuff really went down and I was out doing shows with him. And I remember at the time having this feeling where all of them kind of hadn’t admitted it yet. The corporate media hadn’t admitted that Joe Rogan is the biggest thing in media. They did eventually, after 2024.
But at the time, it was like, so weird. You’re like, wait, Brian Stelter is trying to cancel Joe Rogan? Doesn’t he know?
And so anyway, as Mark Levin is openly calling for you and Tucker’s cancellation and Dinesh D’Souza, people like this are openly—it is just funny because you’re, like, objectively right now, you and Tucker are the two biggest conservative political commentators. This is just undeniable.
And so their plan right now is we want to cancel number one and number two. This is just like, how do you even get away with doing that when the people have already told you they’re on their side, not yours? What’s it been like for you to just kind of watch this?
The Free Market Response
CANDACE OWENS: Well, yesterday was a fantastic day. I mean, to get the email from Podscribe, number one podcast in the world. And I don’t—of course, I am humbled by it, truly, because the audience is the reason. Like, this truly was a free market response.
And to go back and find the people who worked day in and day out to ruin my life—it wasn’t like they just wanted me gone from the Daily Wire, which they got. And they celebrated and effectively danced on my grave. It wasn’t—they then were trying to get my speaking events canceled. They were the ones that put pressure on Charlie not to let me speak. And I said to him, “Dude, I got enough going on. Like, I don’t want you to also, just by proxy, catch a flame.”
DAVE SMITH: So—
CANDACE OWENS: They want to cancel me.
And I think the reason why yesterday was such a win was precisely because they worked so hard and tried to destroy me. And we survived. That’s where their true hatred and vitriol is coming from, is the fact that we survived a virtual assassination attempt. Right? It’s like we shouldn’t have survived it.
But given everything they did and even the element of how they wanted me to be fired, like the element of surprise for Tucker to be fired—he’s doing a show on a Tuesday, suddenly on a Wednesday, he doesn’t get to say goodbye to his audiences. I really do believe even that was a part of their, like, sadistic effort to be like, “You are no more.”
And so, yeah, it feels good. And I’m really happy to say all I did was commit to the truth, and I didn’t allow peer pressure to come to something that’s actually evil.
Do you agree that Palestinians should be genocided? No. Okay, well, then you’re going to be canceled. You’re never going to be on a Republican stage ever again. Okay, bye. I’ll just do my own show.
Okay. You’re not going to be allowed to speak at the CPAC or the RNC. You’re not going to get an invite to the White House. Okay, bye. I’d like to keep my morals and my principles in line. If I never get to go to Mar-a-Lago again, at least I can lay my head on the pillow and know that I’m not cheering for children to die, irrespective of whether Palestinian or Israeli. I’m not going to root on children dying.
The Artificial Market
And so I think also something that’s important to remember, Dave, is these people do not believe in the free markets. That’s number one thing to remember. They want people to be artificially pushed out of the free markets so that they can say they’re number one.
They love a world where, like, what happened back—what was it in 2020 when people were getting knocked off of platforms left and right? Maybe it was earlier than that. Actually, it was before Trump was president. They love that world where you’re artificially kicking out the Gateway Pundit. You’re not allowed to be on Facebook anymore. You’re artificially kicking out Alex Jones trying to allow the platform.
And then they go, “We’re number one. We are the number one most listened to conservative news podcaster.” It’s like, no, you’re not. There’s no market here. And that’s what they want right now. They want their markets to be restricted so that they can be number one again.
DAVE SMITH: Yeah, it is. Well, that’s right. And because in a way, if they make—look, if the punishment, let’s say, like, for whatever, like, it was in the old guard where, like, if you canceled someone, that was it. There wasn’t like another punishment. They couldn’t just go start their own podcast or something.
Like when Bill O’Reilly got fired from Fox News, I mean, I guess he did go start a podcast, but even back then, it was like, it just wasn’t as big of a market. And also his audience was a lot older. They weren’t getting into, like, the technology.
So he goes from being a guy who’s speaking to, like, five million people a night to being a guy who’s speaking to, like, 80,000 people when he does a show. And that’s like, that sucks. And, you know, you could see where the pressure would be, like, “Hey, look, are you sure you want to say this one thing that’ll piss everybody off? Because then you lose the right to say all the other things that you also might think are important.” And you make people make these calculations in their mind.
But you going to number one, it’s like, oh, no, not only is there not a price to be paid, there’s a reward in the market for people going like, “Oh, yeah, she stood up for what was right.”
Standing Up for Decency
And as you talk—when you get down to the specifics of it, what you’re talking about is like, I mean, I don’t know, me and you’ve been reading the news for two years on this. You’re talking about what, children being shot at as they desperately try to get food because they’ve been starving for—like, I’m sorry, the American right wing is still made up of a lot of Christians and a lot of people who are just like, “What? No.” They’re decent people. They’re not going to go along with this.
And the thing is, like, they kind of never got presented the opportunity to hear from people who were going to make that argument. And you’ve been a part of this huge, like, test study of, like, well, how would it work if there was actually a market?
And yes, I think it’s incredibly rewarding for me to see you being the number one podcast because it just shows that, like, yeah, there is—like, you demonstrated that people could have the courage to say the right thing, and then the audience demonstrated that, like, yeah, and there’s a lot of people who will have your back if you do that. I just think that’s a great precedent to be set.
The Journey to Understanding
CANDACE OWENS: It is. And I’m so grateful because I want to remind people you might think of me now as anti-Israel, but when they came after my entire life, I just wanted to learn about the topic. I actually didn’t have a perspective, but I knew that I didn’t know everything. And they were just so vicious with, “No, you have to come out and you have to say these things.”
And I was like, “Look, I don’t know anything about this. Let me speak to some other—like, speak to other people.”
Like, I watched Bassem go viral. The clip go viral where he was holding up the chart and I was going, “Whoa, that is kind of crazy. Are this many kids dying?” Then I went back and I watched some old content of you on Joe Rogan speaking about the topic. Then I hosted you at the Daily Wire and that was a big wake-up call.
And I really was coming from a place that’s still one of my favorite episodes. I don’t think—I think they pulled all the content down. But just learning about Middle Eastern politics, I’m not presenting myself as an expert. And I think that is what also the market is responding to is at least I want to learn. At least I am showing that I will correct where I was wrong.
I was working for PragerU, Daily Wire. I was working with Zionists. I obviously had no hatred in my heart towards the Zionist cause. And then it was just asking the question, like, I was messaging with Max Blumenthal because, you know, strange allies, right? And he has done some really incredible work.
And I went back and I found these messages from a time where I simply retweeted Max Blumenthal on something that he said about Kyrie Irving that I agreed on. So it wasn’t even about Israel. And I got messages like—all I can tell you is like, Agent Smith. I sent it to him. It’s crazy. Like, Marissa Streit, Dave Rubin.
And I actually apologized to them because I was like, “Wow, this guy must literally be Hitler. Like, I didn’t know. I just saw it trending and I retweeted him.”
That’s what kind of goes on behind the scenes. Like, they are actually presenting themselves as free speech thinkers. And then they put pressure on people and tell them, “Hey, even listening or retweeting Max Blumenthal, you may not know it.” And they told me this. “He’s an anti-Semite. Like, he’s a committed anti-Semite, Max Blumenthal.”
So it’s a different time now. And that sort of “We’re going to tell you what to think and you’re going to like it”—people aren’t buying it anymore.
The Conservatism Inc. Playbook Exposed
DAVE SMITH: Yeah, no, that’s right. And I think one of the things that’s just been revealed, there was a lot of things about Conservatism Inc. online type people like Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro and even Steven Crowder and a lot of guys like this who really rose to prominence during the craziest woke years. They were kind of the figures who were speaking up against the insanity, you know, like being like, “No, actually, you’re a dude in a dress. You’re not a chick.”
And you know, that was necessary to some degree. It was pretty crazy what was going on in college campuses and the whole left wing wokeism stuff in general was crazy. But because that was the dynamic and because, for whatever reason, while tons of other right wingers were being deplatformed, those were the ones who weren’t and in fact were very pushed by the YouTube algorithm and stuff.
I mean, I remember for you, I always hated Ben Shapiro. And for years YouTube was like, “I know you want to watch Ben Shapiro.” And I was like, “I do not. I’ve never told you that YouTube.” But YouTube kept insisting I did. I always… Now I do.
CANDACE OWENS: Yeah, you do.
DAVE SMITH: Well, I was aware of this as I’ve been talking about lately, because I was a Ron Paul supporter back in the day and I remember Ben Shapiro saying that Ron Paul wants to strangle Jews and that he’s a vicious anti-Semite. And I’d be like, “Whoa.” And you realize, you’re like, oh, it was easy in those years for them to pretend like that wasn’t actually all they cared about, but actually that’s all they care about. And I mean all they care about.
And this has been revealed. This is the thing with the neocons. This is why even the original core neocon group, they were all a bunch of commies who then became Democrats, who then became Republicans and then became Democrats again. And why they, when they were George W. Bush Republicans, they were like, “Marriage is between a man and a woman and our culture is getting out of…” Because they just thought that was the best way to get votes for their wars.
And then when Donald Trump ran against Hillary Clinton, they went, “Okay, she likes the wars. We’ll go support Hillary Clinton.”
CANDACE OWENS: Right?
The Israel Litmus Test
DAVE SMITH: Marriage, gay marriage. Anyone who’s against gay marriage is a homophobe or whatever. But they don’t actually… And so look, just think about it, right? Why would someone like Ben Shapiro, at the very least, wouldn’t he have liked a lot of things about Ron Paul? Oh, he’s the most fiscal conservative guy. He’s the strict constitutionalist. He’s a devout Christian who believes in traditional values. There’s a million different things that you would… Look, you would go, “Oh, I like a lot of his thing. I do disagree with him on foreign policy.”
Nope, he’s evil. As soon as you’re not on board with Israel and Israel’s wars, you’re evil. And I think part of what happened here is that you just by doing what you did, it demonstrated that not only… It’s not like it went from like, “Candace is great, she’s been heroic on all these issues. We really disagree with her on this one.”
It went, all of that’s gone in one day. You go from being our favorite person, who we champion, who we put billboards up on to, you are the most vicious, evil human being in the world for saying, “You know, I just had some babies, and I’m seeing this mom holding her dead babies. And I’m thinking to myself, oh, my God, what would it be like to hold your dead baby? Jeez, that’s horrible.”
That’s enough to make… And just people seeing that can’t pretend they’re not seeing what they’re watching.
The Psychological Operation
CANDACE OWENS: It’s so true that that is how gentle it was. I had seen it was a dead Palestinian child and she looked like my daughter. And I was going, “Well, this is crazy. This is not just a black and white issue. I need to learn about this issue.”
And as soon as you express a feeling, I describe it very much. It is a psychological operation that is meant to break you. And there’s no question in my mind that they had done experiments to see… I mean, this is really going back to what Kanye was saying. And he’s not the greatest orator of our time, but this is what he was describing was happening to him in Hollywood, where he was trying… This is what he was trying to break free from.
And of course, he notoriously says, “I’m about to go DEFCON 3 on some Jews.” And they made it seem like he had tanks and he was going to come in, he was going to start lighting up Jews in Los Angeles. But in reality, everyone ignored the fact that Harley Pasternak was… And this was one of the people he was referring to. He was also referring to at that time, Scooter Braun.
Justin Bieber has now kind of said things about Scooter Braun. Who knows what’s true and what’s not? I mean, I’ve had friendly conversations with Scooter, so I don’t have a horse in the race. But the point is, he was trying to say that there is this psychological operation that sweeps in if you do not actually pedal certain talking points or certain perspectives, particularly in Hollywood.
I didn’t understand what he was saying at that time. Then I went through it politically and I was going, “What is actually happening?” I mean, the peer pressure. “You’re going to do this or you’re going to lose everything.”
We saw that even in Charlie Kirk’s text messages, there is not a single person that bent over more for the pro-Israel cause than Charlie Kirk. But it wasn’t enough because they were so angry, Dave. Particularly Josh Hammer was angry, Dave, that you annihilated him in a debate on stage. And how did you annihilate him? I don’t know. Just by being a human. A human being. I don’t know.
And Tucker Carlson gets out there, and Charlie was going through it. Okay. And that shows you they do not care. Everything instantly gets wiped.
The “Are You Okay?” Strategy
And for me, the attack they always do is they kind of try to make it seem like you’re going crazy. That’s the wildest part to me, is reading back the messages and they’re like, “Oh, we’re your friend.” They always come at you as a friend. “I care about you. Are you okay, Dave? I saw you wrote that tweet about that Palestinian child, and you said it looks sad. Are you okay? Is your marriage okay right now, Dave? Are there some things going on at home, Dave? I’m your friend. You can always call me.”
This is their strategy behind the scenes, and it’s also their strategy in front of the scenes. I think Seth Dillon is a literal demon. I will never… I can’t explain to you, there’s something very dangerous, psychologically wrong with him. This is what they… This is how they behave. And it’s important for people to see that.
I’m obviously, at the time, it wasn’t fun to go through it, but I am ever resilient on topics when it comes to principles, and I would rather burn everything to the ground and make new friends. When I realized that I am in a toxic relationship, whether that’s an employment, whether it’s a personal friendship, it has to go.
And people now know that it can be done. You can survive it, and people will be with you. Even if it’s not immediately, they’ll start to wake up and see that repeated pattern that you always talk about where someone says something completely normal, and then it’s like a button gets pressed.
The Hypocrisy Exposed
DAVE SMITH: Yeah. And just all of that, you know, as when I was saying back when… back to, say, 2017 or 2018 or something like that, the energy that Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson were able to kind of take hold of was that they were the ones saying, “You guys are afraid to debate. You guys need to rely on censorship. You have to rely on demonizing your opponent rather than just addressing their…”
And now they just can never say that again because we saw what happened as soon as their ideas got questioned, and then they all turned into the exact same thing. And that’s just, you know, the hypocrisy like that is very hard these days in this media environment, in this spiritual environment, whatever exactly it is. It’s just very hard for people to keep their own lies from being exposed.
CANDACE OWENS: Right.
The Charlie Kirk Investigation
DAVE SMITH: So I wanted to, obviously, I want to talk a bunch about Charlie and what… Because you’ve been doing a lot of shows on this. And so it seems to me, and a lot of shows that, I mean, shows that have been some of the most highest rated is a part of the reason why you have the biggest podcast right now.
I just remember I was talking about this on the show a few weeks ago, but I was watching one of your shows, but I had it on my phone and then I was kind of wrangling kids also while I was doing. So I’m watching the show and it’s live, and there was over 300,000 viewers live. And then I paused it because I had to go do something with the kids. And then I came back and when I came back, the show wasn’t live anymore, but it was still… I had it paused where I was in the stream and I looked down and it was… I mean, it was only 15 minutes after the show had been live, and it was over a million views already just on YouTube on it.
I was just like, “Yo, there’s so many people watching this right now.” It’s really unbelievable. And you’ve been… There’s been something very interesting about the way you’ve been covering this. Well, I mean, look, it’s a little uncomfortable to say, but part of what’s interesting and part of what’s compelling about it is that you’re clearly, you’re Candace Owens. You’re this pit bull who’s got a hold of something, and everybody knows you’re not letting go until you shake out everything that there is in there.
Then you’re also a woman who’s in deep grief very clearly over losing a very close friend. And so that’s… It’s just very, you know, real and human people can relate to.
It seems to me… And I kind of want to talk to you almost about what you think the biggest things are that you’ve revealed so far, where we are now. If we try to put this all together. But it seems to me the things that I… The takeaway that I find the most interesting so far is that… And correct me if I’m getting any of the chronology of this wrong, but I think I got it pretty much right.
So you basically come out in the wake of the biggest political assassination in modern American history and a good friend of yours and you go, “Look, here’s the deal.”
The Pressure Campaign Against Charlie Kirk
DAVE SMITH: Charlie was really at war with the Israel lobby and with all of the Zionists. The Zionist handlers around him. They were threatening him, they were pulling funds from him. He had basically gotten to the point where he was like, “I don’t support any of this anymore.”
And immediately that was met with accusations of, “She is out of her mind, she’s lying.” This is a—I believe Josh Hammer called it an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.” There was all types of that.
Of course, Benjamin Netanyahu is selectively reading lines from Charlie’s letter now. He doesn’t, by the way, he doesn’t mention that the rest of the letter, at least the rest of the letter that we’ve seen produced is like, the whole theme of it is like, “This Hasbara bullsh is not working at all. We need to deal with the—I’m getting killed out here” is the whole letter. He omits that and just reads the part where it’s like, “I sure do love Israel so much,” blah, blah, blah.
But anyway, all of them are saying the idea that there was a—Jewish donors were pulling money or that he was in some more. Now, the thing that always at the very beginning made it very believable that we’re saying this is that, well, number one, you’re good friends with him. And number two, we all saw that Megyn Kelly interview. So, like, we all kind of know what’s going on a little bit.
CANDACE OWENS: He was hosting you on stage. I mean, if you’re like so committed to the pro-Israel cause you got, you stay away from Dave Smith. Right? I mean, that’s a pretty easy thing to not invite Dave Smith to do it. A big stage when you know he’s going to win.
Charlie’s Strategic Choices
DAVE SMITH: Well, that was—and I mentioned this also at the thing. There was something about me. Because, look, obviously he had Tucker and he had Megyn Kelly there, who both essentially said Mossad was absent and were very, you know, Tucker certainly was very critical of the Israeli government.
But Tucker and Megyn are Tucker and Megyn. So, like, you have to have them at a conservative conference. Who could tell you you’re not going to have them? They’re like legacy icons of the conservative movement. But there was no need to have me. Like that was a choice. Like that was just—you could—he could have just not invited me.
But anyway, so then this all gets exposed or this, you get attacked for making up this nonsense and now all of the receipts have been produced. That what this is just this part I don’t even think is in dispute by anyone at this point, that yes, millions of dollars had been pulled out of Turning Point USA over platforming Tucker Carlson, and maybe to some extent me or whatever.
And then also this, the biggest one is this, this thread, this group chat where he actually literally says in writing that “I’m forced, I have no choice other than to abandon Israel.”
The Group Chat Revelation
And then the other thing that is a real important detail here, which really, you know, can’t be overstated, is that Charlie’s right hand man there—I’m sorry, I’m blanking on his name. Andrew. Is it at a Turning Point? Yes. So Andrew, who I met down at that event, who was always by Charlie’s side, he—he confirmed not only that the group chat was real, that he’s the one who took the screenshot of it and that he sent it to the authorities, which is like, look, it’s just, I’m not saying that proves anything about who done it, but it is like the fact that the closest guy in the organization to Charlie found that information to be relevant enough that he’s like, “The authorities should know that he just said he was turning on Israel.”
Now, correct me if I’m getting any of the chronology of this wrong or if there’s more stuff you want to add, but that at least is like—that at least justifies your entire investigation into this, that you’re like, “Hey, you guys were saying this whole thing was crazy.” And we’re at least at the point where like, no, it’s pretty much confirmed by all that that’s exactly what was going on.
Netanyahu’s Strange Involvement
CANDACE OWENS: I was just sitting back and amazed at how quickly Bibi Netanyahu interjected himself in this situation. He was not a personal friend of Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk obviously had an affinity for Israel throughout his career. Everybody knew he was changing.
In the end, it was such a strange thing that they then tried to say that that wasn’t real. So that obviously immediately for me becomes a compelling motive because there’s no reason to lie. This is like what I said about the Bill Ackman summit. There’s no reason to lie.
You could easily say, which is 100% true: Seth Dillon pressed him. They did this whole meeting. Bibi Netanyahu calls, invites him to Israel. Charlie says no, offers to fund Turning Point to the next level, which is totally normal for like a sitting prime minister of a country that’s fighting a 97,000 front war. And Charlie said no, okay.
And if they had been like forthcoming and everyone had just kind of told the truth, I would have just been like, “Okay, like, this is like some crazy lefty that did this.” There’s never a reason to lie. Even if I get into a fight with Charlie the day before he dies, I would be like, “My biggest regret is that my last words to Charlie were, ‘F* you,’ and this shows you life can be taken from you at any moment.” Like, I am just beside myself.
They were obsessively lying, trying to bury this thing. And it made me go, “Something’s just not right here.”
Financial Irregularities at Turning Point
Okay. Then I learned, thanks to the Turning Point people like the younger people at the organization were just like, “There’s a lot of lies being told. Charlie was concerned about finances particularly. He didn’t know where the money was coming from.” That’s a very strange thing.
I saw evidence of that. I obviously then presented the DOGE email. He, seven days before he dies, says, “I’m going to start, you know, audit, like a personal audit campaign inside a DOGE committee, inside to figure out things, where it was going, where it was coming from and who it was going to.” That’s not a normal thing for somebody to be wondering about their company and then their debt.
So it was—everything was a lie. And honestly, the one that struck me as the oddest was them lying about the Catholic thing. Okay? And I’m including Andrew Kolba in this because what’s this got to do with anything? I’m thinking, right?
We all know Catholic gang, gang. We knew he was going to mass daily sometimes. We knew he had the St. Michael pendant. I knew that Eric had phoned a priest right when he died. And they’re getting up here and they’re like, “No, he just liked the architecture.” And he would sometimes architecture and sometimes he would go in there and—and because he just liked pretty walls. I’m like, “What is this lie about?” Right?
The Pattern of Deception
So I’m putting together a picture and the obvious thing to me, if I am a detective, is you’re only lying because you’re hiding something. Right? And it seems to me like they’re trying to not upset the very people that were pressuring him. They want him to be this committed Christian Zionist. He never faltered on it. If you want that money to keep going, are these donors still pressuring you?
Now why is Bibi Netanyahu lying? I don’t know. But what I do know is we aren’t getting the truth about anything. Then you couple that with Turning Point is lying, covering that could just be financial. Trying to protect the finances. After Charlie, who knows?
But then you add the Fed messages that they didn’t want to give us a time about the person’s writing like they’re in, you know, 1887, just young gay, 20 year olds writing like we’re in 1887. It’s a nonsense. They have no explanation for that. I know that that makes no sense.
The person’s—I got contact with the family, they’re telling me that the Feds are even lying about why he turned himself in. They basically were told, you know, “We’ll slam, we’ll slam down your doors. Or you can come in peacefully. What are you going to do?” Like, “Hey, we got you no matter what. You have two options here.” You know, he turned himself in, the family friend.
I mean, there isn’t a single thing they have told us unless, you know, believe in the fantasy of the Superman neck because Charlie ate healthy and a 30-06, which would have decapitated him as every hunter knows. He stopped it. He saved lives and he stopped it. And this was just your regular Christian miracle.
It’s all nonsense. Okay? We don’t know what happens, but we certainly know that what they’re telling us is bullsh. Right? And people are not—are—we’re just so tired of being sold slop.
The Breland Holland Mystery
Another thing that struck me as very odd was they were pushing this kid, Breland Holland. You may have seen this, like, nice kid. He’s, like, young.
DAVE SMITH: Yeah. But it looks like he was made in an AI lab or something like that.
CANDACE OWENS: Yeah, like, nice kid. Trump mentions this kid in his speech at the memorial. Okay. Donald Trump mentioned this kid who he doesn’t know. And he’s like, “Charlie interviewed this kid who was only in fourth grade,” blah, blah, blah.
Hi. I was there for the interview. Trump wasn’t. Why is Trump mentioning this? It was a random side podcast that we did when we did an event down in Alabama. Who put this in your speech? Okay, this is nothing to do with you, Trump. You didn’t even know that I was there. Right, because somebody put this in your speech.
That seems to me like you’re just kind of trying to set the stage for this kid who’s controlled by Israel narratives to become the new Charlie Kirk. So it just smells, and I’m covering it meticulously. And there obviously is an emotional investment here.
Charlie’s Legacy and Impact
Charlie was an amazing person. You know, he really was. He held the line, and when he gave an inch, like, “Okay, I won’t have Candace.” There’s a reason. He then said, “And now you get Dave Smith, Tucker Carlson, and everybody else who’s anti-Israel.” That’s how he was. He was very strategic.
And he—I know he pissed off Bibi Netanyahu and his boys because he is the single reason, okay, that we did not go to war with Iran. You guys may think that’s crazy. It’s a fact.
DAVE SMITH: No, it was a big—that was a big deal. And look, I remember it. I remember texting him and giving him a lot of credit for it at the time, because it was like, what happened was as Trump is flirting with what turned into the 12 Day War, or around the time when Israel starts first bombing. And it wasn’t clear whether or not we were going to get in on it.
It was like, again, like, it was you, Tucker. Like all these people. Steve Bannon. There were all these people who, I mean, like, really, really influential. Like, high level. I remember talking about at the time and being like, “I’ve just never seen anything like this before.” Like, I never—this, this would be like in 2004, like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh all turning against George W. Bush’s policy in the war. Like, what would that look like? You can’t even like imagine it or Rachel Maddow and all of them turning against Obama or something you never saw.
The Unprecedented Conservative Pushback
But here you have this. And then Charlie, who was more, look, obviously he was more, he was in a slightly different game than the rest of us are in. Like he wasn’t just doing a show, he was doing a get out the vote, youth, organizational big tent Republican thing. So he was always the most just pro-Trump of the group. Like, not that all, all you guys might have supported Trump, but that was Charlie’s identity.
And then when even he came out and was just like, “No, dude, like, we are not—this is not what the Trump base wants. Like, this is not that.” That is a huge—look. Again, to some degree, it’s hard to prove the counterfactual or what influence everything had. But that made it that there was such a political price for Donald Trump to have escalated the thing.
The Truth About Charlie Kirk’s Final Stand
CANDACE OWENS: And he was saying this to his face at the White House. And Charlie was—someone said to me, and this is a perfect way to put it—Charlie was a maestro, right? So he would play like, “I’m the, hey, you know, Mr. President, here’s why and here’s whatever.” And then he’d go and he’d call me and he’d call like Matt Gaetz and Tucker. He’d be like, “Hammer him, hammer him, hammer him. Show him the market. They don’t like this. Whatever, whatever.”
And he won. In a room full of people who wanted him to go to war with Iran, Charlie Kirk made the difference. And I don’t take Bibi Netanyahu as someone who would take that lightly, right? And just everything he has done since Charlie has passed, trying to assert his legacy as “he never blinked on Israel”—it makes me uncomfortable.
Okay, now that’s a feeling. And I’ve expressed that feeling. But I’ve also been meticulous about delivering a timeline of the facts. And it is very clear that some funny business started happening after the notorious event where you and Tucker spoke at. And they were enraged and the donors were enraged. They took millions of dollars.
And he said, after that, he said no to Bibi Netanyahu. He said, “No, I don’t want your money. I don’t want to take Turning Point to the next level.” I’ve now recently, which I haven’t presented yet, am learning how much money each person at Turning Point lost when Bibi Netanyahu said—when Charlie said no to Bibi Netanyahu. Because they were going to get a percentage of that.
And that’s interesting. Anybody investigating a crime knows—look at financial motives, right? Common sense. Look at financial motives. And they’re emotionally manipulating us. Like, it’s disrespectful to his legacy to pursue truth. I knew Charlie. I’m not listening to them.
You do one of two things when you go through something like that. I suffered a real trauma. I had to take two weeks off because I was just—I couldn’t even process what was happening. And the way they were trying to get us to just forget about it, Dave. Like, just, like, move on. Move on. His legacy is he loves Israel. It’s over. And here’s what you can do. If you love Charlie, donate.
Okay. No, I was behind Turning Point because Charlie was there. He’s not there. I need to know what and who is running this organization now behind the scenes, and I’m not going to accept that. Okay, well, Erica Kirk. Yeah. On paper, she’s a chairman and she’s a CEO. But you don’t learn how to be a chairman and a CEO overnight because your husband died, right? That’s just a fact.
I couldn’t be a chairman and a CEO. And I’ve been in business. My husband does all that because it’s not my natural interest. You have to actually like the mundane. You got to read the contracts and what everybody got to understand—the LLC structures, the contractors that you’re bringing in. For a company that’s worth a hundred million dollars, Dave, like, no.
Okay. There’s some snakes in the garden, and I’m here to cut the grass and figure out where they are.
Charlie Kirk’s Unique Talent and Impact
DAVE SMITH: Yeah, well, and I think also people just don’t—people don’t understand how talented Charlie was. And that’s natural. That’s the way things work with really talented people. Like, you don’t—they make it look kind of easy and then everybody else kind of, you know, doesn’t really.
But it’s like, just to be like, people don’t understand how good you have to be to go just, like, do what he would do and hold court with all of these students and debate a thousand different people and then go—like, you got to be really good to do that. But then also people, in a weird way go, “Charlie did what all of us do.” And then he ran this gigantic organization which really, I mean, really moved the needle in a very powerful way.
In fact, might be the reason why Donald Trump is president. I mean, there’s—it’s, you know, if you go look at the polling data from 2024, moving the youth movement was a huge difference for Donald Trump and might—I’d have to double look at that—might have been the margin of victory. It was a big deal.
And by the way, all those youth are now going back to the Democrats, at least that’s what it looks like as of this week, which is an interesting thing to think about.
CANDACE OWENS: I’m not going to vote. So there’s that, you know, there is.
DAVE SMITH: There’s a real interesting dynamic there that I kind of—that I do want to talk to you about a bit where it seems like it’s almost—and in a way, I think this was something that was one of Charlie’s big concerns. Okay, we’ll get to this.
But, you know, it was like—I know. So essentially right, like, everybody started kind of releasing messages. And, you know, Netanyahu is selectively reading from the letter. Bill Ackman’s releasing text messages. You end up releasing some group chats. And you had that one show where you called on—you were like, “Hey, Dave, Tucker, like, whatever you guys got, like—”
And I was like, okay. So I looked through my text message with Charlie. Now, I didn’t know—we became friends over this last year, but I didn’t know him like the way you knew him. We weren’t like close like that, but I was like, I wonder if there’s—and I didn’t really have much, but I had that one text message that he did send me right after I debated Douglas Murray, where he was like, “This Murray guy was really full of sh*t.” And he goes, “You know, I actually agree with almost all of what you were saying there.”
And I did release it because I just, I do think, like, look, even if—let’s just say there is a thorough investigation, it gets done. You know, there’s cameras in the courtroom, we all get to see the evidence place. And we really are at the end of this, like eight months from now, me and you are talking and we’re like, it was Tyler Robinson. And it was, you know, like, this is just—the evidence does look like he was alone. Left wing, not—okay, fine.
It’s still—the fact is that when somebody, when somebody young who’s so beloved by millions of people gets killed in such a public, gruesome way in such a high profile political assassination, that people trying to hijack his legacy, like, that matters.
And I’m sorry, like, if you’re going to tell me that Charlie Kirk, there is no daylight between him and Ben Shapiro or him and Josh Hammer, or him and Benjamin Netanyahu, let me tell you what none of those guys do is text me after my debate with Douglas Murray and go, “You know, I really agree with most of what you said there.” They don’t say that. You’re an evil enemy to them at that point.
And that wasn’t Charlie’s attitude. Charlie’s attitude was like, like, “I get what you’re saying, man. Let’s talk about this more. Like, we should hammer this out.” And so at the very least, even if it’s not something to do with the actual, like, crime, this is all still very relevant to get to the bottom of, like, what was going on here.
Charlie’s Authentic Character and Transformation
CANDACE OWENS: And then, by the way, you’re speaking to his character and that’s what I wanted people to understand. For the people that were like, “Oh, Charlie was just doing whatever for Israel.” Charlie said Charlie was pro-Israel. Like, I was pro-Israel. Because he actually believed it at that time. He was an authentic human being.
It was not this, like, hardcore political idiot. He wasn’t in—and he was transformative. If he thought something and he was wrong, he would change his mind and he would tell you how he got there. And they knew that about him. They knew that he was not a cult member and that money was not going to be something that was going to make him go, “Okay, well, I’m just going to say the thing and look like a fool.”
What Charlie wanted more than anything else was to win. Okay? In order to win, you have to be right. In order to win, you have to be right long term. And so Charlie would do the due diligence. He would study things, he would have the conversations. And he was landing up—he was just winding up on the other side of this thing, like I did, where it’s like, “Hey.”
And that’s what I said to him. I was like, “When you start looking into this, you’re feeling the pressure. You’re going to see something’s very wrong. We did not have this right, Charlie. We did not have this right.”
And because he had that humility to admit that he was wrong, he no longer served their purpose, right? That’s what you—I realize they will throw you out and coordinate behind the scenes, have all their sickle fans go after you. Take quote out of context. Start with the articles. “He—this is—you know, he’s flirting with anti-Semitism. You know, he put on a hot dress and he saw anti-Semitism, whatever.”
That’s kind of where they start. And it’s like—that’s like the threat of the articles that are about to drop. And Charlie said no. And so that is one of the things that makes me just so happy. And like, you know, when I just pray, I just want him to know, like, you—you died with your soul intact.
And something that brought me such peace was a donor at a Turning Point USA, who’s very close with Charlie, said to me in the immediate aftermath, “A soul that is in struggle will free itself, right? One way or the other, it will free itself.” And I think for Charlie, his soul was starting—he was starting to struggle. And to know that his last things that he said to them was like, “No, f* you, keep your money.” Like, he died a free man. And I think that’s really important for people to know.
DAVE SMITH: Yeah. Yeah. And like, if—if I just can’t imagine, you know, like, say for—to Josh Hammer, who supposedly was a close friend of Charlie Kirk’s, and he’s—and according to him, was the—which is, I think, very weird to be saying right after he died, like, even if this was true, I would find this very bizarre to be said. Like, if you—if I—if I just like the first podcast, just knowing Charlie the way I knew him. If I like the first—
CANDACE OWENS: I’m so sorry Dave Smith died. You know, the last thing Dave Smith said to me, the last thing he said to me, we had this conversation. He was like, “Candace, your feminism book was amazing. And I want to go to makehimasandwich.com and buy your feminism book.” And that’s—that’s—it was the last loving—
DAVE SMITH: So close to Dave, by the way. And I like your book on feminism. But like, if I died and then you did a show about it afterward, I’d find it kind of weird if—
CANDACE OWENS: That was not one show. It was his first tweet after Charlie died. And then every tweet—he did multiple shows about it. It—
The Betrayal of Truth
DAVE SMITH:
Oh my God. And he almost even the way he says it, like I pointed this out on the show at one point, that every single interview, he always says the horrific murder of my friend Charlie. Just always in those words. It’s always the horrific murder of my friend. It’s like, why are you talking to me like you focus group says that? Like, I don’t want the global language dictionary here, dude. Be a human being. Talk about what?
And I would just imagine like, you know, whatever it is. Like, me and you, we agree on all types of issues. And like, let’s say like right before, you know, God forbid something happened to you. Then the night before, you were texting with me and you were like, “I don’t know, Dave. I mean, you know, I know you’ve been saying we should end the Fed and have like a free market and money, but I’m really thinking we need a central bank and blah, blah, blah.”
And I was like, “Oh, shoot. Like Candace is like, you know, diverting from the thing that we agree on or whatever.” And then like, God forbid you got killed. And they’d be like, “Oh, Candace was turning on the idea of Ron Paul and you know, free market economics.” I’d be like, “Well, you know, she was exploring other ideas. It was a time when there was a lot of press.”
Like, but to just lie, I go, like, I would find that to be such a betrayal of my. I’d be like, “Yeah, it was a shame. I would have convinced her though. You know, we were going to argue about it, and I bet she would have come back to agreeing with me after that.” Like, just say something like that. Why? Like, you know, there’s just something very profoundly wrong about lying about that.
CANDACE OWENS:
It is demonic. That’s what I’m saying. Most of us have something spiritually that would stop us from doing it. So we either don’t want to talk about it at all. Because we’re embarrassed, right? Like, I don’t even want to talk about the fact that we were fighting, which is fine.
But to race out of the gate before anybody even cares about what your last conversation was. And to lie about his state of mind. To lie about. And knowing he was feeling so much pressure too. Like, he was like, hurting over this. Like, you know what I mean? And you just lie.
There is something spiritually wrong with Josh Hammer. So I don’t even accept that. Like, oh, like, it’s disgusting. It’s wrong. It’s like, no, this is actually demonic. Okay. A regular human being can’t do that. There’s certain things you just go, “Oh, I’m sorry. I just, that makes me really uncomfortable to do something like that.”
And you could see that that’s why Megyn Kelly, I didn’t expect her to be, you know, such a stalwart on this thing. And she was like, “No, he was definitely going through something towards the end because he died.” And that normal spiritual thing came on where Megan was like, “Hey, these lies are actually not, I’m not okay with it. And I want to make sure the truth gets out there.”
And so it did present an opportunity for people to see that we’re not being dramatic when we say that these people are evil. Like, that isn’t evil to do that to your quote unquote friend, to lie about him because you want to protect your identity as a, you know, a pro Israel psychopath, which is kind of what he is. It’s probably your psychopath. There’s not the other way to say it.
Megyn Kelly’s Stand for Truth
DAVE SMITH:
Yeah, pretty much. And yeah, I should go out of my way, as you said that, just to give some credit to Megyn Kelly, because she has been really solid on this. And obviously, like, you know, there’s, you know, I’ve always liked Megan and I’ve done her show a few times, and I’ve always liked her. There’s always a lot of issues I disagree with her about, I’m sure, but just like, having the basic principle of being like, “No, I’m not going along with this mob and saying I’m supposed to now throw my friends under the bus.”
And this whole thing where we’re supposed to pretend the people who were like you, everybody loved five minutes ago, are now now just like, you know, possessed by evil almost. You know, it was so, I thought it was so funny listening to Mark Levin and Lindsey Graham at this Genocide Fest 2025, where they’re all just, they’re like, you know, like, if you were to hear them talk about it, it’s like, dude, just, I guess everybody just got possessed by Israel hatred over the last couple years and nothing else was going on in the news with Israel.
Candace, it’s just that, I don’t know. So everybody just kind of there. I guess Qatar must have sent a lot of money around. And then everybody was just all, you know, all that’s what happened is that like all these people like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and all the people who had been household names now for many, many years, who, you know, is very successful at the top of the conservative popular, like commentators, they, yeah, they all just sold out their soul for Qatari money and just, and everyone, and their whole audience is possessed by it too, and nothing.
And then they just, like, they just leave out that part where like, you guys committed a genocide in 4K and forced us to pay for it. Like, you don’t think that had a little bit to do with this? You don’t think that had something to do with where we’re at today?
And this, this, like, you know, so one of the things, this is what I was getting at before because Charlie was, Charlie was a movement guy. Charlie was a big tent guy. Charlie was a guy who wanted to find a way for us to not lose to like, the crazy progressive leftists.
And you’ve heard this brought up a lot by Mark Levin and by Ben Shapiro and people like that over this last week. You know, we just had an election. The Democrats had a good night. You go, “Look, there’s this infighting on the right. And so if we keep doing this, we’re going to end up losing and AOC is going to be president or something like that.”
Now, of course, they just take it as a given that, like, I guess we’re just supposed to shut up and they get their way. You know, like, why is that the way it works? But at a certain point, I actually think they’re, in a sense, they’re right about that one argument. And Charlie was right to, like, be concerned about this.
But here’s the thing, right? And you being number one, and you and Tucker are the biggest two, you’re the biggest two conservative people in the news. And like, then, as as Charlie noted, as Megyn Kelly’s noted, nobody under 30 supports Israel anymore. Barely anyone under 40 supports Israel anymore.
It is essentially my point is that you’re right. We, if we fracture up this coalition, we’ll end up losing to the Democrats. But the only way, the only way to overcome that and win is to obviously go with the wind. It’s like saying in 2016, “Hey, there’s a big divide between Donald Trump and the entire GOP establishment on immigration. They want open borders, and he wants to build a wall.”
And it’s like, yes, but you’ve got him and 100% of the base against you. So the only option here is to go with his immigration policy, and then you could win the election. And I do think this all comes down to the war party and to Israel, which are kind of, you know, one in the same in this country.
And it’s like, J.D. Vance, you can embrace that and lose, or you can come over here with the people and have a real shot of winning. What do you want to do?
The Knesset Party
CANDACE OWENS:
Look, we have the Republican Party, we have a Democrat Party, and then we have the Knesset Party, and they’ve infiltrated both of the parties, actually. And what’s happening right now is left and right. People are saying no to that. The reasons might be different, but it’s a populist movement one way or the other.
And it’s hilarious to me that they think after me watching Charlie Kirk get assassinated, them spitting in our face and telling us that it’s raining about everything that happened here. The viciousness that they themselves directed toward me in the aftermath, I mean, people, they tried to say that I didn’t even, like, know Charlie.
I mean, it was so, they were so intent on making sure that not one drop of Candace being anti Israel was a part of his legacy that they just lied. They lied in a way that for the grief that I was going through, like, I’m not a crier. I mean, it was like, it was a lot. You know, I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. It was a lot for me to go through.
And I look back and I’m like, wow, the nastiness of them doing this. And then, like, a couple of weeks later, be like, “And now we demand you tell your audience to go vote for who we want you. We want them to vote for.” Yeah, f you. F you. I am not doing anything.
Okay, here’s the way it works, and here’s how common sense is. Okay? You tell me I can do this job. I can, I can, I can build your house. I can do this. I hire you. Okay? I get behind it. I say, okay, I hire you. Go do that job. You then don’t do it. You look at me and you say, “Epstein who?”
Okay, you’re at the top of the FBI. And you say, “Oh, these are the real messages.” You’re blocking people, as Kash Patel is from looking into Tulsi’s team and, and, and Joe Kent. You saw this playing out in the news. They won’t even let them look into whether or not foreign people could have been involved in this.
And then you’re like, “And now go get out more people to vote so that we stay in power.” No, buddy, okay? In your famous words, you’re fired as far as I’m concerned. Okay? And so I don’t know what’s around the corner, but I do know that my platform is not yours, okay? My platform belongs to the truth left and right, okay?
And so it was just incredible to me. They were like, not even that. They were like, “Get out, people and tell them to vote against Mom Donnie and to like, you know, get behind interview.” If you want to do it, that’s your thing. But I’m telling you, I’m not doing anything because for me, life stopped. Political life stopped when Charlie Kirk was murdered.
And you wanted me to move on. I’m not moving on from it. By the way, it wasn’t because of Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson sitting down that MAGA got splintered. It got splintered when you said, “Epstein who.” That’s it, literally for me. When I said, “Okay, what is this? Did the swamp, the Loch Ness Swamp Monster come up and swallow the MAGA party?”
Actually, who is the Loch Ness monster? I think it’s Israel. Okay. I think it’s Israel, actually. And if Trump suddenly joins the Never Trump Party, which he did. Right? Trump joined the Never Trump movement. That’s what’s happening right now. And now they’re trying to tell us to join it.
I’m good. I was, I’ve always been against the Never Trumpers, and I’m going to stay that way even if Trump has joined them.
DAVE SMITH:
Yeah, well, there’s, okay. I really, that’s such an important point. And so I want to, but I just, real quick, before I get to that, I just do want to say I made this point last night. I was on, on my, my buddy Clint Russell’s podcast, Liberty Lockdown. Clint Russell, by the way, criminally underrated. He’s great. So it was me, him and Ian Carroll, and we did.
CANDACE OWENS:
That was trending.
The Loyalty Question and Trump’s Base
DAVE SMITH: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was a great show. I think I bowled over everyone. I talked too much on the show. I apologized for it afterward, and I was like, I bet I’m going to get shit in the comments for this. And I did today. So sorry about that, guys. It was late. I’d had a couple whiskeys. I was ranting a bit.
But it was a great show, and you should go subscribe to Clint Russell’s channel if you get a chance. But I said this to them on that show, and I wanted to just make sure I say this again while you’re on my show, that, look, I don’t know everything about everyone here, but one thing I do know was over this last year, I mean, me and you become friends over the last couple years. Me and Charlie became friends over this last year from hanging out with both of you.
And I remember talking to you because, you know, we’d all talk about all this stuff. And I remember talking to you about Charlie years ago when we were hanging out, and you just had nothing but love. You were like, “Charlie’s the greatest guy. I love him to death. He’s the greatest guy ever.”
And I talked to Charlie about you briefly when we were down at the student action summit, whatever the big event was where me and Tucker and Megan were. And literally just all he had to say was how much he adored and loved you.
So the idea of people going, like, there was this distance that had been growing between you two—okay, actually, I know both of them. You don’t know what the f* you’re talking about. That’s just a fact. And I really, I genuinely challenge anybody. Anybody in Charlie’s inner circle. Tell me. Even I swear, even Josh Hammer wouldn’t have the goddamn balls. Maybe he would, but he’s lying. So that’s one thing.
The Epstein Factor and Trump’s Degraded Support
But then on this other thing, you know, it’s very interesting. And you’re absolutely right that it really was the Epstein thing. I said this at the time, too, that people do not understand how profound what he’s done here is. And it may not even show up in a poll. You know, I mean, his numbers did go down after that, but I’m not sure the polls can capture it, because a lot of people who support Donald Trump, they supported him. They voted for him. If you asked them, they’d probably still say, “Do you support Donald Trump?” “Yeah, I’m a Trump guy. I’m not a Kamala Harris Democrat or something.”
But the energy and the loyalty and the enthusiasm were just tremendously degraded by him. The whole political raison d’être of Donald Trump was to drain the swamp. And this is the swampiest of the swamp—a pedophile ring connected to government and foreign intelligence assets. Come on, this is it.
And I will say, weirdly, that at that event, which it was a thing that, in a way, I think saved me, because Josh Hammer, which was somewhat crafty of him because it’s the best he’s going to do debating me. But so what he did for the whole opening of his statement was, you know, like, “I’m a Zionist.”
So I get up there and I’m like, “The neoconservatives were a marriage of the Israeli lobby and the military industrial complex. And their clean break strategy is what we embarked on after 9/11. This is the war in Iran. It’s the culmination of the seven countries in five years,” and all this shit.
And then his whole opening statement is just every nasty thing I’ve ever said about Donald Trump. And just look, “Hey, Charlie Kirk Turning Point audience. We love Trump. How about this guy? He don’t love Trump.” And that was—which is a powerful way to win over an argument. I mean, it’s a lame and dishonorable way to do it, but it is how politics works. You know, you get these people like, “Well, what do you want to be? You want to be a leftist Kamala Harris supporter?” You go, “Oh, no, we’re not that.” “Okay, we’ll be the other thing.”
And then I just went, “Yeah, I’m talking about the guy who just covered up the Epstein story. Sorry, I’m going to criticize that guy.” And the whole crowd was back with me because there was something about that moment.
I had this experience recently where I did Steven Crowder’s podcast, and that’s all we had this debate. All he tried to argue with was, “You called for impeaching Donald Trump. You said Donald Trump’s a war criminal.” And then someone showed me the other day, “Go look through the YouTube comments.” Everybody’s rejecting it. Like, everyone’s like, “Now, like, it’s kind of like, look, the Trump loyalty thing is played out. They are public servants. They work for us.”
Loyalty to Principles, Not Politicians
I’m loyal to God. Yeah, I’m loyal to God. I’m loyal to my wife. I’m loyal to my friends. Not loyal to an administration. And to your point, it’s like, this is not—and J.D. Vance or whoever it is is not going to have that type of loyalty from a lot of us either. Like, you got to deliver on what we want. And what we want is not bombing Iran and threatening to overthrow Venezuela.
CANDACE OWENS: You didn’t want war, and we were totally fine. Like, the pro-Israel—he’s always been pro-Israel, but it wasn’t a relevant topic in the way that it is today. Like, are you going to stand up when Bibi Netanyahu says that he wants—immediately wants your bombers to go take out Iran and you just go do it and you are going to do more?
If Charlie Kirk didn’t stop it, you were actually going to do more. Okay, that seems pretty corrupt to us. Like the way that Bibi Netanyahu is just on camera being like, “We’re going to take over. I need this deal to go through with TikTok.” And you’re not saying anything. You thought you were supposed to be the free speech enthusiast and you’re going after college kids.
You got Pam Bondi who’s blanking us on Jeffrey Epstein, but responding to like a kid that gets shoved by a girl on a college campus. He’s wearing an IDF shirt, so he’s basically asking for it and she gives him a little shove and it requires Randy Fine and Pam Bondi to respond within minutes. Minutes. You can’t figure out the Epstein thing, but we’ve got literally an Amber Alert. The feds are able to answer quick. I’m sorry, this is a joke. This is not what I voted for.
And you’re not going to struggle session me into the—they’re like using the ghost of Charlie Kirk. “This is what Charlie would want. This is what Charlie would want.” It’s like, was I born yesterday? I don’t know. But all I know is that I don’t care what happens. You’re going to have to work for our vote when we elect you. You’re electing you for a certain job. You don’t deliver on that job, joke’s on you.
And I think right now the Trump family is feeling that, you know, you see that they are, I think probably now in retrospect, realizing how significant Charlie Kirk was because he was damming that. Right? Because everyone, even if you disagreed with him, people would play his clips. There was a level of respect that people had for Charlie Kirk because they sensed his authenticity. He was authentic. And you would sense that he would get stressed when he was being pressed not to be authentic.
And that’s now removed. And all we have are these puppets. And I’m including Trump amongst this. He has let his base down.
The Free Market of Ideas
And stop blaming Nick Fuentes. Okay, I’m not a Nick Fuentes fan. Why can’t Nick Fuentes have a platform? Why can’t he have a conversation? Why can’t he talk to Dave Smith and Tucker? The free market works like this, by the way, okay? If his ideas suck, then Nick Fuentes will be beaten. The free market works. I don’t need Nick Fuentes censored. I need you to actually deliver on your promises so that Nick Fuentes doesn’t have—he wouldn’t have a platform unless you guys were lying about something, right?
Like you’re lying about something where people feel like they’re not getting the truth from this person and they’re going and they’re listening to more of Nick Fuentes. They sense that you’re a liar. And so stop talking to me about “This is Nick Fuentes. The Groypers. The anonymous frogs. This is their fault.” No, this is your fault for not delivering on your promises.
And one of those big promises was to protect free speech. Okay? And we see what you’re doing. Redefining anti-Semitism on college campuses. Get out of my face.
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Responsibility and Accountability
Well, also, look, again, there’s a certain point. You know, this was actually—it’s funny because my friend Daryl Cooper, when he was on Tucker Carlson, he had this big controversy over people totally misconstruing the thing that he was saying. But if you actually listen to the thing that he was saying, what he was saying was that, look, he goes, “Even if you want to take the most generous interpretation of Adolf Hitler. If you want to find a way to try to be on his side, he’s responsible for the people who died under his custody.”
And the point he was ultimately making was like, “Look, Israel, if you launch a war in Gaza and you don’t have a plan for how to protect the civilians there, then you’re responsible for their death.” Like that. It doesn’t matter, in a sense, whether you shot them in the head or—in the same sense where, like, if you kidnap someone and you lock them in your basement and just don’t feed them and then they die. You murdered that person, right? You didn’t just kidnap them. Now you kidnapped and murdered them because you’re responsible for that. It doesn’t matter if you lock them down there and shot them in the head or just let them starve to death. You still put them in the situation where—
So that was his point. And likewise to Donald Trump, it’s like, whether you even know about any of this or not, you’re still doing it. You’ve allowed your administration to be taken over by these guys. Now, look, I mean, I don’t even think, to use an example about me, right? Like, I don’t think that Donald Trump watched my debate with Douglas Murray and then decided to promote Douglas Murray’s book the next day.
CANDACE OWENS: Right?
DAVE SMITH: Somebody who’s got access to Donald Trump’s Twitter or whatever decided to the next day promote this book after it was like this. And, okay, whatever. Like, I didn’t care. I kind of took that as a feather in my cap. Like, “Yeah, you got to call in the big dogs to try to get us out of this.”
But at the end of all of this, whatever it is, it’s like the Trump administration here has obviously been much more captured by Netanyahu and Mark Levin than by Candace Owens.
The Occupied Administration and Accountability
CANDACE OWENS: Everybody can see this is an occupied administration. And I love how they’re, I think right now I’m trending on X over the sequel. “Candace Owen says she regrets her vote.” You’re not going to shame me for saying everything you’re doing is unacceptable.
Try a mom on the Epstein stuff, okay? Try a mother. If you think I care more about loyalty to the MAGA cause than I care about pedophiles in positions of power getting away with it, you are out of your mind. You must have not listened to a single second of the Candace Owens podcast. You must have never listened to a thing I’ve ever said.
If you think that I am that blind and dumb and loyal to any person, left or right, but I’m going to go, “Okay, we got to, we got to let pedophilia go, okay? We got to just move on. It’s a hoax.” You know, I know he actually went to prison for it. Okay, but it’s a hoax. And let’s move up to Emmett, a Democrat hoax. I mean, it is just, it’s so insulting.
And you are correct that, you know, some of these things are coming from people around him. Like, immediately tweeting out, it was so disrespectful when Charlie died. A photo of Charlie. AI. Do I think Donald Trump hopped on AI and made this photo of Charlie and him holding the Israeli flag combo? No, but I’m sorry, if you’re not capable enough to control the people around you, then you shouldn’t be in a position of power.
Okay? I don’t get to, if something goes out on my account, right? And people go, “Oh, did this guy…” I don’t get to go, “Oh, well, you know what? My producer had access to that.” It’s like, okay, but that’s your account, so you take the blame, okay? The captain goes down, and we don’t even know, you know, who’s in control, but we know it’s not Trump.
So this is effectively like the Biden administration, but totally actually worse because Trump has his wits about him, right? So with Biden, at least we knew that he had dementia before they admitted it. At least we knew he wasn’t in control the whole time. It’s almost worse because Trump doesn’t have dementia, because Trump is actually sharp and he is aware and he is still occupied and somebody else is calling the shots.
DAVE SMITH: Yeah, that’s right. And the fact that you need know, these guys who, all of them, you know, like, I’ve had this experience, right? Like I said, Josh Hammer. That’s how he tried to debate me. That’s how Steven Crowder tried to debate me. “This guy’s not pro Trump. We’re the pro Trump side.”
The Never Trumpers Who Became MAGA
Then Shapiro did, like, several segments on me over the years, and the running joke was that he would never say my name. He would do segments, not just like, me on your show or me on Rogan’s show or something like, on my show. Like, he would do segments of my show and still go, “This comedian who evidently says he’s a libertarian.” Like, he would never say Dave Smith. It’s very complicated name, but he would never say it.
But so, but then the first time he ever said my name was when I called for Trump to be impeached after he launched the war in Iran. And then he goes, “Here’s Dave Smith calling to him.” And like, all I’m saying is like, you look at these, Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder, and so all of them, they were all the never Trumpers.
Like, how stupid does everybody have to be? What? Do you not remember the National Review piece never Trump, Trump in 2016?
CANDACE OWENS: They weren’t just never Trump, they stayed never Trumpers. They were pro DeSantis and the DeSantis law. So they haven’t won the person that they have wanted to put in office, they have not had a winning philosophy. Now all of a sudden they’re like trying to convince us that they’re MAGA. Don’t understand it. Confusing.
DAVE SMITH: Yeah. Half of them pushed the Russiagate hoax. These were never Trumpers. And they were never Trumpers for a reason. Like, people just be like, smart enough to see this for one second, right? Because it’s funny when they come at me because, look, I’m not like I voted for Trump this last time. I sat out the first two. I’ve always been like, I’m, but the thing is, because I’m to the, the MAGA of him, I’m to the non intervention of him.
Like when Donald Trump came out and said, “We’re not going to fight these, these wars, Iraq, you lied us into Iraq,” blah, blah, blah, but we’ll still bomb them and we’ll take the oil and we’ll do this, I went, nope, too much. That’s still too much intervention for me.
Now they rejected him because he was saying we shouldn’t be so interventionist. I was over here like, you should be even more non interventionist than that. Like, I want you to be Ron Paul. And so for them to sit here and say it’s like, yeah, dude, you guys all fought him over this, over him signaling more in our direction of foreign policy, which is that we don’t want to fight all these stupid wars.
And it’s like, yeah, they’re trying to use this energy. It’s like, so what do you guys want to do? You want to run on Mark Levin platform? You want to run on Jeb Bush’s platform? That’s 1% in the polls, man. It’s like, so they have to almost rely on running like us, but then, you know, like trying to, I don’t know, demonize all of us or something.
Neocon Infiltration and the Basket of Deplorables 2.0
CANDACE OWENS: Infiltration. They have to like pretend, pretend and then infiltrate and then try to force like neocon, you know, pro military, pro intervention, nonstop bombing of some countries so we can steal their resources and pretend that there was some moral democratic reason that we were there, and people are awake to it.
So I do wonder. It seems like they’re playing checkers. Nobody’s believing that. Your original MAGA, I mean, such a weird thing. It’s like, they’re like, “The problem are these people who actually got Trump elected when we were attacking him. Like, the problem are these people. They’re so extreme.”
It’s, we’re right back. I’m like, we’re hamsters on a wheel, right? We are just right back to the beginning here, and we’re the basket of deplorables. Okay, let’s go. Like, who’s the, and now it’s like, Trump, I guess, like I said, has joined Never Trump, Trump or is being controlled by the Never Trump movement. It doesn’t matter.
Our eyes are clear on this. We know what we voted for. We know why we got behind Trump, and we know that we’re not getting it. We’re getting, like, bitcoin stuff that he’s, like, pushing and, which is, like, completely crazy. And, like, by the way, also, you are taking advantage of people that believe in you the most.
All of it is just so wrong and it’s so icky. We’re aware of the deals that Jared is doing while you call us funded by Qatar. The deals that Jared is doing in the Middle East with Qatar and Israel. They think we’re this dumb. And I’m going, wow, like, did you always think we were just dumb? Or actually, is it because you’re occupied by the Never Trumpers?
And the Never Trumpers have been explicit in the fact that they think that Trump people are dumb. But we’re not this dumb, okay? The MAGA, original MAGA Party is not this dumb. We’re aware of what you’re doing. We’re aware of the infiltration, and we are not going to support that.
America First Could Win Across the Political Spectrum
DAVE SMITH: Yeah. And the sad thing is, as Tucker said when he was on my show a few days ago, he said, you know, if you really ran on an America first message, it’s going to be enormously popular. And not just with the right wing. I mean, you could carry half the left wing on that message, too. Maybe not all of them, but you could carry a whole lot of independents and liberals and leftists.
If you just said, “Hey, look, here’s the platform.” Like a separation, you know, in the same way we had, like, a separation of church and state or anything like that. You go, a separation of Israel and a separation of Tel Aviv and DC is like a great thing to run on that, that you could get tens of millions of Americans to rally around.
That’s just it. Our goal here is just the platform and is we’re not going to fight stupid wars. We’re not going to have open borders. We’re not going to, we’re going to start spending within our means. Like what, how much tax revenue do we bring in every year? That’s what we can spend. Okay. We can’t borrow and print the money.
And I will say, and this will be the last thing I say, and then I’ll give you the final word. I do see, you know, like as, as Mondaire wins and you know, Ben Shapiro, people like that are going, “When? When did you guys spend any time attacking Mondaire?” You know, and it’s like, now. Why? Look, well, look, I would love in a way to argue with a, with a communist who wants mayor of New York City.
You know, it’s like the problem is that you guys made the whole argument you’ve never visited Israel and then you go, “Oh, you picked the argument that he was right on, that he was, that he was strongest on, was rejecting all of this sh.” Oh, sorry, you won’t even pledge to be a genocidal demon like us. Like, yeah, okay, well I actually kind of like that about him.
Sound Money and the Empire
But the thing about it is, is that if we don’t like, and this has always been my thing that I’ve been beating forever, it’s like Ron Paul’s whole thing was what? Like it was end the Fed and a gold standard and sound money. And why was it that the most anti war libertarian was always talking about sound money? Because that’s the whole game here now.
You let all these Democrats talk about unaffordability. Well, what is unaffordability? What is, that’s currency debasement. It’s another way of saying the sh that the libertarian Ron Paul guys have been saying for all this time. But the reason why Ben Shapiro or Mark Levin or none of them could ever utter those words out of their mouth, even though they’re supposed to be fiscal conservatives, is because, you know, you need that type of monetary policy to have a world empire.
And that’s the only way that you can fight all Israel’s wars is if you keep devaluing the currency because we can’t afford them, the American people aren’t going to be taxed enough for it. Being the world empire is the biggest of big government programs. It’s over a trillion dollars a year we spend maintaining the empire.
And so while, while Donald Trump is still stuck doing all of this sh overseas, he’s had to print a ton of money in this first year. And so what’s happened with prices? They’ve just gone up even more. Even more than from the Biden years.
And so, anyway, the point is, like, we really are in a moment here where it’s like, do you guys want the socialists to win or do you want to keep fighting wars for Israel? Or, like, you get both of those, right? Like, you get, it’s your choice is preserve liberty in the United States of America or fight Israel’s wars.
Take Control of Your Household
CANDACE OWENS: Right? That’s exactly right. And I just say to people, what you can do is you can control your own household. Like, I would never allow my sons to sign up for the military when it’s, the decisions are made in Tel Aviv of whether or not they’re going to die. So all this rah, rah, pro American. No, it’s not. It hasn’t been pro American in a very long time. We see that. We saw that recently.
And the reality is they need America because they don’t have enough bodies. They have enough corruption. They have enough evil. They don’t have enough bodies. And this is why they’re trying to commit you to their cause ideologically, because you are the slaves that are supposed to go over and die.
You know, when they drop bodies and say that they’re spreading democracy, but they’re actually in Afghanistan having people guard the poppy seeds so that they can cause the opioid crisis. Right? Like, you’re fighting for the Sacklers, the Sackler family. You’re not fighting because you’re up against the Taliban. All that’s nonsense.
And people are waking up to that another way. And this is what I say all the time on my podcast. Pull your kids out of their schools. Okay? Homeschool. They get so much power by being able to infiltrate their minds when they’re young. That’s why they are obsessed with the youth generation and guess what? That’s already winning.
There’s a reason why they now want to pass homeschool laws. They’re trying to demonize homeschoolers is because Covid woke parents up to like, “Whoa, why do I have not even control over my kid’s body? Forget the mind. I don’t even have control over my child’s body.” And there’s no upside.
I mean, this is what I, why are you sending your kids to university? For what reason? To plug them into that, that same monetary system where they start their lives like I did, $150,000 into debt because they thought that they had to go to college. This is all the Matrix. Attack it where you can in household.
They’re Backed Into a Corner
And they don’t even know what to do. They’re scrambling. You hear it now. They’ve never been more worried in their demands for cancellation. And it’s because an animal backed into a corner fights the hardest.
Keep talking about Israel, keep talking about Tel Aviv, keep talking about Bibi Netanyahu, keep talking about homeschooling, keep talking about the military industrial complex, and we will win. They are at the beginning of the end of their domination over American minds.
Closing Remarks
DAVE SMITH: Yeah, well, I think you’ve been one of the most effective people, if not the most one in that cause and fighting it. So thank you for everything you’ve been doing. Keep doing it. I know I don’t need to tell you that because I know you’re not going to stop either way.
But thank you so much for taking the time and coming on, and I hope we get to talk again real soon.
CANDACE OWENS: Well, thank you. Because you were, you, Norm Finkelstein, you were the guys that kind of really woke me up, and I was like, “Whoa,” I hadn’t even considered this.
And so it’s all of us plugging in at a different time and being able to have the conversations, sharing our platforms, and so, you know, anytime.
DAVE SMITH: All right, well, thanks, everybody, for listening. I hope you enjoyed it, and we’ll see you back on Monday. Peace.
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