December 11, 2025 - 12:00pm
What on earth is going on in Right-wing podcast world? Candace Owens, who was a media star at The Daily Wire until she was fired last year, is locked in a video feud with beanie-wearing alt-Right veteran Tim Pool. This, in the words of Left-wing e-rag The Daily Beast, is “the latest MAGA civil war”.
The twists and turns of the saga are too intricate to detail in full. But as far as anyone with a family, job, or real-life hobbies can tell, it all kicked off when Owens attacked the decision by Turning Point USA to name Erica Kirk — widow of the recently assassinated Charlie Kirk — CEO. Owens, who was communications director at TPUSA from 2017 to 2019, slammed Kirk’s appointment as CEO as overly hasty, adding that she believed the US military was involved in Kirk’s assassination.
The quarrel has now escalated into what looks increasingly like all-out war in Right-wing podcastland. Tim Pool denounced Owens for telling her fans to demand their money back from TPUSA. Then, in an expletive-filled rant, he alleged his home was attacked by a gunman in connection with the feud. Owens retaliated, dismissing Pool as “weak” and the so-called attacker as actually Pool’s own brother. Owens also drew parallels between Kirk’s response to her criticisms and that used by BLM to deflect questions over how the organization’s funds were being spent.
What does it all mean? If you ask me: almost nothing. Or, at least, it doesn’t mean much more than what color the Princess of Wales has dyed her hair, or who got voted off Strictly last week. I periodically read gloomy articles complaining that “culture” is “stuck”, citing as evidence the fact that movies tend to be remakes, and all the rock bands are in their seventies. This is true, as far as it goes, but seems to me to be missing the wood for the trees. Yes, movies and rock music are stagnant, but this is because far from being “stuck”, culture has mutated into new forms, consonant with the internet: 25 wildly popular “seasons” of Skibidi Toilet YouTube shorts, for example, or the variegated landscape of parasocial e-celebrity, including its vibrant “e-Right” ecology.
If you don’t believe me, take it from an erstwhile contemporary and fellow-vlogger of Pool’s: Lauren Southern, herself no stranger to online beef but who has since exited the ecosystem. Southern recently released a memoir denouncing the entire Right-wing e-politics “movement” as driven less by coherent principles or actual political aims than by drugs, money, and parasocial celebrity. In other words: e-politics is simply one facet of an entertainment “culture” which is not stuck, just very different to what “culture” looked like in the 20th century.
From this perspective, the Owens-Pool beef calls for no convoluted interpretation. Its meaning is simple: it’s happening because it makes good content. In the online competition for eyeballs, few things are clickier than interpersonal conflict. The content of the quarrel is less important than making it maximally noisy, so as to drag in as many other participants as possible.
The media furor around it (and the fact that I’m writing this) is evidence that both Owens and Pool are very good at this kind of media. Whether the form itself is good overall, or what this dynamic means for the future direction of our not-stuck-but-alarmingly-mimetic culture, is a separate discussion.
In the meantime, the only takeaway is probably: enjoy responsibly. I like Strictly; I appreciate a good internet beef as well, in much the same spirit. But what one should never, ever do is confuse what is essentially 21st-century light entertainment for actual politics.
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