I have a confession to make before I introduce today’s guest writer. and I did not exactly start out as friends.
He showed up in my comment section and started bugging me about various things. I don’t even remember all the things anymore, but I do remember thinking, Who IS this guy?
Eventually, our conversations moved from my comment section into private messages. Somewhere along the way, the guy who was driving me a little nuts became someone I genuinely looked forward to hearing from. Now we talk about all the weird stuff that comes with doing this work.
And I’m incredibly grateful for that.
Because David isn’t just some character who wandered into my comments. He’s a brilliant writer, investigative journalist, and editor whose work has taken him deep into subjects I passionately care about including terrorism, antisemitism, extremism, and the alt-right. He’s spent years doing the kind of digging that makes you realize very quickly just how much this guy knows.
He’s also become my friend.
I love that part of all of this craziness. Two writers meet because one of them keeps pestering the other in her comment section. They argue a little, start talking, and discover they actually have an awful lot to talk about.
So today, I get to do something that makes me very happy.
I get to hand The Lioness Writes over to David Michael Swindle for the morning.
David, my comment section may never recover from you…but I’m really glad you showed up.
By David Swindle for The Lioness Writes
September 14, 2026
One year has passed since the political assassination of Charles James Kirk (October 14, 1993 – September 10, 2025,) the co-founder and CEO of Turning Point USA who became the millennial generation’s most influential and impactful conservative political activist.
I struggle to write about Charlie and to even think about him. Whenever I see his face and think about the single bullet which struck the left side of his neck, sending his blood gushing out before he collapsed to the ground, I see the face of the man who guided him, who trained him to ascend to the heights of success which ultimately placed him in a sniper’s scope, and who also died last year.
The man who launched Charlie’s career is the same who launched mine, David Joel Horowitz (January 10, 1939 – April 29, 2025,) a New Left activist and Marxist theorist in the 1960s, a Black Panther confidante and editor of *Ramparts *magazine in the 1970s, a Ronald Reagan speechwriter and bestselling dynastic biographer in the 1980s, and beginning in the 1990s, ultimately the most influential conservative activist of *his *generation.
William F. Buckley, Jr. (November 24, 1925 – February 27, 2008) and Frank Straus Meyer (May 9, 1909 – April 1, 1972) created the post-war American conservative movement, and David Horowitz gave it fangs and claws.
David’s hidden impact beyond the grave can be seen in the central debates gripping the Right today. Who else in the millennial generation did David propel into positions of power and influence?
Ben Shapiro
Josh Hammer
James O’Keefe
Seth and Bethany Mandel
Daniel Greenfield, his designated intellectual heir and now CEO of the David Horowitz Freedom Center
Stephen Miller
Laura Loomer
And… Candace Owens
One of David’s favorite rhetorical moves – which I’ll go ahead and keep alive in his memory – was to start a paragraph by writing “in other words” and then just declare some wild, borderline-offensive reframing of whatever description came before it.
In other words, the legacy of the millennial generation’s most successful conservative activist has now been totally derailed and outright undone by the deceitful efforts of the millennial generation’s most successful antisemitic media entrepreneur, both of whom were professionally launched by the silent generation’s most successful conservative activist.
Today, the name “Tyler Robinson” is an afterthought on the Right when remembering who Charlie was, what he tried to do with his time on earth, and why someone decided to pull a trigger to end his life.
Instead, the discussion has devolved into needing to respond to the shattered sewer pipe of conspiracy theories Candace, Tucker Carlson, and their online armies of goons have chosen to spray all over us, suggesting Israel, Erika Kirk, and some shadowy cabal ordered Charlie’s murder.
Candace even released a grotesque “documentary” casting Erika as a horror movie monster. Inspired by the movie title “Bride of Chucky,” a sequel in the “Child’s Play” series featuring killer dolls, Candace released “Bride of Charlie,” with a menacing graphic of a murdered man’s widow:
How much more cold-blooded can one get? A murderer shoots your friend and you release a “documentary” series suggesting that his own widow masterminded the plot, comparing her to a murderous doll voiced by Jennifer Tilly?
A lot of people have wondered why Candace would do something this vile.
She surely cannot believe that Erika or Israel actually had anything to do with what Tyler Robinson confessed he did, right?
Absolutely right.
Everyone needs to stop treating Candace and Tucker like they actually believe anything they say. What you see when they appear in front of a camera is just a fictional character which they are cynically playing in the real world so they can eventually become billionaires.
And this is simply a totally normal thing that people choose to do in the media world. They puff up themselves with what’s known in the publishing world as “an author persona.” This is how a particular writer presents themselves and performs to the broader public.
Usually an author persona involves taking aspects of the author’s existing personality or identity and then simply playing them up, sometimes to the point of a reckless exaggeration. The recent suicide of Jason Atta Kwei Arday (9 May 1985 – 14 August 2026) following exposure of his systemic academic fraud may come to mind here. For a particular kind of author, they are much more interested in performing their author persona than they are actually writing the books.
The reason for this is simple: there is way more money in performing the author persona as a speaker than there is in actually selling books.
David discovered this in the early 2000s and it was the real driving force behind the campus campaigns he performed for over a decade before finding Charlie to train and take over the fight instead. (Going and arguing with college leftists is a young man’s game.) David didn’t care as much about meaningfully “fighting the Left” on campus as he did making his donors think he did and then collecting the College Republicans’ honorariums as quickly as possible.
When Charlie died, his estimated speaking fee for a keynote speech where he “performed his author persona” ranged from $10,000 to as high as $20,000.
However, to Candace, that’s pocket change.
Here’s the dollar figure she has her eye on:
That’s the amount of money that InfoWars brought in each year at its peak.
She probably also knows this one:
That’s the annual salary which Alex Jones paid himself.
Here’s another number Candace no doubt knows very well:
That’s the high end of Jones’s estimated net worth according to forensic accountants during the defamation trial which has now bankrupted him.
Candace knows full well that because she is a beautiful woman, that if she peddles the same far-right conspiracy theory nonsense that Jones did and offers a comparable e-commerce site filled with stupid junk for her idiot fans to buy, then she can surely do four times what Jones did and hit her billionaire status. Cancace is 37 now. Oprah Winfrey became a billionaire in 2003 at 49. Left unopposed, Candace doesn’t need 12 years.
On January 30, 2026, filmmaker Jeremy Boreing – Candace’s former boss at the Daily Wire who ultimately fired her – spoke on Piers Morgan’s podcast. (Disclosure: I previously wrote scripts for The Daily Wire and now support Jeremy’s eponymous new show where he speaks out against the rising antisemitism on the Right.)
Having previously said that “hiring Candace is probably the biggest mistake of my professional life so far,” Jeremy offered invaluable insights into what really drives a woman who has chosen to revive some of the oldest and bloodiest antisemitic lies while she distorts the history of her friend’s murder.
“Well, the problem with trying to wield cynicism for clicks is that cynicism ultimately wields you. And I think that’s true of a lot of the sort of mistakes that we make in life,” Jeremy said. “We always think that we’re too clever for the sort of evil that exists in the world to ever touch us.”
Jeremy then revealed a story in public which I’d previously only heard in private.
“I’ve asked Candace on two separate occasions what she actually believes,” Jeremy told Piers. “On both occasions, she said, ‘I believe what the people believe. I am the voice of the people.’”
In other words — as David would say — Candace was telling her boss that she believed she was some sort of Pagan Oracle of Delphi channeling the Divine Collective Will of the People.
“And, of course, both times, ‘I don’t know what that means, Candace.’ I’ve come to understand though, at least from my point of view, I think she’s articulating the idea of audience capture and expressing it as a positive value,” Jeremy said. “Does she actually believe the things that she’s saying? I don’t know. I do know that if you say things long enough, you come to believe them. The most convincing voice in the world is our own voice.”
In an interview a few months later with The Daily Mail, Jeremy said “fame is the driving, fundamental priority in her life. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.” He recounted that Candace “used to tell [PragerU CEO] Marissa Streit that her goal was to be the most famous woman in the world. She said it in a different way to me, but she said essentially the same thing, which is that she wanted to be Oprah.”
Jeremy said that “Candace uses ideology in the same way that she uses conspiracy, or in the same way that she uses slander, and that’s for clicks.” He called her “post-political,” and pointed out that “she’s openly telling people not to vote. She’s saying that she’s no longer entrapped by this right-wing divide in the country… “She’s about something else. And what she’s about is Candace Owens.”
As much as I hold up Jeremy’s analysis of Candace’s character as singular and the best-in-the-world that we’re likely to ever hear – at least until she and her husband eventually divorce and George Farmer finally delivers the goods – his assessment of the chance of countering her ascent to billionaire status seems a little shortsighted.
Jeremy told The Daily Mail, “I think that Candace can be opposed. I think that she must be opposed, [but] I don’t think that she can be defeated.”
Anybody and everybody can be defeated, Jeremy.
Candace Owens can end up bankrupt and sleeping on a hard prison mattress alone for years just like anybody else.
The way to defeat Candace is not in the arenas of fame, media, and entertainment where her pretty face and “It factor” charisma can save her.
Just as she sees Alex Jones as a model to make her money, those who care about defeating her can likewise see his downfall as the model.
Want to defeat Candace? You do it in court, both civil and criminal. French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte figured that out when they filed a defamation suit against Candace in July of last year. Brian Harpole, Charlie’s security chief, figured it out when he also filed a defamation lawsuit against Candace on April 28, 2026.
Yes, criminal. What crime? Start investigating — I’m sure that Muslim-hating bigot Laura Loomer has already started digging deep — and we’ll soon find a bunch.
When you smell neo-Nazi smoke, then there’s probably a neo-Nazi fire burning nearby. And a fire needs to be stopped before it burns down the whole neighborhood.
Candace is a historical arsonist. She has set fire to Charlie Kirk’s memory and subverted his death into a platform of self-aggrandizement and financial enrichment for herself.
It’s time for as many wealthy people to do to her the same thing that Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan did to Gawker. Every possible lawsuit against Candace should be bankrolled, and further investigative assets should be deployed to uncover any potential criminality to refer to law enforcement for further investigations, prosecution, and finally, long-term incarceration.
This is really all about money for Candace, so the people she is harming with her defamations should *really *make it all about money for her.
Candace needs to learn the hard way — and be made an example of to all — that defaming people for fun and profit is not a legitimate business model.
Two lawsuits is a good start. Who’s excited to jump in to fund the next dozen?
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