For right-wing firebrand Candace Owens, conspiracy theories are a form of “mind yoga”, a way of bending the mind “like a pretzel”. They’re also extremely compelling, for her millions of social media followers and podcast listeners at least, and extremely lucrative, helping the 36-year-old American build a staggering media empire in under a decade.
Coronavirus and the vaccines. The moon landings. Climate change. The #MeToo case against Harvey Weinstein. Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s legal battle. All these disparate subjects have received Owens’ signature treatment. On her eponymous podcast, she is the queen of the “just asking questions” approach: positioning herself as an investigating crusader who is bold enough to probe the topics that she believes the mainstream media don’t want you to know about.
She is part one-woman outrage machine, part millennial version of a medieval mystic; she has certainly worked out how to cleverly monetise the human impulse to “uncover” so-called “truths” and to feel like we are somehow in possession of a secret knowledge that explains how the world works. But her latest forays into so-called “mind yoga” are tying her in ever more complex knots that set her apart from even the most fact-averse of her fellow microphone-toting far-right truthers.
In the summer, French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte filed a defamation lawsuit against Owens, who has regularly and fervently spouted bizarre claims that the first lady was born male; the couple have accused her of mounting “a campaign of global humiliation” and “relentless bullying on a worldwide scale”. Last month, Owens made the even stranger allegations that the Macrons had attempted to orchestrate her assassination (the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group, the organisation that Owens claimed was involved in the “plot”, told French media that these allegations were fake news).
And in recent weeks, Owens has dragged herself and her followers even further down the rabbit hole by stirring up conspiracies around the death of her one-time boss, Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist and founder of conservative student group Turning Point, who was shot dead in September. Among her inflammatory claims? The suggestion that his death was somehow an “inside job” involving Turning Point employees.
On Wednesday (3 December), Kirk’s longtime producer Blake Neff finally called Owens out for spending months “attacking Charlie’s closest friends”, who, he said, “have had to endure harassment from people who have gotten whipped up by what Candace is saying”. Owens is now playing an even higher stakes game, running the risk of finally alienating one-time allies on her end of the political spectrum, while also surely aware that her most devoted core of fans will expect wilder theories to come.
So how did Owens become one of the most influential – and arguably, one of the most dangerous – woman on the internet? Her early days didn’t exactly lay obvious foundations for a hard-right pivot. The third of four children, she spent her childhood in Stamford, Connecticut and, following her parents’ divorce, was brought up by her grandparents. At school, she experienced racist bullying; when she was in her senior year, she received death threats from some white classmates, including the son of Stamford’s then-mayor. Her family sued the Stamford Board of Education, eventually gaining a $37,500 settlement.
Around this time, she developed “an abiding interest in current affairs”, as a Tatler profile would later put it, with her political sympathies initially skewing towards the Democrats. After dropping out of a journalism degree at the University of Rhode Island, Owens interned in the fashion cupboard at America Vogue (“There was not some kind of formal hierarchy, but it was very clear that she was running the show,” a fellow intern recalled in Vanity Fair).
She then worked her way up the ranks in administration in a New York private equity firm, before co-founding a marketing agency. Dig back into the agency’s blog archives and you will find Owens mouthing off about “the bat-s**t-crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party”. But her politics would soon change drastically. In 2016, she launched a Kickstarter campaign for a platform called Social Autopsy, a searchable database of internet trolls (there is, of course, a certain irony to Owens initially touting herself as some kind of anti-cyber bullying champion).
Inevitably, it stoked criticism: wouldn’t this just amount to doxxing, the typically malicious act of posting another person’s private details on the internet? Owens ended up on the receiving end of online hate herself, and blamed left-wing activists. “I became a conservative overnight,” she later reflected. “I realised that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls.”
Not long after, she started posting on YouTube: her first video was a sketch in which she “came out” to her parents as a conservative. Owens positioned herself as a supporter of Trump, who was then in the early stages of his first presidency, and decried ideas around identity politics, structural racism and the Black Lives Matter movement. She particularly vehemently opposed any suggestion that African-Americans should perceive themselves as victims – and still does.
Owens crossed paths with Kirk at a conservative conference in Florida late in 2017. “Within 30 seconds of seeing her on stage, I said to myself, “Oh my goodness, I have not seen a talent like this in my six years of politics,” Kirk later told The Washington Post. He immediately hired her to work in communications for Turning Point, and they spent the next few years touring colleges, spreading the conservative gospel.
Around this time, Owens launched the BLEXIT Foundation, an organisation encouraging a “Black exit” from the Democrats, urging Black voters to throw their support behind the Republican party instead. Kanye West publicly supported her, writing “I love the way Candace Owens thinks” on Twitter. And she and Kirk also took their Turning Point mission overseas.
At an event in London in December 2018, Owens ended up appearing to suggest that if Hitler had simply stuck to Germany, his policies would have been “fine”. “Whenever we say ‘nationalism’, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler,” she said. “He was a national socialist, but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine.” The “problem”, she added, was that he “had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalise.” Owens would later claim that her words had been taken out of context by “leftist journalists”, and stated that there is “no excuse or defence ever” for “everything that [Hitler] did”.
Owens left Turning Point in 2019, but her profile continued to grow and grow. 2021 saw the launch of Candace, an online show for the conservative platform Daily Wire, co-founded by another right-wing controversy magnet, Ben Shapiro; it featured sit-down interviews with the likes of Trump, but she also used her platform to weigh in on pop culture and lifestyle topics (such as her vehement belief that women should not wear leggings outside of the gym, because doing so is indicative of “the decline of our culture”).
But in 2024, Owens parted ways with Daily Wire, reportedly over her anti-Semitic comments (although she would later claim this was a “smear campaign” and a “ridiculous storyline”). Owens’ great talent, though, is for turning controversy into content, and it wasn’t long before she returned with her own venture, a self-titled podcast. Since launching in June of last year, its ascent has been dizzying: in October 2025, it ranked as the number one show across platforms in terms of downloads and views per episode, with an average of around 3.5 million downloads per show, according to analytics from Podscribe.
The right-wing podcast sphere is booming in a way that the left can’t seem to match. Just a quick glance at the US charts demonstrates the dominance of controversial conservative-skewing figures such as Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and Theo Von. According to a Media Matters report from 2024, right-leaning online shows had nearly five times as many followers and subscribers as their left-wing equivalents. Controversy and conspiracy pay off: the more outrageous the content, the more the listeners keep coming back (not for nothing was “ragebait” announced as the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year).
It’s a model that Owens has honed to perfection. Outrage drives clicks, listens and views. It keeps fans coming back. And this in turn makes advertisers sit up and take note. Her husband George Farmer, the British son of a multi-millionaire Tory peer and hedge fund manager, oversees the business side of the operation, and told Bloomberg that her advertisers “have reported seeing returns of two-to-one on dollars spent with us, and up to five-to-one reported in some cases”.
Her huge listener base mean that the podcast can inevitably charge higher advertising rates; recent analysis from Fortune magazine suggested that her company generates up to $10m in revenues per year. And according to Farmer, only one advertiser has pulled out over the past year; the show now has almost 60 sponsors, Bloomberg reports. In 2023, her anti-trans YouTube videos were demonetised, and last year, she was temporarily suspended after violating hate speech policies, but she has since returned with a vengeance. And even if these bigger sites did ban her, she would probably follow in the footsteps of other “cancelled” right-wing figures and simply move to a new platform.
What’s particularly shrewd, though, is the way Owens has a knack for throwing herself into topics that are guaranteed to creep onto your social feed. Take actor Blake Lively’s legal battle against her It Ends With Us co-star and director Justin Baldoni. Earlier this year, Owens covered the story in obsessive detail, responding to suggestions and “clues” from followers with all the zeal of a TikTok sleuth.
Elsewhere, she borrows the aesthetic of your classic lifestyle influencer. Her website, Club Candace, doesn’t exactly look like the online home of a conservative firebrand; instead of Maga red and shouty graphics, it’s all swirly, cursive fonts and glowing photos of Owens. But then you look closer at the merch she’s selling: the “Candace Intelligence Agency” T-shirts ($35), the “we don’t know-know, but we know” sweater ($60), a slogan that gets to the heart of Owens’ fast-and-loose attitude to facts, and the “conspiracy theorist” mug ($16).
And yet with the Macron lawsuit looming, Owens may have met her match. For all the successes of her podcast, she is now facing a major legal battle. She has been asking fans to donate to her legal fund, and estimates she will need around $5m, but that feels like a conservative estimate. Should she lose, she could face millions in legal fees alone. The case of fellow right-wing podcaster and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones feels particularly pertinent here: Jones was ordered to pay around $1.4bn in total damages after the families of Sandy Hook elementary school shooting victims won two separate defamation suits against him. He has since been declared bankrupt (although he is still broadcasting).
In American defamation cases against public figures, though, the onus is on the plaintiff to prove “actual malice” , or essentially to show that the defendant knew the information they were sharing was untrue. This can be tricky to prove. In 2021, Owens was hit with a separate defamation suit by the former Republican congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik. She claimed that Owens had smeared her with false allegations of drug use, fraud and working as a “madame” in a strip club, but the case was tossed out by a judge; Klacik ended up being required to pay her $115,000 to cover legal fees.
Using Kirk’s death as another trending topic to boost her profile looks like an ill-advised move, too. Owens is far from the only podcaster to indulge in bizarre conspiracy theories, but her personal link to Kirk, coupled with her willingness to exploit that for clicks and listens, makes the whole spectacle feel extremely murky. In aiming for Turning Point, too, she risks splitting her support base. Here, she is not going after the “establishment” or the “elite”, those bogey people of conspiratorial thinking, but her own political allies. And the signs are that Turning Point are not going to let her get away with it.
But Candace is unlikely to let this knock her off course. For her, a backlash is likely to be seen as just another opportunity. In this respect, she is the Trump era pundit par excellence: scandals that would have ended other careers only seem to give her more fodder to feed back to her devoted followers. Until now, Owens, with all her despicable theories, has made notoriety her superpower. In today’s topsy-turvy cultural climate, being the ragebait queen has served her well. It remains to be seen, however, if they make her undefeatable.
