Owens’ rise as internet’s most dangerous voice

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.

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.