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August 17 2024 - 5:00pm
Candace Owens spent the past half-decade becoming a poster child for young conservatism. She had raw talent and used it, amassing millions of followers, headlining the Right’s largest conferences and sitting down with its most prominent figures, such as former president Donald Trump.
Yet the commentator has taken a turn since leaving the Daily Wire earlier this year. In an interview this week, Owens claimed that Joseph Stalin was Jewish and part of a cabal that is now ‘occupying’ America. Recently, she staked her ‘professional reputation’ on Brigitte Macron secretly being a man. And she has revised the Second World War to be a tale of Allied powers targeting Catholics across the globe. And this week, during an interview with Andrew Tate, she equated support for Israel with ‘defense for pedophilia’. What happened?
Just two weeks ago, Owens was set to headline a fundraiser for the Trump campaign that featured Donald Trump Jr. After an online backlash regarding many of her remarks and conspiracy theories, it was announced she was no longer attending. She denied that it had anything to do with her views. But when the Trump campaign judges you to be too far to the Right, that says something.
Until last year, Owens was a skillful and forceful communicator. During the BLM era, she challenged liberal shibboleths on police brutality and white supremacy, and along with other conservatives was subsequently vindicated when policies such as ‘defund the police’ were slowly rolled back.
But as the news turned toward Israel last year, Owens’s persona changed. After October 7, she started referring to a ‘ring’ or mafia of Jews operating in Hollywood and Washington. She discussed at length why history’s demonization of Adolf Hitler ought to be reconsidered, and progressively questioned or denied elements of the Holocaust, referring to it as ‘an ethnic cleansing that almost took place’ and calling historical evidence of horrific Nazi science experiments ‘bizarre propaganda’.
She fixated on Second World War history, claiming America should not have involved itself. She also parroted Third Reich propaganda, arguing that Russia’s Bolsheviks were Jews building ‘Christian death camps’. Owens even said that ethnic Jews should have been held accountable.
When the online backlash swiftly followed, even from some of her former colleagues, it was a confirmation for Owens that she was questioning the right things. ‘What they didn’t want people to see is now being seen,’ she wrote on X last month.
The absurdity in all this is hard to understate. Stalin, the murderous communist dictator who Owens claims was secretly Jewish, attended a Russian Orthodox seminary in his youth and actually planned to inflict genocide on the Jews before his death. He purged Jewish sections from the party early on. Elsewhere, she claims the Jewish Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is just another ‘Bolshevist dragging Christian men to the slaughter’ by sending them off to war.
As Owens started to entertain these views publicly, her partnership with the Daily Wire ended. But many, on both the anti-Israel Right and Left, came to her defense, arguing that the outlet was trying to censor pro-Palestine voices. That claim has allowed Owens to maintain mainstream partnerships on her latest solo venture and her position as a headliner of prominent conferences for the conservative movement.
But now that the Trump campaign has distanced itself from her, might others soon follow? Candace Owens left the conservative movement months ago. Now, conservatives are leaving her.
