I am used to debunking absurd right-wing arguments. But conservative podcaster and author Candace Owens is on another level entirely. Many of her proclamations are so bizarre, they seem better described as “symptoms” than “ideas.” She has said that the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz are performing a “satanic ritual” when they celebrate the death of the Wicked Witch. She says Justin Trudeau, Barack Obama, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Emmanuel Macron are all gay. (And that this is “not a coincidence.”) She has cast doubt on the crimes of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, saying his ghoulish experiments sound “absurd” and would have been a “waste of time and supplies.” Naturally, she believes we faked the moon landing (in fact, all of our space programs were both “fake and gay”). She now claims that the French Foreign Legion were involved in the killing of Charlie Kirk, possibly at the direction of Brigitte Macron (whom Owens thinks is transgender), and believes she herself is being pursued by assassins dispatched by the French government. 

You might think these delusions would limit people’s interest in listening to Owens. Doesn’t the average person have enough common sense to realize that she’s totally detached from reality? Well, I have bad news for you: she has an audience of millions. She has, according to one ranking, the second most viewed and downloaded podcast across all platforms, averaging 3.7 million listeners an episode. Her YouTube channel has over a billion views, 5.6 million subscribers, and brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. She has over 7 million followers on Twitter (“X”) and another 6.5 million on Instagram. She was the subject of a recent CNN special, The World According to Candace Owens, and is a leading part of a sprawling and hugely successful right-wing media ecosystem. 

 How can someone so delusional attract an audience of millions, and what does it say about our country? Well, for starters, Owens is a skilled presenter. Telegenic, polished, and a fluid speaker, she might be saying things that are patently untrue or lack any evidence, but she does it with such conviction and professionalism that one can see how a gullible person might think she knew what she was talking about. 

But then there’s the Owens method. It is not the scientific method. Owens has said explicitly that she has “left the cult of science,” which she believes is a “pagan faith.” The epistemology of Owens—not to be confused with Owenism, a philosophy with a noble history—is, in her words, as follows: “If I don’t get it from the Bible, and I can’t observe it with my own eyes, I can’t stan it as the truth.” This means, for instance, that she professes herself agnostic on the question of whether the Earth is flat—“I’m not a flat Earther. I’m not a round Earther.” You won’t be surprised to learn that she rejects climate science, even claiming that Scientific American’s articles on the subject could not be trusted because the website is a .com rather than a .org. (Interestingly, Owens’ own website is also a .com, while Current Affairs is a more respectable .org.) 

Nevertheless, there is an Owens method of “truth-seeking,” and it’s worth scrutinizing, because it helps us understand how normal, often intelligent people come to believe things that have no connection whatsoever with factual reality. 

The key thing to understand is, Owens doesn’t think she’s detached from reality. She thinks she’s uncovering deep hidden truths, which are concealed by nefarious elite actors. She goes about it with the classic conspiracist mindset, finding patterns in random data points, seeing every inconsistency or gap as proof the conventional wisdom must be a carefully-concocted lie. In this worldview, the fact that you can’t come up with a sensible overarching theory is not a sign of your own failure as an analyst, but proof that the mystery goes even deeper than you think. 

Consider Owens’ approach to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The standard conservative read on this is that Kirk was killed by a fanatical left-winger with a transgender partner, furnishing proof that transgender people are a menace to society and the left is prone to political violence. If you’re a particularly conspiratorially-minded right-winger, you might think other trans people were involved. Laura Loomer, for instance, blames a “trans terror cell with other targets as well.” This theory is at least grounded in the fact that Kirk’s alleged shooter was apparently upset over Kirk’s anti-LGBTQ bigotry. Kirk’s killer being a liberal also makes sense: Kirk said incredibly inflammatory and bigoted things, those things made a lot of people angry, angry people in America have easy access to guns (as Charlie Kirk believed they should), and in a polarized country, it is likely that at least some of the angry people with the guns are going to attempt murder. 

Owens’ theory, though, is different. “I first and foremost do not believe that Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk,” she says, although she believes Robinson was “involved,” possibly as a “patsy.” She has now devoted dozens of episodes to probing the assassination. She has said it was a “military operation,” and concluded that “the French Foreign Legion was apparently involved and on the ground at [Utah Valley University] on the day of Charlie Kirk's assassination.” But it wasn’t just the French. She says that “A military meeting with foreign leaders took place on July 20th on U.S soil,” implying multiple foreign governments were involved. Owens has said that there were 12 Israeli cell phones on campus that day, and she has zeroed in on a supposed Egyptian military plane that she believes was tracking Kirk’s wife Erika in the year leading up to the assassinaton. Whichever foreign government, or governments, killed Charlie Kirk, apparently they all color-coordinated their outfits: “Every guy [at UVU on the day] seems to be wearing maroon shirts as if they were told to wear them to identify each other. It keeps coming up in my research. I think it means something.” The color maroon, she says she has discovered, is “associated with elite airborne operations.” And it wasn’t just the maroon-wearing legionnaires. Owens claims to have evidence that members of Kirk’s own organization, Turning Point USA, “betrayed” him, a belief that was bolstered when Kirk appeared to her in a dream and told her he had been betrayed. 

It’s never quite clear what Owens is actually alleging took place. Egypt, France, and Israel teamed up to kill Charlie Kirk? With some of the TPUSA staff? I don’t think Owens herself even has a clue what coherent theory of Kirk’s killing this could all add up to. But in Owens’ world, the fact that none of it makes any sense is not proof she’s barking up the wrong tree. Rather, it’s proof she needs to dig deeper, to find the ways in which it could all make sense, in which all the little dots can finally be connected (undoubtedly with red string). If she never finds any answer (she won’t, because none of this makes any sense), it will be because They (the nefarious unspecified entities who control everything) have carefully covered their tracks. 

Now, perhaps it’s not fair to say Owens thinks Egypt, France, and Israel teamed up, because as she says in a recent video, she doesn’t believe individual governments really exist. They’re all fronts for the globalized government. Speaking of vague threats she says she received after Kirk’s assassination, she says: 

“[N]ow that we've gotten into the story and realized that virtually everybody [at UVU] that day has these military ties that the threat may have been coming from the government, actually, that the globalized government that we live under—lol, to the idea that we have any national sovereignty—may have wanted me and Tucker to watch our friend die, and then that global gang wanted us to know that you will be next if you don't shut up. Like really it was supposed to be you.”

I realize it may be hard for Current Affairs readers to sift through paragraphs of Candace Owens’ conspiracy theories without feeling as if your brain is melting. But let me depress you a little: the comments sections on these videos are not full of people saying “Candace, my dear, what the hell are you even talking about?” or “Candace has lost the plot” or “Please, Candace, seek help.” They are full of people in awe of Owens’ courage and integrity, pleading with her to continue her investigation of the dark, shadowy entities that rule the world: 

• Bravest F***ing woman in the world. I am actually in tears in admiration of your bravery and commitment to truth.

• Honestly Candace your literally the only person that matters in media right now, I don’t care to watch anything else but you, your a gift from God. Stay safe please, humanity needs you.

• I fear what Candace will uncover is darker than we all think. 

• Charlie noticed something and he didn’t stand a chance. Now Candace is breaking the internet. She’s BIGGER than any corporate media. At one point tonight 175K was watching LIVE. A lot of people won’t be sleeping tonight. GO MAX, Candace… GO MAX.

• I really don’t think they understand… WE DONT BELIEVE ANY OF YOU! We stand with you Candace!

Each of these comments has thousands of “likes.” Hardly any of Owens’ viewers show any sign that they have scrutinized her claims.

Those claims have gotten more and more outlandish over time. In her first book, Blackout, Owens essentially repeated Thomas Sowell’s argument that Big Government is bad for Black Americans and that liberals Hurt The Very People They Are Trying To Help. At that point, she dealt mostly in standard-issue conservative talking points of the kind found in the Wall Street Journal op-ed page.

Today, her obsessions are more bizarre and idiosyncratic. Owens became obsessively dedicated to exposing French First Lady Brigitte Macron as transgender, producing an eight-part documentary series called Becoming Brigitte in which she alleges that the supposed First Lady is actually her own brother, who transitioned to become a woman early in life. This kind of ugly “transvestigation”—in which people accuse various famous people of secretly being transgender—is common, but Owens has pushed her claims against Macron unusually aggressively, saying that she would stake her “entire professional career on the fact that Brigitte Macron, the current first lady of France, was born a man.”

The Macrons have sued Owens over the false claim. Bizarrely, Owens treats the lawsuit as further proof that she is right, saying that the Macrons have not in fact sued her over claiming Ms. Macron is transgender. “She [Brigitte Macron] isn’t suing me for saying she’s a man. She has never sued anyone ever for saying she’s a dude. Because she is one,” Owens says. But a look at the 250-page complaint filed by the Macrons against Owens shows that this is exactly what she is being sued for. The complaint begins: 

In March 2024, Candace Owens, a right-wing podcaster, told the world she “would stake [her] entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron [the First Lady of France] is in fact a man.” Since then, Owens has used this false statement to promote her independent platform, gain notoriety, and make money. Owens disregarded all credible evidence disproving her claim in favor of platforming known conspiracy theorists and proven defamers. And rather than engage with President and Mrs. Macron’s attempts to set the record straight, Owens mocked them and used them as additional fodder for her frenzied fan base. Retaliating against the Macrons for the “audacity” of sending her a retraction demand, Owens helmed an eight-part podcast series entitled Becoming Brigitte[…] Throughout the Series, Owens[…] endorsed, repeated, and published a series of verifiably false and devastating lies about the Macrons, on which this complaint is based. These outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions included that Mrs. Macron was born a man, stole another person’s identity, and transitioned to become Brigitte; Mrs. Macron and President Macron are blood relatives committing incest; President Macron was chosen to be the President of France as part of the CIA-operated MKUltra program or a similar mind-control program; and Mrs. Macron and President Macron are committing forgery, fraud, and abuses of power to conceal these secrets.

Throughout the complaint, the Macrons contest, and comprehensively refute, Owens’ claim that Brigitte was born male. Now, the lawsuit isn’t just about this claim, because, as the above says, Owens didn’t stop there. She’s also accused the Macrons of incest, implied they killed a journalist, said that Brigitte Macron was a participant in the Stanford Prison Experiment, and said that Emmanuel Macron might be a “Manchurian candidate” produced by the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program. Oh, and to top it all off, Owens is aggressively insistent that she has inside information that the French government is actively trying to assassinate her, a claim for which she has presented zero evidence. 

The Owens method of proof depends on elementary logical errors. Often, the fact that one thing is vaguely similar to another is treated as evidence the two things are connected. So, from the fact that Emmanuel Macron was “isolated throughout his childhood,” and the CIA’s MKUltra program used “isolation,” Owens implies Macron was likely to be a CIA plant: 

The MKUltra was real. The government was obsessed with all of these different programs. Really, the main point of them trying to condition the brain, trying to brainwash people, sometimes through isolation, which it sounds like Emmanuel Macron spent a ton of time isolated throughout his childhood. I mean, he’s acknowledging that he lived through books, and his friends are acknowledging … that he was kind of a loner and on his own. So they would experiment psychologically through isolation, through drugs, you know, LSD, drugging people to see if they could get them to commit crimes or to commit other acts unwittingly, essentially trying to establish a Manchurian candidate[...] So we don’t know just how global that program went. We don’t know every element of that program[...] And one element of that program was of course, sexual perversions, like committing a sexual assault in order to then establish how it impacts somebody’s psyche. Truly evil stuff.

This goes on and on, for episode after episode. A cabal of Satanist globalist predators is secretly ruling the world, here’s a shifty man in maroon, here’s a suspicious plane, here’s an address for a Delaware office tied to the French government. To anyone with even a modest capacity for critical thinking, it’s obvious delusional nonsense. But why so many fans?

In part, we can blame the general low level of Americans’ capacity for critical reasoning. We have evidence that the country is becoming less literate. And while I have suggested there is some distance between Candace Owens and “standard” conservatives, those supposedly “less delusional” conservatives still hold beliefs that aren’t grounded in any evidence, from the “China threat” to climate denial to the fear of LGBTQ people and immigrants. Republican ideology is impervious to evidence, whether it is the evidence that minimum wages are actually good for workers or the evidence that burning fossil fuels is creating a climate catastrophe. It’s not clear to me why Candace Owens’ belief in Satanic munchkins and moon landing hoaxes is that much more of a crime against reason than what her more “respectable” contemporaries believe. 

Then there is the depressing fact that Owens is, occasionally, onto something. The CIA’s MKUltra program was real, a grotesque pseudoscientific series of experiments that involved giving psychoactive drugs to people without their consent. When Owens attributes nefarious deeds to “Frankism” she is describing an actual obscure Jewish sect, not making it up out of whole cloth, and when she says NASA was founded by Satanists she is referring to an actual U.S. government rocket scientist, Jack Parsons, who was a follower of the occultist Aleister Crowley.

Owens does dredge up aspects of history that people in power have preferred to sweep under the rug. For instance, she says that “we should not have dropped a bomb on Catholics praying in Nagasaki,” and it’s true that Nagasaki was the center of Catholicism in Japan and the atomic bomb wiped out thousands of Christians, a fact difficult to reconcile with simple narratives of World War II as an unambiguously “good” war. Owens hosts one of the few shows that will give a serious, in-depth interview to Norman Finkelstein, one of the leading American critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As part of her theory that the French manipulate America, Owens claims that Napoleon’s grand-nephew founded the FBI and French aristocrats control Delaware. Both claims are grounded in some truth. The U.S. government (and for that matter, the French government) has done a great many shady things, and given the real facts of cases like COINTELPRO and Jeffrey Epstein, it’s not hard to convince people that shadowy elite institutions are working together against the people.

People distrust the media and government authorities for rational reasons. The problem is that those like Owens leap from the sensible, true fact that those in power have an interest in concealing inconvenient truths to outlandish ideas about what “the truth” actually is. It’s one reason people turn to quack medicine: their legitimate distrust of the healthcare system makes them easy prey for charlatans like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. For instance, Owens is critical of Zionism and Israel, but not just for the sensible reason that Israel is committing crimes against humanity and was founded on a campaign of ethnic cleansing. She goes further, saying the founders of Israel were part of a Frankist “cult” that established Israel as a haven for pedophiles, and that the star of David is an occult hexagram. Then she adds further antisemitic canards, claiming that Stalin was Jewish and Leo Frank was a pedophile protected by the Anti-Defamation League. (This resulted in Dennis Prager sending her a letter trying to explain basic Jewish history to her, although he concedes regarding the bombing of the USS Liberty that “For reasons I do not understand, and wish I did, both the American and Israeli governments covered it up at the time and have never since explained why it happened.” Once again, when the government does lie, it erodes trust and gives fuel to the conspiracists.) 

I am not sure that the rise of Owens concerns me any more than the rise of any of the other ill-informed people who now operate as our media. She’s basically occupying the same lane as Alex Jones, who has now been sued into financial oblivion by the grieving Sandy Hook families he defamed. (A fate that should perhaps make Owens think about continuing to publicly accuse the Macrons of criminal wrongdoing.) There is a broad problem of the collapse of reliable information, including local news deserts and AI fakery. But there is something especially disturbing about this level of departure from reality. I would like to think there is a hard ceiling on the number of people who can believe that Brigitte Macron, Egypt, and Israel are teaming up to threaten Candace Owens’ life. But so far Owens has continued to rise regardless of how absurd her theories get. As usual, I believe the only possible answer to this kind of poisonous nonsense is a political left that acknowledges and exposes the crimes of the powerful, but operates using the methods of careful reasoning and critical thinking, and is always making sure we’re not lapsing into paranoia and conspiracism. That’s not always easy, because the world does contain a great many conspiracies and a great many dark secrets—our government is colluding with a foreign power to perpetrate and cover up a genocide, for instance. But I would hope that if some of us can model sensible skepticism, we can gradually peel away some of the audience attracted by Owens’ promise to unveil the way the world works.