Candace Owens has always leaned into culture-war controversy, but the universe she’s building now feels like it belongs on late-night cable rather than in one of the most popular podcasts in the country. Her claims have drifted so far from reality that they read less like political arguments and more like episodes of a surreal thriller.
Owens has insisted the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz were performing a satanic ritual. She’s said Justin Trudeau, Barack Obama, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Emmanuel Macron are all gay and that this isn’t a coincidence. She has even cast doubt on the crimes of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, calling his atrocities “absurd” and a “waste of time and supplies.”
She believes the moon landing was faked and that all space programs are “fake and gay.” Most recently, she has floated the idea that the French Foreign Legion helped kill Charlie Kirk with direction from Brigitte Macron, whom she claims is transgender, and that French assassins are now hunting her.
You’d assume this sort of thing would limit her audience. Instead she’s booming. Her podcast reportedly averages 3.7 million listeners per episode. Her YouTube channel has over a billion views and millions of subscribers. She’s huge on social platforms and even got a CNN special. Whatever she’s selling, a lot of people are buying.
Owens delivers her claims with poise. She’s polished and confident which makes even the wildest statements sound like breaking news to anyone not paying close attention. She says she has abandoned science which she calls a “pagan faith” and prefers only what she can see or find in the Bible. That has led her to say she’s neither a flat Earther nor a round Earther and to reject climate science because Scientific American uses a .com domain even though her own website does the same.
Her approach to Charlie Kirk’s killing shows how far she’s willing to go. Instead of accepting that the shooter was a young man angry about Kirk’s anti-LBGTQ rhetoric, she has built an elaborate theory that foreign militaries were operating on a college campus and that maroon shirts signaled coordination in an airborne operation. She claims there were Israeli phones pinging on campus and an Egyptian military plane tracking Kirk’s wife. She even says Kirk appeared to her in a dream and told her he had been betrayed.
Owens also insists governments aren’t real and that the world is run by a “globalized government” that wanted her and Tucker Carlson to watch Kirk die. Her fans eat it up. Comments under her videos praise her bravery and treat her as a truth teller exposing a shadowy elite.
Her claims have escalated so much that the French First Lady and President have sued her for defamation. She has alleged Brigitte Macron is actually her own brother who transitioned early in life accused the couple of incest and tied Emmanuel Macron to CIA mind-control programs. The complaint spells out in detail that Owens is being sued for exactly the claims she insists no one has ever challenged.
There are moments when Owens tugs at real history which makes her conspiracies more convincing to people already skeptical of institutions. But she leaps from real misconduct to fantasy. Her rise says a lot about how badly people want explanations for a confusing world and how easily confidence can outrun truth.