Overview

Background

Candace Amber Owens was born on April 29, 1989, in White Plains, New York, and grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. She became a conservative in 2017 after her idea to launch a website exposing those who harass others online was panned by critics on both sides of the aisle. That year, she described having "become a conservative overnight" after concluding that "liberals were actually racists."

She became a popular voice of Black conservatives on YouTube and started social media accounts where she posted controversial videos that attracted the attention of prominent right-wing figures. She founded the Blexit Foundation to encourage Black Americans to leave the Democratic Party and progressive ideologies. She hosted a show at The Daily Wire from 2021 until 2024 and authored the New York Times bestselling book Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation (2020), which emphasizes individual agency over victimhood.

Owens was fired from The Daily Wire in March 2024 amid her promotion of antisemitic rhetoric and conspiracy theories, following public tensions and feuds with co-founder Ben Shapiro over her antisemitic statements. Following her departure, Owens transitioned to an independent media presence, producing content directly for her audience without affiliation to major conservative outlets. Unlike fringe figures operating on the margins, Owens commands a large audience on mainstream platforms like YouTube, with more than 5.7 million subscribers and millions of followers across X and Instagram.

Public Role in the Second Trump Administration

Early Support and Break with Trump

Owens was a loyal supporter of Donald Trump, but his decisions in his second term led her to second-guess him. She defended Trump throughout the 2024 election, but after Trump's first hundred days in his second term she began to change her tune, saying on her podcast that she did not "recognize this administration." The shift accelerated over Trump's foreign policy. Appearing on Piers Morgan Uncensored in June 2025, Owens explained why she regretted endorsing Trump for a second term, citing his failure to keep a promise to stay out of foreign wars. She maintained that she did not regret voting for him over Kamala Harris because she still believed he was the better candidate, but called his conduct "a betrayal."

The Trump of the second term, she said, was unrecognizable to her, and she argued that the shift in his rhetoric — possibly because he no longer faces re-election and is no longer bound by obligations to his voters — was the single biggest reason for disillusionment among his former supporters. Her estrangement culminated in a disavowal of Trump and the MAGA movement in 2026.

The Macron Lawsuit

Her claim that Brigitte Macron, the French first lady, was born male led to a defamation lawsuit filed in 2025 by the Macrons in a Delaware court. The suit alleged that Owens promoted "outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions" on her podcast and social media posts. Owens says Trump personally phoned her in February 2025 to ask her to drop the claim. She refused, and the Macrons sued that July. Trump declined to defend her, with his longtime attorney Marc Kasowitz quitting her legal team. Trump instead criticized her publicly on Truth Social, calling her attack on Brigitte Macron "despicable" and branding Owens "an extremely Low IQ individual." The lawsuit remains a significant legal exposure for her independent operation.

The Charlie Kirk Controversy

Owens extended her conspiracy theorizing to the high-profile September 2025 assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, with whom she was previously associated. Her popularity surged after the assassination, when she pushed a series of radical claims, including the theory that Israel was behind his killing. Her podcast skyrocketed in popularity for episodes supposedly investigating "the truth" about the assassination, becoming the most-listened-to podcast in the world in late 2025.

Turning Point USA sent Owens a cease and desist letter in a dramatic escalation of their public feud, with the legal action centered on claims Owens had made related to Kirk's death. Their working contract had been terminated in December 2025. Ben Shapiro publicly rebuked Owens at a December 2025 Turning Point USA conference, and other conservative figures distanced themselves from her rhetoric.

Antisemitism and Criticism from the Right

Since the start of the U.S.-Israeli military operation in Iran in late February 2026, Owens promoted explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theories blaming Jews for the war and demonizing the Hasidic Jewish sect Chabad as "dangerous." In late February and early March 2026, she spread conspiracy theories about the military operation against the Iranian regime, claiming the conflict was being secretly orchestrated by Jews and that Kirk was killed to lay the groundwork for the war. She claimed on March 6, 2026, that "Charlie Kirk was the first casualty of the War in Iran."

Dennis Prager, founder of PragerU, published a 15-page letter in September 2024 rebutting Owens' claims about Jews, Zionism, and Israel, and went further in a January 2026 statement warning that her statements revive hatred against Jews and lead followers to see Jews as manipulative forces controlling America and the world. The Anti-Defamation League has described Owens as someone who has come to embrace and promote antisemitic tropes and anti-Israel rhetoric, placing her well outside the mainstream of even hardline conservative commentary.

Recent Developments

In May 2026, Owens sat down with Hunter Biden for a nearly two-hour podcast interview that included a number of apologies from Owens and brought Hunter Biden to tears. The right-wing influencer who had repeatedly called Hunter Biden a crackhead over the past six years used the interview partly to apologize to him. The interview illustrated Owens's willingness to pursue counterintuitive content designed to attract attention across ideological lines — and reflected her growing distance from conventional MAGA positioning.

Owens got her start as a Turning Point USA firebrand before reinventing herself as a freewheeling broadcaster. That reinvention continues to define her public posture. Some focus-group research has identified Owens as one of the non-politicians most commonly mentioned as a possible Trump replacement, with voters expressing genuine enthusiasm for her as a potential candidate. Whether such sentiment translates into anything concrete remains unclear.

Outlook

Owens occupies an unusual position as of mid-2026: she is simultaneously more popular than ever by some audience metrics and more estranged from the conservative establishment than at any prior point in her career. Her break with Trump and MAGA, her ongoing legal exposure from the Macron lawsuit, and her promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories have cost her relationships across the right. She remains among the upper tier of conservative digital commentators, with a YouTube audience larger than many prominent conservative hosts, though somewhat smaller than conservative personalities like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson.

Owens argues the result of Trump's second-term conduct is a quiet political realignment, with people moving toward the center and both left and right beginning to understand that pinning hopes on one political figure is a mistake. Whether she emerges as a vehicle for that realignment or simply as a controversialist who has exhausted her connections to organized conservatism remains an open question. Her audience appears durable, her legal and reputational risks are real, and her political direction after MAGA is genuinely uncertain.