The offices of the Daily Wire are situated in a gray warehouse in an industrial stretch of Nashville, Tennessee. The entrance is unmarked, and security is tight: while wandering around a parking lot, trying to find a door, I was approached by a friendly security guard, in cargo pants and combat boots, with a gun strapped to his thigh. Once inside, I was led through a series of studio sets, and then into a dimly lit control room, where Candace Owens, surrounded by producers, was in the midst of a soliloquy on gentle parenting. “It’s so toxic,” Owens said. “When these kids become adults, they’re still babies.”
Gentle parenting, a trendy child-rearing approach that eschews traditional disciplinary tactics for expressions of respect and empathy, would be the subject of Owens’s opening monologue on that day’s episode of her podcast, “Candace Owens.” She began free-associating on its ills. There was an ex-boyfriend so coddled by his parents that he grew into a slob, and there were Stanford law students who’d recently shouted down a conservative federal judge, and looters at a Minnesota Target in the wake of George Floyd’s death. “We should find an old clip of it,” Owens said. Moments later, one of her producers had pulled up footage of people dragging electronics out of a store. Owens looked shocked: “Do you know how mortified—the idea of my parents catching me on camera taking a flat-screen TV because a Black man in Minnesota died?”
Owens, who is thirty-three, Black, conservative, and undeniably striking, with high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes, moved to Tennessee two years ago to join the Daily Wire’s staff. Though she rose to prominence as a Trump supporter, much of her attention these days is on pop culture and life style, not electoral politics. “In my opinion, a huge reason that conservatives have ceded so much ground to the left is because we stuck up our nose to culture,” she said. In the pre-show meeting, I learned that Owens loves Denzel Washington, magicians, and the Nigerian brothers hired by Jussie Smollett to help fake a hate crime. But her show, she said, is about “what enrages me,” a list that includes the Black Lives Matter movement, the body-positivity movement, the trans-rights movement, Ozempic, the Kardashians, Madonna’s plastic surgery, Colin Kaepernick, and the Democratic Party. Owens, who was wearing gabardine trousers with sparkly suspenders, also takes issue with women wearing yoga pants in non-workout settings. “This weird culture of telling women to de-beautify themselves and to be more masculine—I mean, it’s just bad,” she said.
The Daily Wire, which was founded, in 2015, by the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, a former Hollywood producer and screenwriter, is part of a growing cadre of new media ventures looking to popularize right-wing voices outside the traditional mediums of TV and radio. It is the sixth-largest podcast publisher in the U.S., according to data from Podtrac, and also produces films and online streaming content; the company recently announced that the comedian Rob Schneider will voice Chum Chum Chilla, the patriarch of a cartoon family of homeschooling chinchillas, for its first foray into children’s programming. Owens is set to narrate a true-crime docuseries that premières this summer. A spokesperson told the New York Times in late 2022 that the Daily Wire was on track to take in two hundred million dollars in revenue. When the popular conservative comedian Steven Crowder leaked his contract negotiations with the company, which included discussions of penalties if Crowder were demonetized on YouTube—Crowder called it “Big Tech” being “in bed with Big Con”—what stood out was that the Daily Wire had made him a fifty-million-dollar offer.
The Daily Wire approached Owens in late 2020, when she was eight months pregnant with her first child. “I gravitated toward it because it felt like putting roots in Tennessee with a small child was the right thing to do,” she told me. Owens and her husband, George Farmer, the son of a wealthy Conservative British peer, had purchased a town house not far from the White House in Washington, D.C., but Owens had soured on the city. “I think when you have a child, the suburbs call,” she said. There were also strategic reasons for the move: “People love to see me on Fox, which is why I still do it, but I know that my Fox News viewers are not the people that are necessarily subscribing to podcasts. I think the Daily Wire is paying attention to where the world is going.”
Owens’s show premièred, in March, 2021, in a weekly format with a live studio audience. “The media has done a really good job of creating a caricature of Candace Owens,” she said in a teaser clip. “I’m always on the defense. I’m angry. I’m upset. And that just couldn’t be further from the truth.” Despite the suggestion that the show would feature Owens’s softer side—she wore a voluminous evening gown in some of the ad’s shots—it was almost immediately fuelled by controversy. The first episode featured a panel of guests, including Shapiro, who discussed Owens’s intention to sue Cardi B, with whom she’d had Twitter beef.
That December, Owens did a sit-down interview with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Trump defended the vaccine rollout. Owens, who doesn’t believe in vaccinating against COVID-19, later said in a video on Instagram, “People oftentimes forget, like, how old Trump is. He comes from a generation . . . before Internet, before being able to conduct their independent research.” Trump was reportedly upset. On a podcast that aired days after the Republicans’ disappointing showing in the midterms, Owens called Trump rude and questioned whether he had a compelling vision for a 2024 run. (When I spoke to Owens in March, she seemed to have again warmed to Trump, adding that she didn’t trust his main rival: the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.)
Last year, after taking maternity leave for her second child, Owens relaunched her show in a daily format. Her lead producer, Michaelan Mena, who came to the Daily Wire from the Hallmark Channel, had told her, “What I really want to do is let Candace be Candace.” The show is now just Owens talking to the camera—no audience, no guests. She often plays off of various clips, from TikTok or Instagram, presented to showcase the degradation of American culture: the former “Dance Moms” star JoJo Siwa rapping about her “gay awakening”; Katy Perry coming “completely undone” on “American Idol” when she heard the story of a school-shooting survivor. The material is often explicitly aimed at a female audience, and Owens’s affect is that of a girlfriend who tells you that you could lose those last ten pounds if you only did more cardio. “I think it’s really weird that we live in a society where everyone’s hand is being held at all times, and they’re being told they’re amazing, they’re great,” Owens said. “They’re obviously not great. They could be. They could be better than they were yesterday.”
The message has a distinct appeal to women who fancy themselves capable, competitive, and self-reflective. It is, in many ways, an apolitical mind-set. But, on her show and on her social-media pages, where she frequently interacts with fans, many of whom are moms, Owens can convincingly tell her viewers that it is, in fact, a conservative one. She and her fans are “creating a culture,” Owens told me. “I want to inspire them to push themselves harder.”
Owens has said that her early years, many of them spent in low-income housing in Stamford, Connecticut, were “dysfunctional.” Her family moved in with her grandparents when she was nine, and her grandfather Robert became a powerful influence in Owens’s life. He was one of twelve children raised on a sharecropping farm in North Carolina—his first job, at the age of five, was laying out tobacco leaves to dry—and, according to Owens, he often recalled experiences of growing up Black in the Deep South, including violent encounters with the K.K.K. That history, Owens said, is part of what has made her suspicious of liberals’ claims that white nationalism is alive and well in the U.S. In 2019, Owens testified before a Judiciary Committee hearing on “the spread of white identity ideology,” and decried Democrats for “fear-mongering” about racism, and noted that her grandfather “grew up in an America where words like ‘racism’ and ‘white nationalism’ held real meaning under the Democratic Party’s Jim Crow laws.”
In 2007, when Owens was a senior in high school, she got into an argument with a former friend. The boy was suspended and, one night, he left nasty voice mails for Owens, calling her the N-word and threatening to kill her. Several other voices could be heard on the recordings; one of them belonged to the fourteen-year-old son of Stamford’s then mayor, Dannel Malloy, who eventually became the governor of Connecticut. (Malloy’s son declined to comment.) At the time, three girls were also reportedly facing hate-crime charges for attacking Owens in the parking lot of a Blockbuster, where they allegedly kicked her and used racial slurs. Owens stayed out of school for six weeks. Her family ultimately received a settlement of more than thirty-seven thousand dollars from the school district, but Owens was left deeply scarred by the whole affair. “I held my head high at school, but I went home and I cried every single night,” she wrote, in a 2016 op-ed in the Stamford Advocate. She had come to resent her role as a public victim, and felt badly that the case had tarnished the boys’ reputations. “Were they wrong?” she wrote. “Categorically. Should they have been held accountable for their actions? Undeniably. Did they deserve to be branded by a society? No.”
Owens also used the 2016 op-ed to advertise a new venture: SocialAutopsy.com, a Web site she had founded to “stop online bullying by outing the bullies.” By then, Owens had dropped out of college at the University of Rhode Island, and had spent her early twenties as an intern and fashion assistant at Vogue and Glamour. Now she was launching “a searchable database of people who spew hate online.” A Kickstarter for the project advertised an association with the Tyler Clementi Foundation, named for an eighteen-year-old gay teen-ager who had died by suicide after being cyberbullied. But, shortly after launching her fund-raising campaign, Owens became embroiled in something that would soon become routine for her: an online scandal.
Owens’s proposal to out bullies was seen by many as a plan to dox people. Zoë Quinn, an anti-bullying activist who gained influence during the online-harassment campaign known as Gamergate, got in touch. Quinn was concerned about Owens’s proposed site, and the two had a phone call—Owens later told New York magazine that she found Quinn “pompous.” Owens soon began attacking Quinn online, accusing them of instigating a deluge of sexist and racist hate mail that Owens had received. Kickstarter suspended Social Autopsy’s campaign, and Owens walked away feeling that the national media had purposefully undermined her organization.
“I became a conservative overnight,” Owens said, a year later, on a conservative podcast. “I realized that liberals were actually the racists, that liberals were actually the trolls.” It was the height of the 2016 Presidential primaries, and Donald Trump’s campaign message about the lying media resonated with Owens. Right-wing figures, including Mike Cernovich, reached out to offer support. Owens began making YouTube videos under the name Red Pill Black. The first, a spoof of someone coming out as gay, was titled “Mom, Dad . . . I’m a Conservative.”
Owens is aware that her success was initially built on a certain kind of novelty: a Black conservative supporting a political movement that has often been accused of racism. “People are angry at me for not being a Democrat, angry at me because I believe in personal responsibility, because I think that you are in the driver’s seat of your own life, because I refuse the victim narrative,” she said. Being a victim is about the worst thing possible in Owens’s estimation, and she sees it everywhere, particularly in what she regards as Black Americans’ appropriation of the traumas of their ancestors when they complain of structural racism. Of the Black Lives Matter movement, she said, “I probably made a name for myself because it was just so culturally unacceptable for a Black person not to get behind this fraudulent organization.”
Owens’s fame grew quickly in the hothouse media environment of the Trump Presidency. While speaking on a panel in Palm Beach, Owens caught the eye of Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a nonprofit that nurtures young conservative activists. According to an account in the journalist Kyle Spencer’s book, “Raising Them Right,” Kirk knew by the end of the talk that “he had to have her.” Owens was soon travelling around the country with Kirk, doing talks on college campuses. At an event in London, in 2018, she was asked about the “long-term prognosis” for nationalism and globalism, and she brought up Hitler: “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well—O.K., fine. The problem is that he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German. Everybody to be speaking German. Everybody to look a different way. To me, that’s not nationalism.” Owens made no mention of the Holocaust. When the remarks surfaced online a couple of months later, they led to an outcry, including in conservative circles. “I was taken completely out of context, in a conversation about nationalism, and how it’s wrongly attributed to Hitler,” Owens told me.
That spring, Kanye West (also known as Ye), who had become increasingly public about his support for President Trump, tweeted, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.” A few weeks later, Owens accompanied West to the offices of TMZ, where West ranted about slavery having been a “choice” for Black people. Owens later launched the “Blexit” movement—short for “Black exit”—which advocates for Black voters to abandon what Owens has often called the “Democrat plantation.” At the Daily Wire, she made an anti-Black Lives Matter documentary that focussed on the personal failings and previous arrests of George Floyd, who had struggled with drug addiction. “There have always been Black folks who have been willing to endorse the really ragged and hostile edges of the Republican Party,” Leah Wright Rigueur, the author of “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” told me. But technology has helped amplify what is a small group of right-wing Black Americans: “Now, all of a sudden, we can see hundreds of people who are willing to speak to the raw, hostile edges.”
Owens and West appeared together at Paris Fashion Week last fall, wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “White Lives Matter.” West attended the Nashville screening of Owens’s documentary and Owens initially defended West against accusations of antisemitism, after, among other things, he tweeted he was “going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” Around that time, it emerged that West had agreed to buy Parler, a social-media company run by Owens’s husband, Farmer. Farmer told the Wall Street Journal that Owens had helped facilitate the conversations with West. The deal fell apart in November, 2022, after Adidas terminated its partnership with West. (Parler’s parent company reportedly laid off about seventy-five per cent of its staff, before being sold to a conservative media company in April.)
As West’s rhetoric escalated—“I see good things about Hitler,” he said on Alex Jones’s podcast, in December—Owens began to gently push back. “He hurt a lot of people,” she said on her podcast, noting that West was still a friend, but that her silence surrounding his public spiral had hurt some of her Jewish friends. (Shapiro, for his part, called West an antisemite and said, of Owens, “she defended her friend initially in a way that I didn’t like.”) One of Owens’s mentors, the conservative talk-radio host Dennis Prager, who is Jewish, said on his podcast, “She felt that given how famous he is, that he could help the cause she is working for, and that is to convince Black America that the left has hurt them.” Prager also implied that Owens was fame-chasing. “When you attach yourself to the famous, as opposed to the virtuous,” he said, “you’re probably going to get burned.” (On her own podcast, Owens said that she called Prager and yelled at him. “I’m not playing this game with the Jewish community again,” she recalled telling him. “You’ve wrongly smeared me and libelled me as antisemitic in the past.”)
These controversies, in many ways, only made Owens a more prominent figure in right-wing media. “One of the great parts about being on the right and not being on the left is that when you are on the left, you are living a fictitious reality, where you pretend everybody’s perfect,” Owens said. “Which is why when somebody does something wrong, their entire life gets cancelled.” When I asked Owens about her friendship with West, she told me, “Kanye and I have always had a relationship. And it’s only when the relationship becomes public that it creates a firestorm. I think it’s best for our relationship to be private.”
Owens met Farmer at the London event where she made the Hitler remarks. Their encounter was brief, but he soon flew to Florida to see her speak at a conference. “Nothing had been said,” Farmer recalled, in 2022, on the “Pints with Aquinas” podcast. “There had been no romantic overtures at all.” Their conversations, he went on, “were mainly about politics and trying to understand what she wanted to do in life.” Seventeen days after meeting Owens, Farmer proposed over the phone. Seven months later, in August, 2019, the pair married, at Trump Winery. The bride wore three different Monique Lhuillier dresses and a large diamond solitaire.
Owens embraces the Internet label of “trad wife.” The prototypical trad wife frames her choices around the traditional gender roles of marriage and dresses femininely, with an emphasis on looking good—makeup, kempt hair—for her husband at all times. The term is often used by conservative proponents of homesteading, homeschooling, and large families. On Instagram, where Owens has more than four million followers, she documents her pre-dawn workouts, solicits advice about a teething toddler, and shows off her pantry organization. But there’s often a sharp edge to her posts. In a recent Instagram story, Owens wrote, “I cook dinner for my husband 5-7 days per a week. How’s that for feminism.” In another, she derided “basic bitch proverbs like ‘it’s okay to not be okay.’ ” Owens, who has written of an attempted suicide in college and past struggles with an eating disorder, frequently admonishes her followers with the mantra “your life is your fault.”
Motherhood, rather than softening her, has hardened Owens’s resolve. Broadly, she sees her remit as moral guidance for the Internet age, helping impressionable minds sift through a raft of images and concepts. Farmer has suggested to her that she look at her position almost as a secular pulpit. “For a lot of people who are atheists, the podcast space is kind of their sermon,” Owens said. She delights in speaking ex cathedra, and her focus on women and the family feels particularly timely in a political moment shaped by the effects of the pandemic and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. “I think moms are starting to pay more attention to what’s happening,” Owens told me. “It’s not necessarily just transgenderism. It’s everything that’s happening in the classroom. And suddenly it feels like we’re in a custody dispute with the state for our children.” At the same time, Owens said, “to different people, I’m something different. I’m also very into gardening and crunchy culture so, for some people, they follow me because they like crunchy Candace and they don’t care about politics at all.”
Owens picks topics of broad cultural concern, but her answers to big questions are often knee-jerk contrarian. Responding to a study about record levels of sadness among teen girls, she said it was due to our “perverse” hookup and drinking culture which tells people “that aspiring toward family is backwards.” In a video titled “Are Women Ruining the Workplace?” she determines that “things have gotten worse at work since women joined” and that men have to navigate “a bunch of land mines.” When Skims, Kim Kardashian’s shapewear line, used a model in a wheelchair for a line of adaptive underwear for people with disabilities, Owens did a brief segment about it. “I don’t really understand how far we’re going to take this inclusivity thing,” she said. Christina Applegate, who has multiple sclerosis, picked up on the remarks, writing on Twitter, “Woke to see the most horrifying thing. This Candace person making comments about companies who see we need help. It’s fucking gross.” Owens replied to another Applegate tweet, writing “huge fan” with a heart emoji and an invitation to discuss further in the D.M.s, and then tweeted that her staff “simply did not know (the ad did not state) that the underwear was created for disabled access.” Owens explained, “What we thought it was at the time, was another nonsensical ‘representation matters’ DEI initiative which I strongly feel patronizes the people it purports to represent. (Example: clinically obese people modeling swimsuits). This wasn’t that and we simply got it wrong.”
Owens nurtures a certain affection for celebrities. “That’s her mission in life,” Spencer, who interviewed Owens for her book on the young-conservative movement, said. “She wants to be a person in the world, a cultural icon.” She’s on the record as loving Reese Witherspoon, and has interviewed “cancelled” celebrities such as the rapper M.I.A., the musician Winston Marshall (formerly of Mumford & Sons), Roseanne Barr, and Perez Hilton. In Nashville, Owens and Farmer socialize with the former N.F.L. quarterback Jay Cutler and the country singer Jason Aldean and his wife, Brittany. Recently, she tweeted at the actor Don Cheadle, “You’ve been sending me mean tweets for years but genuinely—I just love you too much as an actor to have beef with you my man.”
But Owens is also a fan of feuding with celebrities. She’s long insulted Lizzo for her weight, Harry Styles for wearing a dress on the cover of Vogue, and Jay-Z and Beyoncé for betraying Black people. Speaking to Billboard, Cardi B intimated that there’s a strategy in Owens’s criticisms of high-profile figures. “There’s certain people I want to curse out, but I don’t want to give them clout. For example, when me and Candace Owens got into an argument, I gave that bitch 2 million followers.”
Increasingly, Owens’s show has singled out trans influencers and issues. These segments often center on a critique that trans women embrace female stereotypes. “It’s a mean thing to pretend that all a woman is is makeup and heels,” she has said. In an e-mail to me, she wrote, “Transgendered women are at their core bigoted misogynists.” But, just as often, she cloaks her anti-trans rhetoric in maternal concern for children. She wrote to me that making hormone therapy available to minors—which medical experts have found can reduce feelings of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation in transgender youth—should “in a sane world,” result in “criminal charges against the doctors, parents, surgeons and politicians who fostered these evil lies.”
Christina Buttons, a Daily Wire writer who covered trans issues, recently tendered her resignation following controversial comments from two other Daily Wire hosts. In a speech at CPAC, Michael Knowles said that “transgenderism” should be “eradicated from public life entirely.” Matt Walsh, who starred in the Daily Wire documentary “What Is a Woman?”—an anti-trans exploration of the gender-identity movement—said, of the trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, “You are weird and artificial, you are manufactured and lifeless, you are unearthly and eerie, you are like some kind of human deepfake.” In a post explaining her departure, Buttons wrote, “There is a critical distinction between speaking truth and being tactless, between sticking to the facts and sticking it to the libs.”
When I asked Owens whether a gentler tone was ever useful in trying to win people over to her side, she told me my question was sexist—her e-mails were at turns sharply organized, argumentative, polite, and lashing—and asked for specific examples of things that she had said that I found unnecessarily harsh. I mentioned her anti-body-positivity commentary and frequent use of the worst anti-trans slurs. “A woman telling the truth is not harsh,” she replied. “Lizzo, is in fact, fat.” Owens continued on, attaching a number of pictures of the singer, then signed off, “Just pulling up to a nursery to purchase some plants! Thank you for the productive conversation!”
On March 27th, Owens posted an Instagram story, in which she had shared her morning Bible reading: Proverbs 3, which is about finding comfort and security in one’s beliefs through faith in God’s wisdom. Owens read much of the chapter aloud, and wrote, “A lot to take away from that reading. One thing is that you should not feel any shame in rejecting the perversity (dressed up as diversity) in today’s society. The LGBTQ nonsense, women always finding reasons to get naked on the internet, the sport of victimhood—these are all examples of cultural perversity. Hollywood is satanic. Don’t follow trends. Follow God.”
Hours later, a twenty-eight-year-old killed six people at a Christian academy in Nashville. Among the dead were three nine-year-old children: Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney. From news reports, it appeared that the shooter identified as trans. “When you play Frankenstein with people’s body parts, you can’t be surprised when they behave like monsters,” Owens wrote on Instagram. There were reasonable concerns that the shooting would prompt a backlash against the trans community. On April 3rd, Owens wrote, “I don’t know who needs to hear this but if your instinct—after 9 year old Christian children were ruthlessly slaughtered by a transfendered lunatic—was to reaffirm your support for the transgendered community, it’s likely because you are a piece of shit.” A few days later, she declared that “transgenderism” is “the greatest civil rights violation of our time.” With a nod to her purposeful provocation, Owens said, “It is worse than Jim Crow laws because we are mutilating the bodies of children.”
The shooting seemed to ratchet up Owens’s already inflammatory speech, and it made me think of another part of the scripture passage she had read: “Do not contend with a man for no reason, when he has done you no harm. Do not envy a man of violence and do not choose any of his ways. . . . Toward the scorners he is scornful, but to the humble he shows favor.” It seemed to call for a certain amount of grace, even for people we might see as sinners. I e-mailed Owens to ask for her thoughts on that interpretation.
“Respectfully, any person with that interpretation has likely never read the bible and cannot be at all familiar with the life and teachings of Jesus Christ,” Owens wrote to me. “Better stated, what you are offering here is a recalibration of the angsty teenager-catchphrase ‘live and let live!.’ Something like that belongs on a bumper sticker, a t-shirt, or a tik-tok bio, perhaps—but it can in no way be meaningfully drawn from any Christian doctrine.” She added that “Jesus was not a pacifist,” and quoted Matthew 10:34, which finds Jesus instructing his followers that spreading his teachings won’t be easy: “Do not assume that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother. . . . A man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.” It was, admittedly, an apt description of the current American cultural debate.
I had another question. Are there some people who are so evil that they are beyond repair? “I do not believe any person is beyond repair,” Owens wrote. “We all sin. And we can all be redeemed.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated an individual’s pronouns.
