The monumental ignorance of Candace Owens

This column was first published at The European Conservative

For nearly a year, online influencer Candace Owens has been pushing an alternative ‘just-asking-questions’ version of 20th century history, which derives primarily from her over-fertile imagination. Thus, Owens was thrilled last week when Tucker Carlson interviewed amateur historian and podcaster Darryl Cooper about World War II. As Carlson head-bobbled enthusiastically, Cooper referred to Winston Churchill as the “great villain” of the war, claimed that Hitler was a jilted dove desperately seeking peace with Western Europe, and stated that historians have failed to grapple with how Germans became Nazis—which ironically may be the most obsessively studied historical question of the past fifty years.

“You have this country, Germany, a sophisticated cultural superpower that was fine, and then they all turned into demons for a few years, and now they’re fine again,” said Cooper. “That’s sort of the official story.” It isn’t, of course—not even close. Books and documentaries psychologizing the Nazis are a full-scale industry—Ordinary Men: The Forgotten Holocaust (2023), on the Germans who carried out mass killings, is currently a top Netflix documentary. This ignorance seems more sinister considering the fact that Cooper referred to “the Jewish question” in a follow-up X thread and in other posts implied that Hitler is in heaven and endorsed fascism. Cooper’s views triggered an outpouring of support from Owens and others. 

While Cooper did not assert that the Allies were the villains of World War II—just the “psychopath” Winston Churchill—Candace Owens consistently portrays the Allies as making war on innocent Christians. In April, she stated: “Did you know that when Dresden was incinerated back in 1945, it was Ash Wednesday? Christians were burned alive on Ash Wednesday— many of them were refugees from Stalin’s Christian Holocaust. Christians will no longer be told that we aren’t allowed to know or discuss our history.” She also claims that the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki to wipe out Catholics.

The morality of the strategic bombing campaigns and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been debated since the events themselves—the debate was covered extensively in my university entry-level U.S. history course—and many public Christians have long condemned these tactics. But Owens may be the first to claim that the Allies were deliberately targeting Christians, and she never explains why she believes that the civilians of the Axis Powers were Christians while the Allied combatants were not. She is likely unaware of this, but Allied leaders believed that they were defending Christian civilization against a truly demonic ideology bent on world domination.

The Christians in Nazi-occupied Europe, apparently, mean nothing to Owens. When asked by Steven Edginton of GB News if America should not have gone into World War II, Owens responded: 

Yeah. And that is a radical statement. People don’t know how to deal with that because we’ve all been so brainwashed by the school system to believe that oh, look how great things are. Let me ask you about your country—do you think your country has become greater since? Has our country become greater since? Absolutely not.

That, incidentally, is an almost verbatim regurgitation of one of Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes’s most frequent talking points. 

Owens has not openly denied the Holocaust, as to my knowledge she has not denied that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. But despite frequently claiming that she does not know Fuentes, he is a significant influence on her thinking. According to Ye (formerly Kanye West), Candace endorsed Nick Fuentes when he asked her what she thought of him: “I can’t say [nothing] about Nick. He’s good. I respect Nick.” Fuentes himself has referred to Owens as someone in his “circle,” and affirmed that he is responsible for many of her views. Indeed, despite the fact that Fuentes’ Holocaust denial is well-known and well-documented, Owens described him on her podcast as merely “anti-Israel” and an opponent of “Zionism.” This description was clearly a deliberate attempt to whitewash Fuentes.

Nick Fuentes is a vocal defender of Hitler, and Owens is certainly aware of his views. She is also cycling through all of the favorite talking points of antisemites. She has pushed the claim that Israelis danced for joy on 9/11, a fiction promoted by the father of hijacker Mohammed Atta. (Like Owens, the Islamists are eager to pin all evil on Israel.) Conversely, when evil happens to Israelis, she is suspicious. In her most recent interview with the libidinous vulture Andrew Tate, a pimp and alleged rapist and human trafficker, she nodded approvingly as he referred to the well-documented wave of sexual violence on October 7th as “garbage” that “never happened.” She has also been promoting her new theory that the West is dominated by the “Frankist” cult, founded by sexual deviant and Polish Jew Jacob Frank. 

Owens claims that “Frankism” is the preferred religion of the elites, and that Israel was founded by “Frankists.” “I know you’ve read the short version in the classroom, and it was like”—here Owens changed her voice to sound deliberately whiny—“oh the Holocaust happened and then we realized Israel needs a state … That’s not how it went down at all. Catholics and Christians were going missing on Passover and then they would find bodies across Europe, and they were able to trace them back to Jews. Blood libel! They weren’t Jews. They were Frankists.” She continued: “It’s looking like Theodore Herzl’s family was from the exact same area in Moravia and in Bohemia where the Frankist cult was founded … I’m just throwing ideas out there. And by throwing out some ideas, I mean I’ve read a ton of books and I’ve figured it out.” To say she has not is an understatement.

Indeed, Owens’ claims have become so wild that even Fuentes weighed in to accuse her of giving honest antisemites a bad name, for being an awful researcher for the “Frankist lie” and for claiming that Joseph Stalin and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk were both Jewish (meaning, of course, that Jews would be responsible for the Communist persecution of Christians and the Armenian Genocide). Owens appears to be unaware of the fact that, after recognizing the state of Israel in 1948, Stalin became convinced that Jews represented a fifth column and had begun an anti-Jewish purge just prior to his death—Malenkov even forced his daughter to divorce her Jewish husband. To fact-check every historical claim of a woman who genuinely believed Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter was a form of segregation would be, at this point, a Herculean task.

So what does Candace Owens believe? The truth is that she is a creature of her generation and of the internet—her trust in institutions is broken, she is incredibly and unjustifiably arrogant, and she has an audience feeding her ego. She started off as a progressive and launched a kick starter for a doxxing website called Social Autopsy and claims the backlash to that project led to her conservative awakening in 2016. She resurfaced as the YouTube commentator “RedPillBlack,” and caught the attention of Charlie Kirk at Turning Point USA. She worked for TPUSA and Dennis Prager for a while before landing a gig at the Daily Wire. After drifting into toxic conspiracy theories, she was fired and, as we have already noted, has now gone all in.

Owens managed to accrue an audience despite having little knowledge about most of the subjects she addresses, and no discernment whatsoever. She was in many ways a DEI hire—she was a fierce and talented debater, a vibrant and attractive on-screen talent, but most importantly, willing to go hard after the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement. After BLM collapsed in a cloud of fiscal scandal in a stunningly short time—it was more or less a spent force by the time her documentary on the group came out—Owens cast about for another shtick. Her unwatchable live audience panel show at DW appeared to be quietly cancelled, and her monologue podcast was relatively popular but scattershot. Her fellow host Brett Cooper eclipsed her follower count on YouTube overnight.

Her new shtick is educating her viewers on ‘real history.’ In an unintentionally hilarious self-own, she frequently fulminates about how little she was taught in high school history, as if there were not libraries packed with books you can read for free (although granted, none of them would have told her about the American plan to deliberately nuke Catholics). But because she knows so little about history, she is constantly stunned to discover well-known facts and insists that ‘they’ have been deliberately keeping these facts from her all along. One of her greatest epiphanies that she constantly cites, for example, came from the BBC documentary “1945: The Savage Peace”—literally, a government-funded film aired by the UK’s state broadcaster. She may be the first “conservative” to have her mind blown by the BBC.

Another revelation Owens cites as reshaping her mind is #1 New York Times bestseller CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill, which was reviewed by almost every major mainstream publication and had the film rights picked up by Amazon Studios. Most of the revelations that stunned Owens were revealed back in 1975 by the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission, both of which were federal government investigations. This ‘forbidden knowledge’ was published by the government and is widely known—my history professors at university loved to discuss the sins of the CIA and the West more generally. Owens is late to this game, but it has been going on for decades—although granted, usually played by the Left. 

Owens, like many, is prone to inventing conspiracy theories to fill the gaping chasms in her education. Having failed to read much or widely, she assumes that information those of us who read history were familiar with must simply be forbidden or censored. This explains much about Owens’ trajectory. Because she lacks any coherent intellectual foundation, each new documentary or book or internet rabbit hole immediately occupies an enormous amount of space in her mind. In a matter of weeks, her passion will change, and she will be rejiggering her entire worldview in order to accommodate this new influx of information. Candace Owens does not know what she does not know, and she does not know what she will firmly believe next. 

Owens is a digital native living in the eternal present of cyberspace and is constantly shocked to discover things that happened before she did. Thus, her audience is treated each week to the Candace Owens ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ version of history, and she has made herself an easy mark for internet conspiracy theorists, who happily feed her information that she then covers with breathless outrage on her podcast. One of her favourite clips is of Andrew Tate declaring that he rejects “data” because he “just knows things.” That one made her announce that she had been checking out flat-earthism because she’s open to anything and to reiterate her belief that the moon landing “is a lie.”

Unsurprisingly, a quick scan of the comments under any of Candace Owens’s posts or videos reveals thousands of comments featuring the vilest antisemitism. Owens has stated that she refuses to “disavow” anyone—which is fine, but she is also not correcting their interpretation of her views. Most authors, if they discovered their work was being misinterpreted by a significant portion of their audience, would seek to rectify that. Owens does not. Many of her fans—including more prominent antisemites—are certain that she is one of them, and she has deliberately done nothing to disabuse them of that notion. Many of her other fans insist that she merely has an open mind—but as G.K. Chesterton once observed: “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” 

Considering her short public career thus far, there is good reason to fear what Candace Owens might shut her mind on next—especially because when she does so, she is unlikely to shut her mouth. Even her own father-in-law was concerned enough about many of her views to release a public statement repudiating them in strong and eloquent terms. Her obvious talent as a broadcaster combined with her equally obvious ignorance brings to mind what A.E. Housman once said of a critic: “Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.” 

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