“I just feel really awful. I feel guilty.”
For the first time, Candace Owens—known for her controversial views and hosting one of the most popular podcasts in the United States with over 35 million social media followers—seemed to have a change of heart and sought to apologize.
But who was she apologizing to?
It wasn’t to the Jewish community, whom she has criticized for personal gain; nor to Israel, which she has provocatively referred to as the “synagogue of Satan”; nor to Holocaust survivors, whose experiences she has questioned; nor to Erika Kirk, widow of the late Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, whom Owens baselessly implicated in her husband’s death. It wasn’t to Brigitte Macron, the First Lady of France, who, alongside her husband, has taken legal action against Owens for unfounded claims that Mrs. Macron was born male. Nor was it to the reasonable people she often offends.
Instead, Owens offered her apologies to perhaps the most unexpected individual: Hunter Biden.
During an episode of The Candace Owens Show streamed on YouTube on Sunday, which has since amassed nearly 2 million views, Owens admitted to feeling “terrible” about her past treatment of Hunter Biden. Biden, a recovering addict who fathered a child outside of marriage and faced federal tax charges, later received a pardon from his father, President Biden, toward the end of his term.
And what was Candace’s sin?
She had used the sordid contents of Hunter’s laptop – all those photos and videos of him naked, smoking crack, cavorting with prostitutes – to mock him.
In an interview on The Candace Owens Show, Candace confessed to feeling ‘terrible’ about her prior treatment of her guest, former First Son Hunter Biden
Owens – an antisemite and conspiracy theorist who hosts one of America’s most-popular podcasts and boasts a social media followership of more than 35 million people – had a change of heart and wanted to apologize
‘I just saw you as a caricature,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Before our eyes, a mainstream figure banished to the fringe is reaching for rehabilitation, to be normalized anew – and she is hardly unaware of her prospects.
While many will regard Owens’s sit-down with Hunter Biden as a convention of dunces, two rejects from the Big Time finding common cause, the event raises the question: Who else with a name prominent in Democratic Party circles will be next?
‘Owens is one of the break-out media stars of our era,’ writes Sarah Longwell, the anti-Trump consultant who founded The Bulwark, the conservative opinion site, and conducts weekly focus groups with voters across the political spectrum.
‘[Owens’s] influence is increasingly not confined to MAGA Republicans,’ writes Longwell. ‘In fact, over the last five years, few individuals come up more regularly than her as non-politicians who people see as a possible future president.’
The Real Candace O, as her X handle identifies her, as a potential presidential candidate?
Impossible?
‘[Owen’s] influence is increasingly not confined to MAGA Republicans,’ writes Longwell. ‘In fact, over the last five years, few individuals come up more regularly than her as non-politicians who people see as a possible future president’
Owens has accused Erika Kirk, widow of slain TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, of complicity in her husband’s murder (Pictured: The Kirks in Jerusalem in 2019)
To discount Owens’s chances out of hand is to ignore the lessons of modern history. Ronald Reagan was once dismissed as unfit for high office simply because he had been a film actor; ditto for one of his Republican successors in the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
More recently, the bulk of polling organizations insisted until 9:30 pm Eastern Time on Election Night 2016 that Donald Trump, a real estate developer and businessman-turned-reality show host, could not possibly defeat Hillary Clinton.
Of course, the conduct of foreign policy, in which Owens has no experience, could prove especially challenging for an American head of state banned from the capitals of overseas allies. Both Australia and New Zealand, citing Owens’s Holocaust denialism and propensity to ‘incite discord,’ determined that she failed the ‘character test’ and denied her a visa for speaking engagements there.
For many voters, as Longwell’s focus groups have shown, Owens’s baggage poses no problem at all.
‘Candace Owens is great,’ purred Mycal of North Carolina, who defected from Biden-Harris to support Trump-Vance. ‘I would vote for her in a minute.’
‘If we would’ve swapped out Candace for Kamala,’ agreed Daniela, another North Carolinian in the same focus group, ‘they would’ve had this in the bag.’
Earlier this year, when Gen-Z women in Longwell’s focus groups were asked to identify someone they would be excited to vote for in 2028, Kim from Virginia knew she would take ‘flak’ for replying: ‘I am a Candace Owens fan. I think she’s a very smart lady. I would be interested to see her give it a shot.’
Nancy from Minnesota agreed: ‘Candace Owens would be an awesome president… If she were to run, I think it would take a lot for me to not vote for her.’
How could American voters see presidential timber in a woman who loudly proclaims that they are all ‘ruled by satanic pedophiles who work for Israel’?
Answer: Not all do. ‘She’s a whack job,’ said Rachel, a two-time Trump voter from Louisiana who participated in the focus groups.
Longwell and The Bulwark may have been making mischief entitling her analysis, ‘We’re Not Talking Enough About President Candace Owens.’
As a conservative MAGA foe, Longwell harbors an interest in promoting Owens because the podcaster’s salience and toxicity – in many but not all precincts – would likely exacerbate existing schisms in the movement and split the MAGA vote.
Under this reasoning, Owens’s candidacy might help a figure more broadly accepted within the party, such as Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), become the standard-bearer – an outcome Never-Trumpers would prefer to a ticket led by Vice President Vance.
Another scenario, far from far-fetched, would see Owens running for president absent any expectation of being elected – and without seeking a major party nomination.
Such larks can have real-world consequences. When conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr. launched his quixotic run for mayor of New York City in 1965, he ran not as a Democrat or Republican but under the banner of the newly-created Conservative Party. Asked the first thing he’d do if he won, WFB quipped: ‘Demand a recount!’ He garnered 13 percent of the vote.
At 37, Owens, a onetime intern at Vogue, seems to be doing better than ever. Between Candace’s media empire and the work of her husband, George Farmer, a British-born businessman, her family is reported to enjoy a net worth of more than $200 million. The speakers bureau that represents Candace charges up to $100,000 for her to appear in live settings.
Former President Ronald Reagan was once dismissed as unfit for high office simply because he had been a film actor (Pictured: Reagan in the Oval Office in 1982)
Between Candace’s media empire and the work of her husband, George Farmer, a British-born businessman, her family is reported to enjoy a net worth of more than $200 million
Owens regards that her success came because, not in spite, of her independence.
After she broke with Mr. Trump over the Iran War, a rebellion in which she was joined by other disaffected MAGA supporters – such as Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, two other top-rated podcasters – the president lashed out at all three on Truth Social, calling them ‘stupid people… thrown off Television… Now they think they get some ‘clicks’ because they have Third Rate Podcasts, but nobody’s talking about them.’ Their views, he added, ‘are the opposite of MAGA.’
In her own mind, however, Owens has escaped three theatres of oppression: first, the progressive left, where she felt stereotyped, taken for granted (‘If you are born Black, and you don’t accept your natural status as a victim, then the validity of your Blackness is immediately called into question’); then the conventional right, epitomized by her former employer, Ben Shapiro’s Real Daily Wire, which fired Owens, amid a torrent of anti-Israel rhetoric, in March 2024; and lastly, MAGA, where President Trump has made her persona non-grata at least to the movement’s leadership.
For the rise of Owens and her ilk, some will be inclined to blame President Trump, another savvy user of social media who–while never peddling the antisemitism Owens serves up–has trafficked in conspiracy theory and untruths.
‘This is a bit of ‘Trump reaps what he sows,’ said GOP strategist Erin Maguire on Hill TV. ‘He built his brand on being a big, brash, outspoken voice. And in that, he’s helped bring up other big, brash, opinionated people.’
For the rise of Owens and her ilk, some will be inclined to blame President Trump, another savvy user of social media who–while never peddling the antisemitism Owens serves up–has trafficked in conspiracy theory and untruths
That much is true. But the surge in antisemitism, and the basis for Owens’s popularity – or for that of Nick Fuentes, another antisemitic podcaster with a huge audience – owe to factors much older than the Trump phenomenon.
A partisan might blame Donald Trump for these trends but an honest historian or sociologist will not.
‘Antisemitic expression has exploded in volume and intensity in the last two decades, particularly in the last ten years,’ one scholar has noted.
That scholar was Daniel Goldhagen, writing in The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism (2013). The explosion could be seen, Goldhagen reported, ‘not merely in select countries but around the world, and especially unexpectedly in Western countries…in the halls of parliament and in the streets. Among elites and common people. In public media, places of worship, and in the privacy of homes. Where Jews live and where they do not. It has done so with classical tropes and with new ones, in long familiar forums and in recently invented ones.’
Sounds familiar, no? And yet, when The Devil That Never Dies appeared, Barack Obama was in the Oval Office – and no one thought to lay blame for the explosion in antisemitism at his feet.
What makes Owens a new phenomenon is not the technology that disseminates her lunacy, but the singularity of her person. There have been famous antisemites before, from Father Coughlin to Kanye West, whom Owens defends; but never before, at least not since the propaganda broadcasts of Tokyo Rose in World War II, have Americans beheld such bile from so beguiling a source.
That the ugliness of antisemitism could come from a beautiful woman – a Black woman, at that! – to the diseased cast of mind that is susceptible to Jew hatred, is beyond novel; it is downright exciting.
James Rosen is chief Washington correspondent at Newsmax and author, most recently, of Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986-2001
