Candace Owens

Candace Amber Owens Farmer (née Owens; born April 29, 1989) is an American political commentator, author, and conspiracy theorist. Her political positions have mostly been described as conservative or far-right. She has promoted conspiracy theories on a wide range of subjects throughout her career. Since 2024, she has espoused antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Owens has gained recognition for her conservative activism—despite being initially critical of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party—as well as her criticism of Black Lives Matter. Owens was the communications director for the conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA from 2017 to 2019. In 2018, Owens co-founded the BLEXIT Foundation along with former Tucson police officer Brandon Tatum. After working for PragerU, in 2021 Owens joined The Daily Wire and began hosting Candace, a political talk show. She was dismissed in March 2024 following a series of comments regarded as antisemitic, and months of tensions with co-host Ben Shapiro and other Daily Wire staff.

Owens has expressed skepticism about the extent of white supremacy's impact on society and has voiced opposition to both COVID-19 lockdowns and COVID-19 vaccines. Owens is a critic of Israel and was increasingly critical of the country's ongoing Gaza war.

Candace Amber Owens was born on April 29, 1989, in White Plains, New York, and grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. She was raised mostly by her mother and grandparents from around the age of 11 or 12, after her parents divorced. She is the third of four children. Her paternal grandfather was Robert Owens, an African American who was born in North Carolina. Owens is also of Caribbean American heritage through her grandmother, who is originally from Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands.

She is a graduate of Stamford High School in Connecticut. In 2007, while a 17-year-old senior at Stamford High School, Owens received three racist death threat voicemail messages, totaling two minutes, from a group of white male classmates which included the son of then-mayor and future Democratic governor Dannel Malloy. Joshua Starr, the city's superintendent of schools, listened to the voicemail messages and said that they were "horrendous". Owens's family sued the Stamford Board of Education in federal court, alleging that the city did not protect her rights, resulting in a $37,500 settlement in January 2008.

Owens pursued an undergraduate degree in journalism at the University of Rhode Island. During her first year, she was named to the University of Rhode Island Dean's List for the Fall 2007 semester. In 2022, she completed the requirements for a bachelor's degree at the University of Rhode Island under the name Candace A. Farmer, her married name at the time, and was listed among the university's graduates. After leaving college, she worked as an intern for Vogue magazine in New York. She took a job in 2012 as an administrative assistant for a private equity firm in Manhattan, later moving up to become its vice president of administration.

In 2015, Owens was CEO of Degree180, a marketing agency that offered consultation, production, and planning services that included a blog on a variety of topics written by Owens and other commentators. In a 2015 column that Owens wrote for the site, she criticized conservative Republicans, writing about the "bat-shit-crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party"; she also added that "The good news is, they will eventually die off (peacefully in their sleep, we hope), and then we can get right on with the OBVIOUS social change that needs to happen, IMMEDIATELY." She was also critical of Donald Trump. In 2016, the blog featured an article mocking Donald Trump's penis size.

Owens launched SocialAutopsy.com in 2016, a website she said would expose bullies on the Internet by tracking their digital footprint. The site would have solicited users to take screenshots of offensive posts and send them to the website, where they would be categorized by the user's name. She used crowdfunding on Kickstarter for the website. The proposal was immediately controversial, drawing criticism that Owens was de-anonymizing (doxing) Internet users and violating their privacy. According to The Daily Dot, "People from all sides of the anti-harassment debate were quick to criticize the database, calling it a public shaming list that would encourage doxing and retaliatory harassment." Both conservatives and progressives condemned the website.