Candace Owens' Conspiracy Theories Debunked
For the past few weeks, the X-sphere has been bombarded by antisemitic conspiracy theorist Candace Owens, spewing out daily doses of craziness. Each day gets more fanciful than the one before, prompting many of her former fans who in shock ask, “What happened to Candace Owens???”
Who is Candace Owens?
Owens is a conservative political activist and podcaster who most recently worked for the Daily Wire. After a very public parting of ways and termination of her contract in March 2024, she went independent.
Owens then began to peddle increasingly unhinged antisemitic and other conspiracy theories. Her main complaints mirror classic antisemitic tropes: Jews/Zionists/Mossad control the world, the media, the banking system, etc.
She claims she cannot even talk about “Zionists and Jews” anymore without fear of being killed and eagerly anticipates the “beginning of the end of the Zionist empire.”
Aligning herself with antisemites like Kanye West and alleged felons like accused child trafficker Andrew Tate, she is occupied by various conspiracy theories (most connected to the Jews) that more or less boil down to:
The world is controlled by a wealthy cult of Satanists (one of Owens’ code words for Jews) who engage in pedophilia and blood rituals. She refers to the cult as “Frankists” (another one of her code words for Jews) and believes they are connected to Freud, psychoanalysis, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and most other established institutions in America. This secret society is connected to the Israeli Mossad and the U.S. government, who are both acting maliciously and using their influence to achieve their corrupt agendas and evade all consequences.
In an ideal world, these disproven conspiracy theories would be dismissed as the musings of an insane person, and everyone would move on. But, due to Owens’ fame and large social media following (5.5 million on X alone), her voice continues to be amplified.
Here are of some of Owens’ favorite conspiracy theories – some originate in her imagination, some in the dark corners of the web and some occasionally contain a kernel of truth.
One of Owens' regular tropes involves questioning and belittling the significance of the Holocaust. Antisemites recognize that complete Holocaust denial is unacceptable. Therefore, they will downgrade the horrors of the Holocaust to make Jews seem overly sensitive (and ultimately, liars).
Holocaust denial and trivialization is a form of antisemitism that negates the fact that Jews were the victims of the Holocaust. Rather, it presents Jews as deceiving the world. According to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, “Holocaust denial is an updated version of an alleged Jewish conspiracy in which Jews use lies and extortion to gain advantage of everyone else.”
This is precisely what Owens evokes when talking about Jews and the Holocaust. For example:
Discussing how many Germans died in the war
It is estimated that 4.2 million Germans died in World War II that Germany started. In contrast, six million Jews were deliberately slaughtered by the Nazis in their project of ethnic cleansing.
Questioning facts like the experiments of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele
Josef Mengele, a Nazi doctor at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, conducted inhumane experiments on Jewish prisoners. He had a well-documented affinity for experimenting on twin children because he thought they were ideal test subjects in his field of interest, eugenics. His barbaric experiments exposed around 3,000 children to diseases, torture and disfigurement, and in most cases, concluded with their murder.
Obsessing about the Gulags, the Soviet prison camps
The Gulags were forced labor camps where, beginning in 1929, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin sent dissidents. Owens claims that because there were Jews in Stalin's government, Jews invented concentration camps – not the Nazis.
The earliest internment of a civilian population is accredited to the United States in 1838, when they rounded up members of the Cherokee tribes from the southeast U.S., forcing them into prison camps before relocating them to Oklahoma.
Central to the conspiracy theory that Jews control the world lies the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. Allegedly working in cahoots with the CIA, Owens and other conspiracy theorists often blame the two agencies for horrific world events.
Claiming that the Mossad was behind 9/11 is a conspiracy theory based on reports that a text message warning about the attack was sent to two workers at Odigo, a U.S. text messaging company with offices in Israel at the time.
The conspiracy theory is also based on an alleged “account” that Israelis were seen celebrating outside of the World Trade Center.
Most of these conspiracies originate in neo-Nazi online propaganda, aiming to push the antisemitic trope of Jewish people controlling the world. There is no evidence to support either of these two claims.
Owens has a tendency to align herself with people on the fringes of society. She is friends with the notorious Tate brothers, whose homes were recently raided on suspicion of sex trafficking and rape of minors.
Tristan and Andrew Tate are controversial personalities, social media influencers and self-described misogynists. They promote “toxic masculinity,” violence toward women and exploiting women for sex work. They are currently facing trial for sex trafficking, rape and forming an organized criminal group in Romania. In the UK, they are facing charges of human trafficking and sexual assault.
Like the Tate brothers, Kanye (Ye) West is an eccentric celebrity surrounded by controversy. He was accused of antisemitism in 2022 when he posted antisemitic comments on X (then Twitter) and was recorded praising Hitler.
West lost sponsorship deals and faced harsh condemnation in the media in response to his posts (as well as other offensive posts not related to Jews).
Owens tried to downplay West’s antisemitism, emphasizing that West was wrongly attacked. This makes way for the rhetoric (see above) that the Jews are overly sensitive, control the media and control Hollywood.
West’s tweet that received the most attention read, “I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” DEFCON 3 is a rank used by the U.S. military to indicate a significant risk of an imminent attack.
A common issue with conspiracy theorists is that they read one book, assume it is correct and extrapolate from the book onto unrelated matters.
Owens talks about books by Gershom Sholem and David Bakan, both Jewish academics who studied Jewish mysticism. She claims to derive some of her bizarre theories from these books. By emphasizing that the authors are Jewish, she claims legitimacy to her antisemitic conspiracy theories.
According to Jewish tradition, mystical Jewish texts are considered extremely complicated, difficult to comprehend and must be studied by Torah scholars over the age of 40. It is ridiculous that Owens claims to understand anything about Jewish mysticism after reading two books.
Gershom Sholem was considered an expert on Sabbateansim, a movement behind the false Messiah Sabbetai Zevi. Zevi caused upheaval in several Jewish communities before converting to Islam. Sholem wrote about Frankism, a fringe offshoot of the Sabbatean sect founded by Jacob Frank in the mid-18th century.
Mainstream Judaism ostracized Frank for his heretical beliefs and practices. The obscure sect he created was based on rejecting the central tenets of Judaism. Some accounts say Frank converted to Islam while living in the Ottoman Empire. He later converted to Roman Catholicism and underwent baptism in Warsaw.
Ultimately, the entire sect was baptized and scattered throughout Poland and Bohemia. They gradually transformed from feigned to real Catholics, and their descendants merged with the surrounding Christian population.
Like the infamous antisemitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Frankist conspiracy is a classic white supremacist theory that evokes the antisemitic trope of secret Jewish groups trying to take over the world.
Even though Frankism existed once and was started by a Jew, nothing about Frankism has anything to do with Judaism. Aside from historians, few Jews have heard of Frankism and have no idea what she is talking about.
Connecting this now-extinct radical sect to Jews today is antisemitic and is intended to demonize Jews and associate them with blood libels of satanic rituals and pedophilia.
Considering its mission to fight antisemitism, it’s no surprise that antisemites like to demonize the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
A Jewish German immigrant to the U.S. and lawyer by trade, Sigmund Livingston founded the ADL in 1913 in response to antisemitic stereotypes and bigotry pervasive in American society at the time. Some claim that the lynching of southern Jew Leo Frank triggered Livingston into action.
Owens has claimed that Leo Frank was from a Frankist family (for a description of Frankism, see above). Other than the last name Frank, it is unclear how she made this connection. According to historians, Frankists assimilated into Christian society (most likely by the late 1800s). In addition, considering the fact that Frank is not an uncommon German and French Jewish last name, it does not make sense for a Jewish-American born in Texas to be a descendant of Jacob Frank.
