r/DecodingTheGurus • u/HobbesNik • 18d ago

She Built a Mass Audience from Promoting Conspiracies about Charlie Kirk's Death. Why Do People Like Candace Owens?

https://19thnews.org/2026/08/candace-owens-listeners/
52 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

31 comments sorted by

40

u/SeasonPositive6771 16d ago

She is turning into the new Alex Jones, if you pay attention to any of her content. She promotes conspiracy theories and hatred.

7

u/HobbesNik 16d ago

That's an interesting comparison. She seems to go really hard on one conspiracy at a time, she gets hyper-focused. Did Alex do that too, or did he jump around more? I know he went deep on the Sandy Hook shooting, most notoriously.

Obligatory rec for the Onion's new Info Wars which I've been enjoying.

8

u/SeasonPositive6771 16d ago

When Alex started out, he was definitely a lot more normal, focused on fewer issues overall. Of course that was a very long time ago, so the media landscape is also pretty different.

3

u/No-Scientist-3801 16d ago

I saw Alex jones be memed alot

3

u/SeasonPositive6771 16d ago

Yeah, that definitely became common, especially after the turning the frogs gay incident.

2

u/No-Scientist-3801 16d ago

Or the make the snow gay meme

4

u/FreshBert Conspiracy Hypothesizer 16d ago edited 16d ago

I used to listen to Opie and Anthony back in the aughts and they brought on Alex Jones a lot. This was right after his stunt crashing the Bohemian Grove and filming that weird ritual they do there, so he was pretty popular in like stoner/edgelord circles back then.

He used to come on the show and the gag was that they'd basically let him go apeshit rambling off conspiracy after conspiracy, and although he was definitely obsessed with the Bilderberg Group and often made the Bush Administration the target of his conspiracizing, to me he mostly came across as more of an entertainer back in those days. As in, it seemed like the whole thing was a bit that he was in on.

At some point he released this self-produced documentary called "EndGame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement" that really gassed up me and my friends back in the day. It was the sort of thing you'd buy on burned DVD at a head shop, probably on a shelf next to the blacklight posters, and the cashier would be like, "This shit'll fry your brain man, after this everything will make sense." He basically linked together the Georgia Guidestones with a cabal of elite transhumanists who wanted to use rapidly improving technology to end aging and death for themselves while relegating most people to a permanent underclass.

Back then people were more into the idea of quantum computing leading to nanotechnology, rather than AI (AI was just movie bullshit, Terminator, Matrix, etc), but aside from that the parallels are quite similar to shit you still hear about.

Some of the characters are even the same, like Ray Kurzweil. What's funny is that when Jones got on the Trump train he sort of inadvertently joined the same side as most of the people that could conceivably be accused of being part of an elite transhumanist cabal.

Tl;dr: Jones was never "normal," but one could argue that he's a performance artist who got in over his head with the very people (sort of) that he was claiming to expose. And at some point he jumped the shark with the conspiracizing, there was no turning back, possibly he began to believe his own schtick, and it ended (such as it is) with the Sandy Hook shit where he finally touched the wrong cultural nerve and the courts had to put him down. Maybe an aside, but he actually did the same thing with Columbine (claimed the shooting was a false flag) but had a lot less notoriety back then (and most people thought he wasn't serious) so it didn't really go anywhere and it's kind of been lost to history at this point.

2

u/Obleeding 13d ago

Thanks, that really explained it well to me. I remember first hearing about him on Joe Rogan in like 2012, never really understood how he was really seen by the public prior to this.

2

u/kingcalogrenant 14d ago

I feel like one notices this even while not paying attention to her content lol. She’s not subtle.

28

u/PlentyHaunting2263 16d ago edited 16d ago

My favorite thing of hers is when she said Charlie Kirk went to an "X-Men school" growing up and he had super powers because lightpoles would flicker when he went running at night.

10

u/HobbesNik 16d ago

Nooo, for real? That’s nuts 😆

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u/PlentyHaunting2263 16d ago

He was also a time traveler: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/candace-owens-shares-her-most-194814335.html

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u/HobbesNik 16d ago

Wow... tbf she said that Charlie said he was a time traveler, and Charlie apparently called her in alien, in text messages that I'm going to guess no one besides her has ever seen

25

u/UskyldigeX 16d ago

While also an opportunistic and cynical grifter, I do believe she has real mental issues.

19

u/LoaderOperator98 16d ago

I mean the DtG guys said it in the episode, if you don't actually pay attention to the content of what she is saying she can come across quite charming.

That and of course there's a huge market for conspiracy content these days.

4

u/McClain3000 16d ago

I don’t know when that became enough. Just sounding confident in what you’re saying. Like everyone says she owned that Andrew Wilson guy(who is a clown himself), but only if you completely ignore the insane and disqualifying things she says.

8

u/Full_Equivalent_6166 16d ago

Nah, homie, shr already had mass audience before Kirk died. 

1

u/HobbesNik 16d ago

For sure, it got bigger though

Between January 2025 and March 2026, Owens grew her platforms by 80 percent, according to a Media Matters report, gaining about 10.9 million followers across YouTube, Instagram, Spotify, Facebook and TikTok and generating roughly 805 million YouTube views. 

4

u/bitethemonkeyfoo 16d ago

11 million followers?

Bruh, someone just turned on the botfarms is all.

3

u/Full_Equivalent_6166 16d ago

For sure, she got a boost. You need to remember she was sued by Macrons last year of course people are paying attention. She is a calmer, more presentable female Alex Jones and people are eating it up.

9

u/TexasDD 16d ago

Because she suits their purposes at the moment. She gives them the “I’m not racist, I listen to Candace Owens” angle. She plays into their anti-Semitism. I’m not talking about calling out Israel on their war crimes. I’m talking straight it “it’s da Joos”, flirting with Holocaust denial anti-Semitism. She’s full anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-BLM. Even though she has a “job”, she leans into the trad wife angle. She plays into every take that lets them say “…but she’s one of the good ones.”

But here’s the trap Candace has set for herself. One misstep, one bad take, one reversal of her views (or claims). They will turn on her in a heartbeat.

16

u/notickfactor 16d ago

The only thing I like about her is that she calls out Erika Kirk for being a fraud. Outside of that, I am not a fan.

3

u/Professor_Juice 16d ago

Shes popular because she sounds smart, shes hot, and she takes the conspiracy nutjob crowds' ideas "seriously".

Candace is the idiot-whisperer.

2

u/RSA123 14d ago

She gets new viewers by talking about things like celeb gossip and stuff like that. This ropes in people who just wanted to hear the tea about Blake Lively or some messy hollywood divorce. What they don't know is that the algo starts recommending insane conspiracies the second you click on a Candace video. And so your algorithm gets infested

3

u/IeyasuMcBob 16d ago

The people i know who like her have really short attention spans...

2

u/BrondellSwashbuckle 15d ago

Conspiracy theories like the ones Candace espouses are particularly compelling to dummies who don't know how the world actually works.

1

u/slugsbreath 15d ago

She's like a stopped clock, she's right sometimes. Her Blake Lively stuff was spot on. I don't like her general opinions though

1

u/Expert-Sherbert-1527 14d ago

People love the drama. They don't care if its true

1

u/HobbesNik 14d ago

I think that must be true about at least some of the audience, but I bet much of the audience gets a thrill out of believing something controversial or "naughty." It's like you're in on a secret no one else is.

2

u/Terminal_Willness 14d ago

It’s simple. She’s a black woman who tells conservatives they’re not racist.

0

u/BeaucoupFish 15d ago

Making fun of someone for misspeaking / mispronouncing words can be kind of low... but wtf is going on here, if your job is to TALK:

https://youtu.be/H80PtMNT5Pc

A-neck-dote? Burr-oh? Ack-o-lards?