The gnostic followers of Candace Owens

“Man is the rational animal,” or so we like to believe. Yet time and again, we are reminded that people will behave in the most irrational ways, for reasons that aren’t even transparent to themselves. There’s no better current illustration of this fact than the Candace Owens phenomenon.

Since the murder of Charlie Kirk, Owens has spun out a web of increasingly deranged conspiracy theories, accusing everyone in Kirk’s inner circle up to and including his wife. Yet Owens’s followers haven’t been driven away. In fact, their ranks have swelled. Almost a year after the bloody crime, her cynical content-harvesting continues to rack up millions of views, and with them who knows how many dollars.

The case against alleged killer Tyler Robinson is overwhelming, and the public was allowed to see much of the evidence presented at his recently closed preliminary hearing. Security cameras tracked his movements to the minute as he positioned himself on the fatally unsecured roof. We heard video testimony from the young man he was living with, who chose to cooperate with the authorities. We have the word of his own heartbroken parents, who turned him in. Most damningly, we have DNA evidence from the murder weapon. 

Despite all of this and more, with abundant evidence contradicting various direct claims made by Owens, she hasn’t missed a beat. She continues to maintain that the Truth is much bigger than Tyler Robinson, a grand plot involving everyone from the FBI to the state of Israel. People continue to believe her, and Kirk’s legacy continues to be mired in bitter infighting. Kirk’s former head of security, Brian Harpole, is currently suing Owens for defamation, including claims that he was somehow involved in this imaginary plot. A trial date has not yet been set.

Who are Owens’s fans? The uncomfortable truth is that many of them are just ordinary people—well-adjusted, well-off, good parents, good neighbors. People like this Instagram mom giving a breathless breakdown of Owens’s 4.5-hour appearance on the Shawn Ryan show. In the mom’s words, Ryan was “learning” all sorts of things that to Candace fans like her will be “common knowledge.” As her summary progresses, she chillingly starts to mimic Candace’s aggressive hostility towards Erika Kirk, relishing it like the twist in a crime thriller. It is as if these people are no longer real to her, but characters in a novel whose pages she can’t stop turning.

One helpful way to frame this phenomenon is that Owens and other conspiracy mongers are offering their base a kind of post-modern gnostic wisdom: a completely inverted “truth” that’s received as capital “T” truth by people who regard themselves as a superior elect—insiders with special knowledge. Many factors play into this, including a broad suspicion of “establishment” narratives that unfortunately has some justification. The Instagram mom declares that we are “slaves to the machine,” that every institution has betrayed and lied to us. In the Information Age, the truth will out, like it did in the fallout from COVID-19. From such elite failures, some people have taken the lesson that any alternative narrative of reality will do, however fantastically unmoored from the evidence. But all they have done is replace the old untrustworthy “experts” with new ones, equally untrustworthy.

Conspiracism can also appear as a tempting, toxic way to cope with the problem of evil. For some people, it is easier to handle things like a failing economy, failed wars, and violent murders by fitting it all into one seamless grand narrative with a convenient scapegoat—Israel, for example, or the Jewish people generally. We see this temptation both in the “mommy sleuths” who follow Owens and in disaffected young men who follow voices like Tucker Carlson.

On a smaller scale, figures like Joel Webbon or Calvin Robinson are copying their work with a distasteful “Christian” gloss, unfortunately drawing views from churchgoing followers. Given how many times their own positions have shape-shifted, it’s unclear whether any of these figures actually buy their own product, or if they’re just in it for the clicks. The important thing is that people keep clicking.

This is difficult territory to navigate for parents, pastors, and others who are not “very online” but find themselves attempting to guide people who are. Sadly, they too may fall under suspicion as representative voices of those failed, untrustworthy institutional structures, and sadly there have been those in church spaces who earned that suspicion. But in the end, it is a person’s free choice whether to seek truth impartially or follow voices telling him only what he wants to hear. One hopes that long after Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and friends have passed their sell-by dates, people will have the humility to recognize who is still around, still caring for their souls.