Candace Owens: The Attention Economy’s Perfect Monster
Forged in outrage, fed by algorithms, and now being sued by France.
Welcome to the era where facts are optional, truth is tribal, and Brigitte Macron is apparently a man.
That last bit, by the way, comes courtesy of Candace Owens, the Internet's favourite chaos goblin. In her latest bid for attention, Owens released an eight-part series accusing the French First Lady of being secretly male, incestuous, and part of a CIA mind-control plot. The Macrons are now suing her for defamation in the state of Delaware.
But who is Candace Owens, exactly? And how did she become a political voice with millions of followers and get a seat at the culture war table?
Let's investigate, carefully, and with gloves.
Who is Candace Owens?
She's what happens when the attention economy collides with a media-savvy narcissist. Owens launched her career as a conservative firebrand by weaponising her race against progressive orthodoxy. Here was a black woman calling out Black Lives Matter and explaining how the left is the real racist. That's interesting, edgy and worth thinking about. It's also marketable – and the white, male, libertarian-leaning market ate it up.
But what started as political contrarianism soon metastasised into a full-blown conspiracy content machine. Vaccines, trans rights, George Floyd, the World Economic Forum, the Jews, and now Brigitte Macron. Owens doesn't offer arguments about these contentious and often very complex issues. She throws confident, sharp opinions into the social media feed like a grenade, laying waste to nuance and ambiguity.
The pattern is predictable and takes the following form:
Find the consensus
Invert it
Monetise the outrage
When she defended Hitler's domestic policies in 2019, she didn't make a gaffe. This was a business decision. When she called the COVID vaccine a "sinister plot" despite Trump endorsing it, she was merely reading her audience.
What does she actually believe?
It doesn't matter what she believes because Candace Owens is not offering up thoughtful opinions like a student at a seminar. She's a heat-seeking missile in search of controversy, and she knows how to ride the algorithm. She's also a case study in audience capture.
In the early days, she was pitched as a voice of reason on the right: anti-woke, pro-Western, brash but principled. But as her audience shifted from centre-right to conspiratorial hard-right, so did she. The transformation from commentator to culture war grifter has been seamless, and looked at purely in careerist terms, we're watching a pro at work. And the work is not so much one of persuasion as of performance. We’re not watching a debate. This is a show, and the more outrageous the plot twist, the better the ratings.
Watch her evolution: In 2018, she was debating campus free speech. By 2020, she was questioning George Floyd's death. By 2023, she was exploring the "truth" about dinosaurs and flat earth theory. Each pivot perfectly timed to her audience's descent down the rabbit hole.
Why does she matter?
Candace Owens is the model agitator in a culture where truth is just one narrative among many. Her job isn't to inform a thoughtful audience but to entertain her tribe and enrage everyone else. She plays the part of the fearless truth-teller, standing up to elite hypocrisy, while peddling her own brand of ideological theatre and borderline libel. The reason it works is that being wrong with conviction is no longer a liability but an opportunity. It's the business model of a distinct form of online entertainment.
More importantly, she matters because she's not alone. She's part of an ecosystem — alongside Alex Jones's spiritual heirs, QAnon prophets, and a thousand smaller grifters — that has discovered something profound: You can build an empire on the rubble of shared reality. Her followers don't just consume content; they inhabit an alternate universe where every institution is corrupt, every tragedy is staged, and only Candace sees clearly.
How did we get here?
Ernest Hemingway once observed that bankruptcy happens gradually, then all at once. That's how our relationship with the internet turned from a psychological experiment into a pathology. We replaced editors with engagement metrics, then mistook identity for insight. We trained ourselves to react rather than reflect before arriving at a digital infrastructure where saying the French president's wife is a man gets you more attention than a genocide in Africa. Candace Owens understood this all too well. There is a powerful intelligence at work here, and she understands better than most – and it's a competitive field – how to hijack the culture and monetise it.
The formula is elegant in its simplicity: Controversy drives engagement. Engagement drives ad revenue. Ad revenue drives more controversy. It's a perpetual motion machine powered by human psychology — our inability to look away from a car crash, our desperate need to feel smarter than "them," our addiction to righteous anger. Owens didn't create this system. She just perfected it.
So what now?
The Macrons may win the lawsuit, perhaps even extract an apology, but it won't change a thing. Owens will wear it like a badge of honour, turn it into content, and watch the Patreon numbers climb.
Whatever happens, it will simply bring more attention to Candace Owens, which is the whole point of the game. Furthermore, being sued by the French President is proof you've rattled the right people, hit a nerve, maybe even landed on the truth. So begins the latest episode in the never-ending story of "me versus the system." And the system plays its part.
The real tragedy isn't that Owens exists — every era has its demagogues. It's that we've built an information architecture that rewards her behaviour. We've created a world where the most efficient path to influence runs straight through the sewer. And we keep clicking.
In summary
Candace Owens is the attention economy's perfect monster. A woman forged in the fires of outrage, sharpened by the algorithm and anointed by an audience that doesn't want truth, just someone who'll sneer at the other side with enough confidence to sound like gospel. This is politics as entertainment, and it's exactly what we ordered.
But here's the thing about monsters: They only exist because we feed them. Every hate-watch, every quote-tweet, every outraged share is another meal. We know this, and we do it anyway. Because in the attention economy, we're not just the audience — we're the product, the promoter, and the mark, all rolled into one. Candace Owens isn't the disease. She's just the symptom we can't stop scratching.