Candace Owens, Real Conspiracy Theorist, Not "Performance Artist"
please excuse this
Conspiracy thinking is as old as politics. The state names an enemy inside its own house — real or invented — and uses the accusation to discipline or crush dissent (e.g. McCarthyism, the Palmer Raids, the Alien and Sedition Acts). The suspicion travels downward. This is not a “culture” though. It’s a reflex of power, and every government has reached for it at one time or another.
American Conspiracy Culture is a different thing. It’s a tradition — a specific one, with its own lineage, its own media, its own epistemological commitments, its own communities. This is the lineage that runs from the John Birch Society through Mae Brussell through Bill Cooper through Art Bell and Alex Jones to QAnon and Amy Carlson’s “Love Has Won” cult, rounding through the New Age, through shortwave radio, through Ruby Ridge and pamphlets and zines and bulletin board systems and Usenet newsgroups and Facebook and TikTok. In this tradition, the government is, typically, the conspirator: the deep state, the spooks, the Fed, the mainstream media, the Elites. The people telling these stories have always understood themselves as marginalized, and the conspiracy culture offered an explanation.
For decades the whole operation ran on an amateur media world of its own. None of it came anywhere near the White House briefing room — at least, not officially.
The distinction matters because the story of the Trump era is usually told as though conspiracy thinking migrated from the fringe to the center. This is obviously true but that analysis is incomplete. What actually happened is that a culture — one with its own traditions, internal logic, and habits of mind — got pulled into the orbit of state power on the record.
Conspiracy thinking can be deployed by anyone. Conspiracy culture carries commitments that make it ungovernable once it’s inside the building.
The two were never totally separate, and the relationship between them was more complicated than politicians borrowing a few lines from the fringe. The state didn’t just suppress conspiracy movements: it infiltrated and steered them. COINTELPRO wasn’t only about crushing dissent — it involved planting agents inside organizations, manufacturing front groups, forging letters, running provocateurs, and actively shaping the direction of movements from the inside. The FBI placed informants inside militia groups who sometimes pushed those groups toward more extreme positions.
The line between “destroying a movement” and “becoming part of a movement in order to control its direction” was one the government crossed routinely and deliberately.
This history lives in the bones of American Conspiracy Culture. The community knows it. And it gave rise to a fear that runs deeper than the worry that the government might come after you: the fear that the government might already be you. That the person next to you, the broadcaster you trust, the organization you joined, might be controlled opposition. That the apparatus of suspicion itself could be captured and redirected by the very power it was built to oppose.
That fear is the background radiation of everything that follows.
Politicians, for their part, played at being outsiders long before Trump. “Speaking from below” has always been partly a pose. But the cross-pollination maintained plausible deniability, and the two remained distinct enough to function on their own terms: one governed, and the other yapped from the margins.
During the Trump era, that separation collapsed – as left and liberal media loves to tell us. “Deep state,” “rigged systems,” “shadowy pedophile networks” — language that once came crackling through a shortwave at 2 a.m., and later, on websites like 4chan, started showing up in rally speeches, press conferences, and executive orders. What was once fringe mobilized, commercialized, and most importantly of all, acquired state power.
This is usually discussed as a problem of hypocrisy. How can people who blame the elites govern as elites? But hypocrisy is ordinary. The problem with conspiracy-as-governing-language is different, because the culture itself – not conspiracy thinking, but the tradition of American conspiracy culture – carries an epistemological promise that ordinary politics doesn’t: official authority cannot be trusted to define reality. You must look for yourself. You must do your own research. That promise is the source of its energy and the thing that makes it ungovernable once it gets inside the building. Conspiracy thinking can be turned on and off. Conspiracy culture is a worldview, and a worldview doesn’t take direction.
Once conspiracy talk becomes the way a government communicates, it needs rules about where suspicion can point. Aimed at Soros, at the press, at the approved list of villains, suspicion is encouraged, it’s insider talk, it shows you’re on the right team. But when the same instinct turns inward it becomes a five-alarm fire. It’s an enforcement problem. And it’s a problem unique to a governing language that promised its speakers they would never be managed — spoken to an audience that has documented reasons to believe that management happens from the inside.
In the dialect of conspiracy, “don’t question our allies” is confirmation that the allies are hiding something. The act of discipline confirms the worldview it’s trying to contain. And the audience doesn’t arrive at that interpretation from nowhere. It arrives with a memory.
The enforcement works on two levels.
The first is old-fashioned political gatekeeping. A broadcaster who goes after the right enemies gets the Fox hit and the party invites. The one who starts aiming at people on the protected list gets fired, sued, dropped, maybe even banned from entering a foreign country. This kind of policing is political. It runs on phone calls and lawyers. The second is the market. The conspiracy broadcaster who ratchets up gets more views, more subscribers, and critically, more money. The incentive only runs one way: hotter. This pressure is indifferent to who’s being accused. It doesn’t care about loyalty. It just wants escalation.
Political discipline tries to draw lines and the market immediately erases them, because every line is also a dare to cross it. The governing project wants directional suspicion. The market wants spectacle.
Then the culture itself wants to keep pulling the thread.
* * *
To understand how unstable this gets, it helps to notice that conspiracy culture now operates in several distinct modes at the same time.
The oldest is conspiracy as method. Bill Cooper is the clearest example. Cooper broadcast The Hour of the Time from a house on a hilltop in Eagar, Arizona — a ranch-style place he shared with his wife Annie, their daughters, and a Rottweiler named Crusher. His shows were a fucking slog: they went on for hours, built around long, rickety chains of evidence, some of it wrong, some of it unhinged, all of it painfully slow. The whole thing had the pacing of an obsessive hobbyist’s attic, not a TikTok.
I want to be careful here, because “method” doesn’t mean “correct.” Cooper published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Behold a Pale Horse — swapping “Sion” for “Zion” and insisting the real conspirators weren’t Jews, which didn’t stop the damage and didn’t make the text any less poisonous. He pushed a theory that the driver killed JFK. The method could produce garbage, and it often did (okay, I fell for the driver one, at a time…). What distinguished it was the relationship between the person and the material. Cooper treated conspiracy as an epistemological commitment, a way of processing the world that would take you wherever it took you, including and maybe even especially into delusion. You followed the thread even when it led somewhere ugly or incoherent, and you didn’t check the thread against your network first.
Cooper also saw, earlier than most, that the conspiracy world could be and indeed already was being hollowed out from the inside. His fear came directly out of the tradition’s experience with infiltration. When he accused Alex Jones of being a knowing agent of the very disinformation apparatus he claimed to oppose — someone who had done “no research, sought no truth,” who was “just making it up straight out of his head” — he was voicing the oldest anxiety in the subculture. Suspicion itself could be captured, that the broadcaster rallying you against the system might be part of the system itself, that the whole operation might be controlled. He said the fear and adrenaline in Jones’s voice was “the sound of the future.” It sounded paranoid even by the standards of the conspiracy world. But he was circling something real: that the apparatus of suspicion could become performance, and performance could become product, and once it was product, the question of who was directing it would become unanswerable.
That second mode — conspiracy as affect or spectacle — is what replaced Cooper, and it runs at a completely different clock speed. Whether the evidence checks out matters less than whether the segment hits. Alex Jones built his career on this. His talent is not investigation; it’s performance. The red face, the desk-pounding, the shirt coming half-untucked: conspiracy as a physical event, as WWE. Cooper heard it coming before anyone else.
And then there’s a third mode that has spread over the past several years, though I’d be remiss to argue it didn’t previously exist. This is conspiracy as costume. A growing crowd of podcasters, influencers, pseudonymous posters, and self-identified “dissidents” drifting between wellness, style, and politics have picked up the vocabulary and postures of conspiracy without touching its epistemology. They’re fans, socialites, orbiters. They are wearing the clothes, and because the clothes come off easily, they can be disciplined. A provocation on Monday that they’ll walk back by Wednesday.
They don’t speak truth to power — they read their scripts.
These latter two groups are the people the movement actually wants. They keep the mood of suspicion going without anyone practicing it. They borrow the outsider’s vocabulary to stay interesting and defer to the insiders to stay paid. They are the buffer between the language and its consequences. Affect can be redirected wherever you want it to be. Costumes can be changed.
Method is the one that causes problems, because a person operating in method mode is doing exactly what the tradition told them to do.
* * *
Candace Owens is a reversion to the first mode inside a world wired for the second and third, and so nobody (in power or media, at least) really knows what to do with her.
Her shows have the plodding, obsessive, schizophrenic structure of an amateur true-crime podcast hosted by someone who has decided the official story is a lie. She is doing the Bill Cooper thing with better production values and a much larger audience of “mommy sleuths.” She treats conspiracy as something you do.
One might say the structure of Owens’s media empire complicates any read of her — she makes something like $10 million a year and has a production team. She has a publicist and clippers and posts promos. She is, undeniably, a product of the same attention economy that feeds the entertainer and the costume-wearer. It would be naïve to pretend she stands outside it. Martyrdom itself converts to growth.
I want to sit with this, because I’ve been wrong about it before. I’ve previously written about Owens’s serial public transformations (“conversions”) — liberal activist to MAGA conservative, Daily Wire loyalist to independent operator, live player to enemy — as a kind of alternate reality game (ARG). A media spectacle whose primary product was the conversion experience itself. In that reading, she was the ultimate performer, pastor at the megachurch of Candace.
I now no longer believe that’s the whole story. The serial conversions are native to the tradition. Cooper went through them. Brussell went through them. The whole epistemology of conspiracy theory demands them: if you are genuinely pulling the thread, you will eventually find that your old allies were compromised, that the ground you stood on was rotten. The conversion is the pattern. Each break confirms the worldview and gives you new material. Owens’s business model runs on this, yes. But that doesn’t mean the tradition isn’t also operating through her exactly as it always has.
The money and the belief may be fused in a way that won’t separate into “grifter” and “true believer.” She may be both and I truly believe she is.
* * *
The administration wants conspiracy it can steer. What it gets, periodically, is someone who treats the method as actual method and starts aiming it at the movement itself.
And the movement can’t say out loud what the real problem with Owens is. It can’t announce that conspiracy talk is a tool, useful when aimed out and dangerous when aimed in, because saying so would blow up the whole populist story. So, the policing becomes about ancillary issues — often real ones, to be clear. Owens does traffic in antisemitism. She does say ridiculous, hurtful, illegal things.
But she speaks in a dialect that others speak in and get away with. Conspiracy culture’s tradition has always had antisemitism running through it, and the movement has always tolerated it in some speakers and punished it in others depending on where the rest of their suspicion points. What determines the punishment is not the content of the offense but the direction – and timing – of the aim.
The “quiet” policing, the everything-but-the-issue, to a conspiracy audience,
