Candace Owens traces her rise from YouTube activism to The Daily Wire talk show, crediting audacity and figures like Condoleezza Rice while rejecting labels like "coon." Her return to Christianity—sparked by her grandmother’s 2013 death—contrasts with her earlier secularism, which she calls "misery in disguise." She slams Black Lives Matter as political programming over data-driven solutions, citing Trump’s 2020 gains among Black voters despite racial attacks. Her show targets domestic terrorism, indoctrination, and cultural decay, urging young women to embrace traditional values over progressive self-degradation while framing segregation as exclusion from shared ideals, not the ideals themselves. [Automatically generated summary]
So as you know, we're always making pathetic, desperate attempts to class up the show, and you'd think almost nothing would work.
But this time, this time, I think we finally made it.
We have Candace Owens, who hopefully now and forevermore will be, I can simply introduce her as the host of Candace.
Hello, it's so good to see you.
Welcoming myself to the Daily Wire.
You're going to see me a lot more.
We're thrilled.
We are thrilled.
And I have to, I was just saying off camera that I'm so rooting for the show.
I think it is a really important thing.
You've been rooting for me since the beginning.
I have been rooting for you since the beginning.
Absolutely true.
So we're going to talk about politics.
But before that, we were on backstage together.
And I have some personal questions that actually came into my mind as I was sitting there.
You know, I'm a novelist.
I was thinking to myself, I'm writing the character, Candace Owens, and five years ago, you're on YouTube mouthing off like everybody on YouTube.
And now the curtain opens and you're sitting on this fairly, you know, this major talk show that is really different than anything that's ever been on television.
What is going through that character's mind when that happens?
Oh, wow.
It's funny.
It's so difficult to pause.
It feels like everything has been a rocket ship since I was on YouTube and doing my first video and just saying something different, I guess, just saying something different as a black American.
And also being, I think, more audacious.
I always say there were so many more intelligent black conservatives that have come before me.
Condoleezza Rice, right?
Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Dr. Thomas Sowell.
More intelligent than people.
Yeah, right.
Than all of us, right?
And yet I remember having a conversation with Dr. Ben Carson, a literal actual brain surgeon, and he said to me, I don't know how you've been able to make such strides in such a short amount of time.
And I happen to be able to do that.
And we've been doing this for so long.
And I said, well, the difference is you were too polite, right?
And I said that to him.
And as sitting in his office, he was too polite.
And I think that what that character thinks is that having the courage really to stand by your convictions, but also to do it in a way that allows them to know that you're not going to take that nonsense and be spoken down to or just accept being called a coon or castigated because of daring to think for myself, because I'm an individual.
I would probably that character would think, wow, this is really amazing.
This is a wonderful moment to be in.
And it's because I believed in myself.
Yeah, yeah.
No, and you know, I used to say this to people in Hollywood because a lot of people in Hollywood would come up to me and drop their voices and say, you know, I saw you on Hannity.
And I would say, why are we whispering?
We're right.
We're in the right, you know, and I think that's the right attitude today.
You know, the other thing that occurred to me as we were talking on backstage is you mentioned that you have gone back to the church.
And it's not something I've heard you talk about a lot.
And if you don't want to talk about it, I won't, you know, because in conservatism, sometimes the church becomes almost a badge.
You know, I'm a conservative.
I go to church or something like that.
Is this actually a movement in your life toward God?
Yeah, I don't speak about it often.
And you're correct.
And I remember early on having a discussion with Allie Stuckey.
And she was kind of trying to figure out if now that I was conservative, I was going to come out and be like, and I'm a Christian because I'm conservative.
And that's the box to check.
Kind of like the Joe Biden, I'm a Catholic, and then passalm.
Pretty good.
I actually was raised in a Christian household.
And when I say Christian household, I mean every single morning we had to study the Bible.
I've written in my book about my grandfather and the influence that my grandfather has had.
And I just, for us, we were just, I guess, Bible belt.
My grandfather, faith, has always been dominant in his life, faith and family.
And when I was growing up, I was very embarrassed to be a Christian.
I was, you know, because once you start socializing, being somebody that was raised reading my book of Bible stories and having Bible studies and every morning having a Bible study around the breakfast table became embarrassing.
I was ashamed because I wanted to be cool, right?
Because secularism teaches you that you can be either or.
You can be cool and hip or you can be a Christian and you can go to church with your family.
And so I fell away once I moved out of my grandfather's house away from my childhood and I became more liberal.
And I felt, okay, this is the cool.
I'm going to pick cool now.
And in being cool, I was dying on the inside.
I was just dying on the inside.
I was so miserable when I was a liberal.
I lacked confidence, right?
I lacked confidence.
I was miserable and I was doing these things that were supposed to make me feel freer.
And yet, in many ways, it was more like bondage.
And when my grandmother died in 2013, it hit my family in a way.
It was just, it was really, really hard.
It was a very quick death.
We didn't know that she was going to die.
She was in the hospital and she was dead two weeks later.
And it broke all of us.
I mean, it's still very difficult for me to talk about losing my grandmother because she was a mother to us and she was just a woman who I can't think of a more perfect human being.
My grandmother never even swore if she ever got mad when she got really mad, she would call you a dodo bird.
She'd say, oh, he's a dodo bird.
That's tough.
Yeah.
And so when she died, I just sort of had to face myself in a different way.
Meaning, I remember the last thing she said to me was that, you know, Candace, I worry about you.
And I was being cool, Candace.
I walked into the hospital because she was supposed to be out in a couple of days.
And I had this purse.
I'll never forget a Stella McCartney purse.
And I was like living in New York City.
And she just looked at me as, and this isn't the child that I raised up.
Similarly, you know, in Genesis, it talks about trying to raise up a child that way.
And it just, it transformed things for me.
Outside Perspectives00:07:04
I sort of said, wait a second.
My grandparents, they got something right.
You know, married when they were 17, stayed together until my grandmother's dying day in 2013.
They were religious.
They actually steered far away from secularism, were not ever involved in politics, and they were the greatest examples and the happiest people that I ever knew.
And it just kind of made me change things.
And when I met my husband, who is also deeply religious, his father sits in the House of Lords, and Christianity is written at the DNA of everything that he does.
He does work on the family.
Husband studied theology at Oxford.
It just sort of, you know, just brought me right back to where I started.
It was coming back.
I was coming home.
Yeah, I was coming home.
So one of the things that always bothers me, we're talking about Thomas Sowell and all, you know, Shelby Steele, one of my favorite political writers, Shelby Steele.
But if you're black, that's what you get asked about.
That's what you get asked to talk about.
And there's obviously so many things right now in politics.
It's such a big issue that it's hard to get away from it.
So here's something I actually want to know, because as an old white guy, I lived a white life.
When I heard people say Black Lives Matter, we were raised, we were taught that we were all Americans.
We were all together in this.
We were not going to live that life.
Is there such a thing as a black life?
It's just a life, just a life.
But there is such a thing as a black life.
You know, if you have political interests that you're looking to further and you're the Democrats and you realize that you can gain advantage by really drumming up racial issues and pretending that we're all so different and we're all segregated.
You know, the Democrats originally were the people behind authoring racial policies, segregation and things of that nature, and they're behind it again.
So they really haven't steered far from their roots either.
Right, right.
So a black life is imposed on you.
It's not actually something you live.
No.
Okay.
It is not something you live.
You know, one of the things that I've noticed, having grown up in an America where you knew what an American looked like, not by the color of his skin, but by the look in his eyes, because he was thinking, I come from there, but I'm headed there.
And that's how you knew.
You'd see it with the Koreans who came in.
You'd see it with the Irish.
Today, when I see that look in somebody's eyes, it's almost always a young black person.
They have got, they've got it.
You know, the obstacles have been taken out of the way.
People are rooting for them, I think, in real life, outside of Democrat politics.
People are actually rooting for them.
And I meet people all the time who have got plans and they've got ambitions and they're building businesses.
And I just keep thinking, why do they have to, doesn't this Black Lives Matter or this whole Democratic Party, doesn't that get in their way?
Doesn't that stop them?
Of course it stops them.
Anybody that's telling you, even if there was this big issue in America surrounding race, which I do not believe there is, and statistically, there just is not.
There's no proof of that.
If you start looking at the data, there's just no proof of that.
But even if there was, the idea that you're telling a bunch of black people that every time a black person dies, your response should be to riot and to loot and to steal televisions from Walmart or from Target because you deserve it.
I mean, what is that?
You're just teaching them to act like toddlers, right?
And there's a reason for that.
And I do truly believe, and I spoke about this obviously backstage, is that they are trying to turn black Americans into permanent toddlers who don't have a grasp of anything outside of their own emotions, right?
So to a toddler, genuinely, you look at a toddler and they're really crying about not being able to have candy for dinner.
It's real to them, right?
Like, so they don't care about the statistics of what, you know, obesity.
They don't care about any of that stuff of reality.
It is like, I need this for dinner, right?
And this is sort of the, this is the psychological programming that's happening toward black Americans right now via Black Lives Matter, right?
Like this is all you need to care about and obsess over is racial issues.
Nothing else matters.
Look at the stats, data, nothing.
You are justified in screaming.
And it's such a dangerous, such a dangerous thing to do.
You need candy for, you know, you're right, right, you're right.
You do need to watch TV.
You're right, What would happen to that person, to that little person when they grow up?
You know, I say this when I spoke at colleges before the lockdowns and all this, and I would talk to a black guy.
I would say, guide a guy.
If a politician told me that I wasn't able to do something without him as a guy, I would tell him to get stuffed.
I would walk away.
I would never vote for a politician who told me I was helpless.
It's unmanning.
It unmans people.
Do you confront people about this?
You do.
It is implicit racism like you wouldn't believe.
And it's like you don't even, you're not even aware of your own racism.
And I'll give you a quick little anecdote.
We obviously just moved into Nashville.
Right.
And my husband and I were outside.
We have some construction meeting outside, and the neighbors came down to meet us, super nice couple.
My husband was outside first talking to them, and they were keeping the conversation friendly.
And then I was like, oh, I'll go down and I'll go say hi too.
And I get down there, and my husband's like, oh, this is my wife, Candace.
And they look at me and they say, look, interracial couple, she's black, while I raid in all her politics.
So they said, well, you guys are so lucky.
We just moved into town now before there used to be nothing but Nazis living on this block.
And we said, oh, really?
They said, yeah, but we've done some redistricting and things are better now here in Nashville, but you got here just in time.
That is such implicit racism to look at someone and say, I already know your politics, right?
I know you're a Democrat because you're black.
So now we're comfortable.
Hey, let's have a conversation about the Nazis next door.
And it happens all the time.
They just think they know everything about me because of the color of my skin.
So there have been articles recently that the leftward drift of the Democratic Party is actually leaving minorities behind, that Hispanics and blacks are just going, like, this is not what we voted for.
This is not what we want.
They voted for Biden because of that stupid look on his face that says he's a moderate.
Are people catching on or is that an illusion?
They've been catching on.
It's not an illusion because think about the fact that you have had no president who has been harassed more with claims of being a racist and a white supremacist than Donald Trump, right?
And that's incredible because you had presidents who were sitting in office who were actually racist.
And they had never faced charges of racism like Donald Trump faced.
And yet, despite that, in 2020, he gained eight points amongst black men and he doubled his support amongst black women.
What does that tell you?
Hispanic vote.
What does that tell you that the race narrative is failing?
So I try to get people to focus on that and to realize that the rhetoric is falling short and they know that.
If you look at the Democrats right now, they're not acting like winners.
They're not acting like winners.
I agree.
Right?
After you win a game, you don't go, okay, now censor everybody who's ever had an opponent and make them go away.
And this person and these people are insurrectionists and bull and all over here and make it go.
Oh, and by the way, we beat him so squarely and fairly that we want to make sure we pass laws so he can never run again.
That's not how winners act.
I'd be like, oh, I beat you so easily.
I hope I have to run against you time and time again because you were an easy person to beat.
Rhetoric Falling Short00:05:15
So.
No, that's good.
I'm glad to hear it.
It's hopeful.
So what do you want the show?
And like I said, you know, I'm not somebody who watches talk shows, but this is a show that I really feel is important.
What do you hope it'll be?
You know, I hope it will be me when I say that.
I think that when I entered the space of politics, I was kind of questions from both sides because people said, oh, well, you can't be in politics and also enjoy culture, right?
And then people are like, well, you can't be in culture.
You can't go from, you know, having a debate with Cardi B to then wanting to sit down and have an interview with Vice President Pence.
And I said, why not?
You can't go from hanging out with Kanye West to hanging out with Ben Shapiro.
Why not?
And so I have always understood what Andrew Breitbart said, which said politics is downstream from culture.
He's correct.
It is beautifully said, perfectly said.
And I understand that they're constantly speaking to each other.
And I want my show to be exactly that.
I want to straddle that line.
I want it to be a show where one week Kanye West could be sitting down and I could be interviewing him.
And the following week, I just put out a public request to sit down with Vladimir Putin that I could sit down with him and discuss foreign policy.
And so that is what you're going to get.
In the beginning, you're going to monologue.
These will be written from me every week about just what's on my heart, what's on my mind, and really kind of getting America for the first time to focus on the issues because I think right now, and something the LEP is really good at, is like creating this ADD, right?
Something happens, it gets a lot of crazy stuff, a lot of headlines, and they move on very quickly.
And then you go, wait a second, but this thing that you said actually didn't come to fruition or actually was wrong, but now they're creating a fire over here, so we're not looking.
And I also want to be able to go back and to digest with Americans and say, no, this was really important and we need to talk about this in a longer fashion.
Yeah.
If you do sit down with Putin, don't drink the tea.
That's the only thing.
I will not drink any tea.
Don't drink anything that's glowing.
So if you had to pick three issues, if these are the things that I think are really on Americans' minds or should be, what would they be?
I think at this exact moment, I would say domestic terrorism, and I put that in parentheses.
I think there's a lot of really scary stuff going on in terms of conservatives being silenced and this idea of domestic terrorism being used.
You know, the FBI, people showing up at people's doorsteps and saying, why were you here, is something to be alarmed about.
So I want to really talk about what's going on in this country.
The education system is high up there.
Kids feeling like they can't speak up or this propaganda.
Being told to just remember the answers and do not think critically and obey or have your lives ruined is really scary.
So that's the angle towards young people.
And then, of course, I would just say culture.
I mean, I'm saying a lot.
People think it's, oh, this is dumb.
Why do we care about the Queen and Megan Markle?
And why do we care about Cardi B?
Let me tell you what the political message is.
Let me tell you why you need to care about these issues and what they're actually doing.
And you think it's just Grammy's performance.
You think it's just Megan, you know, and Harry being brats.
But there are more important things that we need to talk about here that's happening, which is the corrosion of values.
Conservatives are slow about this.
But it's changed.
It actually changed.
With Trump, they started to realize.
I thought it was me.
It happened at the same time.
Who knows?
You know, the one last thing I want to talk about is that along with being black, you're also a lady.
And you had this argument with Cardi B that was really fascinating, talking about the fact that she was kind of degrading herself and all this.
But you say a lot that you have an audience of young girls.
And this is, I feel that women are actually being, they're trying to convince women to become extinct.
What do you want them to see when you come on stage, when you do this show?
What do you want them to see?
I want them to see that in many ways, America threw out the baby with the bathwater.
And what I mean by that is that there were some things in America that definitely needed to be fixed, right?
Coming out of segregation, racism.
Of course, there were things about America that were not great.
But there were some things in America that was really getting right.
And what progressivism is teaching the young girls is that everything about America is rotten and wrong and backwards.
The idea of you wanting to be married and being in a household is them trying to hold you down to a new form of slavery.
And that couldn't be further from the truth.
I want to teach them that discipline, making good decisions, it sounds weird and it sounds paradoxical, but discipline does lead to more freedom.
It does.
It does.
And that these people that you are following and thinking these people that are so cool and so hip, you need to really examine their lives and ask yourself one question, which is, is that individual happy?
Is that the lifestyle I want to lead?
And nine out of ten times you will say no.
So why am I following this person?
Conservatism works.
Traditional American values work.
Family works.
And self-respect and dignity also work.
It's funny.
People wanted to be let in.
That was the problem with segregation.
We were keeping people out.
Not that the values were bad, but that the door was closed.
When you open the door, you should come in and take part in those values.