The Rise & Fall of the Token Provocateur

Candace Owens has only her favorite person to blame for her troubles: herself.

Sometimes, the indefensible becomes indefensible.

Conservative provocateur and professional celebrity-feuder Candace Owens is out at the Daily Wire as of Friday morning. “Daily Wire and Candace Owens have ended their relationship,” Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing announced on X. “I’m finally free,” Owens wrote after the news broke, because lucrative Daily Wire contracts are just the most restrictive things ever (just ask Steven Crowder).

I use the term provocateur very intentionally, as opposed to podcast host or cultural commentator. To be sure, Owens fills those two latter roles as well, yet they only ever come across as in service to her broader role: create pop-culture controversy, and use it to segue otherwise disinterested people into timeless arguments about liberty, freedom, and human meaning. Yet, that’s the catch: it’s a two-step process, and Owens has only demonstrated consistent proficiency in the first part.

In fairness to Owens, she knows how to dish out the goods on pop culture hits. She’s achieved feuds with notable non-political celebrities, including rapper and truly exemplary character Cardi B, and secured interviews with cultural figures including Andrew Tate and Charlamagne tha God. She’s had her share of good moments, and many people who have zero interest in Buckley or Kirk (Russell, not Charlie) have probably been exposed to conservative/non-progressive ideology through her content. No matter what happens from here, she deserves credit for that—if only as an ideological gateway drug.

And then there are all the less-than-good moments. Although the Daily Wire has yet to expound on the specific circumstances of her departure, it seems feasible that Owens’ stance on Israel was the final straw. Owens maintains her position on the Israel-Palestine conflict as “no government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide, ever.” The implications of her statement are unclear; for Owens, such vague public statements seem to be a chronic condition.

But that hasn’t always been the case, and it’s likely not the only deciding factor in Owens’ exit. In recent months, she’s also seen fit to elevate bizarre antisemitic conspiracies about Jews drinking the blood of Christians and portray “political Jews” as “some of the most vile, dishonest, manipulative people that I have ever met.”  She’s butted heads with fellow Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro ever since October 7, with the ardent Israel supporter lambasting her comments about Jews and the state of Israel as “despicable.”

Candace Owens isn’t as bad as racialized news outlets like The Root portray her. Nor, I remain convinced, is she a true antisemite (although some of her good friends are far too close to that line for comfort). Yet she does represent a far broader principle that’s far bigger than any one issue or Twitter dust-up: ignorance. It’s ignorance of tone and basic rhetorical objectives to say that it’d be “fine… if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well.” It’s ignorant of the principles of charity and context to claim that your Jewish employer is against quoting Scripture when that’s clearly not the intended meaning. And ignorance, when paired with rhetorical imprecision, does not a worthy thought leader make.

For someone whose entire job is communicating things clearly, Candace Owens is really bad at communicating things clearly. And when you’re so bad at communicating things clearly that Holocaust deniers and actual antisemites like Nick Fuentes are praising you? This makes you, to use the social science term, really crappy at doing your job.

Let’s be real about this: this isn’t the end of Candace Owens. She’ll continue selling her brand, aided by the moronic spirit of the modern right that dictates that any form of opposition is proof of virtue. She’ll continue to generate pop-culture controversy, in all likelihood. But any truth she might communicate will fight to be seen amid the ignorant and unserious lens she’s chosen to show it through. She’s right that DEI and its advocates are advancing a terrifying vision of the future that delegitimizes any criticism in favor of petty distractions and inflated self-importance. I only wish that she could demonstrate more often how she’s different from that.

This article was recently published in The American Spectator. Read it here.