3 | Candace Owens Undone: Clean Shot
Lies live lives of their own.
NOTE: This series blends traditional reporting, cultural analysis, and firsthand reflection to offer coverage that is as fair as it is real. It’s personal, it’s political, and it’s only possible because of your support.
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Weekdays at 3 p.m. eastern, Candace Owens sits at a desk in her Nashville home studio and spends about an hour talking into a camera. Her show, Candace, is an uneasy collision of contradictory ideas, energies, images, angles, and deliveries borrowed from male-dominated right-wing radio, modern bro-podcasts, and female-ruled daytime talk of the nineties and 2000s.
Candace premiered in 2021 on the Daily Wire, where Candace’s star rose until 2024, when she was fired over accusations of antisemitism (her side dismissed this as cover for the petty truth: her popularity had threatened Shapiro). When Candace returned, she was a mononymous diva on her own. “This time, it’s just Candace,” she told viewers What sounded like a catchphrase from last-century TV would prove to be a promise.
In casting and content, Candace is just Candace most of the time. Stars by Kanye West scores the intro photo montage of the host as a child, bride, expectant mother, ending on her beautifully lit, millennial-ly-filtered, and—even a critic has to admit it—lethal face card. It’s her face, with her name and logo scrawled near in purple loopy script, that reveals the split-light conflict of her character. With two doe eyes shining at the camera she still expresses stone-cold self assuredness. Candace sits at the desk, the center of the Candace universe, haloed by professional light, and so charismatic you can almost possible to ignore the ugly foam-covered microphone, laptop-prop, and eyesore plastic water bottle, and you can definitely ignore the screen around her, where the framed photos, books, and cross dissolve into soft focus fuzz.
Most important of all, there’s the talking and talking from the host with little interruption from outside voices. There are rarely any guests.
Candace is streamed live online and downloaded on podcasting apps by an estimated 3.5 million listeners per episode. In 2025, Spotify listed her at number sixteen on its chart, below solo host-driven industry leaders like Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and Alex Cooper, and beneath mainstream giants The Daily (from The New York Times) and Up First (from NPR). The total reach of Candace is hard to judge, since Candace lives on through clips that circulate across social media platforms, where she maintains more than 20 million followers. In daytime talk terms, Candace is verifiably much more popular than Ricki Lake, much less popular than The Oprah Winfrey Show, less popular than Jerry Springer, and about as popular as Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, or Maury. And she doesn’t even have to leave her home.
It’s important to understand how big Candace is to understand how big the terror she inflicts can feel. If social media is a democracy, Candace is a dictatorship. Under her rule, her claims go unchecked. On the basis of often iffy facts, she spreads a contagion of rage to her audience, and from there she’s assisted by the smaller personalities with big ambitions who seek to grow their own brands by following her lead.
On March 27, 2025, I was at the home of a friend in Washington, talking to the usual assortment of family, sources, government officials and pop culture oddities who populate my life and my coverage here. The events of the previous night at the White House and online were on my mind, but I was trying to focus on what was next.
Candace Owens was looking back. By 3 p.m. eastern, she was forcing me to look back, too. At her desk, she spun her version of events and her case against the object of her scorn into the camera.
She began her rant by framing herself as an early MAHA supporter and antivaxxer, an admirer of RFK Jr. “before it was cool.” This was a crucial strategic move. Before she could ask her audience to hate another woman in independent media, one publicly identified as a leading early MAHA supporter and friend of RFK Jr., she needed to establish her own credibility and insulate herself from backlash. I could only be cast as a traitor if she first made a convincing case that she was the one truly on their side.
In her telling, I had launched an unhinged attack, explainable only by alcohol. She framed me as unstable, suggested that I log offline and focus on my family, and repeatedly called me “disgusting” and “a drunk.” Worse, she claimed my supposed one-sided feud had been waged for corrupt reasons. I was not expressing my opinion, she argued, but shilling for neoconservatives and the feminist establishment. As proof, she cited my friendships with Meghan McCain and Weinstein accuser Jessica Mann, hyping these associations as revelatory rather than facts long on public record. In doing so, she misrepresented them, me, and herself.
“You worship Satan.”
On allegation of corruption #1: Candace had lobbed an unprovoked and cruel attack on Meghan, and she was unhappy when I pointed that out. On her program, she said her bullying was somehow justified by her position on vaccines. Speaking in the third person, she said, “So when you have the full context of this back and forth and you realize, no, actually, Candace was standing up for anti-vaxxers at a time when we were being bludgeoned over the head by the mainstream media, bludgeoned over the head by neocons, bludgeoned over the head by people who were trying to essentially force us to get a vaccine that we weren’t comfortable with, and then you see the way House Inhabit just presents it like I just randomly attacked a woman and called her fat. It’s dishonest. She’s engaging in dishonesty and it’s not the only time that she has done this.”
In truth, what Candace said about Meghan was the same out of context as it was within context. Mean, rude, and tactless, regardless.
On allegation of corruption #2: Candace was taking Weinstein’s side in her coverage of the years-old trial, and I thought it would be helpful for her to hear from a credible accuser. I had once offered to connect her with Jessica Mann, but Jessica Mann backed off after concluding that Candace was not credible. In her effort to repurpose Jessica Mann as part of this smear against me, Candace disclosed something I had shared privately with her PR representative, Mitchell Jackson. It wasn’t an opinion I would have broadcast. Hearing it spoken aloud, stripped of all nuance and humanity, simplified into data to support the argument that I lacked integrity, was shocking.
In truth, Candace was the one taking things out of context.
Two weeks earlier, Mike and I had dinner with Mitchell Jackson in Laguna Beach. We were joined by Olivia Nuzzi—per Mitchell’s request. They had met when they were both young reporters, before Mitchell became a PR maven, and had been close friends for a decade, a detail Candace Owens would later (conveniently) leave out of her attacks.
The four of us squeezed into a velvet booth shaped like a clamshell. We ordered steak to share. Mike ordered a tequila, I ordered a glass of pinot noir, and Mitchell and Olivia, who don’t drink, got right into it.
Mitchell and Olivia hadn’t seen each other since the scandal that drove Olivia from New York to the West Coast. Mitchell rolled his eyes as he recounted how she had “freaked out” in the days after news about her and RFK Jr. broke, and refused to meet him at an Upper East Side restaurant because a New York Post reporter was hosting a party there at the same time. “We were on the patio! The party was inside!” he said. “Are you insane?” she asked. “You hung up on me!” he said.
He shouted at her about how stupid she was to not take his public relations and career advice throughout the crisis. She scoffed. “Yes, please, tell everyone about your bright ideas,” she said. “Ideas to save your fucking life!” he said.
Among Mitchell’s ideas was that Olivia should have checked into rehab to make it illegal for New York Magazine to fire her, capitalized on the tabloid frenzy by courting the media attention she was hiding from, and monetized the scandal by publishing sexts from RFK on OnlyFans. “We have very different sensibilities,” Olivia said, shaking her head and covering her face with her hand. “Yeah,” Mitchell said, “Mine are popular!”
He accused Olivia of still being in love with RFK. That was the only explanation for her refusal to attack him, Mitchell said. He went on about how stupid she was and how stupid she would be if she didn’t publish what remained of RFK’s sexts in the future. “You have to be shameless, Olivia!” he said. “You’re protecting him! Stop protecting people!”
It was tense, but it wasn’t a fight. This was their relationship, it seemed. Mitchell was loud. Olivia was quiet. Mitchell saw a crisis as a business opportunity. Olivia saw a crisis as a spiritual event. Mitchell thought that was insane. Olivia thought Mitchell was insane. They were like siblings, each from different planets. “It’s fine, I love Mitchell,” Olivia said. “I’m being hard on you out of love!” he said. “I know,” she said.
Eventually, I changed the subject.
We talked about Candace and my issues with some of her recent content, including her defense of two men she counted as friends. Kanye West and Andrew Tate, under any other name, would be subject to her condemnation. Yet she consistently ignored and excused their endorsement of porn as an acceptable form of public consumption. Kanye briefly had his X account labeled NSFW after sharing explicit porn (midday) during a chaotic posting spree in early 2025, which ultimately ended with his account being taken down.
Mitchell defended her. We debated a bit. Then we talked about the business. He said that Candace’s husband, George, was very involved behind the scenes, which reminded me of an article I had sitting as a rough draft in my possession.
A freelance writer on my team wanted to publish a critical story about Candace, I said. The writer had a draft she had been working on, and a second writer I’d contracted before was encouraging her. The two of them shared a passion for the topic that verged on obsession, and they’d pitched the story as a joint effort. Together, they’d uncovered explosive facts, they told me, related to Candace’s background, rumors about her husband, and his family’s foreign political ties and immense wealth. It sounded promising, but I knew enough by now to be wary.
When I started publishing House Inhabit in 2011, it was a solo enterprise, and it largely remained that way. But as my coverage of the 2024 election began pulling me in multiple directions, I brought on a few freelancers to publish here, easing my concern that subscribers might feel cheated if I didn’t post often enough. One ran an obsessive account tracking Kanye West’s every online move. The other I met at the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. She had a temper that flared quickly and a fast-and-loose approach to invoicing. She once billed me for the time she spent sitting in the pews at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, after I invited her—New York-based already—as my guest to Joan Didion’s funeral. When the invoice came through, I replied simply: Sorry. I do not pay people to hang out with me.
A couple years later, when she reappeared asking for another shot, I was quick to forgive her, despite signs that her behavior with me wasn’t isolated. Another writer whose work I respected had fired her as well. That arrangement ended on bad terms too, in part because of her tendency to overcharge for things she was not specifically assigned.
As the months went on, both of these writers grew increasingly entitled. I know writers are a crazy breed, and I like that. I also liked that they operated so far outside the new world I was entering, up to a point. This Candace exposé sounded like it might be worth the trouble the freelancers created.
I looked at Mitchell and Olivia across the table. Olivia said she thought it was “unwise” to plan to publish a story that was predetermined to be critical when I hadn’t yet read the draft submitted by the freelancer. “You don’t know if it’s good. You don’t know what it even is,” she said. “So how could you know you’ll want to run it?”
I was conflicted. The “independent” part of independent media mattered more to me than the “media” part. It was also true that the more stories I covered, and the closer I got to the people inside those stories, the more complicated everything became and the more constrained I felt. It’s easy to sit in a room by yourself and make judgments into a camera. It’s harder to judge the world when you live inside it. It annoyed me to be criticized by someone who didn’t seem to care about complications and nuance because she lived in her own world.
“Why is Candace beyond criticism?” I asked.
“You can criticize anybody fairly,” Olivia said. She arched her eyebrows dramatically, which was her way of reminding me that I hadn’t been so fair to her. In response to that, she had, annoyingly, not been angry with me. Instead, she was prone to reminding me of her point of view, “Fairness means coverage of Mother Teresa and coverage of Adolf Hitler should meet the same standard!” and she recited facts about famous libel lawsuits, and she made me read The Journalist and the Murderer.
Mitchell had a different objective. He was not concerned with fairness. He needed to protect his client. Candace was an “ally,” he reminded me, but she wouldn’t stay that way if I moved forward with plans to publish criticism of her.
“It would be war,” he warned me.
His suggestion was that I abandon the piece entirely and pivot instead to persuading RFK to soften his stance on poppers. Federal health officials had just raided a poppers factory, halting production. This spelled immediate practical trouble for the poppers industry, and theoretical political trouble for the most powerful health official in the federal government, who risked further alienating segments of the homosexual electorate who love poppers.
We all got distracted by the poppers for a while. Mike sat there kicking me under the table as we listened to Mitchell describe the anal muscle-relaxing properties of the poppers, the details of the raid, and the political implications of the raid. Mike ordered another tequila. Mitchell presented the poppers blowup as a strategic opportunity for me, far more worthy of my time than a negative story about his client. If I used my influence with RFK to change his position on a drug beloved by the gay community, I would earn their favor. “You can save poppers!” Mitchell said.
The four of us drove back together to my office in the old bus Mike kept parked on site. Regular readers are likely familiar with the bus, which has loomed strange and symbolic for me ever since Mike found it in the English countryside in 2022 and had it shipped to our shores against my halfhearted objections. The bus was full of contradictions. I considered it an intrusion and an irritation, and also a physical representation of so much that I love about Mike. As I learned more about it, it began to feel like an omen, though I didn’t know if it was good or bad. The bus was also full of stray objects, including a set of old English tea cups and free weights.
Mike drove, I sat shotgun, and Mitchell and Olivia sat in the back. It was a bumpy ride. After clipping a curb, Mitchell and Olivia jolted nearly to the ceiling. I looked behind me. Olivia was laughing. Mitchell was hanging on for dear life. When Mike pulled into the parking lot behind my office, Mitchell jumped out and practically sprinted to his car. He fled so fast that he left his cardigan behind.
Olivia came upstairs and I opened my laptop so she could review the article at the center of the debate. I still hadn’t read it, and I trusted she was a good barometer for both its quality and its legal risk. She was always reading drafts of stories or scripts for friends and offering notes. I read early chapters of American Canto for her, as did her other friends. This isn’t a conspiracy; it’s being a writer in community with other writers.
It only took a few moments reading the draft before Olivia started shaking her head. “No,” she said. Peering over the top of the laptop, she informed me the draft started with a long meditation on the Chinese year of the snake, “which would be fine,” she said, except that the freelancer had identified the wrong date as the start of the year of the snake, “which would be fine, too,” she said, except that once the date was corrected, the year of the snake was no longer relevant to the introduction at all. She kept reading. “No, no,” she said, “I mean, no way.”
In her opinion, the facts were the first problem, and the writing was a close second. With nearly half a million people reading, she told me that I had to be more discerning about what I shared. She closed my laptop and told me plainly that the draft wasn’t something I could publish without inviting “justified” ridicule and a “credible” lawsuit. Her advice was to scrap it entirely unless it could be substantially reworked. “If you’re going to take a shot at someone,” she said, “it has to be clean,” not a mess that undercut me instead of the subject of the criticism. “And also it should be readable—like, as a starting point,” she said, rolling her eyes.
The next day, I cautiously relayed portions of this criticism to the freelancer the following day. In doing so, I credited Olivia as the one who had intervened to spare us a lawsuit, since I knew this writer admired Olivia and had been starstruck when she met her once. It didn’t help. The writer flew off the rails. I was offended by the idea that I was under any obligation to publish anyone else’s work, especially work that wasn’t worth readers’ time, but I tried a few times to calm her down. The premise of a draft is that it isn’t final, and the process of submitting a draft is by definition a back-and-forth. I told her Olivia would help edit the piece if she wanted. That didn’t help, either. She told me to fuck off.
I fired her in response.
The following day, Candace Owens escalated with another episode of Candace that relied on the accounts of the disgruntled freelancer as well as my former best friend, who had worked for me as my photographer on the campaign trail. She used new fabrications and smears from these new sources to support her ongoing case against me—and to introduce her audience to Olivia Nuzzi, a compelling new object of her scorn.
Prior to our feud, Candace had never known these women. She hadn’t verified whether these sources were trustworthy. She hadn’t verified whether their claims were legitimate. She hadn’t tried to contextualize why these people had volunteered themselves as sources in the first place. Instead, she took their claims and recklessly amplified them to her audience of millions.
The fallout with my friend was, in reality, painful and complicated, and years in the making. It was also highly sensitive. It involved our children, our families, addiction, a toxic relationship, and people and issues that had no place in a public drama, which made it nearly impossible for me to defend myself publicly. They used this to their advantage, knowing that if I revealed the truth behind our fallout, I would be instantly condemned for it. Yet Candace took no issue airing fragmented details of my private life that she didn’t understand or care to understand, even after I provided evidence that there was more to the story. Even after I begged her to stop. After declining my calls, she took it a step further by publicizing information I had shared with her privately, as a desperate attempt to stop her attacks, and used it to support her case against my morality and trustworthiness.
MY TEXT WITH CANDACE
It made no sense: Candace was taking shots at me based on shots I didn’t allow the freelancer to take against Candace, and the shots Candace was taking were aimed by the freelancer who had wanted to take the shots at Candace to begin with. Candace either argued or rejected each of my explanations outlined in text. On a slow news week, the story had been gaining traction. She used it to generate attention and profit by involving the rest of the world. Turning my private pain into entertainment. I had declined to publish a smear against her on the advice Olivia offered. And I had fired a writer who refused to edit what she wrote. Who then connected with Candace to spin a lie, claiming I was the one who ordered the hit piece, and she ran with it. She told her viewers, Olivia and I were working together to mastermind a smear against her. I offered to appear live on her show to answer whatever questions she had or offer context to these accusations. But she didn’t want to talk to me. She wanted to talk about me.
The effect was instant: a viral storm across the entire digital expanse. Women around the country started to chime in, offering commentary on our spat with a passion usually reserved for major sports showdowns or loaded Bravo reunions. Over the next ten days, Candace continued to capitalize on the drama. She tied me to neoconservatives, mocked my writing and readership as a sign of cultural decay, cast me as a compromised mouthpiece for the elite, cited my designer loafers as proof of gross vapidity, and unfairly dragged in Olivia, who had done nothing besides show up to a dinner date and intervene to prevent unfair coverage of her (Candace).
Candace seized on the phrase “clean shot.” It was dramatic enough to insinuate sinister intentions underway. Throughout her hourlong program, she spoke it repeatedly, emphasizing the shot—clean shot…take a shot…take a clean shot…shot…shot…shot. She told her audience that Olivia had ordered a “hit piece” on her, emphasizing the hit—hit piece…ordered a hit…hit piece…clean shot…shot…shot…hit piece…hit…hit…shot…piece…shot…hit…clean…hit…hit… She referred to the “rules of the jungle,” and accused the two of us of “hunting” her. What Olivia and I were planning, she said, was to “take” her “out.”
Candace also told her viewers where her would-be character assassin was stationed: Olivia had moved to Malibu. Prior to Candace’s disclosure, nobody knew where Olivia lived. Only a few close friends, including Mitchell. Almost no one had her address. She had been in hiding for months. Now, millions of people knew that she could be located in a tiny beach town. Millions who also legitimately believed she was masterminding a “clean shot” to “take out” Candace Owens, which made some of those people want to retaliate.
Even more explosive, Candace added that there might be a more powerful shadow force orchestrating the conspiracy against her. She suggested that Olivia was a “honeypot” who had ensnared RFK, and that I was controlling RFK through the “blackmail” Olivia had secured, all on behalf of Israel. That, Candace said, was why Olivia and I both wanted to “protect” RFK, implying he was some kind of asset inside the U.S. government.
Candace: “Olivia, currently living in Malibu, which means now she has fled the city, which means now she’s got to drive a car, is driving a car. She’s driving a foreign car in Malibu and her license plates, I’m not giving you the end of the license plates, but her real, true license plates are, I’m going to show you here, ‘RFK 66 blank-blank.’ Hmm. Hmm. That is some coincidence. I got to tell you. I’ve gotta tell you. I gotta tell ya. It’s not everyday that your license plates reflect the sexting scandal that you just had. Okay? It’s not everyday. Who purchased this foreign car? Who got this car to Malibu? It’s a British car. Your license plates are RFK and some numbers. What the hell is going on, okay?”
Candace said she didn’t censor the license plate to protect Olivia’s safety but to protect herself from censorship. If she included the entire license plate, she might face accusations of “doxxing” which could get her video removed from YouTube over a violation of their terms. “And by the way, YouTube rules: I should be able to show you the entire thing without being accused of doxxing, but I don’t want to take any risk of this video being taken down,” she said.
Candace continued: “We need to look further into what the hell is going on here, and they know I’m coming. They definitely know I’m coming, because you know what, Olivia Nuzzi? You didn’t take a clean effing shot. The shot was not clean enough. It doesn’t seem like you understand the rules of the jungle. You were hunting someone and you didn’t have the shot, and now I’m coming for you, one hundred percent, because I find this whole thing now to reek, to positively reek. I’m wondering who you are and who pays you to go after certain people and why it is that Ms. Jessica Reed Kraus is bragging about her access to Trump and how she operates in the night, which is vile. She’s a vile creature.”
For proof of her theory that Israel may have sent me to send Olivia to fall in love with RFK and lose her job in the resulting sex scandal, Candace cited RFK’s support for Israel. RFK had first positioned himself as the anti-establishment and anti-war candidate as a Democratic presidential candidate. Shortly after he defected from his party to run as an independent, the October 7 attack seemed to complicate his anti-war position, and RFK endorsed Israeli military retaliation against Palestine and US funding of Israel’s siege, although he had steadfastly refused to support US funding for Ukraine as it sought to defend itself from Russia’s aggression (even as his own son traveled to the region to fight alongside Ukrainian soldiers).
What did this have to do with Olivia and me? According to Candace, RFK’s support for Israel could be explained only by her inference that support for Israel, unpopular among his original supporters, must be the result of private pressure from Israel. And that private pressure, she suggested, must somehow be related to his private parts.
As digital mistress, Olivia obviously possessed secrets about RFK that could be wielded to control him, and as a friend to both Olivia and RFK even after their relationship became a scandal, I likely possessed those secrets too. Olivia and I must be professional secret-getters and secret-wielders, Candace suggested, and Israel or its allied deep state forces had assigned us to control the man with secrets to keep, who now controlled the largest agency in the United States government, which would mean Olivia and I controlled the agency on behalf of Israel (which would mean that as our first order of business as allies to the gay community first and shadow-cabinet secretaries second, Olivia and I would use our powers to save poppers).
Candace’s rhetoric about the written word had violent connotations. Her delivery seemed to imply we were not character assassins but perhaps literal assassins. That we could be—seemed likely to be—connected to intelligence and to the spy craft of a foreign government made our rhetorical violence that much more palpable. We were, Candace was strongly implying, hit-women.
How else to explain how these two writers had fallen back in after a public falling out and how I had remained close with RFK throughout the drama? With no compelling alternative theory to raise with her audience, because she did not seek alternative theories, Candace had no choice but to present the theory in which her rabbit hole led to the holy land and confirmed her preexisting biases. It was all so obvious, as Candace told the story: another plot like so many others, concocted by the Jews.
Candace made an open call for her audience to “pay attention to Olivia Nuzzi”—she used her full name throughout the episode, a choice designed to elicit the attention that she was requesting be paid to Olivia—and asked that anyone with information about Olivia come forward. “I’m just trying to figure out what we can learn about Olivia Nuzzi. So I’m openly saying to people, if you know her, if you worked with her, if you dated her, anything, you can email us at info at Candace Owens dot com, and tell us what you know, because I’m going to focus on her. I just know where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Echoing Mitchell at dinner the night of the van jolt, Candace referred to Olivia’s “odd protection of RFK Jr.,” though she seemed to think it was about loyalty to Israel and not love.
When Candace was presented with evidence that proved her smear was wrong, she didn’t correct it. Or retract any of these harmful accusations. She didn’t seem to care. It was a Scooby Doo meets James Bond scenario crafted to spike views—and it worked: Olivia and I were working together, funded somehow by Israel, in order to somehow control RFK on behalf of Israel, and we were conducting our spy craft as two highly visible writers drifting up and down the blue stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway in an old rusted English bus bearing his initials that had been purchased in England during the Queen’s Jubilee, driven by Olivia, who can’t drive stick and is “on principle” totally disinterested in British culture.
Meanwhile, locals watching live found hilarity in how the spin evolved. My phone started pinging as soon as she dragged the bus into it. Around town, Mike and our dog, Louis, cruising the harbor is a common sight. They can be spotted in line at Starbucks almost every morning. Louis, with his head perched out the passenger window, delights in his lot in life that takes him on scenic drives daily.
This detail was easily trackable. A vehicle that is widely attributed to our family would take only minutes to source. It didn’t matter. Candace drove this story to her airwaves without stopping to check what was true and what had been fabricated in a rush, to evolve continued interest in her spin. When a producer seemed to chime into her ear to tell her the vehicle wasn’t owned by Olivia but by the Kraus’s, she offered a quick correction and then quickly corrected her own correction to remind her audience: “And both of these women are liars, so I don’t know whose car it is,” she said.
Ian Carroll calls himself an “independent researcher.” A 33 year-old Washington state native, he gained notice on social media, where about 4 million followers across platforms watch him try to connect dots on The Ian Carroll Show. With a big smile beneath a bigger mustache, Carroll comes across as friendly and innocent. He’s quick to volunteer that he just doesn’t know a lot about public people who figure into public events he comments on because he wasn’t paying attention until recently.
In March, Carroll was welcomed on a stage far bigger than his own by the modern godfather of independent researchers with a wifi hookup: Joe Rogan.
There’s an innocence to Rogan’s approach, too. He can be discerning and shrewd, and he can ask tough questions and suss out nonsense in real time, but he also has a boyish curiosity that makes watching him feel less passive than watching a BBC documentary or traditional news. He’s not entertaining to watch, but hospitable as the host of The Joe Rogan Experience and the human experience itself: calm and collected but also present and real enough to look at something new and just say, “Wowwww,” or “Hollllyyyyy shittttt.”
You can laugh this off as stoner cinema, entertainment for boys, and I’ll admit I’m not its target audience. But I get it.
Carroll and Rogan talked about conspiracies and their appeal generally, and they talked about the conspiracies that they entertain specifically. It was old school Rogan: a good natured, low-stakes dialogue where host and guest were game to throw out subjects and bat them around. And it all seemed new to Carroll. “The thing is, I don’t know how to trust things like AI reconstructed videos,” Carroll said. He sounded serious. “Ah, let’s just trust it, bro, it’s fine,” Rogan said. He sounded sarcastic.
Carroll’s sense of constant discovery and easy awe is central to his appeal: viewers are likely entering any conversation with Carroll with about as much information as he has, meaning they can experience discovery and awe along with him.
The internet is full of conspiracy theorists, some more watchable than others. Carroll is not unique in that respect. He is extraordinary, though, in another way: he has often been a guest on Candace, where guests are not relied on as they are on other popular programs on the medium.
Candace is a one-woman show about a hero, Candace Owens, who wields her powers of sharp insight and sharper tongue to slay the villains who offend or irritate her and who—who knows?—are perhaps conspiring together on behalf of a shadowy and corrupt force that could be “literally”anything but is definitely Israel. The people and events outside the confines of her studio are just material to advance her plot.
As Candace called on her viewers to “pay attention” to Olivia Nuzzi and convinced them to hate me, Carroll followed up to capitalize on the spectacle.
He appeared in a frantic video, in paranoid state. Eyes wide and glassy, he promised to reveal something major—blackmail so shocking it would change the course of history. “So the Bobby Kennedy blackmail story is currently breaking in many directions all across the internet and American politics is not gonna be the same after this weekend,” he said. “That is not hyperbole. This is not just a hook. And I don’t really know where to start.” He told his viewers that what he had to share was urgent and explosive enough that people’s lives could be in danger.
IAN BLACKMAIL
Carroll cited Olivia’s 2013 internship on Anthony Weiner’s campaign for mayor of New York City as proof that viral chatter about our “blackmail” plot wasn’t just about sex and it wasn’t just about feuding online. Carroll wasn’t interested in gossip. Gossip was for girls. Carroll was interested in the unseen hands pressing the buttons of power in America. “If you don’t know about Anthony Weiner, look it up,” he said, suggesting he had perhaps done so recently. “And that is a direct tie to Huma Abedin and to Hillary Clinton and to, at that point, just pick your term for whatever deep state groups you want to talk about. That blackmail could be anywhere by now, but I think we all know who has it and Candace certainly knows who has it.” (Abedin, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton and ex-wife of Weiner, was then engaged to Alex Soros, the son of billionaire investor and Holocaust survivor George Soros, who is to Israel conspiracies what Stanley Kubrick is to moon landing conspiracies. Abedin and Soros wed in June.)
Carroll played a clip of Candace filling in the blanks: “All that we’re all doing at the moment is pretending RFK Jr.’s unflinching loyalty and, quite frankly, his fear of saying anything negative about Israel…”
A Russian nesting doll of Internet content began to reveal itself: within the clip of Candace played by Carroll, Candace played a clip from another podcast, in which Dave Smith interrogated RFK about Israel.
Carroll continued: “And just to clarify, there’s a lot of other evidence that Israel and Israel-aligned people are involved in having this blackmail, but I don’t want to get into detail just yet, because that would kind of compromise some of the journalists that are currently a little at risk. Right now, Bobby’s own staff around him, they know this, and they have been trying to find the handlers, handler that’s close to him, because it must be very close to be managing his tweets, and managing his appearances, and it sounds like there’s a lot of people who are trying to protect him from this coming out, but it is already coming out, and unfortunately, it is out enough that journalists are in danger.”
Carroll said his message was an act of heroism. By posting this video in which he accused me and Olivia of running a blackmail operation as deep state spies, he was acting to protect the “journalists” in possession of knowledge of the blackmail from harm. They had banded together, he said, and they had shared information with each other. There would be no way to silence the story by silencing one of them. So no shadowy deep state operatives should dare try. “We are all location sharing with each other and we are looking out for each other,” he said.
“I do not know all the details yet, and I don’t know if every single little detail that I just said is correct, but I know that enough of it is going on, and I’m getting it from, like, five to six different sources, seven different sources, tonight, that this is coming out, and the next months are gonna be completely insane,” he said.
My heart raced when I saw what he said. I lost sleep over it. Carroll was so convincing that I began to worry I might have unknowingly collected damaging evidence on RFK. I scrolled through both of my phones in a panic. The worst I could find was a slow pan video of his pantry in Hyannis Port. As a nosy house guest in the Fall of 2023, I filmed his vacation shelves scarcely stocked with processed snacks and later cornered his godson, who confessed that Bobby was known to smother copious amounts of Jiffy peanut butter atop white bread on The Cape. Seed oils as a preferred indulgence. Not exactly evidence to topple the nation.
A few weeks later, Ian Carroll would fill in as the host of Candace for a twelve episode-stint while Candace Owens went on leave to deliver her fourth baby. Before she departed from her set, though, she would stage another spectacle.
She was thrilled that our feud had generated not just profit for her but loss for me. She talked about subscribers who had defected from my side to hers. It was “war,” just like Mitchell told me it would be. The only thing he got wrong was what it would require to start the bloodshed. In the end, all Candace needed was a rumor of a shot in the works.
After drafting this whole outlandish serial soap opera built on blatant falsities, she finally decided it had reached its finale. I wished her well in her delivery. She vowed to pray for me and “leave it there.”
The very next day, she resumed the attacks.
What followed in the wake of Candace’s wrath was a bout of frightful, relentless harassment. Strangers flooded my inbox. Rage spilled into my children’s social channels. My two older boys called me terrified and confused. By a restrained estimate, 5.75 million viewers watched Candace’s lies. Millions more saw them spread across the internet. Thousands of people harassed me in response. Thousands harassed and threatened Olivia, too. The threats were grotesque and some were horribly specific, ranging from sexual violence to murder. People promised they were coming to Malibu to take their own “clean shot” of revenge against Olivia. Every corner of our lives online, for a year, has been infected by hateful invaders, followers of Candace, who feel justified in tormenting us. Because of what she aired about us.
Meanwhile, Candace’s sources—the freelancer and my former best friend—found new ways to register from their betrayals. One started a merch site branded around insults specific to me, and collecting Venmo donations as consolation from strangers amid our friendship breakup. Both of the freelance writers launched Substack newsletters and began trashing me incessantly on every platform they engaged with, putting fictitious versions of my work and life behind paywalls, to cover the funds needed to get them to New York to track the Diddy trial like they had been planning all along while running amuck under my trust, opening and sifting through all of my raw edits, taking screenshots of my financial dashboard, inquiring in arranged meetings with Substack how someone with unfettered access might export another editor’s entire subscriber list.
Worst of all, they aligned themselves with the purveyors of a vile hate site dedicated to tracking and harassing my every move, cozying up to deranged cyberstalkers they knew I feared. Not even my children were off limits. My concerns about these individuals were well established among my family and friends—some of whom were swept into the hate simply because they were connected to me.
Candace and her “sources” didn’t stop there. These self proclaimed “victims” of my toxicity continued to monetize their new status as such, validated by the viral smear of Candace. They logged on and posted coded messages, hoping they might bait me into some kind of heated reaction, which would provide them a new excuse to drag out their routine of bullying and doxing the PAID subscribers in my chat, hopping onto hosted Instagram LIVES to taunt and mock me, while making their own attempts to replicate my regular topics and style of news coverage. Watching Candace, perhaps they’d learned that broken relationships and communal hatred can be the foundation for successful personal brands.
When someone sent me a screenshot of the two former writers and my ex friend on FaceTime with my main stalker in frame, I knew there was no limit to their contempt.
After our spat in March, I watched in disbelief as I was steamrolled by lies. My work stalled. My income dropped. For more than a year, I had sought to bridge political divides through my coverage. It was an ongoing conversation. Sometimes heated, but always human, meant to bring people closer rather than push them further apart. My reputation was shredded overnight by a woman who activated an audience primed to respond with rage wherever it was pointed. My credibility was severely damaged even among core Kennedy supporters who assumed it was true, that I was working covertly to destroy RFK, after I had spent half my income and a year away from my family tracking and promoting his campaign.
As everything I loved and built continued to crumble, I fell into a lingering depression. My drive and discipline dissolved. As a family, we struggled to regain our footing.
But on the other side of my anger, as it slowly subsided, my curiosity returned. Candace’s attacks knocked the wind out of me, but I trusted there had to be a reason things unfolded the way they did I also knew humility brings valuable lessons with it. So I began to dig. I stopped reacting and quietly tracked her actions. What I uncovered about Candace’s past reveals a shocking pattern and a trail of people harmed along the way, with stories eerily similar to mine. Many had been silenced by fear, stunted by the reputational destruction she is proudly known for.
The patterns are strikingly consistent. Her tactics trace back to her left-leaning ideology and her cancel-culture activist days. Some of those affected are finally ready to go on record and expose her playbook.
Candace has been nothing short of demonic for a while now. It was her vilification of you that quite honestly made me read your articles for the first time. (I had followed you on IG for awhile.) Watching her and the joy she took in shredding your reputation made me believe you must be doing something right, and I subscribed to your Substack and unfollowed her. I haven’t been sorry once! You’re great at what you do, Jessica. Don’t forget
that. I believe you’re here for a purpose at this time in our nation. Just keep your head down and don’t let the cretins get to you!
Candace can’t just make a point. She has to build a Stalin-level villain first. Facts aren’t enough, so everything becomes an apocalypse. That’s a very Democrat habit, just wearing a different jersey.