Candace Owens Discusses Outrage Culture, Trump, Black America, and Her Political Awakening on Joe Rogan

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Candace Owens Discusses Outrage Culture, Trump, Black America, and Her Political Awakening on Joe Rogan

Candace Owens sits down with Joe Rogan for an unfiltered conversation about outrage culture, her transformation from liberal to conservative, and why she believes authenticity matters more than political correctness. From discussing her high school hate crime experience that shaped her worldview, to explaining why she stopped drinking and became hyperaware of social media's bizarre nature, Owens doesn't hold back. She criticizes celebrities like Chelsea Handler and Kathy Griffin, defends Kim Kardashian's prison reform work against Ben Shapiro's critique, and explains why she thinks Jay-Z and Beyonce betrayed Black America. Owens also opens up about meeting President Trump, why she finds him genuinely likable despite controversial tweets, and how culture, not politics, holds the key to waking up Black communities from what she calls decades of leftist brainwashing.

June 1, 2018

The Strangeness of Social Media and Sobriety

Candace Owens opened her conversation with Joe Rogan by acknowledging the constant controversy that seems to follow her everywhere. At just 29 years old, she's become one of the most polarizing voices in conservative media, yet she remains acutely aware of how strange her digital life has become. Unlike influencers who find Instagram stories completely natural, Owens admits she's painfully conscious of talking into her phone, which she believes actually makes her more grounded in an increasingly fake world.

The conversation turned to sobriety when Owens revealed she doesn't drink alcohol or take any pills. After living 26 years with what she describes as a mind that wasn't her own—believing liberal ideology was the only acceptable worldview—she became hypervigilant about what influences her thinking. She calculated that between starting drinking at 14 and continuing through college, she'd essentially been intoxicated for three cumulative years of her life. That realization prompted her to stop entirely.

Owens explained that once she started questioning the political narratives she'd accepted her whole life, she began questioning everything else, including society's relationship with alcohol. She finds it suspicious that drinking is presented as the solution to every emotion—celebration, sadness, embarrassment, or boredom. Reading an article suggesting that alcohol allows evil spirits to enter the body was enough to seal her decision, though she laughed at how extreme that sounds.

The High School Incident That Shaped Her Worldview

One of the most formative experiences in Owens's life occurred during high school in Stamford, Connecticut. She received voicemails from four male voices threatening to tar and feather her family, put a bullet in the back of her head like they did to Martin Luther King, and using racial slurs repeatedly. These weren't strangers—one was actually a friend she'd been arguing with because he felt jealous of the time she spent with her boyfriend.

What started as a drunken prank call escalated into a media firestorm when her teacher insisted she report it to the principal, who then involved law enforcement. The situation became exponentially more complicated when it was revealed that one of the boys in the car was the son of Connecticut's sitting governor. Rather than immediately taking responsibility, the investigation dragged on for six weeks while the FBI determined whether Owens had somehow fabricated the calls.

The experience taught Owens about outrage culture long before that term became commonplace. The entire state of Connecticut became consumed with the story. Letters to the editor accused her of lying and seeking attention. The NAACP protested outside her school. Meanwhile, Owens never wanted any of it—the situation had been taken completely out of her hands by adults who failed to simply let kids be kids who made a terrible mistake.

She developed anorexia in the aftermath, struggling for five years with an eating disorder rooted in her need to control something in a life that had spiraled beyond her control. The boys involved were publicly labeled racists, and their lives were derailed by arrests, DUIs, and drug problems. Owens believes all of this could have been avoided with a simple apology, and she refuses to label 14-year-olds as racists for saying racist things while drunk. This experience instilled in her a deep skepticism of victim culture and the rush to label people rather than understand them.

On Trump, Authenticity, and Why Obama Felt Fake

Owens didn't hold back in expressing why she finds President Trump genuinely likable despite his controversial tweets and public persona. She's met him multiple times and describes him as remarkably self-aware, comfortable making jokes about himself, and possessing a natural charisma that's hard to resist in person. She argues that media outlets deliberately misrepresent his words, taking clips out of context to make him appear worse than he is.

When Rogan brought up Trump's Memorial Day tweet that seemed to suggest dead soldiers would be happy about low black unemployment, Owens laughed, acknowledging Trump's tweets are often ridiculous but maintaining that his authentic, unfiltered communication style is precisely why people connect with him. She believes Trump represents an ideological revolution—a cultural war where authenticity is defeating the carefully managed fakeness that characterized previous administrations.

In contrast, Owens found Barack Obama's perfection deeply inauthentic. She recounted having dinner with Cubans who told her Obama's speaking style reminded them of Fidel Castro—the perfect tone, perfect hand gestures, perfect inflection, all saying exactly what people wanted to hear. While Owens cried when Obama won in 2008, celebrating a black president, she grew increasingly disillusioned as she watched what she now views as performative leadership that accomplished little for Black America.

She referenced a theory that revolutions occur when the gap between someone's public and private persona grows too wide. American society had become so fake—so consumed with political correctness and manufactured outrage—that Trump's raw, unpolished authenticity triggered a natural correction. Whether people love or hate him, they can't deny he's genuinely himself.

Kim Kardashian, Ben Shapiro, and Prison Reform

One recent point of contention between Owens and Ben Shapiro involved Kim Kardashian's visit to the White House to advocate for Alice Marie Johnson's clemency. Shapiro tweeted that society shouldn't worship celebrities or allow them to shape policy. Owens pushed back, arguing that Kardashian wasn't shaping policy—she was working on a specific case she'd been passionate about for years, funding legal teams and genuinely committed to prison reform.

Owens, who is deeply passionate about prison reform due to seeing her uncles incarcerated, found Shapiro's critique unnecessarily dismissive. She pointed out that every person who meets the president gets a photograph—there's a full-time White House photographer, and it's standard protocol. The meeting didn't constitute worship; it was Kardashian using her platform and resources to help someone who deserved a second chance.

While Owens generally likes and respects Shapiro, she finds him to be a "hall monitor" type—someone who can't help himself from making snarky, unnecessary comments about things that don't align perfectly with his worldview. She values being open to learning, having conversations where she might be wrong, and recognizing that different cultures and communities approach politics differently than by-the-book conservative orthodoxy might prescribe.

Kanye West and Why Culture Matters More Than Politics

Owens was frustrated when Shapiro quickly dismissed Kanye West's public support of Trump, writing him off as crazy. She wrote Shapiro an email explaining that while Kanye's approach might not make sense to someone who's always been conservative and politically engaged, it was monumentally important for Black America to see someone like Kanye break from leftist orthodoxy.

She explained that for people raised in the projects without fathers—communities devastated by the welfare system where single motherhood jumped from 25 percent in 1965 to 74 percent today—culture serves as a surrogate parent. Kids in these communities turn to Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Kanye, and hip-hop to tell them what's right and wrong. The left has maintained a stranglehold on Black America precisely because they control culture.

Kanye's simple tweet expressing love for Trump and his MAGA hat opened up dialogue in ways traditional conservative messaging never could. When Owens first met Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA when he was just 18, she outlined three verticals that keep Black America trapped in Democratic dependency: the breakdown of the family, the control of culture, and the indoctrination of education.

Owens grew up idolizing Jay-Z, treating his albums like going to church. His words meant everything to her during difficult times in her youth. That's why she now considers him a traitor. Jay-Z built his career on the backs of Black America, presenting himself as someone who came from the streets of Queens, dealt drugs, and made it out. Then he stood on stage and endorsed Hillary Clinton—the wife of the president who locked up more black men than any in American history through the 1994 crime bill.

Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and the Globalist Elite

Owens doesn't believe Jay-Z supported Hillary Clinton because he genuinely thought Trump was racist. She's convinced Jay-Z is far too intelligent for that. Instead, she argues he wanted a piece of the globalist pie, to remain in the elite clique that had access to the Obama White House, wore the right ties, and took the right photo ops. He and Beyoncé were interested in controlling the world, not helping Black communities.

When Rogan suggested maybe Jay-Z thought Trump represented racist white people, Owens immediately shut that down. She believes Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and the Obama administration worked behind closed doors to ensure Hillary Clinton would be the next president. Hillary was selected, not elected—first by the DNC, then through coordination with Obama's team. Celebrities who wanted to remain in that powerful circle had to fall in line.

Owens contrasts this with what Kim Kardashian is doing. Kardashian doesn't even agree with Trump on many issues and has criticized him publicly, but she's genuinely committed to prison reform. She was working on the Alice Marie Johnson case before Trump took office and continues working on multiple cases. That, to Owens, is how celebrities should engage—focusing on specific issues they care about rather than grandstanding at award shows or delivering sanctimonious speeches about how wrong everyone else's opinions are.

Award Shows, Marlon Brando, and Virtue Signaling

The conversation shifted to celebrity culture and award shows, which both Owens and Rogan find unbearable. Owens traced the origin of political speeches at award shows back to Marlon Brando, who sent a Native American woman named Sacheen Littlefeather to accept his Academy Award for The Godfather and speak about the treatment of Native Americans and the situation at Wounded Knee.

Since then, award shows have become competitions for who can deliver the most dramatic political statement. Owens finds the virtue signaling insufferable—celebrities getting on stage to lecture Americans about morality and politics rather than simply thanking people and moving on. She differentiates between celebrities who actually do good work, like Ashton Kutcher fighting sex trafficking or Kim Kardashian working on prison reform, versus those who just want to grandstand about how enlightened they are.

The Hypocrisy of Outrage Culture

Throughout the conversation, Owens repeatedly returned to the theme of selective outrage. She pointed out that Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump the c-word and faced minimal consequences, while Roseanne Barr's career was destroyed for a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett—even though Barr claims she didn't know Jarrett was black and was on Ambien at the time.

Owens shared that her mother once took Ambien and woke up to discover she'd gotten up in the night and painted the white bathroom carpet with red lipstick and nail polish like a toddler, with zero memory of doing it. Ambien creates a sleepwalking state where people cook full meals, have conversations, and do bizarre things with complete amnesia afterward. Yet no one wanted to give Roseanne any benefit of the doubt.

Meanwhile, the actress from Smallville admitted that branding sex slaves was her idea—literally burning logos into human beings—and that show remained on the air while Roseanne was pulled from Hulu. Ben Carson, a brilliant neurosurgeon, was called a "porch monkey" by someone with a significant platform, and there was barely any backlash. The rules, Owens argues, only apply if you have any association with conservative thought.

Jake Tapper, Chelsea Handler, and the Question No One Wanted to Ask

Owens recounted tweeting a question while at lunch with a friend: do you think there's a connection between women who don't have children and their increasingly erratic behavior? She was observing a pattern with Chelsea Handler, Kathy Griffin, and to a lesser extent Sarah Silverman—women who seemed to have "gone bonkers" and were trying to mother and parent all of society instead.

Her friend made a joke that "if you don't use your eggs, they scramble." Owens found it hilarious and tweeted the question—not even the joke itself. The reaction was explosive. Ellen DeGeneres's show producers went after her. Jake Tapper jumped in, somehow connecting her question to Trump and Turning Point USA, making a bizarre logical leap that had nothing to do with the original tweet.

Everyone demanded she delete the tweet. Chelsea Handler, Kathy Griffin, and others lost their minds. Owens's response was that the intensity of their outrage proved she'd hit a nerve. If there was nothing to the question, they would have laughed it off. Instead, their reaction suggested maybe there was something worth examining about women without children seeking purpose through hyperactivist politics and constant rage against Trump and his supporters.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised—It'll Be Tweeted

Owens believes America is experiencing a genuine revolution, just not the kind with guns and street battles. It's an ideological and cultural revolution, and while it seems sudden to many people—going from Obama to Trump felt like whiplash—the conditions were building for years. Society had become so fake, so constrained by political correctness, so focused on being offended by everything from hairstyles to hoop earrings, that an authentic disruption was inevitable.

She laughs at the absurdity of outrage over cultural appropriation—people researching the origins of Bantu knots and cornrows to determine who's allowed to wear certain hairstyles. She's never once in her life looked at someone's hair and felt emotionally upset, yet there are people who claim braids on a white woman constitute theft requiring tribute to Africa or Jamaica. To Owens, this represents the peak of fakeness, where private feelings don't match public outrage, and people are performatively upset because they've been told they should be.

Trump's election, Kanye's red pill moment, and the growing number of people rejecting leftist orthodoxy all represent natural corrections to an unsustainable cultural moment. The revolution is happening in real time, and Owens is committed to being part of waking up Black America to the reality that the Democratic Party has not served their interests, that culture has been weaponized to control their votes, and that authenticity and independent thought are more valuable than tribal political loyalty.

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