Candace's Religion

This afternoon I watched an “interview” Dave Smith did a while back with Candace Owens. It was posted yesterday by a YouTube account called the “J-HB Radio Podcast” which when I looked into it seems to be just some randos trying to cash in on Dave Smith’s popularity. According to Grok, “The channel’s handle and older content are in Arabic (username looks like “@القناهالرسميهالننينوفير” — something like “The Official Neninofer Channel”). It used to post family vlogs, skits, or personal Arabic-language videos (e.g., involving characters like “El-Neny,” horror/prank-style stuff with kids or family).”

This practice of cashing in on popular content is lame and gross, and really shouldn’t be allowed. In the future I’ll make more of an attempt to go back to the original post of the conversation on Dave’s or Candace’s own channel, so someone actually involved in producing the content gets some benefit from my watching. Although I realize that’s very minimal, still it’s the principal of the thing.

But I did listen to the whole thing again, even after I realized it was an older interview I had seen before. I like both Dave’s and Candace’s content and it was interesting seeing them in conversation with each other.

One of the things I particularly liked came right at the end when Candace acknowledged that it had been Dave and Norman Finkelstein who had originally changed her mind about Israel’s influence on US foreign policy. Like Tucker Carlson, Candace has been very up-front about the ways her understanding of politics has evolved over the period during which she has been in the business of talking about it on camera. This is refreshing: it suggests these people don’t consider themselves to be infallible geniuses or holders of eternal truths handed down from burning bushes.

I mention burning bushes deliberately, because one of the things Candace focuses on frequently is religion. Dave seems to be from a Jewish family but to have embraced some religious belief system that’s not incompatible with his free-market libertarianism. Candace seems to have been brought up in a Protestant denomination (according to the web, she was raised primarily by her mother and paternal grandparents in a “Reformed Evangelical Protestant” environment). But she converted to Catholicism in 2024 after marrying George Farmer. Her husband’s family (his father is Lord Michael Farmer) are apparently “born-again” evangelical Protestants, but George converted to Catholicism after studying theology at Oxford.

In her book clubs, Candace frequently discusses books about global conspiracies and seems to take the idea of “demonic cults” seriously. Criticizing the cover-up of the Charlie Kirk assassination, she has taken several opportunities to weigh in on the sketchiness of “Pastors”, many of whom seem to have backgrounds in military intelligence and connections to eastern European human trafficking networks. She has expressed her distrust of evangelical religion in America; especially the mega-church variety. I’ve frequently found myself cheering her on but I’ve also wondered how it’s possible that her distrust of religion ends when it touches the Roman Church?

My working theory is that Candace is still young and that she is on an ongoing journey of discovery. She seems to address questions head-on and probe inconsistencies tenaciously. Given time, that may enable her to ask the same sorts of questions about the history of the Catholic Church and its role in world history that she has begun to ask about the roles of evangelical leaders in recent American politics. I’m not claiming that she’s on an inevitable path to atheism, but I hope she continues to look directly at uncomfortable issues and ask challenging questions.