The Fantastical Collapse of the Candace Collision

How overnight, the entire ecosystem that is Candace Owens crashed

I’ll admit it. I was one of those dirty Candace Owens fans. Kinda still am, maybe? Still making sense of what is happening.

What hooked me was her series on French President Macron’s wife, and specifically her penis, built on the reporting of Xavier Poussard. An American podcaster taking on the president of France over his wife’s anatomy. I thought it was the most American gangster thing I’d ever seen. I was in.

For a while, watching Candace felt like watching Jordan Peterson in the early days, or Joe Rogan before he got involved with the gambling industry, or DarkHorse, of course, of course. You know, a dissident speaking truth.

Then, almost overnight, it all fell apart.

The fight that made no sense

Here’s the setup. Candace was heading into maternity leave pregnant with her fifth child, a boy she announced back in June. Meanwhile, a fight was brewing that seemingly had nothing to do with her.

Leah, the financial investigative reporter behind The Leah Files, had been digging into podcaster Shawn Ryan. His relationship with Peter Thiel. His defense tech investments. And Glacier, the “privacy” app he’d spent a year selling to his audience. Leah traced Glacier back to an intelligence contractor and showed the app had quietly rewritten its privacy promises and still keeps records it said it wouldn’t. Throw in contracts tied to what I’d call the Israeli surveillance state, and you’ve got a real story.

Exactly the kind of story the old Candace would have chased.

Instead, she went into full battle mode. Against Leah. (And in the middle of her maternity leave, no less. A lot of people were thinking, shouldn’t you be giving birth?)

She defended Shawn, saying nothing was off limits when she sat down with him a few months back. The very next day, she ran an ad for Glacier. From there it spiraled: screenshots of private DMs, digs at Leah’s poker past, a debate that got cancelled, and finally Candace publicly calling Leah mentally unwell. Which, if you’ve been paying attention, is the exact same strategy Candace claims Zionists use on everyone else.

It made zero sense. And did I mention this was all days before she gave birth?

Knowing when to cut and run

Why did she do it? I doubt there’s any way of knowing. And honestly, I’m not sure it matters.

What I’m learning is that the real trick is knowing when to cut and run. Think of the Star Wars prequels, or the second season of The Witcher. Sometimes you have to appreciate the early work and disassociate yourself from what came later under the same branding.

In my mind, there are two Jordan Petersons. There’s Jordan Peterson before The Daily Wire, and Jordan Peterson after. The second one doesn’t exist to me. :-P Which is a shame, because he truly inspired me, not just to clean my room, but by extension, my life. He told me things I needed to hear when no one else would.

I don’t know what is happening in the world right now, but cutting and running is starting to feel like a vital skill. We’ve watched it with the MAHA movement. We’ve watched it with DOGE. Certain people, and certain movements, run up against something really nasty, and I think it’s important for people to see that and recognize it. Honor those people for who they were and what they represented, while also distancing yourself from what they became and what they represent today.

The first front

I sometimes think about what I would do if I had influence. You know, a few hundred thousand followers or something.

Then I think that having influence might be the most dangerous thing in this world. Influence is more valuable than anything else right now. Information is always the first front of war, not the eighth, as our good friend Benjamin Netanyahu sometimes likes to say.

My hypothesis

Here is my current running hypothesis for what the whole Candace Owens collision (aka the Glacier App Mafia) was. I think it was an attempt to astroturf a kind of anti-Zionist Christian movement, one that would be heavily surveilled using the very technology they were promoting. As relations between Israel and the US continue to deteriorate, I think a plan was put in place to get ahead of the anti-Zionist, anti-Israel sentiment and start their own populist movement, instead of letting a genuine grassroots movement take hold.

That’s my absolute best guess at the moment. It’s what makes the most sense to me, and I’m happy to completely change my mind tomorrow as new information comes in.