Transcription
[Music]
There’s this general feeling that people have that you’re an anti-Semite. Let’s address that head-on. Judaism is a faith; Israel is a state, and it is not above critique. What B.B. Netanyahu has done for the Palestinians since October 7th is a Holocaust. This is about power, and this is about control. I’m not going to quiet my perspective on that to cow-tow to whatever the prevailing narrative is at the New York Post.
All of my gay friends are like, “They better not hold a trial within, you know, 50 miles of Hell’s Kitchen in New York.” This hot assassin executed a woman executive. Would you be saying any of this? I have no idea why Don Lemon is still speaking on the Jay-Z recent stuff. I don’t believe it. I looked into that case, and I actually don’t believe it. There are a lot of holes in there. A lot of people in Hollywood are perverts; they’re drug addicts. They believe that they are gods. And you once said, “Jay-Z is like God to me.” How do you feel about him now?
Did I say this?
You did.
Oh, was “God” past tense? I was like, “What are we talking about?”
Chanice, it’s been great to see you. It’s too much fun. When my next guest went independent earlier this year, some people openly hoped she’d vanish from public life. But no such luck. The uncancellable Candace Owens is more successful, influential, and, of course, controversial than ever. And for the first time ever, she joins me here in the uncensored studio.
Candace Owens, I’m so pleased to be here. We’re meeting in my lair at last. I like it. Interestingly, I just did your podcast today, and it was an experience. You were nice. I mean, you were sort of human, you were warm, you were quite friendly, you were charming. I waited for the sting in the tail, the combat, the gotchas. It never happened.
It never happens.
I’m actually so nice. Either you’re massively misunderstood, or you’re softening in your old age. What’s happening here?
No, I am always nice to everyone. I’m just on the receiving end of so many gotchas, and I’m constantly in defense mode. So people see me, and they perceive me as always battling. Actually, I’d rather just exchange ideas and learn what people believe, but it’s just not possible today in today’s social economy of just constantly trying to get each other. “Oh, I’ve proved Piers Morgan’s racist! See, I tricked him!”
I just want to know who you are. You know, it’s very interesting because I’ve got a theory. The remake of Trump, for example, is that in the longer-form interviews he gave in the election campaign—the big podcasts, Joe Rogan, three hours and so on—people heard and saw a lot more of him than they normally did, and they liked what they heard and saw. He liked the response he was getting. It went from being endless combat with the legacy media, where it’s like press conferences, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, it’s 10-minute soundbite interviews, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. It went to a much longer, less confrontational, more open-minded series of discussions where both sides and the people listening and watching felt like they got a different Trump altogether out of it. I think it has changed him.
I was pleading with them to start doing podcasts because we get it. You go to NBC; they hate you. You’re going to fight with them. They’re going to say you’re racist, you’re sexist, you’re misogynistic. What is the public learning from this? The most fascinating interview he did, I thought, was with Theo Von when he was so genuinely trying to understand Theo’s prior addiction. That’s such a compelling story because Trump has never drank, as you know, his entire life. He lost his brother Fred. That’s the side of Trump that people want to see.
There was actually, I think it was Slate, that did a piece recently trying to understand the new podcast economy and why conservatives have been so powerful. They sort of noted that in this new Joe Rogan economy, as they called it, authenticity sells. People are either reading you to be authentic, or they’re reading you to be somebody that’s just a clone. I think that’s what people like about my podcast, and that’s what I just try to do: just be myself.
You broke away from the Daily Wire; it’s all well documented, or was fired, one or the other. Whatever you want to call it, it doesn’t matter, does it? Same when I left the morning show; I was out. You went out on your own again. I mean, it’s a tricky thing to do that when you’ve been part of a big media conglomerate. Success story in new media like Daily Wire, going out on your own. How did you feel when you went catapulting back into independence, and how has it worked out for you?
You know, I think for most people it’s easier because you leave, and they’re not trying to tarnish your reputation. I kind of left in a period where there was a full-blown effort to cancel Candace Owens. It was like, “We don’t want her to be able to survive.” It was every petty smear that you could possibly come up with, and I wasn’t expecting that, especially after working as hard as I did at the Daily Wire for three and a half years. But I loved it because you need those reminders in life. You fight the hardest when your back is against the wall. So I just turned it around, and it motivated me. I was just excited about being able to take on conversations that, of course, when you’re part of a larger organization, you do have to do a little bit of self-censoring because, well, you know, maybe the execs don’t think that or don’t believe that. You have to kind of convince them about your side. So it’s been just a tremendous opportunity—so much growth. My husband is absolutely brilliant, so he figured out the business side of it, and I just do what I do best: talk on the internet.
I like gold, the Daily Wire guys, and I like it. If that gets me canceled, so be it. But it was a shame to me that you all fell out like that. Do you think you’ll fall back together in a more friendly way or not?
You know, I don’t even think of it as a falling out. I think we’re just different people at the end of the day, and I think that’s okay. You don’t have to be friends with everyone. I was never friends with Ben Shapiro; he didn’t even work in the office. So I think people think that we’re all working together all day. I still maintained my friendships with all of the others that I saw every day, and I learned a lot there. So I have no regrets about the time that I spent there—tons of lessons learned, no hard feelings whatsoever. Because, you know, I made my show bigger and was able to lean more into being myself, so who’s to be upset about anything?
One of the narratives at the time was that you’re anti-Semitic, as you know. On Sunday, you were named Anti-Semite of the Year by the watchdog Stop Anti-Semitism. It said you blew the competition away with more votes than anyone in previous years. Their founder, Leora Rez, told the New York Post, “Candace Owens’ witch’s brew of anti-Semitism drew from vile medieval blood libel claims that Jews drink Christian blood, conspiracies that Jews are pedophiles who control the media, and are taking over America. Modern toxic anti-Israel hysteria. There is no psychotic rabbit hole too extreme for this poisonous hater.”
Now, we’ll come to the specifics of that charge, which are obviously pretty full-on. This general feeling that people have that you’re an anti-Semite—address that head-on.
Well, it’s actually not even a general feeling. What’s really remarkable is if you go underneath that post or go find the New York Post, every single comment is in my favor. We’ve gotten to this point now where the charges of anti-Semitism are kind of going through the exact same routine that the charges of racism did back with BLM. First, people took that very seriously. If I said, “Piers, you’re a white supremacist,” you would have just been astonished because who wants to be called a white supremacist? But then you started to realize this was about power, and this was about control, and this was about trying to manipulate people to take your perspective.
Post-October 7th, you had what I refer to as the lewd party media in America. I count the New York Post among them, who just insisted that unless you agreed with everything that B.B. Netanyahu was doing and towed a very specific line, they were going to smear and libel you and ruin your life. A lot of people, I think, shied away from that and kind of wanted to keep their head low. I didn’t play that game with my own community. I was willing to take all of the figurative bullets with Black America calling me a race traitor, a self-hating Black person, whatever it was. I don’t view Jewish people to be some exception where you’re allowed to now call everybody anti-Semites because you can’t actually debate what B.B. Netanyahu is doing and why so many people around the world are not comfortable with it.
So yes, they can award that all they want. People are mocking it. It’s now become cartoonish, and they have, unfortunately or fortunately, completely removed the power from that term.
What is your view of Jewish people, of Judaism?
Yeah, for the record, what’s your view?
My view is that, you know, Judaism is a faith; Israel is a state, and it is not above critique. What B.B. Netanyahu has done to the Palestinians since October 7th is a Holocaust. There is a Holocaust that is being committed on Palestinian children and women, and I’m not going to quiet my perspective on that to cow-tow to whatever the prevailing narrative is at the New York Post.
I had Dan Buran on Uncensored recently, and I’ve got to say it took a pretty shocking turn. Interviewing him, I hadn’t fully factored in just how, in my opinion, brazenly anti-Semitic he is. This included this clip here: “Do you not understand why Jewish people might feel a sense of victimhood given that 6 million of them were killed in World War II by a genocidal monster in the Holocaust? Do you not understand why that might make Jewish people feel, yes, they have indeed been victims?”
Yeah, I mean, that figure has been revised. They said that it was 4 million that died in Auschwitz, and then they said it was down to a million. So they’ve revised the figure.
Well, how many people do you think were killed in the Holocaust?
Um, I don’t know, but I would bet my entire net worth that it was under 6 million. The evidence all says that it was less than 6 million. I mean, just the mathematics don’t work. You can’t cremate that many bodies.
I’m sorry, but I just find that unbelievably offensive, and I’m not even Jewish.
You see, this is where I’m like you. I think there’s been a weaponization of all these things—whether you’re transphobic, you’re racist, you’re sexist, you’re anti-Semitic, whatever it may be, you’re Islamophobic. I mean, people just spray this stuff around all the time to the extent where it does become meaningless. Actually, people who are genuinely those things get caught up in the wash and are almost protected by the kind of wash of stuff. But when you hear someone like Damar, what do you feel about someone like him?
Yes, so I actually didn’t watch that interview, so I haven’t seen it in its full context. I try never to weigh in on clips because there’ll be something I’m missing, and then everybody screams at me. But what I will say is this: the larger discussion that’s happening right now is whether or not having survived a Holocaust gives you the permission to commit a Holocaust. For whatever reason, people have been, what I would say, milking the Holocaust narrative in the same way that Black Americans were milking the slavery narrative, essentially saying, “We lived through this, and we survived this, and so now nobody can say that anything we do is wrong.”
That’s the big issue today: we have so many people that will not recognize that it is totally feasible that a Jewish person—and I’m speaking here about B.B. Netanyahu—could do something as horrific as what was done to the Jews throughout World War II or throughout history.
But is that an accurate comparison?
I’ll tell you why I say that. As we know, whatever Damar wants people to believe, 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Another 6 million people were murdered by Hitler and the Nazis. The numbers of people being killed in Gaza are, in my view, have gone way beyond what is acceptable as a response to October the 7th. However, you’re still talking about, at the moment, a death toll of under 50,000. There’s no comparison in the amount of dead people compared to the Holocaust.
Do you understand why?
But it is a Holocaust, what’s happening.
Well, is it though?
Yes, language is really important. I think language is really important as well, and that’s why people say Holocaust, genocide. The burning bodies that I see every day, and we talked about this a little bit on my podcast. I have recognized that the ability to see this stuff every day has transformed my opinion. Maybe the numbers wouldn’t have gotten so high if people had spoken up when it was happening at the very beginning during World War I. So I want to use my platform to say that I believe that they are intentionally executing a Holocaust.
I think B.B. Netanyahu—there’s tons of evidence, and obviously the Western media is not reporting on this—but the corruption trials that are going on with B.B. Netanyahu pertaining to October 7th and him editing the transcripts and the prior knowledge that he had is now becoming extremely pertinent. It is a question as to whether or not he allowed the attacks to take place essentially to then be able to go in and commit this Holocaust against the Palestinians.
Now, based on everything that I’ve looked into and stuff that I had not seen before because the Western media doesn’t cover it, B.B. Netanyahu caught off-camera speaking about how he had no intention of following the Abraham Accords and how he was going to get around it. I believe he has genocidal ambitions, and that’s enough. We don’t need to dispute, go backward or forward. Do I think B.B. Netanyahu has genocidal ambitions against the Palestinians? The answer is yes.
Do you think he’s a war criminal?
Yes, I believe he’s a war criminal. I think that the issue is how much power he has, particularly in America. I want to make sure that I’m just crossing or, I guess, making that clear to people across the pond. You know, in America, we have lobbying; you guys don’t have lobbying here.
Not to the same degree.
Yes, like AIPAC spent $100 million in our elections, and what that means is that they’re able to write fellowships, they’re able to pay journalists, they’re able to pay people to attack and take down people who speak against their initiatives. AIPAC, I would say, is very much pro-lewd party, pro-B.B. Netanyahu. This is why you have seen people like me being attacked in the way that they have been attacked for what I believe is just a human stance on what’s happening to the Palestinians.
I don’t care if you had flipped it. If it had not been Israelis, if it had been, you know, the M—if it had been Christians doing this to Muslims, I would say the exact same thing based on the images that I’ve seen. But there was a ton of evidence that B.B. Netanyahu allowed October 7th to take place, including the things that we found out because I now read Haaretz daily.
Do we not actually think he knew it was going to happen?
Well, let’s just talk about the facts, don’t we? We don’t have to speculate on that. What we do know is that they did intercept the hostage plan before it took place, right? The 250 hostages that came out in Haaretz media. We also know that Egypt gave them prior warning that the attacks were going to take place. Egypt said that they were being ignored. That was a fact.
I’ve been to Israel. Have you been to Israel?
We know it’s the size of New Jersey. We know that it takes 15 minutes to get from one end to the other, and we know that every 5th there’s a person in your face holding a gun. That attack went on for two hours without interruption. I find that hard to believe.
This gets to the, I guess you could say, the nucleus of the corruption trial against him when now he’s even arguing with the IDF minister, who he fired, Yav Galant. Am I saying the last name correctly?
Yes.
Where they’re saying that some funny stuff happened on October 7th, and they are explicitly accusing him of feeding lies to the Western media. This is crucial, you know, and this could be the undoing of everything if we find out that he had prior knowledge. We do know for a fact that he said he intentionally wanted to take over Palestinian territory. You should find that clip and play it on the show because it’s very significant.
When he asked the reporter to turn off the camera, and then he starts speaking about his plans for the Palestinians. This was years ago. I think B.B. Netanyahu is a monster, and I think the people that are still standing by him and supporting him, you know, I wouldn’t want to have that on my conscience.
Let’s turn to the Palestinians, who I think have been appallingly oppressed for many decades. I’ve made no secret of that. But what Hamas did on behalf of the Palestinian people on October 7th was an utterly heinous terrorist attack—absolutely no question about it. So my question would be, let’s go back to October the 8th. What should have been Israel’s response to that, given the scale of it?
Well, first and foremost, there had to be a response. We know that the IDF is very capable of a surgical tactical response because they’ve done it over the years plenty of times in which they’re able to take out terrorists. We just watched them execute a beeper attack and hit out Hamas terrorists.
So this, I think, is a very relevant point because if they could do that to 3,000 Hezbollah terrorists, why couldn’t they be as precise with Hamas? Because they don’t want to be. They want to level it because they want to take it over. I believe, and you can see this by the way in the videos of the settlers dancing. I mean, why do they have settlers already ready? Doesn’t that seem strange that this quickly you already have settlers that are going in and taking over the territory, and you’re hanging, you know, children’s toys?
What should Israel have done, though? What would have been?
They should have just taken out the Hamas terrorists.
How do you do that when they’re embedded amongst?
Well, listen, I’m not an IDF minister, but what I can say is going back to that beeper attack, it seems pretty precise. There have been many examples of them doing that in the past, so I just don’t buy the BS of like, “You know, we actually just have to take down entire towers and buildings.” It doesn’t even make sense. I mean, I’m not an engineering major, but if you’re telling me that there’s a tunnel under everywhere, you only have to hit a tunnel at a couple of points to render it completely useless.
So the idea that they had to level the entire place, plus go out into refugee camps, doesn’t make any sense. Like I said, I think their goal—and as they do—they have all these policies mowing the lawn where they kill a certain amount of Palestinians every year. This is genocidal. The aims here are genocidal.
Your father-in-law, a very highly regarded man in this country, Lord Michael Farmer, said the Israeli Defense Forces were acting in a highly accountable way in an extremely complex and difficult environment. We cannot forget that they have been forced to prosecute this war. Obviously, a different interpretation of events there. Have you discussed this with him?
Yeah, I mean, I try to separate my politics from his politics because I think it’s unfair in any family to say, “Well, what does your mom think? What does your cousin think? What does my sister think?” My sister’s a Democrat, you know? What I can say is I deeply respect him. He’s done a tremendous amount of work.
I want to say this: I was on the Zionist side. Let’s not forget this. For years, I worked for Prager University; I worked for Daily Wire. I was much more sympathetic to, I would say, the Zionist cause throughout my entire career. But the difference is—and I think we spoke about this on my podcast—generationally, with the access of social media, being able to see these things every day versus the person who, as you described it, is still kind of a combo who hears the thud of the newspaper and reads the newspaper and believes that, you know, this kind of becomes or colors their worldview is very different.
Social media completely transformed my perspective on what’s happening in Israel and Palestine, and I’m disgusted with myself for not being more awake.
That’s interesting because can social media also wrongly skew a narrative? In other words, can it reinforce one view which is very quickly established? I was astonished how quickly the narrative after October the 7th became anti-Israel and very pro-Palestinians, stroke Hamas in many cases. I found that quite terrifying that that was the case, notwithstanding my own view about how Palestinians have been treated before that.
But could it be? I mean, you’re a very smart person, but you say that you were affected by social media. Social media was incredibly partisan behind the Palestinians almost immediately to the extent where I would argue, looking back at the whole time that I’ve argued persistently, “Well, what would be proportionate?” I can’t think of anything Israel could have done given that Hamas were embedding themselves among civilians. I don’t know how they could have attacked Hamas without being criticized.
Whatever they did, they would have been criticized.
But not to this degree. Everyone was expecting a response, and myself included. We’re like you said, and we agree on this: we’re way past that, so that’s not even a question anymore. There had to have been a response, and you are correct that no matter what the response would have been, it would have been criticized. But now there are questions about whether or not, like I said, they allowed this attack to happen, and I think this corruption trial will tell us much more. My instincts are telling me yes.
But to go back to your question about whether or not social media can color you the wrong way, for the first time ever, we were just able to see what was happening in Palestine. Before, we just had to rely on legacy media.
Who did you believe?
When I first saw it, I kind of wanted to wait. I was trying to just sort through everything. I’m still not sure all the stuff I see is right.
Well, some, but I’m now getting my information because I ended up signing up for Haaretz, Israeli newspapers, because they’re protesting it. They’re calling this ethnic cleansing. Why do we not have people in the Western media that have the courage to call it the same? It’s clearly not anti-Semitism. Why on Earth would Haaretz, or Israeli newspapers, be anti-Semitic and want to see the undoing of Jews?
Again, this goes back to AIPAC and back to lobbying. But to answer your question, that piqued my curiosity, and I couldn’t believe that essentially everything that I had these presets to believe about Jews—everything was existential. Again, that sort of Holocaust upbringing in my mind culturally, seeing so many Holocaust movies, I kind of had these factory settings where I instantly always wanted to see Jewish people as the victim.
It was very hard for me to kind of shed that.
But a lot of Jewish people were victims here too, correct?
But what I’m saying is my factory settings—what I mean is that the second a Jewish person got hysterical about anything, I just assumed they were telling the truth and were the victims. I’m just kind of going back and assessing my own character flaws. I got this wrong in my political career.
What you should do is not have these factory settings and actually examine the facts, right? And so when I started to do that, what I started noticing was I wasn’t even allowed to ask a question. I’d see something, and then I’d say, “Well, what is this?” And then suddenly it was anti-Semitism. That right there, to me, signals you’re not telling me the truth because you shouldn’t have to do that.
Right?
Nobody is going to—I think that works in almost every single debate in the world right now.
I see it the other way around, where you get accused of being an Islamophobe if you dare to criticize anything on the Palestinian side, even if a lot of the stuff that’s been going on is worthy of criticism.
I haven’t seen that, and I say this as someone who was deeply critical of people that were Islamic throughout my entire career because, again, I jumped into politics, and there’s a certain perspective that you’re supposed to have in America about Zionism, and you’re supposed to kind of marry yourself to it. Despite all of the things that I now kind of blush when I look back on that, I sort of had those factory settings.
They never kind of just routinely dismissed me; they just kind of were like, “Well, she’s paid for.” They never called me an Islamophobe, whatever it is. I just want to be fair, and I want to be fair. If something happened tomorrow and in an elite place in America and a bunch of Jews were killed and targeted, I want to stand on my platform and say what is happening to Jewish people is wrong.
I’m not married to hating Jews because I think what B.B. Netanyahu is doing is wrong. It has nothing to do with the Jewish people at large. This is a foreign state; he’s allowed to be criticized in the same way that I criticize Biden, in the same way that you can criticize Trump. I’m criticizing B.B. Netanyahu, and I think the IC got it correct in pursuing an arrest against him.
Do you think Hamas is a terrorist?
Absolutely.
You do?
If you kill civilians, you’re a terrorist organization. That was always very clear.
Could they play any part in a government after all this, in your view?
I would really struggle to see how that would be a plausibility.
Let’s turn to Syria because, interestingly, you said the fall of Bashar al-Assad is not a good thing.
No.
Why?
Well, it just kind of going backwards, and I also want to be careful here because I try not to be an expert on things that I don’t know enough about, and that’s why I usually have people on my show. I had on Scott Horton, who was way deeper on the topic of Syria. I had him on last week.
Yeah, he’s super. I actually had him on with a top American general, and it was a fascinating debate because they agreed about a lot more than I think they thought they would agree about.
Yeah, it was really interesting, actually. When you have a civilized conversation between two people you think are implacably opposed, actually, often they find a lot of common ground if they’re fair-minded.
Exactly. And so I always say I like to take time, and I view my show as a place where people can come and learn along with me. I’m not a snob; I don’t pretend that I know everything, and I have the humility to admit when I’ve gotten things wrong and to adjust my opinions.
You know, on the topic of Syria, it has been pretty clear to me and everyone, and I’m grateful that J.D. Vance even said it, that this was going to result in the mass killing of Christians. It just seems that hasn’t been happening yet.
So it’s interesting; there’s not been a persecution of Christians so far since the topping of al-Assad. In fact, what you’re seeing is a lot of the forewarnings that XYZ would happen—they’re not happening. Now, it’s way too early to say they’re not going to happen, but certainly what is fascinating to me in the interplay of what’s happening in Syria, you’ve got this guy who used to be one of the al-Qaeda commanders, and he’s clearly in his rhetoric been moving to a much more moderate position in the last few years.
Now he’s taken charge, and he’s continued to sound and speak like a moderate, and he’s not ordering the kind of retribution murders and mayhem that people may have thought he would. That includes specifically the fact that Syrian Christians are not at the moment being subjected to any kind of apparent oppression.
I mean, are you surprised and encouraged by that?
You know, to be honest with you, because I traveled over here and then I was sick for an entire week, I haven’t done enough. I haven’t looked into the story.
You’ve had a right, yeah, exactly. I need to stay more up to date on what’s going on. But my concern is that, and even if it’s not happening imminently, that a lot of Christians are about to be murdered.
And listen, again, talking about the broader conversation of Israel’s involvement, which I showed on my show with Scott Horton, you know, them admitting that they armed al-Qaeda, al-Nusra—all of this is just inappropriate and wrong. You just keep calling yourselves victims, and you’ve been caught so many times funding rebels, you know, giving rebels weapons to pursue Israel’s aims in the region.
I think that our foreign policy in the West is way too tied to what B.B. Netanyahu wants. Okay? And I’m happy that this conversation is happening. I’m happy that people are able to debate it. I’m happy that people like Scott Horton are given a platform to really think through these things because, in terms of America at least, there’s a major awakening happening as it pertains to our foreign policy in the Middle East.
Let’s turn to some of the other big stories at the moment—the shooting of the healthcare chief executive, and in particular the weird reaction from the left of kind of immediately moving to, “Well, he’s a hot assassin, Luigi Mangion,” when in fact he’s just a cold-blooded assassin. Your old friend Don Lemon said this: “Do you think it’s a gay thing? Because look, maybe we are over-indexing on the gay friends and text because all of my gay friends are like, ‘Someone said they better not hold a trial within, you know, 50 miles of Hell’s Kitchen in New York.’ I got a couple hung jury texts. I’ve got some texts that aren’t really appropriate for the Don Lemon show, so it might just be a gay thing.”
All I could think watching that was, “Really, guys? I mean, if this had been a female chief executive, would you be saying any of this stuff? If this hot assassin had executed a woman executive?”
I mean, no. Why are they doing this?
I have no idea why they’re doing that. I have no idea why Don Lemon is still speaking. Nothing that he does makes any sense anymore, so I’m not even sure what the aims of his new show are. But yeah, there have been tons of people that are commenting on his looks. Really, what it’s fostering, which I think is more important, is a discussion on healthcare in general in America, which is another topic that people tend to not understand.
You seem both interestingly because you’re married to an English guy, and we have the NHS here, the National Health Service, free-for-all, which is not perfect by any means. But it does mean that if you walk out here today and you fall over and break your leg, you’re going to get free healthcare in this country. You’re not going to have someone standing over you wanting payment before they’ll give you painkillers.
There’s something amazing about that as a system. In America, you know, I’ve had injuries; I’ve broken some ribs and stuff, and I remember somebody, as I was dozing in and out of consciousness, wanting to know how I’d pay for this. It was quite scary having been used to the NHS. That is real America, and I could afford to pay for it, but imagine if you couldn’t.
Apparently, some of these healthcare companies are operating at like a 30% denial rate at the moment, so a lot of people are dying because they’re being denied coverage.
That’s exactly right. And what people don’t understand is it’s not a marker of a failed free market system; it’s not a free market system at all. What’s wrong with American healthcare is that it’s a fully operating drug cartel. You’re completely blindfolded; you have no idea how much anything costs. The insurance companies are making deals. You’ve got the government involved.
I say it’s always the exact aims of the Mexican cartels were actually accomplished in America—a partnership between the government, the insurance companies, and the pharmaceutical giants. They decide on pricing; they blindfold you, they send you in there, and it’s all about price gouging and seeing how much money they can make.
A great example of what happens, actually, if you had gotten rid of these health insurance companies entirely is things become instantly more affordable. Lasik surgery being a classic example of that. I had that years ago. When the insurance companies were involved, that would cost people $40,000 per eye. Today, the average price for both eyes is $4,500 because insurance now declines coverage.
So it’s people are angry about our health insurance, and that’s why you’re seeing some of that rhetoric where, like, “Well, nobody cares what happened to Brian Thompson.” But even though I disagree with that rhetoric strongly, you should always condemn murder, especially cold-blooded murder in the way that it happens. The sentiment behind it is just recognizing that people’s loved ones are suffering, loved ones are dying, and it’s because we do have a criminal cartel operating in broad daylight.
Daniel Penny was the other big story where he was obviously a veteran marine, and he apprehended this guy who was going nuts on the subway, and he did a sort of chokehold restraint on him, and the guy dies. I never thought that Daniel ever got to court. Fortunately, I felt justice was done. He’s now been seen with Trump and everybody at the big football match at the weekend and so on.
But what was interesting to me was, given your background with BLM, the leader of BLM in New York, Hawk Newsome, said, “We need some Black vigilantes. People want to jump up and choke us and kill us for being loud. How about we do the same?” The framing of that as being loud, as if that was all that Jordan Neely was doing when nine out of 11 of the witnesses who were there at the time, including women and children, they all said it was the most terrifying experience they’d ever had on a subway.
This wasn’t somebody being loud; it was somebody being incredibly threatening. Apparently, he prepared to go to prison for life and didn’t care if he even died in the process. That’s somebody that needs apprehending to protect innocent people. It’s not someone being noisy, which this guy wants to flip into, “Well, we must take equal violent, potential deadly action against people that try and stop us.”
Yeah, well, talk to him. I’ve sat down with him twice now over the years, and I can tell you he is virulently racist towards white people. There’s no question about it. He has a hatred for white people like I’ve never seen. I had him on friendly terms. I was like, “Hey, let’s just have a conversation about what it is that you believe.” Right away, he’s angry when he sees a white person and sort of buys into this whole victim narrative. He truly is someone who believes that there is no wrong that a Black person can do if a white person is there.
So he’s not someone that should be paid attention to, and he does these things to get headlines. It’s completely not sensible, especially for people who have young kids like I do. Daniel Penny is a hero. This is exactly what you want to take place. The only lack of justice here was the fact that he had to go through the court system at all as opposed to have just been, “Thank you so much. Here’s a GoFundMe. We’re all raising money. I hope you live out the rest of your days as a millionaire because you stepped up and saved a bunch of people’s lives.”
You know what’s interesting, Candace, is, excuse me, I’ve got—
You know what I’ve got?
The interesting thing to me has been the reaction to two things: one, the Daniel Penny case and the verdict, that despite all the efforts of people like that guy, Hawk, to whip everybody up into vigilante violence and mass protest, it never happened. There were no mass protests. We didn’t see another George Floyd uprising of rage around the country at all. In fact, even on a tiny level, it never happened.
But secondly, the attempt to portray Trump as the new Hitler, a fascist, and so on and so on—the most existential threat to democracy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Two interesting things to me: I was at the Madison Square Garden rally; there were no protesters turned up. This is the middle of Manhattan just before the election. The new Hitler’s in town, right, with all his young new Nazis, and only 150 people turned up to protest. 50,000 Trumpers turned up who couldn’t get in, who were keen to join the party.
I remember thinking, “Wow, Manhattan’s basically given up on this because they don’t believe this.” I felt the same thing with the Jordan Neely verdict response, that the BLM movement was so damaged, really, as the longer it went on, that actually this time around, people weren’t having it.
And we’ve seen it in those two things, both with Trump and with this case—really interesting lack of protest.
What we’re really seeing is just like the media—the mainstream media is just a vacuum. I go back to that Jeff Bezos piece because it was really brave what he wrote. It also, I think, took a tremendous amount of humility. I don’t think it’s going to make a difference in the end because we’re not going backwards to legacy media.
What he said when he said, “We’re essentially writing these pieces; it’s an echo chamber to ourselves.” That’s exactly what it is. It’s funny because I almost forgot that Trump was literally Adolf Hitler for years, and now I’m anti-Semite of the year. These words don’t have meaning anymore.
So you have the media writing articles to themselves—the elitists, the journalists—and then you have the rest of the real world, and we kind of understand about what’s happening. We want to have free speech; we want to communicate ideas. We’re voting for Trump not because he’s Adolf Hitler, but because we want low gas. People were not doing well under Biden because we don’t want a woman that’s going to lecture us about why you should vote for her because she’s a woman.
I mean, these are—it’s really common sense is making a return. Trump is also—he did make that joke before years ago when he said, “You’re going to get tired of how much winning we’re going to do.” He must be getting tired of all the winning that’s going on because not only did he win the White House, the Senate, the House, the popular vote, the Electoral College, he’s now just won $15 million off ABC over being defamed by George Stephanopoulos.
What was interesting to me is that was a massive blow for the legacy media to basically admit we lied about Trump, and we have to give him $15 million, right? And we’re going to apologize. You’re seeing a lot of big wins for Trump. He was Time’s Person of the Year, etc., etc. He rang the bell at the stock exchange, greeted like a conquering hero.
There’s a real change in the way that Trump’s victory this time around is being treated compared to how it was last time. I think he’s kind of—he’s won. He’s defeated the people that were so intent on destroying him in such spectacular fashion they basically threw in the towel.
But it wasn’t that they were intent on destroying him. You know, we should really assess what the Trump win was really about because it was something so much bigger than that. You know, when you have this man come down the escalator back in 2015, and you had him make a declaration, he said, “You are fake news. You are fake news.”
Nobody really knew he was talking. Everyone was just like, “What do you—everyone was existing under the spell where we still believed legacy media.” We couldn’t believe how cross this guy was being. “Who’s this gutsy billionaire from New York who’s going to call out the legacy media?”
That really was the war. Even when he wasn’t in office, that was the ideological and cultural war that has been fought for a very long time. Like, are we giving the media the power to tell us what is fact and what is fiction, to destroy people at the drop of a hat, to build people up at the drop of a hat, to tell us who the new celebrities are?
So I loved thinking about this last election as like a battle between Taylor Swift-type feminism and ballerina farm. You probably don’t know who this is. Realizing that just like regular people won—regular people won against the giant establishment of the mainstream media, the latte-sipping elitists on the coasts who mock them, who mock their lifestyles, who think they’re backwards and racist.
The symbolism of the Trump win is so much bigger, and it will take years and decades and in perpetuity for us to really know.
The Hollywood endorsement of politicians, which is always obviously the Democrat, whoever it is, however useless they are—Hollywood rounds around the Democrat. On this occasion, having tried to—I mean, to me, that time in L.A., I think it was in late June, where Clooney led the big rally night for Biden, and they had a big fundraiser and raised, I mean, tens of millions.
But you could see them all standing on that stage as Obama led away Biden, literally had to guide him off stage. I remember thinking, “None of you people—George Clooney, Obama, any of them—none of them actually believe this guy should be serving another four years. They know he’s basically gone, but they’re perpetrating a lie to the public.”
It’s the ultimate form of elitism. And then when they flipped in Kamala Harris, it was exactly the same thing. It’s like, “We know best; we’re going to just crown her, and then she will win because she’s not Donald Trump.”
They’ve all been made to look spectacularly powerless. Interestingly, they must be looking at themselves in the mirror going, “Wow, what the hell just happened? Nothing we said made any difference.”
And now what are they going to do?
That’s what’s interesting is this kind of forecast. Okay, they can’t do it again. We can’t do a Taylor Swift post; we can’t do a George Clooney post; we can’t do a Beyoncé post; we can’t do J.Lo crying. I mean, if celebrities could win an election, this was it, right?
Yes, this was the Super Bowl. They all came out; they all did their thing. They brought Eminem back from the dead. What do they do now?
What is your actual opinion? Take me to 2028. What are the Democrats doing?
Yes, are they going to have to speak to us?
Oh no, are they going to have to come down and actually learn about Joe who drives a truck and the people who touch their own door handles and the farmers and the ranchers? God forbid, are they going to have to learn about the rest of America that happens outside of Los Angeles and New York City?
And then you hear all the stories about Oprah’s production company helps stage one of the big sort of on-stage things she did with Kamala Harris. Then you hear that Beyoncé may have been paid; she denies it, but who knows? There’s a lot of stuff going on here where it looks like not only are they preaching to everybody, but they might also be feathering their nests at the same time.
Of course, of course. This is out of the system, right?
Yeah, so he killed Hollywood; he killed politics; he killed all these necessary deaths that needed to happen so we could go back to fostering conversations and having an authentic understanding of one another.
Actually, I would say he didn’t kill Hollywood. What he’s done is put Hollywood back into the box of Hollywood. What’s interesting now for all these big movie stars is more than half the country voted for Trump. If you’re going to carry on hammering Trump in the way you’d like to because that’s all you know, then actually a lot of the people that might want to come to your movies are not going to come, right?
You’re going to commit acts of self-harm. Now, knowing the egos that are at play in Hollywood, in the movie profession in particular, they’re not going to do that. You’re going to see them all go very quiet about Trump. There’ll be no more of these award shows where they queue up one after another to insult Trump, insult his supporters, and so on.
They’re going to start doing exactly what the tech bros have all started doing. They’re going to be starting to kiss the ring, right, or keeping quiet. So, you know, you’re going to see them. We’ve seen Tim Cook go down to Mar-a-Lago. We’ve seen Jeff Bezos—all these guys, right?
They’ve all worked it out, which is actually the majority of Americans now with this guy, and you’re on the train or you’re screwed. Yeah, you’re going to get run over by the train.
So it’s almost like they—Hollywood will continue, but I just don’t think you’re going to see these award shows now by anti-Trump. They know it’s the Wizard of Oz. We thought it was so scary; it’s Hollywood. Oh, they’re so popular. Oh my God, it’s Taylor Swift. Who could disagree? It’s Beyoncé. Who could ever say no to the queen?
And then suddenly Trump kind of exposed them as these measly little people operating a machine behind the curtain, and you can’t go back from that. You know, they’re not cool anymore.
No, completely right. Well, they’re just not—they’re not powerful. They’re not—they may be powerful in flogging a movie, but they’re not powerful in moving a political needle, and that will—that once that’s gone, that never comes back. They’re kind of done. They’re just theater kids now.
Yeah, which is fine. Which is actually where I prefer them to be.
Yeah, same. You know, I like Hollywood when they’re being Hollywood. Give me a Tom Cruise, Top Gun: Maverick movie; I’m the happiest guy in the world.
Right? But, you know, give Robert De Niro saying, “I want to punch Trump in the face” every two minutes. Nobody cares.
Who cares, man? Bob, it’s over.
Bob, it’s over.
Bob.
Talking of over, we talked a bit about P. Diddy last time you were on, and obviously now that Jay-Z, we’ve seen, has been named in court documents. Can you tell me?
I was right about P. Diddy. Remember when before the guy said it’s coming? I read that lawsuit. I always try to fairly assess lawsuits. I do a very good job of reading it. I don’t just accept that people are crazy. They do make allegations against all the time.
I think you’re going to be proven completely right.
Obviously, obviously he’s not convicted, but the scale of the charges and the number of people coming out with very similar stories—
Well, and interestingly, male and female, right? It seems to be almost a split, right? Like he was basically, you know, out there. It just seems to me on the face of it, allegedly, abusing almost everyone.
That’s correct. I mean, very chilling. And everyone in Hollywood knew, and that’s a piece of this that we still haven’t gotten to. What’s going to happen to all of them? Do you think they’re all going to get swept up in this?
I think so. I think they are going to get swept up in it. I don’t see how they can’t. This is pretty clear-cut. If you can use your platform to talk about every meaningless social issue and I’m with her and hashtag me too, this is a pretty important one when you have this many victims lining up.
When you once said, “Jay-Z is like God to me,” how do you feel about him now?
Did I say this?
You did.
What?
Yeah, Jay-Z was God to me.
You said, “Oh, was God past tense?”
Growing up, I was like, “What are we talking about?”
Yeah, when you grew up, his music—
Yeah, when I was growing up, I loved Jay-Z because in his lyrics—
Be clear, he’s been emphatic in all his denials. Let’s be clear.
I also want to be clear on the Jay-Z recent stuff. I don’t believe it. I looked into that case, and I actually don’t believe it. There are a lot of holes in it.
Yeah, that one doesn’t pass the sniff test for me.
But in terms of his relationship with Diddy, I would expect him to make some sort of a statement because, like I said, he is overtly political. So I just want people to keep the same energy. If you normally don’t comment on matters, that’s totally fine. But if you’ve been lecturing us for years about every other social ill, now would be a great time to use your platform for that same energy.
If you were saying women are suffering, I’m with Kamala. Well, we’ve got some women that are suffering and have a lot of proof and evidence to that point.
But it’s interesting. It’s like I said, and this kind of—we can kind of seem roll this into that larger discussion about what’s happening in Hollywood. We are realizing that they are just false idols. That these parties were taking place, the amount of drugs, having these Airbnb owners talk about, you know, the cocaine they allegedly found the next day, the debauchery parties, these openly sex-filled.
I think it’s very good. Like I said, I think nature is healing. People are starting to see these people for what they are. A lot of people in Hollywood are perverts; they’re drug addicts; they’re idiots, and they believe in their own magic. They think that they are gods, and they are people that we need to turn off and focus on our families.
You know, that’s what I believe. More power to the individual, and everyone’s leaving the Hollywood cult.
Well, let me end by focusing on family, yes, because you made the very sensible decision, and apparently he asked you to marry him 19 days after you met, which is very English.
Yes, Russell Brand was our Cupid.
Really?
Yeah, he was.
Well, let’s hear this because I’m fascinated.
Nineties, what happened? You guys meet where?
So a buddy of—this is George, your husband.
Yeah, we—Turning Point UK was hosting an event. George was there; I didn’t get to meet him. I then went to do Russell Brand’s podcast in the countryside, and through a lot of miscommunication, nobody had told me that my now husband was hosting a massive dinner with major players in politics. Like Douglas Murray was there that night, you know, all these fantastic people.
So I was three hours late because I was with Russell Brand doing his Under the Skin podcast. This is amazing because this is when he was a communist, you know, this was the old Russell Brand. And then my assistant kind of comes in and is like, “There’s a massive dinner for you,” and I’m like, “I have to go. There’s a random guy named George Farmer hosting a dinner for me.”
Jumped in the car, went down to Belgravia, three hours late, and my husband’s just plying everyone with red wine like, “What’s even coming?” I don’t know; I just locked eyes with him and just knew that I was going to marry him.
It was insane, literally. And it’s funny because his best man then read the text messages that George was sending to him like, “I’m going to marry this girl,” and I was sending messages to my assistant like, “I’m going to marry this guy.”
From that, like locked eyes, this is like a true rom-com story featuring Russell Brand.
Yeah, was it just the accent?
No, everyone had an accent.
Do you find this accent irresistible?
Americans do like an English accent, so I will say that it is a plus. But everyone there had an accent; it was just his face. He didn’t even speak to me; he was so nervous.
Then he flew to meet me the following week at Turning Point USA’s big conference they have every December, and it was just—I just knew. It was the strangest thing.
And then he proposed to me. We didn’t even kiss.
Nothing?
Didn’t even know if he had a girlfriend.
And you not even had a date, really?
We didn’t even have a date. We had our first kiss in Terminal 5.
Really?
That’s very romantic.
It is.
Love Actually.
It is Love Actually, actually.
And now you’ve had children.
Now we’ve had three kids, and he lives in America, and we spend time here, and we’re fighting the culture wars, and we’re just so happy.
I’m a Catholic.
Baptized Catholic this year?
A Catholic.
And how’s that going?
Amazing.
You like being a Catholic?
I absolutely love being a Catholic.
Yeah, the Brompton Oratory is amazing. You guys are really blessed to have that here.
Yeah, really blessed to have that. It’s an amazing place.
It is. And the other thing we have here that you don’t have is Christmas crackers. Are you familiar with Christmas crackers?
The ones that like—yes.
Have you ever cracked a Christmas cracker?
No, but someone sent them to me from Fortnum & Mason.
Allow me. I’m so excited!
This is so exciting!
So the technique is you swap hands, okay? So put one there, okay, like that.
Actually, no, hang on, hang on. That one there—no, no, no. Right hand, that goes in your right hand. We cross, you see, like that.
Okay.
On the three. One, two, three.
Oh, of course you won both of them!
Yay!
You won a nail file!
But we also have Christmas cracker jokes. There should be a joke in each of them.
Oh my gosh!
This is so great!
So what’s the joke, guys? What do you get if you cross Santa with a duck?
Go on.
A Christmas quacker!
The other one—wait, we got to ask the conversation starter. Would you rather have the ability to speak five foreign languages or play five musical instruments?
Wow, instruments.
Yeah, I agree.
Actually, I’ll take language.
Okay, why?
Why did Santa go back to school?
Go on.
Because he wanted to learn the alphabet!
God, man, this is so great!
Which five celebrities would you pick to have Christmas dinner with?
This was not a good one. Whoever put this one—
Let’s do that one then. You go first.
None of them, really.
None of them?
They’re all—
I’d have Trump.
You already had dinner with him.
Yeah, and Trump because they’d be great for dinner parties.
I’d have Ben Stokes, the England cricket captain.
You can come.
Okay, why not?
You’re a celebrity.
Yeah, I’m fine.
I need one more.
No, let’s think about this. Let’s have Robert De Niro just for the sheer crack of having him with Trump.
Yeah, I agree. That’d be hilarious.
That’s brilliant. That’s our answer. Take it to the bank.
And you get to wear the hat.
This is the hat?
Yeah, there you go.
Strangely matches you.
Put this on, and then a fully-fledged English spirit.
There you go!
Wow, look at that!
Were I Queen, England would still be quite terrifying as a potential queen.
Candace, it’s been great to see you!
[Laughter]
Lovely, lovely. Too much fun. Great to see you.
Right, and I love your podcast too.
Merry Christmas to everybody!
Merry Christmas!