Coleman Hughes: Candace Owens, Brigitte Macron, and Our Age of Conspiracy

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump was staged. The floods in Texas were caused by cloud seeding. Israelis secretly control the U.S. government, and 9/11 was an inside job.

I thought we had reached peak conspiracy. But thanks to Candace Owens, we have reached new heights. For the past year or so she has been peddling the bizarre theory that Brigitte Macron, the 72-year-old wife of French president Emmanuel Macron, was born male.

This proposition was originally the brainchild of Natacha Rey, a French citizen who first put forth the idea on the YouTube channel of a woman named Amandine Roy, a self-described medium. From there it passed to the independent French journalist Xavier Poussard, who wrote a self-published, book-length “investigation” called Becoming Brigitte—and finally to Candace Owens, who has provided this brainworm with its biggest platform yet.

She said in March 2024 that she would stake her “entire professional reputation” on the idea that Macron “is in fact a man.” And her eight-part video series, also titled “Becoming Brigitte,” has amassed millions of views on YouTube in the past few months.

Among them, apparently, are the Macrons themselves. They are not pleased. The president and his wife have filed a defamation lawsuit against Owens in Delaware, claiming that she has promulgated “outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions.”

There is a special irony in the fact that Owens is the one to orchestrate the mass online bullying of an elderly woman. Before she became a political firebrand, Owens was an anti-cyberbullying advocate. Her short-lived website, SocialAutopsy.com—which would have allowed people to dox online bullies—was so ill-conceived that it united critics on the far left and the far right.

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