Candace Owens takes her patriot act to Putin’s talent show
America First, St. Petersburg second.
Raw Story reports that Owens is scheduled to appear at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on a panel called “A Big Family, A Big Reach: New Demographics and Narratives for Media Leaders.” Other scheduled panelists include Russian media and political figures under U.S. and European sanctions for supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Owens, meanwhile, has been posting about Russia as if she discovered a family-friendly Christian theme park with better architecture. She has praised the country’s “Christian heritage and expression” and presented the trip mostly as sightseeing.
That is the funny part. Owens has built a career out of treating mainstream institutions, public health, journalists, scientists, and political enemies as sinister puppet shows. But put her near a Russian influence event wrapped in “family values,” anti-woke messaging, and Orthodox aesthetics, and suddenly Owens’ conspiracy detector goes into airplane mode.
Raw Story notes that Russian state media reported her participation, while Owens herself had not publicly announced the forum appearance. The article also points out that Russian intelligence has historically used the St. Petersburg forum as a place to cultivate sympathetic foreign media figures.
Maybe Owens is just speaking on a panel. Maybe she thinks Russia is a natural ally in her civilizational war against liberalism. Maybe she is simply following the well-worn path of American right-wing influencers who discover that Putinism looks like “traditional values” if you squint hard enough and ignore the bodies, and accept the check.
Whatever the explanation, it is quite a look for an America First patriot.