Jeremy Boreing, the co-founder of the Daily Wire, is breaking his silence on Candace Owens, and the portrait he paints is not flattering. In a recent interview, Boreing told the Daily Mail that he bears some responsibility for elevating the media personality and wishes he had exercised better judgment along the way.
"I'm not the cause of Candace's talent or fame, but I did play a role," Boreing said. "I should have been more discerning."
Boreing, who co-founded the conservative media brand alongside Ben Shapiro and helped build the startup into a billion-dollar enterprise, stepped away from his role at the Daily Wire in March. He has since focused on creative projects like producing "The Pendragon Cycle: Rise Of The Merlin," but his comments about Owens mark a rare and pointed return to the public conversation about the direction of the right.
Boreing's central claim is simple: Candace Owens is not driven by ideology. She is driven by celebrity. And he says the evidence was there all along, if you knew where to look.
"Fame is the driving, fundamental priority in her life. Once you see it, you can't unsee it."
According to Boreing, Owens used to tell PragerU CEO Marissa Strite that her goal was to be "the most famous woman in the world." The version she shared with Boreing was slightly different in phrasing but identical in ambition: she wanted to be Oprah.
That kind of ambition is not, by itself, disqualifying. Plenty of effective conservatives have large personalities and sharp elbows. The question is whether the ambition serves a set of convictions, or whether the convictions are just fuel for the ambition. Boreing is firmly in the second camp, as Yahoo Entertainment reports.
"Candace uses ideology in the same way that she uses conspiracy, or in the same way that she uses slander, and that's for clicks."
He described Owens as someone with an almost preternatural ability to sense where the energy is flowing online and to position herself at the center of it. "She has the highest quantity of 'it' of any person that I've ever encountered," Boreing said, adding that in any interaction, "she's the star of the room. She's the center of gravity."
That is a remarkable concession. Boreing is not dismissing Owens as talentless. He is arguing something more uncomfortable: that extraordinary talent, unmoored from principle, becomes a liability to the movement that hosts it.
One of the more revealing anecdotes Boreing shared concerns a private conversation about Nick Fuentes and the Groypers, the online movement that has drawn sharp criticism from mainstream conservatives for its open flirtation with antisemitism and white identity politics.
Boreing recalled pressing Owens on her unwillingness to challenge what he called "very obviously bad actors starting to emerge in the movement." Her response, as he tells it, was blunt:
"I'll never go against the YouTube boys, are you crazy? I don't go against the YouTube boys."
Boreing called this "one of the most honest things that I think Candace has ever said." Not because the position was defensible, but because it revealed the operating logic. She wasn't making a principled case for engagement or free speech. She was making a market calculation. The Groypers had an audience. She was not going to alienate it.
This is the pattern that should concern anyone invested in the future of conservative media. When audience metrics replace editorial judgment, the boundary between populism and pandering disappears entirely.
Owens joined the Daily Wire on March 19, 2021, after gaining recognition at PragerU and Turning Point USA. She left in March 2024. Boreing addressed her departure in a leaked staff speech, claiming she had violated contractual obligations.
But the real rupture, Boreing says, was not contractual. It was moral. He pointed to Owens' engagement with users, accusing a rabbi of "drinking the blood of Christians," a reference to blood libel, the centuries-old antisemitic trope that has been used to justify persecution of Jews for generations.
"I'd been uncomfortable with a lot of what she had said in the months leading up to that, but really, if there was a straw, it was the blood libel."
"A centuries-old trope used by anti-Semites to defame the Jews, from my point of view, that was the point of no return," Boreing added.
There is a meaningful distinction between criticizing specific policies of the Israeli government and trafficking in medieval conspiracy theories about Jewish people. Conservatives can and do disagree on foreign policy. What they should not do is provide cover for rhetoric that has been the prelude to pogroms.
Boreing's most interesting observation may be his characterization of where Owens has landed since leaving the Daily Wire. He describes her as "post-political," noting that she is "openly telling people not to vote" and presenting herself as no longer constrained by the right-wing framework that made her famous.
"She's really actually just sort of detransitioning. She's returning to her first identity."
When asked what Owens actually believes, Boreing recounted that she once answered the question herself: "I believe what the people believe, I'm the voice of the people." It is a statement that sounds populist until you realize it means nothing at all. It is a mirror held up to whatever audience is standing in front of it.
"She views herself as primarily a famous person. She is going to give the people what they want. And she has an unbelievable instinct, as many incredibly talented people do, to [determine] which way the river is flowing at any given time. She knows where the clicks are."
This is worth taking seriously, not because Boreing is a disinterested observer (he plainly is not), but because the pattern he describes is recognizable. The conservative movement has a recurring vulnerability to personalities who adopt its language, build a following on its platforms, and then drift toward whatever content maximizes engagement, regardless of whether it serves the movement's actual goals.
Perhaps the most strategically important thing Boreing said was this:
"I think that Candace can be opposed. I think that she must be opposed, [but] I don't think that she can be defeated."
He explained the asymmetry plainly:
"Everyone who stands up to her is engaged in an action that's fundamentally about worldview, ideology, morality and truth. And that's not even the game Candace is playing."
This is the core problem with influence merchants who operate outside ideological frameworks. You cannot win a principled argument against someone who is not having one. Every rebuttal becomes content for them. Every confrontation becomes a storyline. The attention economy rewards the person who treats everything as performance, and punishes the person who treats anything as serious.
Conservatives have faced this before. The right has always had to police its own boundaries more carefully than the left, because the media establishment is eager to amplify the worst voices on the right and ignore the worst on the left. That reality makes discernment not optional, but essential.
Boreing says he learned that lesson too late. The question is whether the broader movement learns it at all.
