Episode 1125: Candace Owens

TL;DR: Conservative commentator Candace Owens spent much of this 2.5-hour conversation dismissing the scientific consensus on climate change and offering politically charged takes on race in America. Rogan, to his credit, pushed back on her climate denial in real time, but the episode still functioned as a platform for misinformation from a guest with no scientific or policy credentials.

Candace Owens, then Communications Director for Turning Point USA, joined Rogan in May 2018 during her rapid ascent in right-wing media. She holds no scientific, climate, or public-policy credentials, yet much of the conversation centered on topics requiring exactly that kind of expertise.

The Core Problem: Climate Change Denial

The most documented moment of the episode came when Rogan asked Owens whether humans need to care about the environment.

Owens, laughing: “Not even a little bit.”

She went on to characterize anthropogenic climate change as a scheme to “extract dollars from Americans” and said she could not accept the scientific consensus because climate science had “become so politicized.”

What the evidence says

IPCC AR6 (2021/2023): “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.” Link
NASA: Multiple independent studies show 97%+ of actively publishing climate scientists agree humans are causing recent global warming. Link
Science Feedback fact check (2019): Reviewed Owens’ and Charlie Kirk’s later viral claims and rated them “incorrect,” noting they ignore basic, well-established physics of greenhouse gases. Link
NOAA: Atmospheric CO2 is now over 420 ppm, the highest in at least 800,000 years; surface temperatures have risen ~1.1°C since pre-industrial times. Link

Why it matters

Climate denial from high-reach commentators delays policy action and erodes public trust in mainstream science. Owens has continued to push these claims in subsequent years, including paid social ads.

Joe Rogan’s Role: A Rare Real-Time Pushback

This is one of the episodes where Rogan deserves credit for not letting a claim slide.

He pulled up a Scientific American article live on the show citing the scientific consensus on human-caused warming.
He challenged Owens directly when she dismissed environmental concern.
He repeatedly pointed out that “the scientists who study this for a living” disagree with her.

Scientific American itself publicly noted the exchange on social media, highlighting the gap between expert and public belief on climate. Link

However, the pushback had limits:

Rogan still gave a non-credentialed commentator 2.5 hours to air denial of basic climate science.
He did not consistently challenge her broader political claims with similar rigor.
Owens left the platform with her brand amplified, regardless of whether she “won” the climate exchange.

Other Concerns

Sweeping claims about race in America

Owens offered confident takes on systemic racism, the Democratic Party’s history, and Black voter behavior — claims that civil rights historians and political scientists have repeatedly contested.

Historians at the American Historical Association and political scientists have long documented the “Southern realignment” and the post-1960s shift of segregationist Democrats into the Republican coalition. Link
Owens’ framing — that nothing meaningful changed in either party — is widely rejected in the academic literature on American political development.

Outrage culture framing

Owens framed protest, activism, and pushback against right-wing figures as “outrage culture” rather than political disagreement. This is a recurring rhetorical move that flattens substantive critique into a generic cultural complaint, making it easier to dismiss specific factual challenges.

Real-World Harm

Owens’ climate denial has been cited approvingly in subsequent right-wing media, including in segments later reviewed and corrected by Science Feedback and other climate fact-checkers.
Long-form, friendly platforming on JRE — even with pushback on one topic — amplified Owens’ reach considerably during a critical period of her career.
The episode is still circulated as an “argument she held her own in,” despite the climate claims being demonstrably false.

Bottom Line

Episode 1125 is a mixed but ultimately problematic episode. Rogan deserves real credit for fact-checking climate denial in real time — this is the kind of host behavior The Brogan Report wants to highlight. But the episode still platformed a non-expert making confidently wrong scientific claims for over two hours, and the non-climate portions of the conversation went largely unchallenged.

A skeptical host pushing back on one claim does not neutralize a platform that hands the microphone, unchallenged on most topics, to a guest with no relevant credentials.