Candace Owens Suspended Again by YouTube for Anti-LGBTQ+ Content

Far-right commentator Candace Owens has been suspended from YouTube for her anti-LGBTQ+ statements.

Owens’s Daily Wire colleague Michael Knowles announced in a video last Tuesday that she has been temporarily barred “from posting or appearing on any of the Daily Wire’s YouTube channels.” He did not say how long the suspension would go.

A YouTube spokesperson told watchdog group Media Matters, “We issued a strike to the Candace Owens Podcast channel for violating our hate speech policy, which prohibits content promoting hatred against protected individuals or groups, including the LGBTQ+ community.”

Owens’s recent LGBTQ-related content includes a July 14 interview with right-wing commentator Brandon Tatum in which he said homosexuality is all about “sexual lust,” not love, and results from being molested or exposed to pornography as children. Owens didn’t dispute Tatum’s claims and said that LGBTQ+ people once represented a “small subset of people who were perhaps molested” but now are greater in number because of “social contagion.”

Then on July 17, she again said homosexuality is caused by molestation and other traumatic incidents in childhood, and that in the Catholic Church and other institutions where children are sexually abused, “it is gay men that are abusing children … the issue is that we have homosexual men that have invaded institutions.”

Owens had been suspended for a week in June after posting content that included “accusations that anybody who shopped at the retail chain Target was ‘gay’ and ‘a pervert,’ claims that ‘transgenderism’ is ‘a cancer and we should fight it,’ and boasts that the podcaster could beat up a nonbinary naval service member,” Media Matters notes.

Three strikes issued by YouTube within a 90-day period can lead to permanent removal from the platform.