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

0:00Coleman Hughes:Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. Today I'm going to talk about conspiracy theories.

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0:51Coleman Hughes:9-11 was an inside job. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump was staged. Israelis secretly control the U.S. government. And on and on they go. I thought our culture had reached peak conspiracy. But thanks to Candace Owens, we've now reached new heights. For the past year or so, she's been peddling the bizarre theory that Brigitte Macron, the 72-year-old wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, was born a male. This proposition was originally the brainchild of Natasha Ray, a French citizen who first put forth the idea on the YouTube channel of a woman named Amandine Roy, who was a self-described medium.

1:34Coleman Hughes:Always a good sign. From there, it passed to the independent French journalist Xavier Poussard, who wrote a self-published book-length investigation called Becoming Brigitte, and finally on to Candace Owens, who's provided this brain worm with its biggest platform yet. Candace said in March of last year 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, and they are not pleased.

2:12Coleman Hughes:The president and his wife have filed a defamation lawsuit against Owens in Delaware, accusing her of promulgating outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions. There is a special irony in the fact that Candace Owens, of all people, is the one to orchestrate what is essentially an exercise in the mass online bullying of an elderly woman. Because before she became a political firebrand, she was an anti-cyberbullying activist. Her short-lived website, socialautopsy.com, which would have allowed people to dox online bullies, was so ill-conceived that it actually united critics on the far left and the far right.

2:50Coleman Hughes:In more recent years, she's taken up such topics as blood libel, the secret Jewish ancestry of Kamala Harris and Joseph Stalin, and the alleged murder of JFK by AIPAC. You may notice there's a pattern in her obsessions. But nothing, perhaps other than Israel, has taken up more of her attention than Brigitte Macron. The story that Candice spins in Becoming Brigitte has all the hallmarks of arthouse cinema. Once upon a time in post-World War II France, there was a man named Jean-Michel Trogneau who yearned to be a woman. He socially transitioned and even appeared on a French TV show advocating for trans rights.

3:33Coleman Hughes:But French society did not allow legal gender transition at the time. Then one day, his younger sister Brigitte became ill, and as her dying gift, she gave her identity to him. So he began living as Brigitte sometime in his 30s, became the high school teacher of a young Emmanuel Macron, and through a series of serendipitous events, wound up becoming the First Lady of France. And because this is a French story, it has to involve incest somehow, so sure enough, Candace ends the series by insinuating that Brigitte might even be President Emmanuel Macron's biological father. It's the talented Mr. Ripley meets Tootsie meets old boy.

4:16Coleman Hughes:Now, to be clear, this story is exactly as insane as it sounds, and there's no evidence to support it. The closest that Candace comes to presenting evidence is her analysis of a family photo in which a young Jean-Michel, pictured on the far left, bears a strong resemblance to the current First Lady of France. Of course, several other members of the family bear a strong resemblance too, including her older sister, pictured on the top right, and of course Brigitte herself, pictured on her mother's lap. Nevertheless, Candice believes that the resemblance between young Jean-Michel and modern-day Brigitte is so strong that no other explanation is possible.

4:57Coleman Hughes:They are the same person. To add an air of scientific precision to this theory, Candice uses a piece of facial recognition software called Face++. She claims that according to this software, which she touts as extremely accurate, photos of a young Jean-Michel Trogneau are a strong match for recent photos of Brigitte Macron, but photos of a young Brigitte are not a match. So I decided to test the reliability of Face++ by getting an account and playing with it for a bit. It was not long before it made a huge error. According to Face++, these two photos are not the same person, except that they're both photos of me.

5:38Coleman Hughes:So either Face++ is not very reliable or my dad has some explaining to do. Is the software accurate enough to identify people correctly much of the time? Sure. Is it accurate enough to prove a case of swapped identity in elderly siblings using grainy childhood photos? Not even close. Besides the fact that her entire theory is based on this unreliable software, Candace's story also has some glaring plot holes. For one thing, Jean-Michel Trogneau, Brigitte's brother, is still alive. And we know he's alive because he was present at both of Emmanuel Macron's inaugurations in 2017 and 2022. How does she explain Jean-Michel Trogneau's existence?

6:23Coleman Hughes:Well, apparently, the Trogneau seen at Macron's inauguration is not the real Trogneau at all. It's another man named Jean-Michel Nogue who somehow faked his own death in 2006 and then reappeared to play the role of Trogneau at both inaugurations. Now, if you're confused at this point, I don't blame you. Let's just put on our tinfoil hats for a moment and take some of Candace's premises on board. If the Trogno family is so powerful that they can easily fake a death as with Nogue and easily hide a death as with the original Brigitte, then why not just fake Jean-Michel Trogno's death right after he assumed Brigitte's identity.

7:04Coleman Hughes:That would have been way cleaner and way easier than waiting decades, faking a different man's death, and then putting that man on national television where people would surely recognize him. But this is how conspiracy theories work. Whereas thinking like a scientist means applying Occam's razor, finding the simplest explanation that fits the observable facts, thinking like a conspiracy theorist means the exact opposite. Assuming the fantastical and then working backward from that conclusion. And when evidence is scant, well, that's just proof of how good the cover-up was. When evidence is available in plain sight, well, that's just proof that the evil cabal is so powerful that they want to flaunt their evil before our very eyes.

7:50Coleman Hughes:As with all die-hard conspiracy theorists, I'm sure Candace will come up with clever workarounds for the plot holes in her story. Meanwhile, the rest of us should answer some equally hard questions. What does it say about our information ecosystem that such an insane conspiracy theory can rack up millions of views? And how do we restore sanity and common sense to the public sphere?

8:20Hey everyone, if you've got thoughts on this episode or just want to keep the conversation going, come find me in the Free Press Forum. The forum is kind of like a reddit page for free press subscribers and on Tuesday August 18th at 3pm I'll be in there live to answer all of your questions. Head to the fp.com slash forum or use the link below to start asking now.