Candace Owens

Candace Owens speaking at the 2018 CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland.

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“”You can feel free to call me an Uncle Tom. It does not affect me. You know why? Because I actually read the book — Uncle Tom was the hero.

—Candace Owens, actually getting something right

“”So just like Blaire White gets to spend her entire life being thought of as one of the good ones by her community, just like Milo Yiannopoulos got to be one of the good ones of the gays until he was outed as a pedophile, and just like you get to be one of the good ones from your community, you will never rise above the level of tepid acceptance from people who think you're an outlier to your group. But I guess that's enough for some people

—Vaush

Candace Owens is a wingnut commentator and rising airhead of the young conservative movement. She is the founder of Red Pill Black on YouTube and also serves as Turning Point USA's "director of urban engagement." Get it? Because she's the only black female TPUSA supporter who isn't a stock photo model. Candace Owens distinguishes herself from other wingnuts that typically subscribe to bigotry and conspiracy theories by not only being a token black conservative, but she manages to stray farther right than the typical wingnut by also flirting with some really seedy viewpoints including The Great Replacement conspiracy theory and omitting the Holocaust when describing Hitler's goals. Due to her complacency to Neo-Nazi ideas, white supremacist leader Richard Spencer has described Owens as "the last stand of implicit white identity". As of April 2018, she is also Kanye West's new best friend.

Biography

Owens hails from Stamford, Connecticut and was a victim of racism in high school. She attended college at the University of Rhode Island, before dropping out after her junior year. She later went to work for Vogue magazine.

Attacked by GamerGate, recruited by GamerGate

In 2016, she attempted to start up a website called SocialAutopsy.com in a naive attempt to try to expose cyber-bullies and stop their activities by doxing them. This led to her being contacted by anti-harassment activist and recurring GamerGate target Zoe Quinn. Quinn tried to warn Owens what kind of internet shitstorm she was stepping into. And then, things began to go quickly downhill. The digital lynch mob that is GamerGate, sensing fresh meat and eager to destroy a potential threat, descended upon Owens in a storm of hate mail, that due to her inexperience with internet jargon, Owens mistook for an attack from Quinn. What followed was a series of surreal tweets from Owens to Quinn, in which Owens accused Quinn of participating in a massive conspiracy in an attempt to shut down the SocialAutopsy project. This was followed by a scathing open letter from Randi Lee Harper, another professional activist, in which Harper was quick to point out many flaws in Owens' website design, anti-harassment experience, presentation, and technical skills, leading to Harper getting caught up in the maelstrom as well.

Meanwhile, GamerGate decided that Owens would make a better ally than enemy and pulled an abrupt one-eighty, supporting her tweetstorm on Twitter, sending her links to pro-GamerGate websites, and even interviewing her. All of this eventually led to Owens "taking the Red pill" and becoming a permanent fixture of the less reputable corners of the interwebs, from whence she continued to spew forth bizarre and increasingly ridiculous conspiracies, such as attacking the Washington Post for a story they never actually published, but that she was nonetheless sure would be an attempt to smear her.

Who is she?

“”I actually don't have any problems at all with the word 'nationalism'. I think that the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don't want, so when you think about whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. He was a national socialist. But if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine. The problem is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German. Everybody to look a different way. To me, that's not nationalism. In thinking about how we could go bad down the line, I don't really have an issue with nationalism. I really don't. I think that it's okay.

—Candace Owens, ignoring the Holocaust

Candace Owens's first and foremost specialty is grifter and provocateur. She relies on her grift by being the garden-variety online conservative wingnut who is black to validate conservatism for blacks, like a lot of other black conservatives, even though black conservatives really aren't that uncommon.) Her primary platform seems to be that she has awakened to the "lies" of the Democratic Party and encourages other people, particularly blacks, to do what she did: "take the red pill" and become a conservative, while other conservatives can claim, "See? Even black pundits agree: we don't have a racism problem."

She has ties to InfoWars, having been personally interviewed by Alex Jones on several occasions. She also claims that InfoWars editor-at-large Paul Joseph Watson was responsible for "discovering" her on YouTube.

Owens does have monetary advantage to be an outspoken Black Conservative™. Owens, after all, is willing to overlook or downplay the very real issues facing African Americans today, including police brutality, disproportionate incarceration rates, substandard housing, crumbling schools, hostility to the black trans community and just plain overt racism by the very Trump supporters whose praises she likes to sing.

Views

“”Every time I write about Candace Owens, I feel manipulated. I feel manipulated because Candace Owens, on her own, is not newsworthy. She’s not witty or particularly charismatic. She’s billed as a commentator and activist, but to describe her grasp on politics, history, gender, or race as shallow would be doing a great disservice to the word, because shallow still has depth. Activism implies, well, activity, or purpose. Activists tend to have a moral center—however questionable or controversial. Owens has never successfully articulated such a moral center, and her leap from running an anti-Trump site in 2016 to grabbing Kanye West’s “free thinker” coattails in 2018 implies one doesn’t exist. Owens’ only gift is grift, and she’s been exceptional at it in a way that says far more about conservative white people’s grievances than it says about her. Her currency is outrage, and her endgame is attention. Owens is a troll. And she is a troll among many—many who hold considerably higher positions of power. (Lest you forget, America’s president [Donald Trump] [was] also a troll.)

—Anne Branigin, The Root.

Her outrageous claims just rely on a combination of pseudohistory, conspiracy theories, half-truths, loaded language, and appeals to emotion. She frequently makes hyperbolic comparisons such as believing journalists "journalist hitmen" and school shooters are the same because they both like publicity and thus should not be named or her comparing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's proposals practiced by Stalin, Lenin, and Adolf Hitler combined.

Indicative of her attacks on Washington Post writers previously mentioned, Candace Owens cries oppression and has claimed her Facebook posts were "censored" (this reaction is usually a red flag that someone is a bullshit purveyor). One of them about Kamala Harris's heritage was flagged by Facebook as false or misleading, and there was a source from Associated Press provided explaining how those claims are false or misleading.

Candace Owens's rhetoric may carry grave consequences. Brenton Tarrant, the Australian white nationalist terrorist who shot and killed 50 people at Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 15 March 2019, named Candace Owens as his biggest influence in his manifesto. Her response? A weak attempt to distance herself from the shooter and do no self-reflection in her part of potential radicalization pipeline while blaming "the Left" for daring to associate her with those attacks, even though the shooter clearly has associated his motives with her.

LOL! FACT: I’ve never created any content espousing my views on the 2nd Amendment or Islam. The Left pretending I inspired a mosque massacre in...New Zealand because I believe black America can do it without government hand outs is the reachiest reach of all reaches!! LOL!

In a later post, after receiving fire for her "LOL!" tweet, she perceived the critiques as a sort of defamation and doubled down and threatened lawsuits for the simple tough question for her that her content may be harmful.

To be clear: We played the ‘Candace is Hitler’ game. We played the ‘Candace is anti-rape victims’ game. If the media attempts this ‘Candace inspired a mosque shooting in New Zealand’ bit—they better all lawyer the f*ck up. I will go full Covington Catholic lawsuit. Try me.

It is difficult to tell, however, what the shooter's real motives were for citing Candace Owens as an influence because the shooter has a record of trolling and provocation. That being said, Candace Owens does have significant enough influence to even be considered, so her role her views may have played in radicalization is worth a thought, even if the shooter himself doesn't believe this and is just trolling. Additionally, Owens is also a dishonest troll herself, though only with a reputation and platform to lose, which only adds to the difficult question of her true role in radicalizing someone to kill others.

Racism

Despite her claiming to be a champion for blacks everywhere, Candace Owens dismisses most racism against black people as no longer being a "real" problem (even though it still very much is), but rather just a manufactured one created by the mainstream media. This had put her in conflict with Black Lives Matter, whom she has referred to as "whiny toddlers" who are "pretending to be oppressed for attention." She's even gone after white people, once claiming that the only reason any white person would speak out against racial injustice is out of a sense of white guilt.

She presents herself as a champion of free thinking (once saying, "I'm not far-right - I'm free.") fighting for the black community, but really, she's just a paranoid hypocrite who blames the Democrats for literally everything. Like every other conservative who pulls out the Dixiecrat fallacy at every opportunity, Candace refuses to believe that the Democratic Party of today might just be different from the pre-Nixon Democratic Party and is convinced that they still have a "slave master" mentality that they use to oppress African-Americans in more subtle ways rather that overt slavery, such as the liberal media, the welfare state, public education, affirmative action, and liberal politics in general. According to Candace, the Republican Party is the great beacon of hope for the black community, and if more black people become Republicans, they will have "left the plantation" that is the Democratic Party.

However, in order for Candace's logic that the Democratic Party being the "real" racist party to actually make sense, one would have to ignore the significant impact of Richard Nixon's Southern strategy on both parties. Today's GOP (especially following the rise of Donald Trump) has practically turbo-charged the Southern strategy, making it more apparent that most of the racists are operating as members of the Republican Party.

In addition to denying systemic racism today, she thinks white supremacy is a myth created by the media, and she makes a mocking of people that are alarmed by the display of white supremacy at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 and people that are alarmed at people believing Donald Trump energized the white supremacists. She engages in both-siderism, agreeing with Donald Trump's response to Unite the Right, characterizing the Neo-Nazis and the counterprotestors at the rally as both losers, two groups of extremists that just hate each other. She backs up with the tired "93% of black homicide victims are with other blacks" (this one crime statistic isn't evidence against white supremacy; people tend to commit crime in proximity in each other, and income inequality, which disproportionately affects blacks, exacerbates the problem). She also thinks 6,000 Klansmen in the nation is not really anything to worry about. On the other hand, to try to be "fair", she also claims that white people also commit homicide against each other and mocks those that blame Obama for BLM being violent, and urges "both sides" to blame the media. After all, she has a nice experience with a white girl handing her a towel and a Spanish woman made coffee for her, so systemic racism doesn't exist, the racial war is fake, there's no white guilt (unlike most right-wing pundits, she doesn't seem to subscribe to that one), and so on.

Candace Owens does believe the education and prison system disadvantage and oppress black people and keep them on the cycle of crime and poverty (which is quite a widespread view among her opponents and is the reason they believe in racism today), but believes the media is not willing to discuss that. This may be part of the reason she believes Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are mass incarcerators (this is actually common among left-wing criticisms of at least Kamala Harris). Her belief this is ignored by media is simply wrong, especially when "media" encompasses pretty much everything. These problems regularly are reported in most mainstream news sites, and these issues are among the biggest rallying cries from Black Lives Matter.

Anti-immigration

Bolstering Candace Owen's racism are her fearmongering anti-immigrant views. She thinks vulnerable people reliant on DACA (people with DACA that attend college are particularly vulnerable) can get a work permit should be "sent home".

Owens tried to exploit Mollie Tibbetts' death to fearmonger about how apparently violent all undocumented immigrants are because of one crime. When called out for this behavior by one of Mollie Tibbetts' cousins, she attempted to manipulate murder victim's family member by dragging Elizabeth Warren and "an MSNBC host" into this while crying crocodile tears that the cousin lobbied harsh words at her (who obviously cares about Mollie's family)^{Do You Believe That?} and not at the murderer. After the cousin told her to eat shit, Owens realized that what she did was a bad idea and tried to gaslight and deny that the Twitter fight ever happened. As a result, the University of Iowa Turning Point USA Executive Board Members ended up resigning because of her antics, declining an invitation for Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk to host an anti-immigration event at the University of Iowa in the process. This forced Candace Owens to deny that she and Charlie Kirk were ever planning on hosting an anti-immigration event at the University of Iowa.

She claims to have toured the ICE immigration center in Broward County, Florida, and she made a video in which she was standing outside the entrance of what is supposedly the ICE facility in question. In this video, Owens claims that the migrant children being held captive in the building have access to arts and crafts, a Zumba class, a library, volleyball and basketball courts, a foosball table, a soccer field, a hair salon, 24-hour medical care, phones, PCs, a convenience store, and “a ton of cash”.^{Do You Believe That?} Of course, Owens was unable to actually show any of this stuff in her video, probably for the same reason that conspiracy theorists are unable to provide any real evidence for the existence of Bigfoot. Nevertheless, Owens still thinks that since she received poor treatment in public school, it's unfair that the migrant children are supposedly being treated well in the ICE buildings. Considering that Owens has never been taken from her family, put in a cage, held captive in a concentration camp, been forcibly injected with drugs against her will, forcibly stripped naked, physically assaulted, tortured, sexually abused, forced to drink toilet water, pressured to commit suicide, or killed, the appropriate response to Owens' bullshit is to offer her some cheese to go with her whine.

Anti-feminism

Candace Owens does not believe women in the United States are really oppressed. In a Turning Point USA video called "Who is March is it Anyways?", she described the Women's March in Washington as a "joke." She ridicules the signs that say "fuck you, you fucking fuck" and how Madonna threatened to blow up the White House. Owens argues that since Trump has elected more women to high-ranking cabinet positions than any other president in the history, women are graduating from universities in much higher numbers than men while also being responsible for the majority of business start-ups, and since women are less likely to commit crime, there isn't much of a reason to march. Then she says that those that are discouraged can lend to "actual" causes like the case in Saudi Arabia and Iran, where women are "actually" oppressed, as if societal disadvantages stemming from the same problem (patriarchal society, religious fundamentalism, both aspects of right-wing belief) don't exist in multiple forms of differing severity.

Transphobia

It is clear that she is a transphobe, slanted more to transmisogyny, with making the trite "I identify as [outrageous thing]" and "did you just assume my gender" jokes and has expressed explicit TERF talking points. In defense of JK Rowling's "persecution", a woman bullied by "a mob of men" (she means trans women), she believes that all-capping "MEN" to describe trans women and all-capping about a set of reproductive functions makes her important and correct. She believes that trans women are men that can just identify as men, a plan of the "patriarchy" (yeah she put them in scare quotes to wish away systemic problems), to infiltrate women's beauty pageants and sports and "slowly take over and dominate everything". (What then should we think of trans men?) Her transphobic conspiracy theories are quite ironic, considering that there was once a time when she supported trans people against attacks from Republicans. That was before Candace Owens realized that she could become rich and famous from being a token black woman shilling for the far-right.

Islamophobia

Flirting with white supremacist The Great Replacement conspiracy theories and using Muammar al-Gaddafi's ideas of demographic takeover to scaremonger about Muslim Europeans, Candace Owens believes that Europe's gradual demographics shift from falling birthrates of white Christians and a gradually increasing Muslim population is cause for concern. Noted in her tweet, "To all of my European followers" and in another tweet about non-Muslim French people ("the declining birth rate of its people" excludes French Muslims from "its people") she tries to reinforce the racist idea that being Muslim (a religious belief) and being European (a nationality) are mutually exclusive concepts, that Muslim Europeans don't exist because Muslims mostly aren't white.

COVID-19 pandemic

Candace Owens joins Donald Trump, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and other conservative grifters in cynically and recklessly politicizing the 2020 coronavirus outbreak in the United States. In February 27, 2020, when the coronavirus had its first reported case, she referred to the pandemic just the left acting as a doomsday cult. Given that the U.S. made the world blush with its 6,000,000+ cases and nearly 200,000 deaths and an atrocious record economic contraction as of September 2020, Owens and her ilks' responses aged as well as semi-solid fruit mush under the hot sun. Realizing that the pandemic is quite srs bsns, she pivots to the idea that the pandemic is a hoax to just to impoverish America and rig elections. Because most coronavirus deaths are caused by some inconvenient co-morbidities like the negligible amount^{[citation NOT needed]} rates of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, weakened immune system, asthma, and more... coronavirus ain't all that dangerous. Never mind the incapacitation and further spread from getting coronavirus either. The downplaying of COVID-19 deaths by focusing on just co-morbidities is a common misleading claim in social media, and it's like saying HIV isn't dangerous because an otherwise-manageable flu kills you afterward. Even so, the ones that DON'T have co-morbidities is actually "just" severe pneumonia caused by the virus.

Owens does not find her horrible little irresponsible tweets toward her followers irresponsible.

Conspiracy theories

Candace Owens joined other right-wing pundits including Rush Limbaugh, Bill Mitchell, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and Donald Trump, Jr. in the aftermath of the MAGAbomber's failed attempts to mail bomb Democratic politicians in characterizing it as a false flag attempt, along with "paid" and "organized" migrant caravans, to curry favor for the Democrats for the mid-terms. The tweet has been since deleted. She insists that whenever politically motivated violence occurs, it's probably leftist, so she's working from a conclusion and using conspiracy theories to fit the conclusion if evidence contradicts this.

Other views

As of November 2019, Candace Owens flirts with being an anti-vaxxer. While she implicitly accepts mandatory vaccines for contagious diseases, she believes this shouldn't be applied to noncommunicable diseases such as HPV after claiming to have received an adverse reaction to HPV vaccine when she was 16. The HPV vaccine, however, is safe to administer as adverse side effects, if any, are usually not serious compared to getting cervical cancer (the second most common cancer and fifth leading cause of death for women worldwide).

Candace Owens is a climate change denier, which comes to no surprise. What is also no surprise is the weak support of her views. Candace Owens, for instance, said she doesn't trust Scientific American on climate change because their website address ends with dot com, but she would have trusted them more if they had a dot org address, which is a seal of quality in her view. (Yes, this is the level of argument we're up against.) As with far too many climate change deniers, she doesn't understand the difference between climate and weather. She takes after her master.

Candace Owens believes abortion is disproportionately killing black babies, so Black Lives Matter should incorporate fetuses. She probably doesn't support welfare nets for raising the family or help women get access to affordable reproductive care, two essential needs that black women, being systematically disadvantaged, are disproportionately in dire need of.

Candace Owens seems to support gay marriage because she condemned Chelsea Clinton for having parents that oppose gay marriage.

Candace Owens also panders to the fragile masculine crowd, who make up a big component of the right-wing audience. She got mighty upset at a man wearing a dress, decrying that Harry Styles is the decay of masculinity in "the West" (while "the East", the land of phytoestrogen-rich soybeans, animé twinks, and k-pop boy bands, is apparently the paradigm of strong men), or because Marxism is taught in public schools, or because she's jealous she couldn’t pull it off.

The Blexit campaign

She founded a “Blexit” campaign, a campaign that was supposed to convince black people to leave the Democratic Party and join the Republican Party. However, Owens screwed up the campaign in several ways. For starters, she falsely claimed that Kanye West designed the T-shirts for the campaign. This allowed Kanye to realize that Owens was a charlatan and fraud who was using him for political gain. As a result, West revealed that Owens was lying when she claimed that he designed the T-shirts. West also cut all ties with Owens, distancing himself from politics in the process. Owens then responded by apologizing to West while simultaneously denying that she claimed that West designed the Blexit T-shirts. Unfortunately for Owens, there is both video evidence and image evidence that she claimed that West designed the Blexit T-shirts. Numerous pro-Trump activists, including Tomi Lahren, blamed Owens for losing West.

Beyond the drama, Owens relies on misinformation to spread the message. Historian Kevin M. Kruse pointed out that several of Owens’ claims about the Democratic Party on her Blexit website were false. Owens's response was to block him on Twitter. Also, Owens was caught using stolen photos and stock images for her Blexit website, which is against the law. Furthermore, it turns out that the name “Blexit” was already taken by another organization. The original Blexit founder is currently threatening legal action against Owens.

Blexit was a failure, as the Republican Party completely failed to win the black vote in the 2018 midterms (among many reasons, not just because Blexit), with many of the Blexit accounts on Twitter having been revealed to have been Russian bots and trolls.

Candace's greatest hits

• She thinks the welfare system and public education are "socialism" and for that reason they should be eradicated. However, she does not believe this to be the case with the fire department.
• She attacked journalists for attacking Charlie Kirk for (falsely) attacking Candace’s parents and sisters for being alcoholics and on welfare, respectively. Think about that for a moment.
• She is against welfare because she has cousins who are on welfare, and they are her closest family members. (It doesn’t make sense to us either.)
• She turned down a million dollar contract in order to stay with Turning Point USA because she is loyal to Charlie Kirk. What was that thing Malcolm X said about the House Negro and the Field Negro?
  • The above point is extremely ironic considering that Candace Owens tried to use a Bernie Sanders talking point to support Donald Trump.
• She thinks the #MeToo movement cheapens female survivors of rape. (This probably has something to do with the fact that she is against welfare because some of her most beloved family members are on welfare.)
• She condemned CNN for suspending an alleged sex offender. Paris Dennard, the alleged sex offender in question, had even admitted to the sexual harassment allegations against him. Nevertheless, Candace Owens felt it was appropriate to compare his suspension to public lynchings because... he happened to be a black Trump supporter. It doesn't help that Candace Owens praised a domestic abuser for being a black Trump supporter immediately afterwards.

See also

• Charlie Kirk
• Tomi Lahren
• Kanye West
• Turning Point USA
• Jesse Lee Peterson