Candace Owens was born in 1989 in Stamford, Connecticut. In high school, Owens was the target of several racist and threatening voicemails. Because one of the students leaving the messages was the son of then-Stamford mayor, Dannel Malloy, the story attracted widespread attention. Her family settled with the school district for $37,500, thanks to the NAACP, an organization Owens now believes is “one of the worst groups for Black people.” The settlement wasn’t the only repercussion of the incident. Owens battled with anorexia for years after the settlement.

From Anti-Trump to Team Trump

After dropping out of college, Owens became CEO of Degree180, a website which included, among other things, a blog focused on taking down then-candidate Donald Trump. Under Owens’ leadership, the publication consistently bashed him at every turn. One article was titled, “Does Donald Trump Actually Have A Small Penis?” The piece concluded that “Donald Trump most likely has a penis the size of an infant.”

In a 2015 column, Owens wrote about “the bat-sh*t-crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party,” and that it was “good news” that they “will eventually die off (peacefully in their sleep, we hope), and then we can get right on with the OBVIOUS social change that needs to happen, IMMEDIATELY.”

Owens now: “I absolutely love this president. I think that what he did in this country was the most necessary thing by killing political correctness.”

Falling Into the Conservative Party

In 2016, Owens launched a Kickstarter to fund a new venture, “Social Autopsy.” It was a project that ended up changing Owens’ political trajectory.

“It was like a project that was so from the heart. It was trying to rectify the wrongs that I felt were done for these kids that aggressed me in high school and instead I end up in the middle of a firestorm,” she said.

Owens explained the project’s intentions, “We attach [people’s] words to their places of employment, and anybody in the entire world can search for them. What we are doing is figuratively lifting the masks up so nobody can hide behind, you know, Twitter handles or privatized profiles…”

Internet users were concerned that the site would encourage public doxxing and could potentially publish private information about anyone at all. In the wake of the project launching, Owens got a call from Zoe Quinn, a target of the sexist online harrassment campaign Gamergate. She allegedly told Owens she was worried this would lead to the doxxing of children and tried to get her to not go through with it. Shortly after the conversation, Owens began receiving threatening emails. Simply because of the timing, Owens believes Quinn was behind the myriad of emails from users with pro-Trump handles.

According to Owens, these emails definitely didn’t come from actual Trump supporters. And because the web publication Breitbart supported her conspiracy theory by writing an article saying that these attacks all came from Zoe Quinn — a theory never backed by any evidence other than coincidental timing — Owens became a full-on conservative.

“People that I thought were white nationalists, which I thought was Breitbart, was the only publication that was telling the truth about what was happening,” Owens said.

Social Autopsy never saw the light of day after Kickstarter suspended the campaign, but created along the way was a newly minted firebrand for the conservative right.

Things were quickly falling into place for Owens. After shedding her liberal roots, Owens was hired by Turning Point USA, a conservative campus advocacy group that was facing accusations of racial bias. The group drafted Owens shortly after one of its former national field directors sent a text to a Turning Point employee that said, "I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like f*ck them all... I hate blacks. End of story."

Owen’s platform at Turning Point sprung her into the national spotlight. And when Kim Kardashian’s husband Kanye West tweeted, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks,” Owens became an overnight sensation.

“I find her to be a very- I know her! I think she’s a fine person, a fine young woman,” said Trump.

Owens’ brand of conservatism is seemingly empty and vapid. When you begin to peel the assertive layers back, there’s often times nothing there, no facts to back up her beliefs.

When asked if we should care about the environment, Owens responded with: “No, not even a little bit, like no.”

A New Spin on Hitler

What many know Owens from is a video where she legitimized Adolf Hitler, spinning Nazi-ism into a patriotic form of nationalism. In a congressional hearing on the rise of white nationalism, Ted Lieu played back the video.

“When we say nationalism the first thing we think about is Hitler. He was a national socialist but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, ok fine. The problem is he had dreams outside of Germany,” Owens said.

At the same hearing, Owens claimed white nationalism wasn’t a threat, and said that the Southern Strategy, a well-documented tactic used by the Republican party to leverage racism against Blacks to increase their political support amongst white voters, never existed.

In a YouTube video she posted, Owens says Black people shouldn’t be concerned with the KKK, or white supremacy.

“I mean there are what, 6,000 klansmen left in our nation and you want me to process that as a legitimate fear?” she said.

According to the Washington Post, Owens believes “accounts of rising” white supremacy are made up by the media. It’s worth noting that Owens was named in a manifesto by a white supremacist accused of killing 50 people in New Zealand. The gunman said Owens was his main inspiration.

The Black Voice No One Asked For

Owens has positioned herself as the Black voice within the vastly white far-right. She believes the 8% Black vote Trump garnered in 2016 can be boosted. And in May of 2019, Owens walked away from Turning Point to focus on this exact issue. She launched “Blexit,” an effort to push Black people out of the Democratic party. She told the Washington Post she “truly believes that if Black Americans defected and ushered Trump into another term, their collective fortunes would rise.”

Owens goes further to pit herself against the community she ostensibly claims to defend. She says police brutality isn’t a concern “whatsoever” for the Black community. But, one survey, which polled over 30,000 black people across the U.S., found 87% of respondents said that police killings of Black people is a problem in the community. Additionally, new research published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that Black males are two and a half times more likely than white males to die during encounters with police officers.

Owens, who claims liberals think Black people are stupid, once said the NRA was started for Black people to defend themselves from the KKK—which is 100% false. The NRA was started in 1871, by Union Army officers as a training club for marksmanship.

But While Owens is working hard, and lying about history, to move the needle for Trump, in a few years, when she’s old enough, she may try to move it for herself.

“Let me say what Trump said, ‘If my country needed me, I would step up and I would do the job.’”

