From RationalWiki

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

“ ” You can feel free to call me an 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 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[1]

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".[2] As of April 2018, she is also Kanye West's new best friend.[3]

Biography [ edit ]

Owens hails from Stamford, Connecticut and was a victim of racism in high school.[4] She attended college at the University of Rhode Island, before dropping out after her junior year.[5] She later went to work for Vogue magazine.

Attacked by GamerGate, recruited by GamerGate [ edit ]

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.[6] 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.[7] 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.[8] 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,[9] 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,[10] supporting her tweetstorm on Twitter, sending her links to pro-GamerGate websites, and even interviewing her.[11] 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.[12][13]

Who is she? [ edit ]

“ ” I actually don't have any problems at all with the word ' 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[14][15]

Candace Owens is your garden-variety online conservative wingnut, with one "major" exception: she's black, and just so happens to be a conservative (which she thinks makes her something special, 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 to do what she did: "take the red pill" and become a conservative.[16]

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.[17]

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 [ edit ]

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[18][note 1] or her comparing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's proposals practiced by Stalin, Lenin, and Adolf Hitler combined .[19]

Indicative of her attacks on Washington Post writers previously mentioned,[12] 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,[20] and there was a source from Associated Press provided explaining how those claims are false or misleading.[21]

Racism [ edit ]

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."[22] 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.[23]

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.[24][25] 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),[25] 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).[26][27] 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.

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?",[28][note 2] she described the Women's March in Washington as a "joke."[29] 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,[note 3] women are graduating from universities in much higher numbers than men[note 4] 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 [ edit ]

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[30][31] 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),[32] she believes that all-capping "MEN" to describe trans women[31] and all-capping about a set of reproductive functions makes her important and correct.[33] 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".[34] (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.[35] 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 [ edit ]

Flirting with white supremacist The Great Replacement conspiracy theories and using Muammar al-Gaddafi's ideas of demographic takeover to scaremonger about Muslim Europeans,[36] 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.[37][38] Noted in her tweet, "To all of my European followers" and in another tweet about nonMuslim French people ("the declining birth rate of its people" excludes French Muslims from "its people")[39] 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 [ edit ]

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.[40] 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.[note 5] 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.[41] 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,[42] 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.[40]

Other views [ edit ]

As of November 2019, Candace Owens flirts with being an anti-vaxxer.[43] 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).[44]

Candace Owens believes abortion is disproportionately killing black babies,[45] 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.[46]

The Blexit campaign [ edit ]

She founded a “Blexit” campaign, a campaign that was supposed to convince black people to leave the Democratic Party and join the Republican Party.[47] However, Owens screwed up the campaign in several ways. For starters, she falsely claimed that Kanye West designed the T-shirts for the campaign.[48] This allowed Kanye to realize that Owens was a charlatan and fraud who was using him for political gain.[49] As a result, West revealed that Owens was lying when she claimed that he designed the T-shirts.[50] West also cut all ties with Owens, distancing himself from politics in the process.[51] Owens then responded by apologizing to West[52] while simultaneously denying that she claimed that West designed the Blexit T-shirts.[53] Unfortunately for Owens, there is both video evidence[54] and image evidence[55] that she claimed that West designed the Blexit T-shirts. Numerous pro-Trump activists, including Tomi Lahren, blamed Owens for losing West.[56][57][58]

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.[59] Owens's response was to block him on Twitter.[60] Also, Owens was caught using stolen photos and stock images for her Blexit website,[61] which is against the law.[62] Furthermore, it turns out that the name “Blexit” was already taken by another organization.[63][64][65][66] The original Blexit founder is currently threatening legal action against Owens.[67][68]

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),[69] with many of the Blexit accounts on Twitter having been revealed to have been Russian bots and trolls.[70]

Candace's greatest hits [ edit ]

She thinks everyone protected by DACA should be "sent home".[24]

See also [ edit ]

Notes [ edit ]

↑ Candace Owens sure likes getting publicity for making such remarks and smears against other people, though. ↑ The video uses a possessive "who's". Displayed as a giant video title. ↑ This is hardly an achievement for advancement of women in society. Trump is a known misogynist with several allegations of sexual assault that bragged about groping women, got political power in spite of inflammatory remarks, and women mass wore pussy hats in response. Even if Trump has actually elected more women than any other president in history, this isn't a very high bar to cross, Trump does not pick people for diversity or qualifications, and most of Trump's administration is still made up of old, white, rich men. ↑ One can still see lower rates of men attending college and still be marching for women. One argument is that societal expectations for men place lower emphasis for education and more emphasis on earning money as soon as possible. The trend is not just more women attending college, but less men are also attending college ↑ We believe it's a lot cheaper, less risky, and easier to just pull off attacking and gutting the mail service, gerrymander, restrict polling locations, cut taxes for the wealthy, strip worker protections, and more, all Republican tactics, than somehow manufacture spread a volatile virus that can endanger loved ones and destroy Trump's beloved strongish economy.