Black against BLM, a woman against #MeToo – and rising
Candace Owens is a star among conservatives
It’s a Wednesday morning at Liberty University and the basketball arena is packed with nearly 10,000 people. Students reach their arms skyward, eyes closed, entranced in deafening Christian rock music.
Backstage, administrators and students dote on Candace Owens, that day’s convocation speaker, who has quickly built a career trashing liberal politics with a millennial fierceness. She hasn’t rehearsed. It protects her authenticity. But she knows her beats.
Onstage, she speaks for about 24 minutes, gliding back and forth across the stage in heels, attacking some of her usual targets: Planned Parenthood, feminism, the welfare system.
She builds to the moment. Then, she goes for it. “Kanye West. Man, he’s a wonderful man,” she says to applause and cheering – breaking the quiet of a calm, attentive audience.
“What is it that President Donald Trump, Kanye West and Candace Owens have in common?” she asks rhetorically. “Kanye West describes it as ‘dragon energy’ and to me I think it’s individualism. It’s believing in yourself. It’s standing up in the face of everybody telling you you can’t.”
Owens embraces her role as a young black woman defending conservatism, attacking liberals and praising two of America’s more complicated men.
Since April when West tweeted, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks,” she has never been far behind the star, playing his chief defender as he lurched from one controversial headline to the next. She accompanied West to TMZ when he said slavery “sounds like a choice” and posted a photo of herself with West after his headline-making White House visit last week. People ask her to autograph West’s CDs.
Owens, 29, regularly appears on Fox News and travels six days a week to speak at college campuses. It’s made her friendly with Trump and his family. .
But barely more than a year ago she was an unknown YouTuber.
What changed her life was a video about the Charlottesville, Virginia, rally, wherein she blames the media for creating racial hysteria. That video prompted Fox News host Jesse Watters to invite her on the network for the first time late last year.
Fox News amplified Owens, who was then hired by Turning Point USA, an organization aimed at bringing conservative ideas to college campuses. Her Twitter following quickly grew to 108,000. West’s tweet brought hundreds of thousands more, ballooning her audience to 850,000 today.
The president took notice. Trump said Owens “represents an ever expanding group of very smart ‘thinkers.’ ”
Her rapid rise gives her a massive political voice for someone with such a brief career – or even interest – in politics. Owens says she has never voted. She recently registered as a Republican, but previously identified as liberal.
“I had no interest in politics whatsoever prior to 2015,” she said.
Owens illustrates a political fact stamped and sealed by Trump: that strong voices can break through regardless of previous experience.
Owens defends Trump’s comments after Charlottesville: “I still agree with him. There are morons on both sides.” She doesn’t believe in white privilege and often criticizes Black Lives Matter. Feminism, she claims, has become radicalized. Planned Parenthood is “murdering” people using abortion, which has slowed black population growth. The media causes dissent. And lately, amid Kavanaugh’s ascension to the Supreme Court: “I’m really passionate about defending men.”
She’s now preached politics to hundreds of thousands of students, said Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk. Her reach isn’t contained to conservative havens such as Liberty, where its president Jerry Falwell Jr. is an outspoken Trump supporter. Most recently Owens and Kirk spoke at the University of Colorado-Boulder, the University of Washington and the University of Georgia.
After the speech at Liberty, Owens jumped off stage and was hounded by a group of students, black and white, seeking selfies. Security had to step in to control the crowd. On Twitter, the speech was mostly praised.
But outside the arena at a small protest, Liberty senior Abigail Ferrisheld up a pro-#MeToo sign. It’s the day before Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, testified before a Senate committee. Owens often dismisses the #MeToo movement as a Democratic political ploy and called Ford a liar who should serve time in prison.
“We’re not directly protesting her,” Ferris said. “But we are showing while she has made some disparaging remarks to the movement, that there are students on campus who respectfully disagree with her.”
More than anything, Owens preaches against victimhood, particularly among African-Americans, a pull-yourself-up-by-your bootstraps mind-set.
“I consider myself insanely privileged to be in this country,” she said. “I try to tell people how much value there is in seeing yourself as privileged ... because if you see yourself as a victim, you’ll have that shade over your eyes in life.”
Owens has her share of black critics. Black Lives Matter protesters have heckled her speeches. The news website The Root, which focuses on African-American issues, often takes aim at her.
“Either they are delusional or they earned their Ph.D.s from the history, sociology and political science departments at the University of the Sunken Place,” wrote Michael Harriot in The Root, referring to Owens and West while referencing the hypnotic abyss from the film “Get Out.”
It’s the comments from other African-Americans that bother her father, Robert Owens.
“What really makes me upset are the comments she gets from her own race,” said Owens, a registered Independent who did not vote for Trump or Hillary Clinton in 2016.