Candace Owens

An Unauthorized Biography of the Conservative Thinker and Founder of Blexit

Candace Owens

An Unauthorized Biography of the Conservative Thinker and Founder of Blexit

Richard West

© 2020 by Richard West

The cover image is hosted at https://www.flickr.com/photos/22007612@N05/45715329164

and is made available under a Creative Commons 2.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/). The creator, Gage Skidmore (https://www.flickr.com/photos/22007612@N05), has not endorsed this work.

Praise for Candace Owens

Candace Owens of Turning Point USA is having a big impact on politics in our Country. She represents an ever expanding group of very smart “thinkers,” and it is wonderful to watch and hear the dialogue going on...so good for our Country!

– President Donald Trump

There are challenges within America, as well, and I’ve often said we have to win the next generation. That’s why I’m such a Candace Owens fan.

– Vice President Mike Pence

I like the way Candace Owens thinks.

– Kanye West

“[Candace Owens is] one of the real freedom fighters out there.”

– Sebastian Gorka

“Owens [is] a young and pretty and compelling black woman…”

– Bret Easton Ellis

I had a very simple message… Maybe not every single person in America is a racist.

- Candace Owens

Table of Contents

Contents

Chapter 1: Gifted

Chapter 2: Aspirations

Chapter 3: Grandfather

Chapter 4: Racism

Chapter 5: Hate Crime

Chapter 6: Newsworthy

Chapter 7: College

Chapter 8: Education

Chapter 9: Work and Dating

Chapter 10: Business

Chapter 11: Social Autopsy

Chapter 12: Cyberbullies

Chapter 13: New York Magazine

Chapter 14: The Washington Post

Chapter 15: Red Pilled

Chapter 16: YouTube

Chapter 17: Commentary

Chapter 18: Escape

Chapter 19: Interviews

Chapter 20: Liberal Problems

Chapter 21: Turning Point

Chapter 22: Crazy Leftists

Chapter 23: Black and White

Chapter 24: Social Media

Chapter 25: Kanye West

Chapter 26: Meeting Kanye

Chapter 27: Meeting Trump

Chapter 28: Conservatives

Chapter 29: Kavanaugh

Chapter 30: Black Leadership

Chapter 31: Blexit

Chapter 32: Criminal Law

Chapter 33: Jussie Smollett

Chapter 34: Hitler

Chapter 35: Testimony

Chapter 36: Reaction

Chapter 37: Marriage

Chapter 38: Revolt

Chapter 39: Granddaughter

CHAPTER 1

Gifted

Today, we know Candace Owens as the leader of Blexit, a grassroots movement that encourages black Americans to leave the Democratic Party, with its failed racial policies, and assert their right to think for themselves. Owens made her own Blexit in 2016, after being betrayed by the liberal media, and she is the perfect person to explain why black Americans should flee the left.

Before she founded Blexit, though, Candace Owens fully experienced the Democratic vision of black life in America, beginning with a poor, inner-city childhood. Her mother had limited education and few opportunities, but she gave Candace two important gifts.

The first gift was her name. According to Candace, her mother resolved that her three daughters “would not have names that preceded [their] character.” She would not give her children stereotypical “black” names.

Instead of using identifiably black names, she gave her children names that said nothing about their race. Today, Candace describes her name as “culturally ambiguous.” On paper, “Candace” could be Asian, white, or any other race. Perhaps her mother was aware of the negative expectations that stereotypically cultural names can create.

In their 2005 book, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner demonstrated that black and white Americans tend to give their children different names. In a 2016 study, Harvard Business School professor Katherine A. DeCelles found that black job applicants who “whitened” their resumes by removing information that identified their race received more job interviews. The whitened resumes resulted in a 25% interview rate, compared to a 10% interview rate for non-whitened resumes.

Whatever the reason, the decision of Candace’s mother to give her children racially neutral names started Candace off on the path toward thinking for herself. Her name would not cause her to be categorized based on her race. In time she would embrace the idea of escaping racial stereotypes about how she should act, think, and vote.

Candace’s mother could not, however, give her a racially neutral childhood. Instead, that childhood featured every stereotypical aspect of inner-city, black American life. Candace faced significant obstacles in her early life, and she could not be characterized as “privileged” in any way.

When Candace was born on April 29, 1989, her family lived in low-income housing in downtown Stamford, Connecticut. The city had recently emerged from a difficult period of government corruption, during which high-ranking members of the police department ran a hugely successful drug ring. Other city departments also engaged in corruption, and the local government’s failings made life difficult for poor families like Candace’s.

For nearly two decades, developers had tried to remake the city of Stamford by removing complexes that housed poor residents. While some areas of the city benefited from new construction, poor residents had fewer options for housing as development squeezed them into a smaller geographic area.

In the book Stamford ’76, JoeAnn Hart describes the largest inner-city housing complex as follows:

And then there were St. John’s Towers, low-income housing developments in the shape of three trash cans, where the old downtown residents (read: black residents) had been dumped. The towers themselves came into being as the result of a lawsuit in the early 70s that stopped Stamford’s urban renewal because it had destroyed nine hundred downtown housing units without replacing a single one. [The F.D. Rich Company, an urban renewal developer working with the city,] fought the towers every inch of the way. There’s no profit in housing low-income families, but if [the company] wanted to continue the flow of federal money, [it] had to build them. They were, for a time, distinctive features of the city skyline.

The Owens family lived in a small, inner-city apartment. In the first few years of Candace’s life, her family’s home must have seemed utterly normal to her, because she knew nothing else. She shared a room with her two sisters and accepted that a weekly visit from the roach exterminator was part of normal apartment life. The apartment remained habitable, but only just.

This apartment lifestyle must have seemed normal to Candace’s mother, as well. She had been raised mostly in group homes, like her eight siblings. She had never experienced the luxury of owning her own home or living in a well-furnished apartment.

Most of Candace’s mother’s siblings eventually spent time in prison. Candace recalls that visiting uncles in prison seemed ordinary to her when she was a child. Some of her cousins were convicts, as well. Instead of being distant problems, criminality and the resulting incarceration were ordinary parts of life for the Owens family.

Candace’s father came from a more successful family, though. His parents lived in a nearby middle-class neighborhood and had worked hard to establish themselves financially. He, however, struggled in various ways. His relationship with Candace’s mother was troubled; the two would soon separate, and eventually, when Candace was in her early 20’s, they would formally divorce. Candace recalls that he also struggled with obesity, partly because of the family’s poor diet, which consisted of frozen dinners most nights.

CHAPTER 2

Aspirations

Despite his upbringing, Candace’s father could not provide his family with a comfortable lifestyle. While his parents lived in a tidy house in the suburbs, he could only give his family the bare essentials of subsidized housing.

Shortly after Candace began public school, she got a glimpse of what a more prosperous life could be. At age five, she became friends with a girl named Lindsay. At school, Candace did not pick up on the subtle clues that Lindsay’s lifestyle was different from her own; she was just happy to have a friend. Eventually, her new friend invited her for a playdate at her home.

Lindsay’s mother probably drove Candace to the home because Candace’s mother did not own a car and did not know how to drive. As they drove out of the city and into the suburbs, a new world opened up for Candace. She recalls: “I was shocked as we were driving that the houses just got bigger and bigger and bigger. I said, ‘Oh, my goodness. Do people live like this?’”

Lindsay’s family inhabited a large, white, Victorian house. Among other things, it had a playroom filled with expensive toys, like glass dolls. The family also had a nanny. Candace had never imagined having these luxuries, and she was stunned to discover that her own friend enjoyed such lavish surroundings.

Even at age five, Candace had a practical, optimistic outlook. She recalls her reaction to this surprising opulence: “I wasn’t jealous. I wanted to know how I could become that – how I could live like that.”

After the playdate ended, on the drive back to the poverty of her own home, as the houses got smaller and smaller, Candace might have wondered how long she would have to wait to have a nice home of her own. The wait would be much shorter than expected, and it would come in a surprising way. That move, however, was still a few years away.

The second gift that Candace received from her mother was a love of reading. She was born with the personality of an avid reader. Her mother remembers her as a serious baby who seemed to understand what was going on around her. This perceptive ability and curiosity about the world would naturally lead to an interest in books.

Candace’s mother had not finished high school, but she determined that her kids would read books. Perhaps she had noticed that her most successful acquaintances were readers, or perhaps she realized that her lack of education had held her back. She was certain that reading was the key to her children’s future.

Her insistence on reading is reminiscent of the childhood experience of Dr. Ben Carson, the world-famous surgeon, bestselling author, and member of President Trump’s cabinet. In his autobiography, Gifted Hands, he wrote about how he and his brother learned to love reading after his mother banned television from the house:

Mother had already decided how we would spend our free time when we weren’t watching television.

“You boys are going to go to the library and check out books. You’re going to read at least two books every week. At the end of each week you’ll give me a report on what you’ve read.”

That rule sounded impossible. Two books? I had never read a whole book in my life, except those they made us read in school… But Mother had spoken, and it didn’t occur to either of us to disobey…

“Bennie,” she said again and again, “if you can read, honey, you can learn just about anything you want to know. The doors of the world are open to people who can read. And my boys are going to be successful in life, because they’re going to be the best readers in the school.”

Candace’s mother advocated essentially the same philosophy. Her children would succeed because they would learn to love reading. Years later, Candace would tell Dr. Carson in person that her childhood had been similar to his.

Unlike Dr. Carson, though, Candace seems to have loved reading from the start. Every weekend, her mother would walk her to a nearby library, along with her sisters, to get new books. Candace enjoyed those visits.

Reading also had a competitive aspect. The library let child patrons make paper link chains to show how many books they were reading, with each link representing a book read. Candace’s chain soon wrapped twice around the children’s reading room, demonstrating that she was reading far more than her peers.

Her mother let her read a wide variety of books. At a young age, she was reading Dean Koontz and Nora Roberts, as well as many other adult novelists. She came to appreciate the joy of holding a page-turner and wanting to keep reading to find out what happens next. Her mother read, too; for example, the pair enjoyed racing through the Harry Potter books together. For young Candace, reading was an escape.

In addition to reading, Candace loved writing. By age 8, she decided that she would be a writer one day. Her early writing efforts focused on poetry and rap lyrics. She recalls that she would rap her own lyrics while her sister sang. Despite quickly giving up on a career as a rapper, Candace never gave up on her dream of being a writer.

Candace’s love of reading and writing would lead to incredible opportunities for her in the future. As a child, though, her single greatest opportunity would come from the generosity of her father’s parents.

CHAPTER 3

Grandfather

When Candace was eight or nine years old, her paternal grandfather visited her home and decided that he did not want to see his grandchildren raised in that kind of apartment. There was little that he or anyone could do to improve the apartment itself, so relocating the family seemed like the only option.

He offered to move the family into his own middle-class home. They would fill the house, but it would provide a better lifestyle for the family. It would also allow him to educate his grandchildren. Candace has called this generous offer “my very first break in life.” Suddenly and unexpectedly, Candace Owens could take a large step in the direction of the fantastic lifestyle her friend Lindsay was living.

At her grandparents’ house, Candace moved into an attic room with one of her sisters, while her parents moved into the basement. Sharing a room was nothing new for Candace, but having a multi-level home was a change. Despite the tight quarters, this was a major upgrade for Candace and her family, but the move came with some strings attached.

Candace’s grandfather had rules and routines. Every morning, for example, he would prepare a Southern breakfast. The children would come downstairs to eat, and he would not give them a breakfast plate until they said, “good morning.”

Religious instruction was part of the program. After breakfast was served, the children had to participate in family scripture study. Grandpa Owens would read a passage from the Bible and ask the children questions to see whether they understood what he had read. He would then reward the children with different hot chocolate mugs, based on how well they had answered.

Candace’s grandfather also made sure the family prayed at every meal. If the children misbehaved, Grandpa Owens would discuss them in his morning prayer. On one occasion, Candace broke a house rule by turning up the heat during the night. She recalls her grandfather’s prayer that morning: “Dear God, please help Candace to realize she shouldn't turn the heat on in the middle of the night.” After her grandfather spoke those words, she started crying and ran upstairs.

Outside of her grandparents’ home, Candace did not experience much religious sentiment. She recalls being embarrassed by her grandfather’s religious practices and not wanting to acknowledge them in public. Later, she would come to realize the value of that early religious instruction.

Grandpa Owens taught Candace and her siblings more than religion, though. He also had lessons to teach about racism in America.

Robert Owens was born in 1939 in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He grew up in the shadow of slavery in a South still dominated by institutionalized racism and the Ku Klux Klan. His parents were sharecroppers.

After the federal government abolished slavery, Southern landowners institutionalized sharecropping. Freed blacks could farm the land, but they had to pay an excessive share of their profits to the landowners. The landowners let black farmers buy seed and supplies on credit; then, at the end of a season of farming, the sharecroppers often found that almost all of their profits went to the landowners.

At age five, Robert Owens started his day at four o’clock. He had hard, physical work to do in the fields, like drying tobacco and picking cotton, and it was best to do the work before it got too hot outside. He could not attend school because the family needed him on the farm.

Many children of sharecroppers, like Robert and his eleven siblings, had to skip school to do manual labor. Southern schools and local governments accommodated this need by allowing children to go uneducated. Some landowners preferred that blacks go uneducated because they wanted a steady supply of uneducated laborers on the farms.

Sharecroppers often worked side jobs, in addition to their farming activities, to make ends meet. Selling produce on the street provided important supplementary income for some. Candace’s grandfather pursued this form of income, but he paid a horrible price for his entrepreneurial efforts. Candace Owens recalls hearing about her grandfather’s victimization by racists:

He was caught selling oranges on the “wrong” corner. As a resulting punishment, the Ku Klux Klan hunted him down, and branded him in the face (you know, like they do to cattle). Do you want to know what he did when that happened? Nothing.

This incident was not Robert Owens’ only run-in with the KKK. He recalls hiding in a corner of the family home when KKK members fired bullets into the home and burned crosses outside. His father shot back at them.

Despite this extreme racist persecution, Robert Owens did not develop a hatred of white people. In fact, Candace never heard him speak negatively about white people.

At age 17, Robert moved to the North and married his wife, to whom he would remain committed for the rest of her life. Candace recalls that her grandfather lived by conservative principles. He worked hard and saved his money. His wife was a homemaker, and they raised a family together.

It would take years for Candace Owens to fully appreciate the virtue of her grandfather’s life. During these years, she would have to deal with racial issues of her own while trying to establish a life for herself.

CHAPTER 4

Racism

Although Candace had experienced negative aspects of inner-city black life in America, she recalls that she did not grow up thinking there was a race war in America. Perhaps because of her grandfather’s stories of conflict with the KKK, Candace did not see her modern-day struggles as heavily influenced by race.

One year for Halloween, a white classmate in Candace’s school painted himself black, and she thought it was a great costume. Her school teacher then talked to the class about the history of blackface, which was an entirely new concept to her.

In an article called “WTF is ‘Acting White’?,” Candace Owens described her first personal brush with racism. Owens excelled in her 3rd-grade standardized tests at school. As a result, when she reached middle school, she was placed in a class with fellow high achievers. She was one of only three black students in her new class.

As Candace reflected, “If you surround yourself with (read: if your teachers place you with) all white people, you can instantly become not black enough.” Black students started making fun of her for hanging out with white people.

The worst incident occurred during the school lunch period one day when Candace was about 12 years old. A black girl spotted Owens sitting with her white classmates and asked her, “Candace, if I said to you ‘holla,’ what would you say back to me?” The question was a reference to the current hit “Holla Back” by rapper Fabolous. Candace answered that she would say “hello,” which resulted in humiliating laughter. According to the song, she should have answered: “holla back, youngin.”

Embarrassed, Owens decided to study popular music. She started by memorizing the lyrics of “Holla Back.”

The experience made an impression on young Candace Owens, though. It demonstrated to her that race could have a confining effect; it could be used to force people to act in a specific way. About three years earlier, in 1998, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas expressed his views on this same phenomenon in a public speech. He stated that he had not “come to defend my views, but rather to assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I’m black.”

After five years, Candace’s time at her grandparents’ home came to an end. When she was in high school, her family moved out of her grandfather’s home and back into a less-desirable living arrangement. The years with her grandfather exerted a great influence on her, though. In a 2018 interview, she recalled that her grandfather was probably the only important male figure in her early life. “My sense of humor, my passion, [and] my work ethic all come from the man.”

After he retired, Robert Owens moved back to Fayetteville and bought the sharecropping farm on which he was raised. He and his brothers divided the land and built themselves new retirement homes. The purchase constituted a symbolic victory over racism. The KKK was gone, sharecropping was over, and Robert Owens would live out his final years on his own land, free and clear. Given his personal philosophy, though, Robert Owens might not have even considered the racial significance of the move.

Thanks in part to her grandfather’s influence, Candace Owens was not particularly interested in racial politics during her high school years. In her senior year, though, she would unexpectedly become the center of a widely reported racial incident.

Experiencing a racial incident for herself would allow Owens to decide whether or not to be a victim. It would also affect the way she viewed the society around her, including individuals and adults who claimed to help victims.

CHAPTER 5

Hate Crime

Midway through her senior year of high school, Candace Owens had little reason to think of herself as a victim. Despite the family’s move back into low-income housing, high school had gone well for her. In addition to being a good student, she was a cheerleader, and her boyfriend was the football team’s captain. She also ran track. In the final months of high school, though, an incident occurred that would scar her for years to come.

One night in February 2007, Owens and her boyfriend were at home watching the 2016 movie, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. The comedy stars Will Ferrell as Ricky Bobby, a NASCAR driver, with Sasha Baron Cohen co-starring as a rival driver from France. The movie promised a care-free evening with very little drama.

During the movie, though, Owens received four phone calls from a private number. She sent each call to voicemail. After the movie ended, she went home and listened to her four voicemail messages. On the messages, four male callers made a series of racist threats against Owens. Among other things, they threatened to shoot her in the head and to attack her family. The messages were explicitly racist, using the N-word and specifically referencing Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. She could not figure out who would call her and leave such messages. Her initial reaction was to cry.

The following day, Owens attended a philosophy class at school. The class discussion related to racism, and it occurred to Owens that her experience from the night before was relevant. On a whim, she shared the story. At her teacher’s request, she played the voicemail messages. Her teacher then insisted that she report the incident to the principal. The principal, in turn, spoke to the school’s resource officer, ultimately resulting in the reporting of the incident to the police.

Had the school officials not reacted so strongly to her story, Candace Owens probably would not have considered the voicemail incident to be a big deal. In retrospect, she has expressed her view that the adults blew the incident out of proportion; in her opinion, they should have stopped and considered the obvious truth that the call came from some teenagers trying to be mean and not from committed racists. At the time, though, the adults’ actions demonstrated to Owens that something truly horrible had happened to her. She started to see herself as a victim.

After some investigation, law enforcement determined that Owens was friends with one of the four callers but did not know the other three. The boy she knew had gotten into a shouting match with her at school two days earlier, resulting in his suspension. He was upset that Owens was spending less time with him than in the past because she was hanging out with her boyfriend. He and his friends had made the calls, apparently, out of a desire for revenge, enhanced by alcohol.

One of the callers that Owens did not know was the son of Stamford’s mayor, Dannel Malloy, who would go on to serve as Connecticut’s governor from 2011 to 2019. Because of this political connection, the incident was soon widely reported in Connecticut and New York newspapers, and the FBI became involved in the investigation. After a six-week investigation, the FBI determined that the messages were authentic, and police eventually arrested the perpetrators.

CHAPTER 6

Newsworthy

Journalists quickly labeled the incident a hate crime. Beginning in the late 1980s, American legislators passed laws that increase the penalties for certain crimes when the crimes had a basis in prejudice. The voicemails left for Owens made explicit racial threats. If they constituted a crime, then it seemed clear that they constituted a hate crime.

The incident also made for a timely news item. There was an ongoing effort to pass a federal hate crimes law, as a reaction to the 1998 murders of Matthew Shepard (targeted because of his homosexuality) and James Byrd, Jr. (targeted because he was black). Just over two years later, in October 2009, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act would become law.

Reflecting on the voicemail incident, Owens notes that the local newspapers were looking for a story of oppression and oppressors, but that the news coverage was ultimately harmful to her (i.e., the oppressed). The NAACP and others got involved, with a similar focus on the oppression narrative.

Reflecting on his work on the case, the NAACP’s Scot S. Esdaile recalls that:

Her family reached out to the NAACP for help. She was saying that she was scared. She feared for her life, and we made sure all the safety protocols were in place. We were just trying to make sure she was safe getting back into school and that the police department was aware of all the different issues that were going on in reference to her complaint.

On May 24, 2007, Candace Owens and her father filed a lawsuit against the school’s Board of Education for failing to protect Candace from harassment. Despite the publicity surrounding the incident, the school had not suspended the students involved.

At Owens’ school, some kids speculated that she had faked the incident. Owens recalls that her sisters got into fights defending her against such claims. There were also cruel comments about Owens in the comment sections of online articles.

For six to eight weeks, Owens was homeschooled because attending school was so unpleasant. Eventually, the school district paid a settlement of $37,500 to the Owens family as compensation for mishandling the harassment case.

Candace Owens has noted that at least some of the instigators went on to have substance abuse problems, which she believes resulted from the mishandling of the incident. Just as society had forced her into the role of victim, it had forced the four young boys into the role of criminal.

At the time, though, Candace and her immediate family apparently saw her as a victim. This victim identity ran contrary to the philosophy of her grandfather, but it faithfully aligned with the liberal politics that Candace and her family had embraced.

In the early 2000s, conservatives frequently criticized liberals for fetishizing victimhood. A few months after the Owens voicemail incident, Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint published their bestselling book, Come On, People: On the Path from Victims to Victors. At the time, Cosby had a clean public image. In the book, he sought to counter the victimhood narrative by providing black Americans with tools to improve their lives, rather than see themselves as victims. Many black leaders and conservative thinkers were looking for ways to counter the victim mentality.

Victimhood did not benefit Candace Owens. Seeing herself as a victim would soon result in a serious disorder for Owens, and it would take years for her to overcome that disorder.

CHAPTER 7

College

The hate crime incident overshadowed an otherwise exciting time for Candace Owens. Thanks to her hard work in school, she had been accepted to attend college at the University of Rhode Island. As a first-generation college student, she was excited. She also felt that she needed to take advantage of this opportunity.

Her family could not, of course, afford to pay for her education. Out-of-state tuition would cost between $13,000 and $23,000 per year, and that would not include the cost of living. So, at age 17, Owens signed the necessary loan documents and prepared to join a class of 3,000 incoming freshman students.

She described her freshman dorm room as “designed like a penitentiary.” Complaining about one's dorm is a standard part of college life and can be a point of bonding for freshmen. For Owens, though, the drab physical surroundings were a minor concern. She had much more serious fears on her mind. The hate crime incidents from her senior year of high school continued to haunt her.

Moving away from Stamford might have seemed like a good way to escape that unfortunate event and make a fresh start. Thanks to the internet, though, Owens could not really leave her past behind. She harbored a fear that new college friends would read about the incident online and believe negative comments about her.

Owens soon found methods of coping with her feelings of victimhood, and some of those methods were profoundly unhealthy. Near the beginning of her freshman year, Owens became anorexic. She started skipping meals and running excessively to burn calories.

She has repeatedly stated that being anorexic gave her a feeling of control that she was otherwise lacking. “Internally, my anorexia was an orchestra, I was its conductor upon a box, waving a stick madly. Lost in the rhythm, my head rocking back and forth.” According to Owens, the addictive part of anorexia is the mental clarity that results from conquering one’s body.

As she watched her body wither, Owens realized that anorexia was not a solution. Instead, it was one more problem to address. She went to a therapist at one point but found the therapist’s advice unhelpful. She would have to work through this new issue on her own.

For Owens, anorexia served an important purpose. It helped her deal with the pain she felt as a victim. While the behavior was maladaptive, she would have trouble abandoning it without first dealing with her underlying issues. Russell Brand, the British comedian, discusses the utility of bad behaviors in his book, Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions, in which he shares a striking incident from his own drug rehab experience:

A counsellor at the treatment centre where I got clean, herself a woman in recovery, surprised me when she said, “How clever of you to find drugs. Well done, you found a way to keep yourself alive.” This made me feel quite tearful…. [S]he told me that I had done well by finding something that made being me bearable… To be acknowledged as a person who was in pain and fighting to survive in my own muddle-up and misguided way made me feel optimistic and understood.

Anorexia was helping Owens survive psychologically, even as it threatened to kill her physically. She could not control the past, but she could control her present self, albeit in an unhealthy way.

Drugs presented another possible method of coping with her internal pain. During her freshman year of college, Candace broke up with her high school boyfriend. She was heartbroken, and she recalls crying incessantly. She decided to see a doctor about getting medication for her grief. To her relief, her doctor prescribed Xanax, a popular prescription drug that produces feelings of calmness.

Owens was willing to look past the negative aspects of Xanax, which include addiction, reduced effectiveness as tolerance increases, mood swings, and a loss of appetite that leads to weight loss. The prospect of further reducing her appetite might have been particularly troubling had she considered it.

When she got back to her dorm with the pills, she had the following exchange with a friend named Zoie:

ZOIE: Why are you going to take that pill?

CANDACE: I’m literally depressed, I can’t stop crying.

ZOIE: But why are you crying?

CANDACE: Because Sean and I broke up, of course.

ZOIE: If you can identify why you are crying, you do not need a pill. In fact, you probably aren’t even depressed. You’re probably just sad. You’re likely just [experiencing] human emotion.

Thanks to her friend’s advice, Candace decided not to take the pills. She recalls that other college acquaintances actively abused Xanax, using it to relax before dates. In retrospect, she is grateful that she did not.

She was not opposed to all pills, though. Like many college students of her generation, she experimented with nootropic drugs to help her in school. One week, she had three papers to write and a party to attend, so she decided to seek out some chemical assistance.

She visited her doctor’s office and asked the nurse to refill her prescriptions. When the nurse asked her which prescriptions needed to be filled, Candace listed a couple of allergy medications that she was already taking and added Adderall, the popular ADHD drug, to the list. The nurse wrote down the list of drugs, and the doctor filled the prescriptions. Adderall became a regular part of Owens’ test preparation process.

While she was busy with the challenges of college, Owens seems not to have given much attention to politics. In retrospect, though, she recalls that she was a true liberal from about age 16 to 22.

CHAPTER 8

Education

At the university, Owens majored in journalism and English. As part of her studies, she took the Feminism 101 course during her Freshman year. At the time, she felt that she was probably a feminist, and she has described the instructor as a stereotypical feminist. As the course progressed, though, she realized that its purpose was to make women hate men.

Owens’ epiphany came when her professor spoke about eating disorders. Because these disorders are more prevalent among men than women, the professor maintained that men (i.e., the patriarchy) are responsible for the disorders. Candace reflected on her own eating disorder and concluded that men had not caused it. The anorexia was about exercising control over herself.

She suggested to the professor that not everything is men's fault. The professor then argued that advertising agencies were causing eating disorders by displaying images of impossibly fit women. Owens responded that steroid abuse seems to disproportionately affect men, but that no one blames women for that.

Exasperated, the professor said, “Candace, I just feel like you were sent to me from the men's department.” Candace responded, “Professor, I feel like I was sent to you from the common sense department.”

While Owens could not accept all of her feminist professor’s ideas, she did generally accept the progressive, left-wing ideology of the campus. Reflecting on this years later, she expressed her belief that she was indoctrinated in school – during high school, but especially during college.

Thoughts of social justice could not protect her from the hard realities of finance, though. Owens had to drop out of college after her junior year because she could not get the student loans she needed to pay for her senior year. She recalls that Sallie Mae had tanked after the 2007 financial recession, and it was harder to get loans than in the past.

At age 20, she still struggled with the fallout of her high school hate crime incident. Now, though, she also had $100,000 of student loan debt, no college degree, and an education that was not conducive to making money. She knew she had to take action to address her debt.

CHAPTER 9

Work and Dating

To cover her living expenses, Owens worked as a nanny throughout college. An affluent couple hired her to watch their three-year-old daughter and six-month-old son. This job was a formative experience for Owens, as she learned from her interactions with the family. She also created real bonds with the children she watched.

For a year after dropping out of college, Owens continued to work as a nanny. She knew, though, that the job was not lucrative enough to solve her financial problems and that it did not represent a viable future career option.

Owens experienced a major breakthrough in a yoga class. A friend invited her to attend, and she began using yoga sessions to meditate about her life. Among other things, she reconsidered her beliefs about the four boys who had harassed her in high school. She came to believe that they were not racists – just dumb kids. She eventually managed to overcome anorexia, at age 22.

That same year, she began a serious relationship with a 33-year-old man. While some people might have questioned the age difference, Owens later reflected on the benefits of dating an older man: “[Dating an older man] will instantly elevate your standards: I actually wince when I think about where my standards were before I dated someone older.”

In addition to being older than Owens, he had a different religious background (Jewish) and came from a different socioeconomic group (wealthy).

For two years, Owens lived with her boyfriend. She found comfort and safety during a tumultuous time in her life. She described the time as “a period when my identity and life seemed to mirror chaos.” Ultimately, Owens ended the relationship because she was not yet ready to settle down and get married, while he apparently was.

The relationship had seen Owens through a tough time in her life, and it might have suggested to her that she was capable of establishing a stable long-term relationship when she was ready to do so. She was not yet ready to have the kind of home life her grandfather had enjoyed, though.

Before she seriously considered family life, Owens would venture into the business world. Her confidence and anti-authoritarian personality seemed perfect for the marketplace, and she would soon prove that she had an aptitude for business.

CHAPTER 10

Business

During her time in New York City, Owens landed a job with a private equity firm. She recalls that the two men who ran the firm took a chance on her. She worked as an executive assistant to the head of the firm, traveling wherever he went. As a result of this opportunity, by 2009, Owens was spending a significant amount of time abroad and especially in London.

After this experience, Owens would repeatedly tout the value of foreign travel. On several occasions, she has suggested that Americans can develop a more informed perspective on politics by visiting other countries and thereby making valid comparisons between the United States and the rest of the world. Even after leaving her private equity position, she would continue to travel abroad frequently.

Ultimately, though, she tired of the business world. As she recalled later:

Life is one big test to see whether or not you can hold onto your soul. I lost mine to the world of finance and in the heart of NYC. After 4 years, I had no idea who I was anymore. I was ‘successful’ by most people’s standards, but I never felt that way in my heart. I stopped feeling like me. I stopped being me. When I quit my job, one of the first things I did was go back home.

While she had to leave the New York City finance world, Owens had become interested in starting a business. In 2015, Candace decided to found a company of her own. Her stated intent was to “be a part of the change that I feel our world needs to make.” She was reacting against the financial industry in which she had worked, attempting to create a business that was both profitable and philanthropic.

For inspiration, she looked to John Mackey, who started the Whole Foods company, and Jeff Tindell, the founder of the Container Store. The two had attended college together at the University of Texas, and they had developed similar views of business. Both men touted the benefits of “conscious capitalism.”

Tindell emphasizes the importance of creating organizations that help everyone involved to thrive. He believes the Container Store helps consumers by enabling them to spend their time more efficiently, thanks to improved organization of their homes. When he talks about his company, he frequently discusses employee morale, as well.

John Mackey has written a book called Conscious Capitalism, which explains his approach to business. Mackey believes in capitalism but bemoans the negative reputation of business. He believes that business can be conducted in a more conscious, ethical manner, which will improve its reputation. He argues that capitalism has been phenomenally good for humanity, but that it is often misrepresented by intellectuals, possibly due to resentment.

Mackey argues that economic freedom and financial prosperity are inextricably linked and that declining freedom in America would lead to declining prosperity. While a business must be profitable to survive, Mackey insists that survival is not the purpose of a business. Like Tindell, Mackey talks about creating value for various constituents of his company, including employees, customers, investors, suppliers, and communities.

Mackey has advocated for an increased presence of women in business, arguing that women have greater emotional intelligence than men and can, therefore, promote the human values that he endorses. He has also advocated for the millennial generation, arguing that millennials have great potential, despite the widespread criticism of their performance in the workplace.

Owens, a millennial herself, decided to engage in her own form of conscious capitalism. Her new company was called Degree180.com. One of her stated motivations for founding the company was to help women succeed in business. She believed that women could influence the corporate workplace if they first worked to rise to positions of leadership. The company would support women through editorial writing about business and related issues.

Describing her work in late 2015, she wrote:

[P]eople who have never been there before don’t know what it takes, (the hours, the approximate 400 e-mails you are rapid firing off and responding to daily, the copious cups of coffee, ineffectively battling the zero sleep your getting)…

During 2015 and 2016, Owens posted dozens of articles online, generally focusing on lifestyle issues. Her writings demonstrate that she was still quite liberal in her political views at this time. For example, she was an outspoken critic of the conservative Tea Party.

She could not have known that a series of events would soon change her view of the world dramatically.

CHAPTER 11

Social Autopsy

At age 26, Owens had an idea to launch a website called Social Autopsy, which would address cyberbullying. Her interest in the concept resulted partly from the hate crime she had experienced and her belief that the boys involved should have received a more lenient punishment.

Owens had not worked in the cyberbullying space previously, so she was unaware of Zoe Quinn, who was working with Twitter on antibullying issues. Quinn had recently become somewhat famous as an anti-cyber-bullying activist. She had over 73,000 Twitter followers and a book deal. Quinn’s fame was the result of an online controversy known as Gamergate, which occurred in 2014.

In what came to be known as Gamergate, several female video game creators were harassed online by gamers. The harassment resulted primarily from the gamers’ perceptions that (1) the target video game creators were making politically correct video games and (2) video game journalists were giving these creators preferential coverage, probably for political reasons.

Zoe Quinn had created a game called Depression Quest, which focused on the experiences of a protagonist who suffered from depression. Depression Quest was not what most gamers would think of as a video game. It was text-based, similar to games that were popular in the early 1980s. Video game journalists widely praised the game, but online gamers did not.

Carl Benjamin (known on YouTube as Sargon of Akkad) played the game and described it as follows:

[Zoe Quinn] made a free, digital choose-your-own-adventure book… It was all text, nothing else in it. It can't [have] taken her very long, but it was about learning to deal with depression… [It] was more like an interactive novel which is – again, it's in itself fine – but the gaming press because she was a prominent feminist and progressive, she got unbelievable amounts of coverage.

In August 2014, Quinn’s former boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, posted an article online that suggested that Quinn had a romantic relationship with a particular gaming journalist in order to get a favorable review of her game. Quinn denied the claim, and Gjoni eventually retracted the story and apologized. However, gamers reacted aggressively to the perception that Quinn had acted inappropriately to get reviews.

Quinn became a well-known victim of online harassment and was soon talking about her experience to anti-bullying groups and even the United Nations. Major companies began asking her for advice on cyberbullying issues, and she received thousands in donations via Patreon.

Quinn could also fairly be described as a social justice warrior (SJW). She had not merely been opposed by the so-called alt-right (the arch-nemesis of SJWs); she also believed in the liberal victim ideology of intersectionalism. When her book, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate, was published in 2017, it contained passages like the following:

Much of the existing dialogue around the issue of online abuse frames it as violence against women, and that’s a major problem. Most of the space being taken up focuses on gender and ignores race, sexuality, and every other type of identity and the intersections thereof. Yet most of the people whom I consider to be the top experts on online abuse and how to defeat it are not white.

In line with the progressive thinking of her time, Quinn was skeptical of the views of white males and “cis” women.

In early 2016, Candace Owens and some friends launched a Kickstarter campaign, seeking to crowdsource money for a website called Social Autopsy.

Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform. Founded in 2009, the platform allows ordinary consumers to help fund new projects by donating money, in return for perks, such as access to the results of the project. In 2015, the Pebble Time project launched on Kickstarter, seeking to fund the creation of a new smartwatch; it became the most successful Kickstarter ever when it raised over $20 million, and it went on to be acquired by Fitbit. Most Kickstarter. About 37% of the projects posted on Kickstarter succeed at raising their target amount, and the average project raises about $10,000.

The website would hold online bullies accountable for their bullying actions. Organizations would be able to use the website to do background checks on individuals to see if they had engaged in online bullying.

The Social Autopsy website would not prevent hostile phone calls like the one Owens received in high school, but it might deter bullies from harassing people online. Owens had received online harassment via Facebook after her high school hate crime incident, and she knew firsthand how damaging that type of bullying could be.

There were many details to be worked out still, including how long the Social Autopsy site would retain information about bullying incidents. In its initial version, however, it would be aimed at adults and not children. The database would be searchable by name of perpetrator only (e.g., not by the names of victims). Owens had consulted with attorneys about certain sensitive issues, including privacy. She had also consulted with Facebook because the database would use public information from that social network.

Six weeks before the Kickstarter launch, a couple of articles were published in Connecticut newspapers, describing the Social Autopsy concept. Subsequently, Owens responded to questions and met with educators in Connecticut.

Before the Kickstarter launch, Owens and her friends created a non-pubic prototype of the website. As she explains:

I had an off-site web developer who had helped us to build Degree180.com, draw up a mock of how the [Social Autopsy] website might function. He did it quickly—in about 10 days if I recall—before sending me a link that would allow us to go in and add profiles of people so that we could see all of the potential flaws in our design. We added about 100 or so profiles and sent around the not-live link to a close group of friends and relevant parties for feedback.

As part of the Kickstarter campaign, the Social Autopsy team posted a short video explaining their plan. Owens expressed her belief that the rise in teen suicides was due in part to cyberbullying.

The Kickstarter campaign also made provocative promises. It promised that users would be able to “run a real background check” on neighbors and others, to see their bullying and hate speech behavior. These behaviors would be reported to the service anonymously.

Owens recalls being nervous about the launch of her Kickstarter campaign. However, by the end of the launch day, April 12, 2016, the campaign had raised $2,700. The goal was to raise $75,000 in total, and the first day seemed to be a step in the right direction.

When Zoe Quinn learned about the Kickstarter campaign, she did not like it. She immediately sent out over 20 tweets about Social Autopsy, criticizing the project. She then tried to contact Candace Owens.

In the evening, Owens learned from one of her partners that someone was trying to reach her to discuss the project. She let the partner share her personal e-mail address with the interested individual, who turned out to be Zoe Quinn.

Candace Owens wrote about her communications with Zoe Quinn that night, recalling that Quinn described herself as the “co-founder of Crash Override Network, one of the only online abuse helplines and victims advocacy groups” and “patient zero of Gamergate.” Owens had never heard of Gamergate, but she quickly read about it on Wikipedia.

Owens recalls that Quinn e-mailed her a message including the following:

I came across your Kickstarter today and I would very much like to speak to you about it. Or rather, I would like to talk you out of it based on what I know from over a year and a half of being a leading voice in the discussion around solving online abuse. I’m assuming you’re coming from a place of good faith with trying to fix the issue of online abuse, and I’d like to ask you to assume I am as well given my expertise in the subject.

A couple of hours after the email, Quinn called Owens on the phone.

CHAPTER 12

Cyberbullies

Quinn told Owens that many organizations that work to combat cyberbullying were troubled by the Social Autopsy project. Quinn said she was concerned that bad actors could use the website to “dox” individuals; Owens acknowledges that she did not know what doxing was at the time.

Doxing is the practice of revealing a person’s private information without their consent, to cause harm by identifying them. An example of threatened doxing came in July 2017, after President Donald Trump retweeted an animated meme in which he delivered a wrestling body slam to an individual with a CNN logo displayed over his face. CNN tracked down the identity of the individual who created the meme, tweeting on July 4: “Exclusive: CNN tracked down the Reddit user behind the Trump wrestling GIF. Now he’s apologizing.” CNN then crossed into doxing territory when it wrote that:

CNN is not publishing “HanA**holeSolo’s” name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again…CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.

Online observers identified this statement as a threat, making it clear that if the individual in question ever criticized CNN on Reddit again, then the network would dox him. The hashtag #CNNBlackmail began trending on Twitter. Note that some observers, including a staff writer for Wired in a piece called Don’t Let the Alt-Right Fool You: Journalism Isn’t Doxing, have defended CNN by suggesting that journalism is (or should be) outside the definition of doxing.

Owens’ ignorance of doxing did not indicate a lack of expertise in bullying. Instead, it underscored the fact that Owens was an entrepreneur – not a techie. Having accumulated some experience in the business world, Owens knew that if she created a sound business model, she could hire all the technical people she needed. In fact, she had already hired technical help to create the prototype website.

Zoe Quinn did not possess Owens’ level of business experience, though, and Quinn focused on the narrow expertise she had gained in programming and bullying.

Quinn warned Owens that Social Autopsy could be used to harass bullies. She also raised legal concerns. Then she argued that individuals targeted by the website were not all bad, acknowledging that she had been a part of the hacker group Anonymous.

When Owens refused to accept Quinn’s arguments, Quinn told her that members of Gamergate would attack her online, seeking to shut down the Kickstarter. Owens recalls that Quinn became emotional and started crying, saying that Social Autopsy would “ruin everything.”

Quinn would later deny using the phrase “ruin everything,” and she characterized her phone call with Owens quite differently in her 2017 book:

I reached out to discuss this project with the founder, who, it quickly became clear, had not done her homework, thought that abusers “deserved” to be abused, and was not particularly savvy regarding tech or internet culture.

A few hours after the phone call, in the early morning, Owens e-mailed Quinn a follow-up to their phone conversation. Shortly afterward, Owens received an abusive Kickstarter message from a user named “John Joe,” which repeated the N-word three times.

This first message was quickly followed by over 50 angry messages from various accounts. Before the John Joe message, the Social Autopsy team had not received any such messages. Because the messages were similar (i.e., they expressed the same concerns and appeared to come from Gamergate men) and came shortly after her exchange with Quinn, Owens concluded that Quinn was causing the backlash. “Is it a coincidence? That everything Zoe feared for us happened within hours of her warning me it might?”

Later that morning, Owens received an e-mail warning her of further online backlash. It looked like the Kickstarter messages, but it was sent to her personal e-mail address – the address that had been shared with Quinn.

Quinn emailed Owens that afternoon, noting that she had discovered the Social Autopsy demo site. The link to the site soon circulated on Twitter. There were also personal attacks against Owens, claiming that she was anti-Semitic and/or a radical feminist.

Owens contacted Kickstarter about the online controversy and was satisfied with their response. Ultimately, though, less than two days after the launch, Kickstarter ended the Social Autopsy campaign.

Owens noticed that the name Randi Lee Harper appeared repeatedly in the discussion about her website. Ms. Harper had posted an open letter to Candace Owens on April 22, 2016, on Medium. It stated, in part:

I left my career to focus on online harassment after a domestic violence incident targeting my friend Zoe Quinn (yes, the woman you spoke to on the phone) escalated into the most publicly discussed online harassment campaign to date. I spoke out about this harassment, and in return, I was targeted as well….

I’m telling you my credentials so you can understand where I’m coming from when I tell you, unequivocally, you are a goddamn trainwreck….

Look, fluffhead. Someone telling you that your idea is shit isn’t bullying, especially when that someone has been doing this for much longer than you….

You blamed your Kickstarter getting shut down on trolls. You’re wrong. That was us….

When she read the statement “That was us,” Owens interpreted “us” in this instance to refer to Harper and Quinn. Despite Quinn’s denials, Harper seems to have admitted that she and Quinn orchestrated the abuse that targeted Candace Owens.

Owens’ new opponents had also launched a petition on Change.org, seeking to oppose the Social Autopsy project. The petition, titled “Kickstarter: Terminate the Orwellian SocialAutopsy.com Campaign,” ultimately attracted 1,417 supporters.

While Owens received hate mail via her Degree180.com website, there were also messages of support. Owens reported that she had heard from other victims of Quinn and Harper, who had been harassed by them. It was clear to Owens that this pair used victimhood, racism, and sexism to achieve their ends.

Owens announced online that she planned to publish the emails she had received, and then she noticed that the messages stopped entirely. She took this as evidence that Quinn was behind the emails.

Owens pondered Quinn’s actions in writing:

It’s interesting, and really something I had never considered. Just how much power you could wield if you devoted yourself to creating a cyber unit. Even if it was just you and 20 other people involved, each with multiple fake accounts. If a blog piece was written about you, you could all … write criticisms shifting the landscape of the other people’s thoughts. … What you could do is control people’s perception.… Yes, if you were willing to spend full time dedicated to the web, you could begin to distort reality by presenting an assumed majority.

Seven months later, after the election of Donald Trump as president, mainstream media would raise the alarm about organized social media campaigns conducted to distort the truth. Specifically, political opponents of Donald Trump claimed that Russians had used social media to help Trump win the election. In April 2016, though, the mainstream media treated Owens’ claims like a conspiracy theory.

Candace Owens had studied journalism in college and respected reporters, but she was about to learn some harsh lessons about the news industry.

CHAPTER 13

New York Magazine

In the days after the Zoe Quinn incident, Owens received messages warning her that the press was protecting the reputations of Quinn and Harper. She wrote that this “suggestion sounded to me like the echoing of a dramatized conspiracy theory…”

Then Jesse Singal of New York Magazine asked Owens to speak with him about the Quinn incident. Singal asked her not to publish her account of the incident and instead let him tell the story.

Owens was unaware of Singal’s history with Gamergate and Zoe Quinn. Back in 2014, Singal had written articles for the Boston Globe in which he made it clear that he believed Zoe Quinn was on the right side of the Gamergate scandal and that her opponents were angry, misogynistic losers. Perhaps because of her interest in journalism, Owens did not immediately suspect that Singal might be trying to protect Quinn.

They spoke on April 17, 2016. Per Singal’s request, Owens sent him evidence she had gathered of the abuse she received from Quinn. She was suspicious of the fact that Singal insisted on using his personal e-mail address. The next day, Singal published an article that portrayed Quinn and Harper in a positive light, while presenting Owens as irrational. He criticized the posts Owens had published on her @socialcoroner account:

If you stumbled upon the Twitter account @socialcoroner over the weekend, you might have immediately assumed it was being run by a type that’s become sadly familiar online: the hard-line Gamergater. If you spend enough time on Twitter or Reddit, you run into these folks occasionally: sitting at the far end of the obsessiveness bell curve, these are the dudes (and they’re mostly dudes) convinced that a cabal of feminist “social-justice warriors,” or SJWs, are controlling everything from behind the scenes, viciously targeting their enemies and punishing them for not toeing an imagined wacko-progressive line.

Two common targets of this sort of obsession — and, broadly speaking, two of Gamergate’s biggest bête noires — are the anti-harassment advocates Zoe Quinn and Randi Lee Harper. And, indeed, they were exactly who @socialcoroner went after.

Afterward, Owens wrote online about Singal’s prior relationship with Quinn and Harper, which he had not disclosed to her. She believed he had pumped her for information so he could provide it to his two friends, with no intent to use the information in his article. Singal criticized Owens repeatedly on Twitter.

On April 17, 2016, the day of the Singal interview, the Ralph Retort, a publication that had been friendly to Owens, posted its interview with Owens on YouTube. Thanks to the internet, the traditional media could not entirely control the narrative.

The negative attention had also produced some positive results. Potential investors had learned about Social Autopsy and reached out to Owens and her team. When Owens launched a Change.org petition to convince New York Magazine to recall Singal’s article, 701 supporters signed.

Owens contacted New York Magazine, advising them of Singal’s actions toward her. The publication responded by advising her that it has a policy against withdrawing articles.

CHAPTER 14

The Washington Post

On April 19, 2016, Caitlin Dewey, a reporter for the Washington Post, e-mailed Degree180.com. She requested a phone interview with Owens.

Like Jesse Singal of New York Magazine, Dewey had a long history of covering Gamergate, and she had made it clear in print that she believed Zoe Quinn’s side of the dispute was correct. In a 2014 article titled “The only guide to Gamergate you will ever need to read,” Dewey cast the controversy as a battle between inclusiveness (Zoe Quinn) and “dude-dominated gaming culture” (Gamergate).

Shortly after sending her interview request, Dewey spoke with Owens. According to Owens, Dewey tried to get her to back away from her claims of harassment by Quinn and Harper. Owens refused to provide details about her now-defunct Kickstarter project and her interested investors.

That night, an official from an anti-bullying organization called Owens to say that he had heard she had spoken on his behalf to the Washington Post. Owens said that was a complete distortion of her remarks because she had not told Dewey the identity of any of her partners or supporters. Owens broke down, crying on the phone call.

The next morning, after Owens and her Twitter followers reached out to Dewey, Owens received a call from David Malitz, who was Dewey’s editor. Owens explained why she believed Dewey was acting unethically, but Malitz stridently defended his reporter. After the call, Malitz sent Owens an email denying wrongdoing but stating that the paper would not be proceeding with an article about Owens at that time.

Owens reflected that:

I couldn’t process that I had just caught the Washington Post red-handed in a lie, and perhaps worse, that nobody had felt it necessary to apologize. It was the same pretentious attitude that I had seen Jesse Singal displaying on his twitter feed and now, both Caitlin and David Malitz had exhibited those same qualities.

On April 25, 2016, Candace Owens tweeted a link to an article she had written about the Washington Post incident, which she posted on the degree180.com website.

The article claimed that Washington Post journalists Caitlin Dewey and David Malitz had tried to create a misleading article about her. “These people were willing to ruin my entire professional career and reputation, to protect the slimey images of Randi Lee Harper and Zoey [sic] Quinn.” Fortunately, Owens had recorded her conversation with Dewey.

Before the Social Autopsy incident, Candace had believed that Breitbart News was a racist publication. Breitbart, named for its founder, Andrew Breitbart, was a leading conservative news site. In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, the site expressed support for Donald Trump.

Breitbart’s support for Trump resulted largely from the preferences of its leader, Steve Bannon, who would become Chief Executive of the Trump campaign in August 2016. To combat Trump, the left-wing media frequently and erroneously accused Breitbart News of advocating for white nationalism.

Owens later recalled that “At that point, I thought Breitbart was a bunch of white nationalists, so just imagine my surprise that the only people who were printing the truth was Breitbart.”

On April 27, 2016, Breitbart’s Allum Bokhari wrote an article titled “Why Are ‘Anti-Abuse’ Activists Zoe Quinn and Randi Harper Trying to Protect Anonymous Trolls?” The article identified another crowdfunding project that had been squashed by Zoe Quinn two years earlier, noted that Gamergate supporters like Milo Yiannopoulos had been on the receiving end of threats, and asked why Quinn would oppose an anti-bullying website like Social Autopsy. It also noted that other individuals who had come into conflict with Harper, including businessman Vivek Wadhwa and scientist Chris Von Csefalvay, had subsequently been targeted with anonymous online campaigns.

On May 2, 2016, Bokhari published a second piece about Social Autopsy, this time focusing on the claim that journalists had targeted Candace Owens. The article, titled “Anti-Cyberbullying Campaigner Accuses Journalists of Sliming Her to Protect Zoe Quinn and Randi Harper,” referred to Caitlin Dewey and Jesse Singal as “two of Quinn’s staunchest defenders in the mainstream media.”

Mike Cernovich also spoke out in her defense online. Candace was surprised to see that conservatives were supportive of her even though she considered herself a liberal.

Owens would later recall that May 2016 was the month when she became a conservative. She realized once and for all that the mainstream media was intentionally distorting the truth to promote a liberal agenda and that the liberals were the real bullies.

CHAPTER 15

Red Pilled

Online, people often refer to the eye-opening moment that makes someone abandon liberal thinking as a “red pill.” This phrase is a reference to The Matrix, the 1999 Keanu Reeves film, in which the protagonist chooses which of two pills to take. He takes the red pill, which opens his eyes to how the world really works.

Candace Owens was definitively red-pilled in May 2016 after her Social Autopsy experiment. A couple of other incidents contributed to her change in political philosophy, though.

For several months her online articles had reflected her disillusionment with feminism. In a February 2016 article, for example, Owens discussed rapper Kesha’s claim that Dr. Luke, her music producer, had raped her. The claim gave rise to the hashtag #FreeKesha on Twitter, but Owens noted that Kesha had previously testified that Dr. Luke had never assaulted her. Ultimately, the court dismissed Kesha’s claims.

Owens wrote about a conversation she had with her then-boyfriend about the case. He told her that:

It’s difficult not to be sexist toward women when 9 times out of 10, when situations like this arise, they “PMS”. – I’m kidding with that term, but what I mean to say is that they simply fulfill the notion that they aren’t capable of thinking rationally, which is exactly what top-level management, at high corporations are supposed to do. For some reason, women struggle with it.

Owens was not offended by this statement, and instead concluded that: “Feminism for the sake of feminism, which is blind feminism void of a thorough understanding, is not what propels our progress, it is what slows it.”

Another red pill moment for Owens came when she watched Dave Rubin’s January 15, 2016 interview of Larry Elder. It is unclear when Owens watched the interview, but she has quoted it frequently and has described it as a video that helped her become a conservative. In the interview, Elder argues that the greatest problem facing black Americans is the lack of fathers in the homes.

Owens also recalls reading Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman's books. She notes that Sowell helped her see how people were using African Americans for political purposes.

Sowell’s background was similar to Owens’. He was born in North Carolina but moved to New York City with his mother after his parents split up. Until seventh grade, he was surrounded primarily with black people, and he recalls being surprised to learn that most Americans were white. At a young age, he discovered the library and became an avid reader. Then, in seventh grade, he tested with a high IQ square and was moved into an advanced group of students, where he associated with white kids for the first time. While he succeeded academically, his home life was troubled, and he moved out at a young age.

Eventually, Sowell pursued a career in academia. He earned a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, where Milton Friedman mentored him. Sowell then became a renowned economist, bestselling author, and conservative thinker.

Owens waited about a year after her conservative conversion before she began reaching out to others. In 2017, after a night of drinking, Owens broke down crying. She told a friend that she believed God wanted her to quit drinking, and she proceeded to do so.

Then she uploaded a video to YouTube for the first time.

CHAPTER 16

YouTube

On July 9, 2017, Owens published her first YouTube video, titled “Mom, Dad....I'm a Conservative.” The video began with a fictional scene in which Owens revealed to her parents (also played by Owens) that she was a lesbian; they promptly showered her with support. She then announced to them that she was a conservative, and they reacted negatively, making the point that in 2017 coming out as a conservative was challenging.

Owens commented that she never had an actual coming-out moment with her parents regarding her conservative views. She did not think they would be particularly concerned. When asked about Candace’s decision to be a conservative, her father said:

I was not surprised. We don't agree on some issues, which I care not to mention, but I will say I support her in bringing both sides to the table; Democrats should not assume they have our vote because we are African Americans and Republicans should not ignore African Americans because they assume we are going to vote Democrat.

It seems that Candace’s father, like many of her acquaintances, might have always suspected that Candace would not be a liberal.

The online reaction to the video was positive. People liked Candace’s humorous approach to a serious issue, but they also found her message appealing. One commenter noted that the video hit very close to home: “I accepted my brother as gay in 2001 and he hasn’t spoken to me in a year because I supported Trump.” Encouraged, Owens posted several more videos on her YouTube channel, which was called RedPillBlack.

On July 16, 2017, Owens published her second video, titled “Feminism vs. Also Feminism.” Here, finally, she could express some of the frustrations she had felt since her Feminism 101 class in college. In this video, she described all the things that a woman can get in divorce court, making the case that American’s family law system is biased against men.

Her next video would go viral, largely due to her choice of topic. She was willing to say what many people were thinking, but most were afraid to say.

Colin Kaepernick was drafted to play football in the NFL in 2011. He was a promising young player. He was also a mixed-race (black and white) man who had been adopted and raised by white parents. He grew up in a predominately white area of California.

By 2015, Kaepernick was having career troubles. He experienced tensions with his 49ers teammates and frequently seemed unhappy with media interviews. He also had a series of injuries and surgeries.

Around this time, he began posting on social media about police shootings of black people. At the time, the Black Lives Matter movement was growing in response to several high-profile shootings.

During the 2016 preseason, Kaepernick decided to remain seated on the bench during the national anthem as a form of protest, but almost no one noticed or cared. Then, a few games later, Kaepernick began taking a knee during the national anthem. This time, people did notice his protest, and many football fans were upset that he was disrespecting America and its flag. Because Kaepernick became an activist at a time when his career was struggling, it appeared to many that he was opportunistic, pursuing activism to compensate for his poor performance on the field. The liberal media, however, largely celebrated his actions.

On July 21, 2017, Owens published a video titled “The Myth of the ‘Coon’: Black Lives Don't Matter.” Owens explained that liberals use terms like “coon” and “Uncle Tom” to oppress blacks who express conservative ideas, including those who criticize Colin Kaepernick for his protests.

She argued that people like George Soros, who say they want to help blacks, should send blacks to college instead of funding protesters. She also noted that police do not shoot more blacks than whites in America, contrary to the talking points of Kaepernick and others.

The video was a huge hit, generating 26 million views. Millions of Americans shared Owens’ disgust with Kaepernick’s form of protest. President Trump was one of them. He tweeted about the issue numerous times. For example, on September 25, 2017, he wrote:

The issue of kneeling has nothing to do with race. It is about respect for our Country, Flag and National Anthem. NFL must respect this!

Owens could not have expected to become a celebrity with her third YouTube video, but that is what happened. After years of working in business and one major entrepreneurial failure, she had finally found something she could succeed at overnight.

She did not hesitate to put out another video after her successful Kaepernick episode. On July 24, 2017, Owens published a video titled “Sovieta RX (A prescription to combat Russian Hysteria).” At the time, six months into the Trump administration, liberals were pushing a conspiracy theory that held that Donald Trump was beholden to the Russian government, due to compromising intelligence that Russia had collected on him, and that Russia had helped him get elected. This theory would be fatally undermined in April 2019 after former FBI Director Robert Mueller, who Congress appointed to investigate the issue, released a report finding no Russian “collusion” in Trump’s election. In 2017, though, many liberal commentators were stating in all seriousness that Russia controlled Donald Trump.

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC invested heavily in the conspiracy theory. According to The Intercept, between February 20 and March 31 of 2017, 53 percent of Maddow’s broadcasts were focused on the Russia story, with only 1.3 percent focused on President Trump’s immigration measures.

In her Russian Hysteria video, Owens called out the Russia conspiracy myth by advertising a fictional drug called Sovieta, which could treat people suffering from paranoia about Russia. As in her prior videos, Owens used humor to make compelling arguments about timely issues. She knew how to speak to an audience of millennials.

Candace Owens now had a platform from which she could address important issues. She continued to do the work of figuring out where she stood on various issues, and which matters were most important. She would flesh her ideas out over a series of subsequent YouTube pieces.

CHAPTER 17

Commentary

Both in temperament and experience, Candace Owens was a businesswoman. The RedPillBlack YouTube channel constituted her third start-up company. With her first start-up, Degree180.com, Owens had experienced moderate success. With her second start-up, Social Autopsy, she had experienced heartbreaking failure and a life-changing education. Now, with her third start-up, RedPillBlack, Owens had finally hit pay dirt. Her videos tapped into a large deposit of eager consumers.

Like any business, RedPillBlack needed to continue delivering value to its customers. Based on the success of the Kaepernick video, Owens evidently concluded that she should focus her videos on timely news stories. Accordingly, in the next three weeks, Owens covered three hot-button issues of the day: (1) the transgender movement, (2) rape culture, and (3) white supremacy.

On July 28, 2017, Owens published a video titled “No Transgender People in the Army: Who cares?” In the video, Owens discussed the inherent contradictions between gay and lesbian ideas and transgender ideas. These contradictions would also be discussed by others, including by Douglas Murray in his 2019 book, The Madness of Crowds. While gay and lesbian people generally believe that gender is fixed and assigned at birth but sexual orientation can be toward either gender, transgender people generally believe that gender is not fixed and that, for example, a man who is attracted to another man might be a woman trapped in a man’s body.

Owens argued that gay/lesbian groups and transgender groups are not naturally aligned, but that they have become politically aligned because the left finds it useful to lump them together. By this point, Owens characterized the Democratic Party as an organization that survives by capturing and controlling disenfranchised groups, whether those groups be racial minorities or sexual identity groups.

On August 7, 2017, Owens published a video called “Rape Vs. Regret: Here's the difference.” In it, she discussed a case in which a female student at USC accused a male student of rape. The court found the student not guilty of rape, but the university would not clear him of the alleged crime.

Owens criticized the idea that women should be considered “too drunk to consent” after they voluntarily go to a bar in an attempt to hook up with men. She talked about her own college experience, in which she experienced blackouts, which led to binge eating, and shared the fact that some of her college friends took Xanax before going to bars to loosen up socially.

She expressed her view that men face a double standard in dating. If women regret a one-night stand, they should learn from their shame instead of holding innocent men criminally responsible.

The topic of Owens’ next video was forced upon her by current events. On August 12, 2017, white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, in response to the proposed removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Counter-protesters, including left-wing Antifa members, attended the event, as well. Violence broke out between the competing extremists, and a white supremacist drove his car through a crowd of people, killing a woman in the process.

The policy issue that gave rise to the Charlottesville protests was whether the government should remove confederate monuments. On the one hand, these monuments did celebrate champions of black slavery, making them offensive to many Americans. On the other hand, some argued that people need to remember history, whether they approve of it or not. In 2017, the terrorist group ISIS held power in Syria and was actively tearing down historical monuments to re-write history. Some argued that America should avoid using similar tactics.

Two groups of extremists, Antifa and neo-Nazis, used the occasion as an opportunity for violent protest. As a result, what could have been a scene of peaceful protest and public debate erupted into violence.

The American news media gave the Charlottesville incident intense media coverage. Much of the coverage focused on President Trump’s comments about the incident. For example, on August 15, The Atlantic published an article that stated:

President Trump defended the white nationalists who protested in Charlottesville on Tuesday, saying they included “some very fine people,” while expressing sympathy for their demonstration against the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

As numerous conservative commenters noted, the media’s reporting about Trump’s statement, in The Atlantic and elsewhere, intentionally distorted its content. The president had actually said:

You had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides…

And you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists – because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.

Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people. But you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets, and with the baseball bats.

For the next two years, journalists would dishonestly report that the U.S. president had called neo-Nazis “fine people.” As recently as August 2019, an edition of Newsweek featured a cover image in which Donald Trump stands in a montage of images of white supremacists, with the phrase “very fine people” in bold type. Conservatives have dubbed this reporting “the Charlottesville lie” and “the Charlottesville hoax.”

Dennis Prager, the conservative Jewish thinker, noted that the lie is easily debunked. Because the core tenet of the Nazis is a desire to kill Jews, no serious person could believe that Donald Trump, the father and father-in-law of a Jewish couple (the Kushners) and the grandfather of Jewish grandchildren, would consider Nazis to be “fine people.” Additionally, if Trump’s statement that there were fine people on both sides was referring to the two violent sides of the conflict, then saying that the Nazis were fine people would also be saying that Antifa were fine people; no one can seriously maintain that Trump considers Antifa to be fine people.

On August 16, 2017, Owens posted a video titled “I Don't Care About Charlottesville, the KKK, or White Supremacy.” In the video, Owens argued that it is irrational for black people to fear white supremacy. She noted that almost all black people who are murdered are murdered by blacks (just as almost all whites who are murdered are murdered by whites) and mocked both Democrats and Republicans for blaming presidents for white supremacy. She argued that they ought to blame the news media, who push the idea of white supremacy.

She advised her viewers to trust their own experience rather than the media. She then noted that the Charlottesville incident was a case of two hateful groups meeting up and that President Trump characterized it correctly. Blacks, Owens argued, should fear the U.S. educational and prison systems instead of white supremacists.

Later, Owens reflected that the left-wing media’s coverage of Charlottesville frustrated her because it cheapened the actual suffering of people like her grandfather, who experienced true persecution from white supremacists.

The Charlottesville YouTube video was another viral hit. In the next six months, it would receive about 80 million views. This visibility would lead to media opportunities for Owens.

CHAPTER 18

Escape

In the next few weeks after the viral Charlottesville video, Owens turned her attention to issues that directly affected black Americans and that were close to her heart.

On August 21, 2017, she published a video titled “How to Escape the Democrat Plantation (an easy guide).” Owens explained that she escaped the Democratic plantation of thought in mid-2016.

She then explained that every four years, ahead of a presidential election, Democrats become interested in blacks. Reviewing the relevant history, though, we see that Democrats were the segregationists and KKK members who persecuted blacks. Today, Owens argued, blacks have been indoctrinated into voting for Democrats, and she noted that the Democrats are trying to do the same thing to other marginalized groups.

On August 25, 2017, Owens published a video titled “WTF? Black Lives Matter Has A List of Demands for White People!” In this video, Owens reviewed a list of outrageous demands that a Black Lives Matter representative had made to white people. Among other things, the list asked white people to give their homes to black people.

The video included clips from the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and Owens compared BLM members to Veruca Salt, a whiny girl from the film. Owens called the BLM’s list reprehensible because it portrayed black people as beggars who could only succeed if white people gave them free things. She also noted that every race had experienced slavery.

On September 1, 2017, Owens published a video titled “What YouTube and Facebook REALLY think of Black people.” In this video, Owens addressed the banning of her anti-Black-Lives-Matter video by social networks. She explained that those platforms like black victims, not people like her, and she warned of the platforms’ ability to spread propaganda. Conservatives like Owens were increasingly seeing their content banned or suppressed on YouTube and other social media platforms.

Social media, according to Owens, was portraying President Trump and others inaccurately. Contrary to the media narrative, America is not a racist country, and most Americans realized that the Russian collusion theory was a hoax. She argued that the media sought to divide America.

Less than two months after her first YouTube video, Owens realized that she was succeeding and needed a way to fund her work. In this YouTube and Facebook video, Owens asked for a Patreon donation for the first time. The Patreon platform, founded in 2013, facilitated the crowdsourcing of patronage. Fans of a particular social media figure, for example, could sign up to donate a given amount of money each month. If many fans decided to donate, even small donations could add up to a significant income stream.

Other YouTube stars, such as Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson, were using Patreon to generate personal income. In fact, around half of Patreon’s fund recipients were YouTube personalities. By early 2017, Jordan Peterson was reportedly making an annual salary of over $180,000 Canadian through Patreon. He noted that the funding allowed him to remain intellectually independent and avoid caving to pressure from his university employer.

Patreon seemed like a good way for Owens to fund her work. Her videos had struck a nerve, but she would need funding if she wanted to focus her time on creating more content. She recalls that a supporter in California sent her $5000, telling her that her content was good, but she needed to buy a suit.

In her next video, Owens addressed a personal pet peeve – celebrities who use their platform to speak out about political issues. On September 7, 2017, Owens posted a video titled “Dear Celebrities: NOBODY CARES WHAT YOU THINK!!!” She criticized the recent Video Music Awards, which hit a historic low in viewership alongside political statements and virtue signaling. Madonna, Miley Cyrus, and Chelsea Handler all used the opportunity to express their support for Hillary Clinton, who had lost the presidential election nearly a year earlier. Owens also criticized foreign pundits, like British author J.K. Rowling, for trying to influence U.S. politics.

One of Owens’ favorite targets was the Clinton family. She blamed Bill Clinton for damaging the black community with his crime bill, and she disliked the way Hillary Clinton pandered to black voters.

On September 12, 2017, Hillary Clinton published a book titled What Happened?, in which she gave numerous explanations for her 2016 election loss. One of the explanations, naturally, was that the voters were too sexist to elect her.

On September 19, 2017, Owens posted a video titled “Nobody Likes Feminism: that's what happened, Hillary.” She started the video with a clip of the crazy antics of modern feminism. She then differentiated between first-wave feminism and the bizarre 2017 version, discussing the irrationality of women boycotting the results of an election in which they were allowed to vote. She also mocked the so-called “pussy hats” that feminist protesters had begun wearing, as well as male feminists.

Owens characterized the wage gap (i.e., the claim that women get paid less than men for doing the same work) as a fake issue. If women believe there is a wage gap, she suggested, they should start their own companies and hire only women. She had essentially done that herself before she became a conservative.

After a couple of months spent creating viral videos, Owens was about to become the subject of other YouTubers’ videos – a compelling guest interview subject.

CHAPTER 19

Interviews

Established online personalities had begun noticing Candace Owens. Stefan Molyneux, Andrew Klavan, Paul Watson, and Dave Rubin were some of the earliest people to see her potential. Owens has credited Watson with being the first person to share her YouTube videos with his followers.

On September 10, 2017, Molyneux, a Canadian conservative, posted a video of an hour-length interview with Candace Owens on YouTube. In the interview, Owens talked about Social Autopsy, her childhood, and her determination to succeed. She also cited Kanye West as an inspiration.

At this stage, Owens understandably focused on the Social Autopsy experience, because that is what led her to become a conservative.

Shortly thereafter, on September 28, both Andrew Klavan of the Daily Wire and Dave Rubin posted interviews with Owens, which were recorded on the same day.

Andrew Klavan is a bestselling novelist whose books have been adapted into Hollywood films, a Christian convert, and an ardent conservative. He created his podcast in conjunction with Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire organization.

In the interview, Klavan noted that he saw Owens’ videos when they had hardly any views, before she went viral. He praised her Charlottesville video and then gave her a chance to talk about her story, including Social Autopsy. When Klavan asked Owens about Trump, she said, “I love Donald Trump. He is hilarious.”

Dave Rubin began his career as a political commentator with the leftist Young Turks Network. He gradually became frustrated with liberals and, at the time of his interview with Owens, considered himself a centrist. Rubin recalls that when he first booked Owens as a guest on his podcast, he did not even know her name. He just knew that he needed to get RedPillBlack on his show. He titled the interview “On Her Journey from Left to Right.” At this point, Rubin, a lifelong liberal, seemed to be making a similar, albeit slower, journey from left to right. Owens told her story, once again focusing on the Social Autopsy event.

Late in the interview, Rubin asked Owens a viewer question, which is interesting in late of Owens’ later dealings with Kanye West: “I know you admire Kanye West; do you think that Kanye will be speaking out for the truth anytime soon or has he been threatened into submission?” Owens responded by saying:

I'm only a fan of Kanye West and the interesting thing is, a popular Kanye quote is that if you're a fan of Kanye West, you're not really a fan of Kanye West – you're a fan of yourself and you believe that you can make it…

The problem with Kanye is he gets misunderstood… people that don't follow him don't dig deep enough… He told them he supported Trump and look what happened – mental disorder… [after he checked out of the mental hospital] he went straight to Trump Tower and did a photo op with Donald Trump… and it's because he's always been anti-PC.

One other memorable moment in the Rubin interview came when the host asked Owens for her position on abortion. She explained that she did not yet have a position on abortion, but that she was thinking about the issue:

I make it very clear to everyone that I'm still learning. I'm still developing. I don't want to be one of these people that's just… I know absolutely everything, because I think that that's the problem in the world right now.

Critics would latch on to statements like this to argue that Owens was not a “real” conservative. The statement, however, demonstrates the humility and sincerity that would lead Owens to success. Like Dave Rubin, she was willing to learn from other people, and she did not want to commit to ideas until she was confident in her conclusions.

While the Klavan interview had a modest viewership, the Rubin interview would eventually be viewed by millions on YouTube. It arguably launched Owens to a higher level of fame. Owens was not riding anyone else’s success, though. She would continue to create viral content over the next few months.

On September 30, 2017, Owens posted a video titled “The NFL is Anti American?” In it, she took aim at the Colin Kaepernick protests, which had spread to involve other players.

She recalled that in 2016, the hashtag #oscarssowhite began to trend on social media, and now even NFL players were getting political about race issues. As a former high school cheerleader, she explained, she knows firsthand that football players are not the brightest.

She mocked the kneeling NFL players, who complained about the oppression of blacks while getting rich playing football. She explicitly argued that Colin Kaepernick needed a new income stream when his skills were not enough, so he became a social activist. She also criticized the fictionalization of African roots, noting that in Africa blacks were sold into slavery by other blacks.

She concluded that NFL team owners were addressing these protests in too weak a manner and that they should fire the players. She also predicted a Trump reelection win in 2020.

Increasingly, Owens would directly confront the liberals who were damaging America.

CHAPTER 20

Liberal Problems

Two major stories hit the news in the first two weeks of October 2017. On October 1, a lone gunman in Las Vegas shot into a crowd at a music festival, from his room in the Mandalay Bay Hotel. Over 58 people died, and over 400 were injured. Despite the tragic outcome, the shooter’s motive was never determined.

On October 10, journalist Ronan Farrow published a story in The New Yorker that quoted numerous women who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein, a prominent Hollywood producer.

Candace Owens posted reactions to both events. First, on October 13, 2017, she released a video titled “Harvey Weinstein, Eminem, and why the left can't stop losing.” In the video, she argued that Hollywood had been covering up for a serial rapist while blaming Trump for being a misogynist. Additionally, they lied about Trump being a racist (Eminem’s new song called Trump and Steve Bannon racists).

Meanwhile, the left used the recent Las Vegas tragedy to attack the second amendment’s right to bear arms. In response to attacks on the NRA, Owens noted that no NRA member has ever conducted a mass shooting.

On October 26, Owens was a guest on Chicago’s Morning Answer, a radio show, where one host characterized her videos as “reality checks.” In the interview, Owens made it clear that she was active off the camera, too. She noted that she was involved with the non-profit organization, 21st Century Dads Foundation, run by David Hirsch. She also revealed that she had visited Berkeley’s campus twice in October to speak to students.

On October 29, 2017, Owens posted a video titled “Halloween Is Cancelled Because Liberalism.” In the video, Owens reported that a Massachusetts school recently canceled its annual Halloween parade because the event was “not inclusive enough.” Owens asked how Halloween was not inclusive, adding, “Why do liberals hate fun so much?”

In her liberal days, Owens had thought Chelsea Handler was a funny comedian. Recently, though, Handler had become markedly less funny and more political. On November 5, 2017, Owens posted a video titled “Chelsea Handler Blames Mass Shooting Victims For Their Own Deaths?” After another shooting, this time in San Antonio, comedian Chelsea Handler blamed Republicans. Owens noted in her video that Texas is a strongly Republican state, so Handler was essentially blaming the victims for the shooting.

Although Owens had become a bona fide YouTube star, her success with videos was about to present a new opportunity that would make her offline life far busier.

CHAPTER 21

Turning Point

Owens soon met the young founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk. At an early age, Kirk had become a committed conservative, in part due to the influence of conservative thinkers like Milton Friedman. In 2012, at age 18, and despite having no political connections, Kirk established an organization called Turning Point USA. He focused his efforts on educating college students about conservative principles, mostly through speaking engagements on college campuses.

In summer 2016, in the final months of the U.S. presidential election campaign, Charlie Kirk met Donald Trump, Jr., the son of the soon-to-be-elected Republican candidate. Kirk got Don, Jr. to speak on college campuses in battleground states, giving the Republican campaign an important boost. After the election, the two remained friends, providing Kirk with a solid connection to the Trump White House.

Despite his success, though, Charlie Kirk was always looking for new talent. In November 2017, he traveled to Florida to attend Restoration Weekend, an event organized by David Horowitz. Raised by left-wing parents, Horowitz was a radical liberal for most of his life, but he became conservative over time. In the 1980s, he began speaking openly about his conservative beliefs, and he eventually became an activist.

Candace Owens attended the event as a speaker. Other attendees reportedly included James O’Keefe (of Project Veritas), Joy Villa, Gavin McInnes, Ann Coulter, Sebastian Gorka, Steve Bannon, and Milo Yiannopoulos. Several legislators attended, as well, including Congressman Devin Nunes. Only four months after posting her first YouTube video, Owens was mingling with some of the most prominent conservative activists of the time.

Kirk was so impressed upon first meeting Candace Owens at the conference that he hired her on the spot. Owens eagerly accepted the offer, recognizing that a lone YouTuber can easily be silenced, while a member of an established organization like Turning Point is harder to combat. Her official title with Turning Point USA was Director of Urban Engagement.

Owens began visiting college campuses with Kirk to talk to students about conservative principles. While speaking to students might sound easy and straightforward, Kirk and his organization were finding that campuses could be extremely hostile to conservatives. In 2017, numerous conservatives, including Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, and Jordan Peterson, had been banned from college campuses or had seen their events canceled due to protests. Kirk believed, however, that his organization needed to expose college students to conservative ideas that they would not otherwise encounter.

Ultimately, Owens would visit over 60 campuses, finding that universities were far more leftist than when she was in school only a few years earlier. Sometimes, she would ask students whether America is more racist than it was 60 years ago, and most of the students would answer “yes.” This sort of naivete, she once said, made her feel like she was teaching Kindergarten.

She also used social media, and especially Twitter, to share her thoughts. Soon, she appeared regularly on Fox News. For most conservatives, Owens was a breath of fresh air.

As she became more prominent in conservative politics, Owens began discussing and defending the Republican president, Donald Trump. Her next series of YouTube videos would focus on supporting the president.

CHAPTER 22

Crazy Leftists

As she has noted on multiple occasions, Candace Owens did not vote for Donald Trump (or Hillary Clinton) in the 2016 presidential election. At that point, she had rejected liberalism but did not necessarily consider herself a Republican. She did feel that the media treated Trump unfairly, though, and she enjoyed watching the media meltdown after he won. A year after the election, she was ready to attack Trump’s critics and support his policies.

On November 27, 2017, Owens began a new video series called “The Declaration” by posting a video titled “Kaepernick, Jay Z and Al Sharpton Are Frauds.” She called Kaepernick a coward with a ridiculous Twitter feed. In response to the various liberal activists talking about black deaths, she noted that Bill Clinton locked up more blacks than any other U.S. president. She also provided statistics about black deaths and crime, arguing that blacks need to solve their community’s poverty issues if they want to reduce crime.

She then noted that her intelligent approach to these issues had led critics to call her an Uncle Tom. For the first time, she ended her video with the Turning Point USA logo.

On December 8, 2017, Owens released a video titled “The Left Uses ‘Racism’ To Control Black Voters.” She discussed an issue that would become a mainstay of her political speeches – the fact that Democrats only get serious about black issues every four years, right before a presidential election, because they need black votes. She noted that we are not living in the civil rights era and that Democrat-controlled cities are disastrous for black Americans.

On December 14, 2017, Owens posted a video titled “Trump Derangement Syndrome: An American Epidemic.” During the George W. Bush administration, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer used the term “Bush derangement syndrome” to describe people who seemed to come unhinged due to their animosity toward the president and his policies. Even before Donald Trump was elected president, conservatives began using the term “Trump derangement syndrome” to reference the craziness of liberal commentators who hated him.

In her video, Owens stated the basic truths that (1) the Russian collusion theory was an illusion and (2) Donald Trump won the presidential election. Those suffering from Trump derangement syndrome might not like those facts, but they were true nonetheless.

On January 2, 2018, Owens posted a video titled “Tax Cuts For Dummies.” On December 22, 2017, President Trump had signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law. It had passed in the U.S. House and Senate without a single Democrat vote, making it an extremely partisan act. The law provided for tax cuts, which Republicans believed would help the middle class; Democrats complained that the tax cuts would help the wealthy. In her video, Owens explained that 91% of the middle class received tax cuts.

As the year 2018 began, Owens felt justifiably proud of the success she had achieved in the preceding five months. Her best year was still to come, though. The events of 2018 would change everything for Candace Owens.

CHAPTER 23

Black and White

In the early months of 2018, Owens focused her thinking on racial politics in America. As she spoke on college campuses, she realized that Democrats often manipulated black people, while they made white people feel guilty.

On January 5, 2018, Owens posted a video titled “The Left Thinks Black People Are Stupid.” The video included a clip of Hillary Clinton trying to ingratiate herself to black voters by explaining that she keeps hot sauce in her purse (playing on the racial stereotype that black Americans love hot sauce). Owens also noted that Hillary pretends to be a Jay-Z fan and that, instead of addressing actual issues that matter to black Americans, Hillary held a Jay-Z and Beyoncé concert to rally support.

Owens acknowledged that she was fooled by Obama when he ran for president the first time but made it clear that she was no longer interested in racial pandering in politics.

On January 23, 2018, Owens posted a video titled “Women Marching In America Again? What a JOKE.” Owens asked the question that many observers were wondering about: “What are these pussy hat women marching for?” She then noted that foreign Muslim women lack freedom, but American women do not.

She followed that video with a February 13, 2018 segment called “White Guilt: a trend that needs to die.” Here, she criticized the phenomenon of white guilt and virtue signaling.

On February 22, 2018, Owens posted a video titled “Black Panther: A Pro-Trump Movie.” When the Marvel film Black Panther was released on February 16, 2018, critics gushed about how empowering it was for black Americans. In the film, the lead superhero, the Black Panther, leads the hidden African nation of Wakanda, which features advanced technologies and a peaceful culture.

Owens stated that she loved the movie, but not for the same reason as liberals. She noted that Wakanda had strong national borders and refused to let refugees bring their problems to Wakanda.

These comments were timely because President Trump’s efforts to build a wall to reduce illegal immigration across America’s southern border continued to be controversial throughout his first term as president.

In March 2018, Owens spoke at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which put her in front of the nation’s most prominent conservatives. Among other things, Owens noted that the fake news spread by CNN was helping Republicans win.

Social media was also helping Republicans win, but the social media companies frequently took actions that seemed biased against conservatives. A month after CPAC, Owens was penalized by Twitter for the first time.

CHAPTER 24

Social Media

In April 2018, Twitter published a “moment” labeling Candace Owens as “far right.” Owens quickly complained about the issue, with an April 21, 2018 tweet:

Far right? Allow me to clarify: I believe the black community can do it without hand-outs. I believe the Democrats have strapped us to our past to prevent us from our futures. And I won’t stop fighting until all black Americans see that.

I’m not far right—I’m free.

Twitter’s founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, is politically liberal and has frequently donated to Democratic candidates and liberal causes. Unlike some Silicon Valley tech magnates, though, Dorsey has demonstrated a willingness to meet with Donald Trump and other Republicans to make Twitter less biased.

On April 27, 2018, Dorsey responded to Candace Owens with a statement that seemed truly contrite:

Hi Candace. I want to apologize for our labeling you “far right.” Team completed a full review of how this was published and why we corrected far too late (12 hrs after). There was a clear break in our curation process and understanding, and we’re fixing. Thanks for calling out.

When a Huffington Post reporter questioned Dorsey about the incident, he defended his apology to Owens, noting that it was inappropriate for Twitter to categorize people. He also emphasized that Twitter should provide multiple perspectives for a story.

In a statement to Breitbart News, Owens expressed her gratitude for Dorsey’s apology. Only four months later, though, Twitter would suspend Owens’ account in a telling incident relating to a New York Times reporter named Sarah Jeong.

In August 2018, the New York Times hired Jeong as a technology writer and member of its editorial board. Shortly afterward, Twitter users began discussing Jeong’s bizarre tweets from the year 2014, which included overtly racist comments like “Dumbass f****** white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants” and “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.”

The New York Times refused to take action against Jeong, the offensive tweets remained, and Twitter did not suspend Jeong’s account.

To demonstrate how offensive the tweets were, Owens re-posted them, replacing “white” with “Jewish.” Even though the Owens tweets stated that she was parodying Jeong’s comments, Twitter suspended Owens’ account.

After public outcry, Twitter restored Owens’ account. She then tweeted: “In every way imaginable – Twitter has just proved my point. Racism in this country has been sanctioned against white people.”

Despite her troubles with Twitter, Owens received a major surge in followers in May 2018, after she received an endorsement from her one and only celebrity idol.

CHAPTER 25

Kanye West

Kanye West has a mixed history with U.S. Presidents. He was famously outspoken in criticizing Republican President George W. Bush. In a television appearance with comedian Mike Myers designed to raise support for victims of Hurricane Katrina, West was supposed to read text off of a teleprompter. Instead, he blurted out: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” A visibly stunned Myers did not know how to react.

The statement became West’s first major public controversy. President Bush called the incident one of the most disgusting moments of his presidency. When asked about the issue years later, Candace Owens said that people are allowed to evolve and change their opinions and that West had done so. Kanye West confirmed this fact in 2018 when he noted that seeing the video of George W. Bush pushing his father, also a former president, in a wheelchair made him see Bush as a human and desire to apologize to him.

Although West clearly did not have a good relationship with George W. Bush, it seemed that he might have better luck with a black Democrat. Before running for office, Barack Obama visited West, calling him his favorite musician. West even held a fundraiser for Obama. Less than a year into his presidency, though, Obama abandoned West.

On September 13, 2009, at the MTV Video Music Awards, after Taylor Swift received the award for Best Female Video, Kanye jumped on stage and said: “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you and I’mma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!”

When asked about the incident, Obama famously called Kanye West a “jackass.” Three years later, Obama clarified that “He is a jackass. But he’s talented.” However, according to West, Obama never apologized to him for the insult.

West remained interested in politics, though, and he was intrigued when Donald Trump was elected president. With Trump, West would finally find a president he could support and who would support him in return. Candace Owens would become an important part of the relationship.

Candace Owens loved Kanye West long before she became a conservative. As a young businesswoman, she felt a kinship with the star. She found his message empowering.

In November 2016, shortly after Candace Owens’ red pill moment and only days after Donald Trump’s election as president, Kanye West made statements that supported Trump. On November 18, he announced that he had not voted but would have voted for Trump. Then, during a November 20 concert, he seemed to celebrate the Trump victory:

It’s a new world, Hillary Clinton, it’s a new world. Feelings matter. Because guess what? Everybody in middle America felt a way and they showed you how they felt.

The media, including music figures, reacted to Kanye’s rants by calling him crazy. He canceled several concerts and spent time in a hospital, due to an opioid addiction he had developed after cosmetic surgery.

Then, on December 13, 2016, West traveled to Trump Tower in New York City to meet with president-elect Trump for the first time. After the meeting, West explained that:

I wanted to meet with Trump today to discuss multicultural issues. These issues included bullying, supporting teachers, modernizing curriculums, and violence in Chicago.

The visit drew criticism from others, including his friend, singer John Legend, who called the meeting a “publicity stunt.” For a while, West retreated from politics. He stopped talking about Trump, and he even stopped using Twitter. It seems, though, that he was still paying attention to Trump and his supporters, including Candace Owens.

In April 2018, as part of her work with Turning Point USA, Owens spoke to students at UCLA. At the event, Candance responded to a group of protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement, stating, in part, that:

There is an ideological civil war happening. Black people that are focused on their past and shouting about slavery. And black people focused on their futures. What you’re seeing is victim mentality versus victor mentality.

After the event, Owens posted a video clip of the Black Lives Matter incident on Twitter, so her 350,000 followers could see what happened. Kanye West also watched the clip.

On April 21, 2018, West tweeted: “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.”

That seven-word tweet changed everything for Candace Owens.

CHAPTER 26

Meeting Kanye

Candace Owens received a phone call from a friend, telling her that she needed to look at Kanye’s Twitter feed. When she saw the tweet, she was overjoyed. She was not the only one reacting emotionally, though. The internet, predictably, went nuts about the tweet. Republicans cheered Kanye’s support for the conservative Owens while some Democrats accused Kanye of losing his mind.

Kanye posted a text exchange that he had with friend and fellow musician John Legend shortly after his Candace Owens tweet. Legend wrote, in part: “So many people who love you feel so betrayed right now because they know the harm that Trump’s policies cause, especially to people of color. Don’t let this be part of your legacy.”

Kanye responded: “I love you John and I appreciate your thoughts. You bringing up my legacy is a tactic based on fear used to manipulate my free thought.” Kanye was adamant that he had a right to think for himself, and he recognized in Candace Owens another proud individual who believed in intellectual freedom.

For her part, Candace Owens was not impressed by John Legend’s criticisms. Legend and his wife, Chrissy Teigen, were very political and had previously attacked Owens on Twitter.

Owens was, however, blown away by Kanye West’s endorsement of her thinking. She responded to Kanye’s tweet with a message of her own:

I’m freaking out. @kanyewest ….please take a meeting with me. I tell every single person that everything that I have been inspired to do, was written in your music.

I am my own biggest fan, because you made it okay. I need you to help wake up the black community.

Kanye did, in fact, want to meet Owens in person to discuss her ideas further. On April 29, 2018, Owens visited Kanye at his office, meeting him for the first time. Charlie Kirk also attended the meeting. Then, the next day, Kanye tweeted a photo of a whiteboard drawing with the text “Candace Owens wrote this at the Office yesterday.”

The whiteboard featured the phrase “How to create a mind.” Below it, Owens had written “family,” “school education,” “culture/media,” and “politics.” Presumably, she had discussed with Kanye his role in developing the minds of black Americans.

On May 2, 2018, Kanye West and Candace Owens traveled to the offices of TMZ in Los Angeles, where they spoke with the tabloid news company’s founder and editor, Harvey Levin.

During the visit to TMZ, West repeatedly referenced Owens – at one point telling his interviewers that they should talk to her to get all the facts – while making several controversial statements. His most inflammatory statement addressed slavery:

When you hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years? That sounds like a choice. You were there for 400 years, and it is all of y'all?

West’s subsequent comments made it clear that he intended to make a statement about how modern blacks (and everyone else) can choose whether to be intellectual slaves. This sentiment was consistent with West’s prior statements, as well as with Candace Owens’ insistence that blacks must leave the Democrat plantation.

Not surprisingly, though, many observers were offended by the idea that historical slavery was a choice. Later, West tweeted a clarification:

the reason why I brought up the 400 years point is because we can't be mentally imprisoned for another 400 years. We need free thought now. Even the statement was an example of free thought It was just an idea

As part of his push for free thought, West told TMZ that people need to be willing to engage with Republicans like Donald Trump, regardless of whether they agree on policy. “We have to talk, because Trump is a human being also, and he is in a very powerful position.”

West’s comments proved divisive, even for the TMZ staff. One staff member rebuked him, and West responded calmly, expressing his love for the staff member. The comments also provided support for critics who said that West was suffering a mental breakdown of some kind. During the TMZ visit, West acknowledged that he had become addicted to opioids in 2016.

Just as Owens had told Dave Rubin eight months earlier, Kanye West is easily misunderstood and not always a good communicator of his ideas. While his words to TMZ were probably unhelpful, his actions in support of Owens were clear and productive. He began introducing her to other cultural influencers. She spoke with rapper T.I. and The Breakfast Club radio host Charlamagne Tha God, among others.

While Owens received a great deal of support from conservatives online, one fellow millennial conservative criticized her relationship with Kanye West. Tomi Lahren said she refused to become “Kanye-obsessed” and noted that West’s rant on TMZ sounded crazy.

Lahren, an attractive blond, established her reputation on Glenn Beck's Blaze TV network. Although she eventually had a falling out with Beck, many of her segments on the Blaze went viral online. In addition to being a fresh voice among conservatives, Lahren staked out a unique political position, advocating fiercely for some conservative positions, while siding with liberals on abortion.

In her July 2019 book Never Play Dead, Tomi Lahren makes repeated allusions to Owens while never referencing her by name. Lahren describes being invited by Charlie Kirk to speak alongside someone he had plucked out of obscurity (i.e., Candace Owens), and says that she refused to do so. Among other things, Lahren says that people should not become conservatives simply because Kanye West wore a MAGA hat, and she criticizes conservatives who claim that liberals have oppressed them. In a candid passage, Lahren admits that she was jealous of Owens, but then says she does not have to bring Owens down because Owens will take herself down.

That prediction would turn out to be phenomenally incorrect. There was nothing Lahren or anyone else could do to rain on Owens’ parade. For the long-time Kanye West fan, getting to know the superstar was a dream come true. It was also hugely important to the cause of black conservatives.

As if that were not exciting enough, though, less than a month later, Owens had an opportunity to meet President Trump.

CHAPTER 27

Meeting Trump

Even critics of Donald Trump admit that he is a master of social media. Because of his heavy Twitter use, the president was likely aware of Candace Owens long before Kanye West tweeted about her.

Trump tweeted about Owens for the first time on May 9, 2018:

Candace Owens of Turning Point USA is having a big impact on politics in our Country. She represents an ever expanding group of very smart "thinkers," and it is wonderful to watch and hear the dialogue going on...so good for our Country!

On May 10, 2018, Owens posted a YouTube video titled “What Candace Owens Thinks (How to create a mind).” The video seemed to reiterate the ideas she had discussed with Kanye West.

In the video, Owens asked, “Where do your ideas come from?” She then gave three answers:

1. Family,

2. Culture, and

3. Education/indoctrination.

She said, “I woke up one day and decided to be Candace Owens.” Consistent with Kanye West’s recent tweets and statements, Owens encouraged people to think for themselves and not to passively allow their minds to be created by others.

President Trump hoped to sway freethinking black Americans like Candace Owens to support him in his next election. Democratic candidates were so dependent on black votes that even a small change in the percentage of blacks voting Democrat versus Republic (a change of 10% according to Owens) could be decisive in a presidential election.

In addition to praising Owens, Trump used his presidential power in ways that he believed would serve black Americans. For example, on May 24, 2018, Trump granted a posthumous pardon to boxing great Jack Johnson, America’s first black heavyweight champion. In June 1913, a white jury convicted Johnson of violating Jim Crow laws. Sylvester Stallone had asked Trump to grant the pardon.

The next day, on May 25, Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk visited the Oval Office for a twenty-minute meeting with the Commander-in-Chief. The conversation focused on issues facing black Americans, and the president discussed Kanye West with Owens. Owens was impressed by Trump’s sense of humor, observing that he is aware of the jokes people make about him and is willing to joke about himself. Trump was obviously aware that Owens and her new friend could be a valuable link to the black community.

Over the next few months, Candace Owens and Kanye West apparently interacted frequently. For example, gossip columnists reported that Owens attended an early June party in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with West. He introduced her to various guests and said that she might be our nation’s first female president.

During this period, Kanye also continued to talk about his admiration for Trump. For example, in September 2018, he appeared on Saturday Night Live and went on stage afterward in a Make America Great Again hat, to talk about his support for Trump. Among other things, he made an argument that seemed to include some Candace Owens talking points:

The blacks want always Democrats… It’s like the plan they did, to take the fathers out the home and put them on welfare… Does anybody know about that? That’s a Democratic plan.

The mainstream media again claimed that Kanye had lost his mind. On October 9, CNN aired a segment in which Kanye was called a “token negro” and a “dumb negro.” Bakari Sellers, a black Congressman from South Carolina (and a Democrat), tweeted that “Kanye is what happens when negroes don’t read.” Owens offered Sellers $100,000 to debate her, but of course, he ignored the offer.

Some of the criticism of Kanye turned into criticism of Candace Owens, too. As she explained: “In about 10 seconds [after Kanye’s tweet] I became the KKK member, anti-LGBT, you name it. Just because I think differently, and I refuse to accept this narrative that I’m a victim. I’m not a victim.”

Owens was more than willing to defend herself and Kanye West from attacks, though. When actor Chris Evans, famous for his role as Captain America in several Marvel movies, insulted West’s intelligence on Twitter, Owens responded, noting that “Chris Evans sounds like a plantation owner” and calling him “Captain out of touch with America.”

On October 11, Kanye West met with President Trump in the Oval Office. West’s comments to the president included a possible reference to his conversations with Candace Owens:

I've had conversations that basically said that welfare is the reason why a lot of black people end up being Democrat. They say – you know, first of all, it’s a limited amount of jobs. So the fathers lose the jobs, and they say, “We’ll give you more money for having more kids in your home.” And then, we got rid of the mental health institutes in the ’80s and the ’90s, and the prison rates just shot up.

Owens had frequently voiced the idea that welfare had caused black Americans to be Democrats. It seems likely, therefore, that Kanye was paraphrasing Owens when he spoke to the president. Regardless of the source of his ideas, the singer obviously enjoyed his time with Trump. Kanye repeatedly expressed his admiration for President Trump, and he famously told the president that wearing his MAGA hat made him “feel like Superman.”

Immediately after the White House meeting, Kanye West met with Candace Owens again. Owens later explained to Breitbart that “The man is a creative force of nature. And just like that, the next thing I knew, I was on a plane flying from Philadelphia to Africa.” Owens visited Uganda with Kanye West and his wife, Kim. While there, Kanye West met with the country’s president, Yoweri Museveni, and delivered shoes to orphans.

Reflecting on Kanye West’s actions after the fact, Douglas Murray wrote in The Madness of Crowds that West was able to express his support for Candace Owens and Trump because (1) he had “F-you cash” (i.e., he had so much money that it did not matter if expressing his opinions cost him some popularity) and (2) he does not care whether people think he is “slightly unhinged.”

Candace Owens later observed that Kanye West’s tweet about her was hugely important in opening options for black people because it broke the liberal stranglehold on culture. If one of the most influential black entertainers could unabashedly state his support for the Republican president, then ordinary black Americans could also support Republicans and their ideas.

The mainstream media continued to imply that Kanye was crazy or troubled, but not everyone agreed with that assessment.

Bret Easton Ellis, the author of literary bestsellers including American Psycho, discussed Kanye’s mental state during this period in his book, White. Ellis admitted that he was concerned that Kanye’s support for Candace Owens and Donald Trump could signal some type of personal crisis. In mid-2018, however, he met with Kanye, and was relieved to find that the media claim that Kanye was having a mental breakdown was utterly false:

In the five years I'd casually known him, I’d never seen him so attentive and focused and happy. This was Kanye at his most lucid, and this afternoon confirmed for me that he was, in fact, sane: his own man, no apologies, and not some drugged-out freak gibbering on Twitter. People simply needed to acknowledge — not approve or to embrace—that here was someone who saw the world in his own way, and not according to how other people thought he should see it. What Kanye was championing in his Trump tweets was an idea of peace and unity, imagining a place where different sides could work together despite vicious ideological differences—that’s it.

After it became clear that Kanye West sincerely supported Candace Owens and Donald Trump, the next obvious story for the mainstream media was some type of breakup between Kanye and the Republicans. That narrative would play out only weeks after his White House meeting. In the meantime, though, several other compelling issues had arisen for Candace Owens.

CHAPTER 28

Conservatives

By becoming a well-known conservative, Owens made herself a target for liberal activists. Left-wing activists frequently protested her speaking events, and sometimes their confrontations became personal. In 2018, activists became particularly confrontational, spurred on by the rhetoric of leftwing politicians like Maxine Waters, the California Representative, who told her supporters:

And if you see anybody from [Donald Trump’s] Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they're not welcome any more, anywhere.

In a short period during 2018, liberal activists chased several prominent Republicans out of restaurants, including White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Kirstjen Nielsen, White House Senior Policy Advisor Stephen Miller, and Republican Senator Ted Cruz.

In August 2018, Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk joined the list of harassment targets during a trip to Philadelphia. The pair stopped by a coffee shop for breakfast at about 8:00 AM. As they ate, they were approached by a crowd of Antifa protesters who yelled and made noise to disrupt their meal.

Owens and Kirk left the coffee shop, but Antifa members continued to harass them outdoors. As protesters shouted “F*** white supremacy,” one woman poured a drink onto Kirk, and another protester threw an egg at him. The police arrived and were able to disburse the mob, and Kirk decided not to press charges.

Owens later posted a video of the incident online. The video provides very negative optics for Antifa. It shows a mob of white people harassing a black woman on the street while screaming about white supremacy. If Antifa members were not so emphatic in describing themselves as anti-fascist, it would be difficult for anyone watching the video to avoid seeing them as a racist, fascist mob. Owens tweeted:

To be clear: ANTIFA, an all-white fascist organization, just grew violent and attacked an all-black and Hispanic police force.

Because I, a BLACK woman, was eating breakfast.

Is this the civil rights era all over again?

In a subsequent interview, Owens revealed that Antifa had used a Huffington Post article to make the case that Kirk and Owens were racists, thereby inspiring their members to attack the pair at breakfast. “We say it all the time, the leftist media is inciting violence and hate by calling everybody a racist and a white supremacist.”

The Huffington Post article in question was probably the April 25, 2018 article entitled “Turning Point USA Keeps Accidentally Hiring Racists.”

MSNBC invited Owens to discuss the harassment incident with Michael Eric Dyson, a black liberal author and Georgetown University sociology professor. Dyson dismissed Owens’ views, saying, “Here is a woman incapable of arguing, therefore she articulates and overspeaks people. Bless your heart, little girl.” Had Dyson not himself been black, his comment would surely have struck many people as a throwback to the racist rhetoric of the Jim Crow era. Later, on Twitter, he apologized for calling Owens “little girl.”

Despite the incidents of harassment, though, most of Owens’ experiences with Charlie Kirk and Turning Point were positive. She visited numerous campuses where audiences greeted her message enthusiastically. Earlier in the year, she had traveled to Israel with Kirk to attend the opening of the American embassy in Jerusalem on May 14. Various Republicans appeared at the event, but no Democrats attended.

CHAPTER 29

Kavanaugh

After the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, many women on Twitter started using the hashtag #metoo to share their own experiences of sexual assault. Soon the hashtag was being used more broadly to complain about “toxic masculinity” and male behavior.

On June 11, 2018, Owens tweeted, in part, that “The entire premise of #metoo is that women are stupid, weak & inconsequential.” As she had stated in her earlier YouTube videos, Owens believed that women were capable of taking responsibility for their dating relationships.

After a strongly negative response to her tweet, Owens discussed her thoughts at length on a Periscope video, explaining that the #metoo movement had turned into a witch hunt. She noted that she had talked to men who no longer wanted to hire women because they considered interacting with women to be too dangerous. A few months later, data would begin to show that men were, in fact, refusing to associate with women in the workplace out of fear that accusations of sexual impropriety could ruin their careers.

Owens has repeatedly stated that she was the first person to condemn the #metoo movement. She realized early on that, even if well-intentioned, the movement was bound to lead to unjust outcomes eventually. As the year 2018 progressed, #metoo proponents increasingly said that all women accusers should be believed (#believeallwomen), despite cases in which men had been falsely convicted of rape. In early 2018, a Teen Vogue writer tweeted: “Sorry. If some innocent men’s reputations have to take a hit in the process of undoing the patriarchy, that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay.”

The #metoo movement and its ideas came to a head in fall 2018 with the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.

After Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his plan to retire, Trump nominated federal judge Brett Kavanaugh to fill the vacancy. Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer and others warned that Kavanaugh would behave like a conservative on the bench, and some suggested that his confirmation would lead the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and ban abortion. The confirmation process came shortly before the midterm elections of November 2018, so some Democrats sought to score political points by opposing Kavanaugh.

The confirmation hearing, which occurred in the first week of September, was unusually contentious, with outbursts from Democratic Senators and protesters. The real controversy began a week later, on September 14, when it was reported that a Palo Alto University professor of psychology named Christine Blasey Ford claimed that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when he was a teenager. Kavanaugh denied the allegations, but the Senate permitted Ford to testify on September 27. Kavanaugh referred to the allegations as a “last-minute character assassination.” In fact, evidence emerged that Democrats had known about the charges in advance but had delayed disclosing them until after the initial confirmation hearing in order to inflict maximum political damage.

Two other women also stepped forward to accuse Kavanaugh of inappropriate sexual conduct, but their claims were quickly dismissed by most observers due to their implausibility and lack of evidence.

After Ford's testimony, Democrats insisted on an FBI investigation, and the FBI was given one week to examine Ford's claims. The agency reported that it found no evidence to corroborate the clams. The Senate then confirmed Kavanaugh's nomination. He was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice on October 6, 2018.

During the process, the public divided along party lines on the issue of whether to believe Ford’s claims. In an October 2, 2018 interview, Owens warned of toxic feminism. Asked specifically about Christine Blasey Ford’s claims, she said:

She’s lying. She’s completely and utterly lying. I don’t believe her for one second… She did not conveniently fall out of amnesia 38 years later and remember her almost-rape [which] she spoke to no one about, not even her best friend.

Owens’ reasoning was sound, but she was learning that a certain segment of America’s left could not be persuaded by rational arguments. In fall 2018, Turning Point USA conducted its “Campus Clash” tour, with visits to several university campuses. During the first visit, at the University of Georgia, which featured Donald Trump, Jr., one liberal protester yelled at Owens: “You’re not black!”

Owens planned to speak at DePaul University with Kirk on October 16, 2018. A week before the scheduled date, the university canceled the event, reportedly due to “violent language.” Owens took to Twitter to discuss the cancellation, noting that “For the first time ever, my right to speak as a black conservative is DENIED… BLACK PEOPLE DO NOT HAVE TO BE DEMOCRATS is not ‘violent language.’”

Despite protests and cancellations, Candace Owens was succeeding at educating America’s college students. She also had plans to do something big for black conservatives.

CHAPTER 30

Black Leadership

In early 2018, Owens began planning the launch of a black leadership summit. At first, she thought it would be a small gathering, but after Kanye West endorsed her, she knew she could create a much larger event. She held a small, three-day retreat in Phoenix in June, but the large event was scheduled for October.

With the help of Turning Point USA, Owens gathered more than 400 black students in Washington, D.C., for the Young Black Leadership Summit. The event kicked off on October 25, with a speech by Donald Trump, Jr.

Then, on October 26, the summit moved to the White House, where President Donald Trump addressed the group. He discussed his administration’s achievements for black Americans, and it was clear that he enjoyed the meeting. Among other things, Trump said:

This is a beautiful meeting, I have to be honest with you. I go to a lot of ’em. Some of them, I’m a little bored. I do my thing, I say my words, I say, “Bye everybody” and I go and I say, “It’s all right.” But to me this is a very exciting meeting.

The summit continued on October 27, with various prominent black Americans speaking, including Ben Carson, Larry Elder, and Stacey Dash.

On October 27, 2018, as part of the Young Black Leadership Summit, Candace Owens gave a “Black State of the Union address,” in which she discussed the problems facing black America. During the speech, she announced the creation of “a movement called BLEXIT, the black exit from the Democrat Party…”

To showcase the new movement, Owens launched Blexit.com, a website that encouraged black Americans to leave the Democratic party (Blexit is short for “black exit”), by showing videos of people who had already left the party. The website was designed to take one more step toward weakening the left’s hold on culture. If black Americans could see other black Americans explaining why they no longer support the Democratic party, then they would feel freer to reconsider their own political ideas.

In the following months, Owens would hold numerous rallies in major U.S. cities, gathering black conservatives together. Fans of Owens naturally wondered what role Kanye West might have in the Blexit movement.

CHAPTER 31

Blexit

For the new Blexit organization, Owens enlisted the help of Brandon Tatum, an associate from Turning Point USA, and David Harris, Jr., among others.

On October 29, Owens discussed the Blexit shirts that she had introduced at the Young Black Leadership Summit being held by Turning Point USA. The New York Post and others reported that she stated:

Blexit is a renaissance and I am blessed to say that this logo, these colors, were created by my dear friend and fellow superhero Kanye West.

Owens would later deny that she stated that Kanye West had created the logo. Before she could issue a denial, though, the quote had been repeated throughout the media, and it had reached West himself. On October 30, 2018, he tweeted that:

I introduced Candace to the person who made the logo and they didn’t want their name on it so she used mine. I never wanted any association with Blexit. I have nothing to do with it.

He then tweeted:

My eyes are now wide open and now realize I’ve been used to spread messages I don’t believe in. I am distancing myself from politics and completely focusing on being creative !!!

In other words, Kanye West apparently felt that he had been used by Owens for marketing purposes, and the incident had soured him on conservative politics generally. This was the sort of reversal that many liberal fans of West had hoped to see.

In response to the Kanye West tweet and widespread reporting of the incident, Owens posted a lengthy article at candaceowens.com, providing her perspective on the incident and stating in part:

I never once said that Kanye designed the t-shirts for BLEXIT. This is a lie that seems to have made its way around the world; a lie I would like to again correct for the record. Kanye was completely right to feel used in that regard and as I have done personally, I would like to publicly apologize to him for any undue stress or pain the effort to correct that rumor has caused him, his business relationships, or his family. He simply never designed them…

I would also like to publicly apologize to President Trump, as I know that Kanye’s tweets were rapidly misinterpreted as a shot to this administration.

His tweets were aimed at me and me only, rightfully, for my personal failings.

Kanye might have realized that his foray into politics was creating mixed results. However, the many newspaper articles that celebrated his political reversal were misguided. Kanye was still very much a supporter of Donald Trump and the ideas espoused by Candace Owens.

On January 1, 2019, Kanye tweeted: “Blacks are 90% Democrats That sound like control to me.” Ten months later, he would publicly proclaim his personal devotion to Jesus Christ and release a new album entitled Jesus is King.

Although the Owens-West relationship seemed to have ended badly, the endorsement that Kanye gave Owens had exposed her to a much larger audience of black Americans. She now had a national reputation that she could use to effect real change in public policy.

It is unclear whether Owens continues to communicate with Kanye West. In late 2018, though, Owens became very involved in a project spearheaded by West’s wife, Kim Kardashian.

CHAPTER 32

Criminal Law

Kim Kardashian is best known as a star of the reality TV show, Keeping Up with the Kardashians. She is largely viewed as being famous for being famous, and she is frequently the topic of pop-culture news coverage. It was, of course, big news when she married Kanye West in 2014. Prior to 2018, though, virtually no one saw her as a social reformer or activist.

She undeniably participated very actively on social media, though. One day, while perusing Twitter, Kardashian watched a video clip about a woman named Alice Marie Johnson. Johnson was convicted of a nonviolent first-time drug offense in 1996. Despite the minor nature of the crime, she was sentenced to life in prison. As Johnson often says, this is the same sentence that Charles Manson received.

Kardashian became interested in the story and wanted to find a way to help Johnson. It occurred to her that she personally knew Ivanka and Jared Trump, so she could contact them and ask about getting a presidential pardon for Johnson. She quickly reached out to the Trumps. Later, she would also credit her husband with helping her connect with President Trump.

In May 2018, Kim Kardashian met with Donald Trump in the White House to discuss the issue. Van Jones discussed his own participation in the discussion. He said that he tried to convince Trump that Johnson needed to be released from prison but did not seem to be making any headway. Then, with a few brief statements, Kim Kardashian cut to the heart of the issue and persuaded the president. He agreed on the spot to pardon Ms. Johnson. After 21 years in prison, Johnson was released. She had missed out on her children's upbringing but was now able to see them as adults and visit her grandchildren. Johnson recalls that the inmates in her prison cheered as she left.

Kim Kardashian saw this success as a first step in helping America's prison population. After the Johnson success, she wanted to continue to push for change. The next opportunity for major reform for Kardashian and other activists in this area was a bill called the First Step Act.

Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and advisor, had strong feelings about prison reform. His own father had been sentenced to federal prison at one point, and Jared had seen firsthand how harsh and arbitrary the prison system could be. He became a champion for the First Step Act, a bill sponsored by Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, which would reduce minimum sentences for certain crimes, and especially for drug crimes, thereby releasing many inmates from prison.

The proposed bill also struck a chord with Candace Owens. She had often said that Bill Clinton's 1994 crime bill was bad for black Americans, and now she had an opportunity to help undo the damage that bill had caused.

Owens worked to persuade others to support criminal law reform. In his book, Taken for Granted, Fox News personality and black conservative Gianno Caldwell recalls being convinced by Owens to support the bill. Friends told Caldwell that working with Owens would tarnish his reputation, presumably because she was a strong supporter of the president. He knew, though, that the proposed act would be hugely beneficial to the black community. He visited Capitol Hill, trying to persuade Ted Cruz and others to vote for the bill.

Owens also lobbied legislators personally, encouraging them to support the bill. On November 28, she visited several senators, along with David Harris, Jr., Brandon Tatum, and others. She commented that:

The First Step Act is a huge opportunity because there are so many liberal refugees who realize that the Democrats have been lying – that their policies have led to the decimation of our communities.

In December 2018, the First Step Act passed with bipartisan approval.

Activists like Van Jones noted that the First Step Act, despite its obvious importance to black America, was only a first step. Candace Owens evidently agreed because she continued to work on the issue of black incarceration.

On December 17, 2018, Owens posted a YouTube video titled “Fact or Narrative: Are Private Prisons Evil?” Senator Bernie Sanders, who had run for president in 2016, repeatedly argued in public that private, for-profit prisons should be shut down. Owens, drawing on her education in journalism, did some actual field reporting on the issue.

As a child, she had frequently visited government-run prisons to see family members. Now, as an adult, she visited a private prison for the first time, and she interviewed several inmates on camera. The inmates raved about the benefits of private prisons, noting that their prison gives them educational opportunities that will make it easier for them to function in society after being released.

Owens said that she grew up believing private prisons were evil, but after visiting a private prison, she had changed her mind. She was learning that law enforcement and black incarceration were complex issues. A very public incident in Chicago was about to emphasize that point.

CHAPTER 33

Jussie Smollett

Sometimes life provides us with perfect foils. If there is an opposite of Candace Owens, that person is Jussie Smollett.

In late January 2019, it was widely reported that an American actor named Jussie Smollett had been attacked by Trump supporters in Chicago. As details of the crime emerged, many conservatives became skeptical of Smollett’s claims. Smollett, an actor on the TV series Empire, claimed that he was walking to his home in the early hours of the morning in freezing cold weather in Chicago when two white men wearing MAGA hats made homophobic and racial slurs against him, poured bleach or some other chemical on him, and put a noose on his neck.

Many liberals immediately expressed support for Smollett and condemned Trump and his followers for the attack. Candace Owens, however, stated her opinion that Smollett was lying. On February 1, Owens tweeted:

Thoughts and prayers?

I’m more inclined to believe that Hillary Clinton is the President of the United States, than the story that #JussieSmollett was attacked by Trump supporters…

When Donald Trump, Jr. retweeted this comment, he was roundly criticized by the mainstream media. For example, The Mercury News published an article with the headline “Is Donald Trump, Jr. promoting a Jussie Smollett conspiracy theory?” In this case, though, there really had been a conspiracy.

Two weeks later, on February 13, the skepticism of Candace Owens and Donald Trump, Jr. was vindicated when police discovered evidence that Smollett had hired physical trainers and actors, who happened to be black, to wear ski masks and MAGA hats and pretend to attack him. The city of Chicago would later sue Smollett for the cost of examining his bogus claim.

Owens’ reaction to the Smollett case was one more example of how she was able to look beyond skin color and examine the merits of a claim. In the Smollett case, there were many red flags, which were hilariously identified by comedian Dave Chapelle in a Netflix special a few months later. Chapelle pointed out, for example, that it is impossible to believe that two white MAGA supporters recognized Smollett: “If you're a racist and homophobic you're not even gonna’ know who this n*** is. You can't watch Empire.”

Owens also seems to have had a visceral reaction to Smollett, because he personally embodied the opposite of her most cherished beliefs. In addition to espousing liberal political ideas, Smollett lived life as a privileged black man – someone who had succeeded professionally in the prestigious world of entertainment – but sought out victimhood. Despite his success, he preferred to be seen as the victim of racism and took steps to dishonestly portray himself as such.

As Owens stated in numerous public appearances, “I am a girl who came from nothing.” As a teenager, she experienced an actual racist attack, and yet she spent years of her life trying to avoid being a victim. Despite having every excuse in the book, Owens made something of herself using a victor mindset, rather than the narrow victim mindset of the world’s Smolletts.

Candace Owens’ intellect and skill in communication were becoming a thorn in the side of America’s liberals. Inevitably, they would soon resort to their oldest trick – the one they used daily against Donald Trump. They would call her a Nazi.

CHAPTER 34

Hitler

As the Trump presidency progressed, Scott Adams, who is most famous for being the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, established himself as a unique political commentator. He started a podcast and began sharing his political views publicly, which he acknowledged would likely impact his cartooning career in a negative way. Explaining his decision to speak out on politics, he noted that he has enough money that he can afford to risk his income.

Adams was one of the earliest observers to predict a Trump election victory in 2016, at a time when liberals agreed that Trump would lose in a landslide. Adams explained that Trump was the best persuader he had ever seen and that it was, therefore, obvious that he would win the election. While it would not be accurate to describe Adams as a conservative (he frequently describes himself as “left of Bernie Sanders”), he admires Donald Trump’s persuasive skills and speaks about them frequently.

In 2019, as Democrats pushed a series of conspiracy theories about President Trump, including the claim that he was a Russian agent, Adams increasingly focused his political commentary on media hoaxes. His February 8 episode focused on three hoaxes, including one about Candace Owens.

Liberals claimed that Candace Owens had praised Hitler in a speech. Before addressing the actual content of that speech, Adams said:

Without knowing exactly what she said, if you hear the story (and it's all over social media) that says that Candace Owens is an apologist for Hitler… Do you think there's any chance that she intentionally went in front of the public and, even if there was a slip of the tongue, do you think there's any chance that she said something positive about Adolf Hitler? And the answer is no. There's not the slightest chance that that actually happened.…

Despite this astute commentary by Scott Adams, liberals online were, in fact, claiming that Candace Owen's, a young, black, Millennial woman, had expressed admiration for Hitler.

Adams went on to explain that Owens made the controversial statement at issue while attempting to explain that nationalism is not inherently bad. She said, hypothetically, that if Hitler’s only flaw were his nationalism, then he would not have been a problem. Adams noted that it was a horrible explanation, but obviously not an endorsement of Hitler.

Candace Owens made the comment in question at a Turning Point USA event, on stage with Charlie Kirk. Her exact words were as follows:

I think that the definition [of “nationalism”] gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don't want… Whenever we say “nationalism,” the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. You know, he was a national socialist, but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, 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. That's not, 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.

On February 8, 2019, a video of Owens making this statement was circulated on Twitter. It soon attracted comments from various leftwing critics who were eager to portray Owens in a negative light.

Chelsea Clinton tweeted, in part:

There was nothing, using @RealCandaceO own words, “great” about the Third Reich before it began annexing & invading its neighbors. …

An obviously frustrated Candace Owens tweeted back at Chelsea:

Don’t you ever in your miserable life have the the [sic] audacity to tweet at someone who [is] educating blacks on the nasty, racist, harmful “evil regime” policies inflicted by your soulless mother and father. There will be a #BLEXIT. And your trash parents will be alive to witness

Like most instances of Twitter outrage, though, the incident passed quickly. Candace Owens moved onto other things. She continued to work with legislators to influence public policy.

Another round of Twitter outrage occurred after the March 15, 2019 mosque shooting in Christchurch New Zealand, in which a lone gunman live-streamed his armed attack on Muslims. He killed 51 innocent people. Before the shooting, he wrote a manifesto in which he purported to list his inspirations. The list included YouTuber PewDiePie, the video game Fortnite, Nelson Mandela, and Candace Owens.

The Atlantic and other major publications concluded that the list was not serious and was meant to troll the political world and cause discord. That conclusion did not, of course, stop people from promoting the idea that Owens had inspired a terrorist attack.

Despite the attacks on her character, though, Owens continued to spread her message. On March 1, 2019, she spoke at the annual CPAC meeting for the second year in a row. She used the opportunity to argue that conservatives can win minority votes by simply telling the truth. She then shared hard data about blacks in America, including the fact that single motherhood among blacks has risen from 23 percent in the 1960s to 74 percent in 2019, which is a testament to the failure of Democratic social policies.

Because of her high profile as a conservative speaker, Owens would soon be called on to testify before Congress. Predictably, Democrats would try to smear her as a racist once again.

CHAPTER 35

Testimony

On April 9, 2019, Candace Owens was scheduled to testify before Congress on the topic of white nationalism. A Democratic subcommittee had called the hearing, and the Republican members had designated her as one of their witnesses.

The day before the hearing, Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Congresswoman who had frequently been accused of anti-Semitism, tweeted her disapproval of the Owens appearance:

This is going to be tough for the family because the @GOP are calling ZOA’s Mort Klein & conservative Candace Owens to testify at the same hearing. Both have elevated hate rhetoric and extremism in our country.

Nothing that Owens had said would fall within the average person's definition of hateful rhetoric, and the accusation was particularly galling because it came from Tlaib. Candace tweeted back at Tlaib:

“Black people don’t have to be Democrats” is not hateful rhetoric. “We’re gonna impeach this motherf**cker” is. You and your little congress clique of raging anti-Semites do not scare me. My voice will be heard tomorrow.

That same day, Owens received a letter via email from the office of Democratic Representative Jerry Nadler, who would be conducting the hearing. It advised her that she must submit a personal biography and other paperwork to his office at least 48 hours before her appearance as a witness, which, of course, was literally impossible. Nonetheless, she hurried to get her paperwork over to Nadler’s office. She then had to travel from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., for the hearing.

The next day, Owen's arrived at the hearing with her grandfather, who sat behind her. His presence seemed particularly apt because he had personally been victimized by actual white supremacists in his childhood.

The Democrats' witnesses at the hearing did not include any such victims. Instead, they consisted of white academics who presented themselves as experts on white supremacy. Owens would later explain that “the only place more ridiculous than a college campus is Congress,” noting that the Democrats’ best witnesses on white supremacy were white people who had studied the problem.

The hearing included a stunning exchange between Congressman Ted Lieu and Owens. Lieu began with the following:

In congressional hearings the minority party gets to select its own witnesses, and of all the people the Republicans could've selected, they picked Candace Owens. I don't know Miss Owens. I’m not going to characterize her. I’m going to let her own words do the talking. I’m going to play for you the first 30 seconds of a statement she made about Adolf Hitler.

He then played this portion of the Candace Owens comment that had been tweeted two months earlier:

I agree. I actually don’t have any problems at all with the word “nationalism.” I think that it gets – 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. You know, he was a national socialist, but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, 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.

Lieu then asked a white witness: “So when people try to legitimize Adolf Hitler, does that feed into white nationalist ideology?”

The witness answered: “It does, Mr. Lieu. I know that Miss Owens distanced herself from those comments later, but we expressed great concern over the original comments.” Owens then had to sit, biting her tongue, while the witness discussed her view of white nationalism.

A few minutes later, the committee asked Candace Owens if she would like time to respond to the recording. She responded:

Yes. I think it's pretty apparent that Mr. Lieu believes that black people are stupid and will not pursue the full clip in its entirety. He purposely presented an extract –

Nadler then interrupted her, instructing, “The witness may not refer to a member of the committee as stupid.”

Owens responded: “I didn’t refer to him as stupid. That’s not what I said.”

Nadler then permitted Owens to continue:

As I said, he is assuming that black people will not go pursue the full two-hour clip, and he purposefully extracted – he cut off, and you didn't hear the question that was asked of me. He's trying to present as if I was launching a defense of Hitler in Germany… [W]hat I responded to was that I do not believe that we should be characterizing Hitler as a nationalist. He was a homicidal, psychopathic maniac that killed his own people…

[H]e purposefully wants to give you a cutoff, similar to what they do to Donald Trump to create a different narrative. That was unbelievably dishonest, and he did not allow me to respond to it, which is worrisome and should tell you a lot about where people are today in terms of trying to drum up narratives.

By the way, I would like to also add that I work for Prager University, which is run by an Orthodox Jew.

Once again, the optics for Nadler and the other liberals who attacked Candace Owens were terrible. The Democrats purported to address white nationalism, but they actually brought in a group of white people and used the hearing to attack the one black woman who was testifying. Throughout the farce, that black woman’s grandfather, who had been branded on the face by actual white supremacists, sat calmly behind her.

The Democrats might have felt that they had “won” the hearing, but the online reaction would soon demonstrate that they had not.

CHAPTER 36

Reaction

After the hearing, Dave Rubin quickly criticized Lieu on Twitter:

In lieu of truth, Ted doubles down as they always do. Hey Ted, are you actually implying that @RealCandaceO was saying she was OK with what Hitler did to the Jews? Come out and say it if you mean it!...

Many supporters online congratulated Owens on her testimony, including Donald Trump, Jr., Dana Loesch, and Ted Cruz. In her praise, Mike Cernovich tweeted: “No one has ever done what Candace Owens did today. There is no one like her. Masterful.”

That same day, Candace reflected on the hearing:

The greatest part of the hearing today was when @RepJerryNadler simply **shrugs** after I catch him flat-out in a lie. I have literally watched this clip and cannot stop laughing at the audacity of Democrats. They just don’t even care when they’re caught lying.

The next morning, in an interview with Charlie Kirk, Owens explained why the Democrats were suddenly interested in white nationalism:

The entire Russia collusion hoax just fell apart, and these guys – they’re changing and looking at a new narrative – white nationalism, white supremacy.

Millions of viewers enjoyed the video clip of Candace Owens reprimanding Lieu for his Hitler stunt. YouTube put the PragerU video of the testimony in “restricted mode,” making it difficult for people to find it. Despite that attempt at censorship, though, people managed to find the clip on C-SPAN’s website.

The social media senior specialist at C-SPAN, Jeremy Art, announced regarding the Owens clip that: “In less than 24 hours, this video is the most-watched C-SPAN Twitter video from a House hearing (4.47 million views).” The clip would go on to receive millions of additional views.

The day after the hearing, a White House reporter asked President Trump about the incident, and he defended Owens, stating that:

I think it’s a terrible thing that he would do that. I find her to be a very – I know her. I think she’s a fine person, a fine young woman. And I think that’s disgraceful that they could say that.

Donald Trump is loyal to his friends, and it was clear from his comment that he considers Candace Owens a friend. Owens tweeted a link to a video of President Trump’s comments, adding:

Thank you, Mr. President for not only defending me, but for defending all black Americans against the baseless and persistent attacks that we receive from racist Democrats when we refuse to accept their pandering and victimization.

Four days after the hearing, Ted Lieu criticized President Trump, tweeting:

Rep @IlhanMN is getting death threats. It is wrong and dangerous for the President of the United States to try to incite violence against her. @realDonaldTrump must take down his pinned tweet.

Charlie Kirk quickly responded to Lieu:

Candace Owens received several threats this week against her and now requires security It is wrong and dangers [sic] for a member of Congress to try and incite hatred against a woman of color, which you did by playing a edited clip of her remarks You did what you accuse Trump of

The Ted Lieu incident was another indication that Candace Owens’ political star was rising. Shortly after the hearing, on May 1, 2019, Owens announced via Twitter that she was resigning as Communications Director for Turning Point USA.

A couple of weeks later, on May 17, Owens revealed that Facebook had suspended her account for seven days because of a post in which she stated that “White supremacy is not a threat. Liberal supremacy is.” After Owens tweeted about the issue, Facebook restored her account, noting that it had made a mistake and that the post in question had not violated its terms of service.

Simultaneously with this unbanning, though, Breitbart News obtained a screenshot of an internal Facebook spreadsheet that listed banned right-wing users and included a category labeled “extra credit” that listed Candace Owens. Breitbart reported that the listing meant that Facebook considered Owens someone who should be investigated for possible banning.

Speaking in June 2019, Owens bluntly stated the purpose behind such social media bannings: “They are trying to make sure that conservative voices are suspended ahead of the 2020 election cycle.”

CHAPTER 37

Marriage

Throughout the whirlwind events of the first half of 2019, Candace Owens had something important on her mind. She was engaged to be married.

Back in January 2016, before her red-pill moment, Candace Owens wrote:

We don’t honor connection at all in our youth, because we don’t realize how incredibly special and rare it is to meet someone and in an instant moment just – feel. I’m already in my mid twenties and it’s happened to me only TWICE. That means an entire quarter of a century—a full quarter of my life is already dead and gone, and on just two occasions throughout all of these years of dating, living in the busy city of Manhattan, and coming across thousands upon thousands of people – did I experience that thing.

In December 2018, Owens experienced that sense of connection once more, but this time at a much deeper level. At an event in the UK, she met a young conservative named George Farmer, who was serving as the chair of Turning Point UK.

Two and one-half weeks after they met, Candace was in Florida. George was in an airport and asked if they could Facetime. Candace pulled her car over. He said, “I need to tell you something in case this plane crashes.” Owens immediately asked what was wrong with the plane, and Farmer assured her that the plane was fine. Then he asked her to marry him, and she said yes. The pair were engaged, and they had not even kissed yet.

On January 21, 2019, Owens announced her engagement to Farmer on Twitter. She later recalled that some people told her she should not be marrying a white man. However, this was one more opportunity for her to prove that she could do what she wanted to do with her life, regardless of skin color.

On March 2, 2019, Owens tweeted that Trump had announced Owens’ engagement at a conservative event. She described the announcement as “one of those life moments that I will never ever forget.”

On August 31, 2019, Candace married George Farmer in Charlottesville, Virginia. Guests visited from around the world, including Nigel Farage, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Larry Elder, Charlie Kirk, and Joseph Paul Watson. At the wedding, the best man jokingly referred to Owens as America’s first black white supremacist. The wedding had a spiritual aspect, which included the singing of religious songs, including Amazing Grace.

Owens had only one regret about her wedding:

At my wedding, my grandfather was supposed to walk me down the aisle and a couple of days before he had dialysis treatment, and he couldn't make it, and I was devastated on the day of my wedding…

Despite that unfortunate omission, Owens appeared radiant in her wedding photos. She had finally found her soulmate. Now she was ready to start a family. Owens moved with her new husband to Washington, DC. Marriage would not, however, stop Owens from carrying on her work.

CHAPTER 38

Revolt

Days after her wedding, Owens was back in action. On September 14, 2019, Candace Owens appeared on stage at the Revolt summit in Atlanta, along with several famous personalities, including Killer Mike and T.I. The summit was a gathering of the hip-hop community, and the onstage debate was designed to address black issues. Owens was one of two true conservatives on stage, the other being Katrina Pierson. The audience and the other debaters, however, were generally not friendly to Owens.

When asked what the biggest issues facing blacks in the upcoming election might be, Owen said the main issues were socialism and Democrats using blacks. Owens was asked a series of questions but was constantly interrupted and spoken over as her fellow debaters resorted to typical liberal talking points about Trump, including the claim that the MAGA hat is racist and the claim that Trump called Nazis “fine people.”

After the debate, critics of Owens on social media said that she had been destroyed in the debates, but she actually had not been allowed to speak, and comments on the YouTube video of the event suggest that many viewers would like to have heard more from her.

Less than a week later, on September 20, Owens appeared as a witness at another Congressional hearing on white supremacy. Once again, Owens was the only black witness at the hearing. The Democrats introduced only white academics to make their case, and, as if trying to repeat their humiliation in the last hearing, the Democrats again misrepresented Owens’ words to paint her as indifferent to racism.

When Republican Congressman Jim Jordan gave Owens time to speak, she explained that focusing on white supremacy is simply a Democratic election technique, and stated:

I also found it quite hilarious that when asked for actual numbers, nobody here could actually provide them, because [white nationalism] is not actually a problem in America or a major problem or a threat that's facing Black America.

Another witness, professor Kathleen Belew, attempted to undermine Owens by taking her words out of context:

I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word “hilarious.” To me, this feels a lot like your reaction to being named in one of these manifestos. Now, you’re, of course, not responsible for the words of somebody writing that document. But I do think that laughing at it is a real problem because these are real families that are impacted by this violence.

Dr. Belew clearly did not understand her opposition. Owens quickly educated her on word choice and white supremacy:

I was not referring to the subject matter that is ‘hilarious.’ I said that it’s hilarious that we are sitting in this room today, and I’ve got two doctors and a Mrs., and nobody can give us real numbers that we can respond to so that we can assess how big of a threat this is… And the audacity of you to bring up the Christchurch shooting manifesto and make it seem as if I laughed at people who were slaughtered by a homicidal maniac, is in my opinion, absolutely despicable… [H]e also cited Nelson Mandela as a source of inspiration. I don’t think that Nelson Mandela has inspired mosque shootings…

It is ironic that you’re sitting here and you’re having three Caucasian people testify and tell you what their expertise are. You want to know what my expertise [is]? Black in America. I’ve been black in America my whole life, all 30 years, and I can tell you that you guys have done the exact same thing every four years we have an election cycle and it needs to stop.

Even though the online reaction to the hearing was strongly positive for Owens, the hearing must have been disheartening. Clearly, no matter what she said or did, leftists would twist her words to undermine and defame her.

Owens did have one thing going for her, though. Now, after a hard week of fighting leftwing zealots, she could return home to her husband. She had the type of relationship that even the angriest feminist might envy.

CHAPTER 39

Granddaughter

Candice Owens did not set out to become like her grandfather. Maybe she was like him to begin with, or maybe after a few decades of experience she realized that he was her perfect role model. Whatever the case, by 2019, she was living the conservative lifestyle he had taught her as a child.

On March 17, 2019, Candace Owens tweeted:

A dailymail journalist attempted to manipulate my 80 year old half-blind, grandfather into giving him an anti-Trump interview. Instead he confirms he grew up on a sharecropping farm, survived the KKK, and thinks “Trump is right”. LOLLL

Owens included the text of her grandfather’s comments:

Sometimes [Candace] might come over to some people one way in some of the things she’s saying. I’ve listened to Donald Trump and some people hate what he says and I listen, and dig out the history of America, and say, you know what? Donald Trump was right.

Candace Owens could have no stronger validation than these words from her grandfather. In addition to him, though, millions of other Americans are nodding their heads in agreement with the things she says.

Owens is young, and she undoubtedly has decades of political activism ahead of her. People already wonder aloud whether she will be elected president one day. She seems open to the idea, and she has the ambition and skill to succeed in politics.

Regardless of what the future holds, though, Owens is already living out her dream. She has overcome extreme obstacles in order to live life on her own terms.