More recently, Owens has started to eschew those fringier parts of the far-right media. Her videos quickly started to attract attention, but it was “I Don't Care About Charlottesville, the KKK, or White Supremacy” - her response to the media coverage of the deadly white supremacist rally last summer - that went viral and attracted the notice of InfoWars’ Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson, Rubin and Jesse Watters of Fox News. Owens started new Facebook and Instagram pages, a YouTube channel, a Twitter feed and a connected patreon account, a subscription service where she collected monthly donations in exchange for content. In one post, she wrote about the “bat-shit-crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party,” adding, “The good news is, they will eventually die off (peacefully in their sleep, we hope), and then we can get right on with the OBVIOUS social change that needs to happen, IMMEDIATELY.” The site included a blog that featured writing from Owens on a variety of topics including anorexia, acne, breakups and dating - and occasionally politics. A representative for the university said Owens dropped out after her junior year.īy 2015, Owens was living and working in New York, paying off debt and looking for her next move when she and a co-worker founded Degree180, a marketing agency that offered consultation, production and planning services. Owens went to the University of Rhode Island to study journalism, but she said she was forced to leave because of an issue with her student loan. She says he went on to start a business, raise a family and eventually retire in North Carolina, buying the very land that he had once worked. Owens rarely speaks of her immediate family, but often invokes her grandfather as a model black American.Īt Turning Points events and in videos, she says her grandfather Robert Owens was born in segregated North Carolina, picking cotton and laying out tobacco from the age of 4 on a sharecropping farm. She grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, and, according to her telling, was raised by her grandparents after her parents divorced. (Owens called reports of internal discord “fake news, and says conservatives critical of her or her message generally are “secret socialists.”)
After she blasted the #MeToo movement for having “turned sexual assault into a trend,” predicated on the idea that women are “stupid” and weak,” Charlie Kirk, her boss and the president of Turning Points, asked members in a group message not to walk out or boo Owens during her speech at an upcoming women’s leadership conference. Owens isn’t just pushing buttons on the left. told NBC News, “and deeply appreciates what she has done to bridge the polarizing delta left by leftist politicians and their media cohorts, who wish to see this country divided.”
“Everybody in our immediate family has met Candace on multiple occasions,” Donald Trump Jr. She’s moved from appearing on fringe online conspiracy websites to guest hosting gigs on Fox News. That contrarianism and aggressive Trumpian delivery, combined with a talent for angering those on the left, has led Owens to amass 560,000 Twitter followers in the last year, and her YouTube videos have racked up 7 million views.
as children should be immediately deported, and concern over rising white nationalism is “stupid,” an opinion she expressed after a white nationalist drove through a group of counterprotesters last summer in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing a woman. Owens has called Black Lives Matter advocates “whiny toddlers,” advocated for the end of all welfare programs, and likened black Democrats to slaves on plantations.įor Owens, climate change is a lie used to “extract dollars from Americans,” abortion is the “extermination” of black babies, undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. Owens’ conservative awakening embodies what the Republican Party hopes to see across the country - young people, minorities and women embracing the ideas of Trump’s America.īut she’s not doing that by softening any of the platform that has emerged on the far-right. I wanted to do a deep dive before I started going out there and saying stuff as opposed to other people who mindlessly vote.” The platform “This is the first time I’ve been politically inclined and active, and I think Donald Trump is a tremendous president. “Yeah, I didn’t vote exactly,” Owens said in an interview with NBC News.
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