She wants to replace the Constitution of the United States of America, a document she says ‘was not written by morally sound individuals.’ She thinks climate change is a hoax intended to ‘extract dollars from Americans.’ She considers Scientific American a ‘random website’ and ‘propaganda.’ She has called women who get raped after going to a hotel room ‘too stupid’ and women who don’t fight back against their rapists ‘too weak.’ Just this week, she attacked the cousin of Mollie Tibbetts, the 20 year-old Iowa woman killed by an illegal immigrant, publicly responding to the cousin that she found it ‘strange … you have not directed a single bad word toward the monster who committed this terrible crime.’
She’s a con artist and a grifter just a text message away from the White House. She is Candace Owens.
Owens rose to national prominence after rap superstar-cum-provocateur Kanye West tweeted, ‘I love the way Candace Owens thinks.’ The media were distressed by Kanye’s contrarian flirtation, as they would have been had Kanye tweeted about Tucker Carlson, Tomi Lahren, or any other primetime, pop-conservative.
But Candace is not really a conservative. She’s an imposter who began her professional foray into the culture wars by creating the largest doxxing dossier online, Social Autopsy. While many prominent thought leaders on the right migrate from leftism or liberalism, Candace converted – if you honestly buy that she is a true believer – from the bully pulpit.
She was catapulted from the dregs of the internet to having the First Daughter on speed dial. (That’s not an exaggeration; Adam Rubenstein at the Weekly Standard reported that Candace tweeted ‘praise of Ivanka Trump at the first daughter’s request.’) Some people brandish the label of conservatism to shield their virulent racism. Some do so to mask sexism, and others to cover up big government isolationism. These are hateful, ineffective ideologies, but their (semi) consistent streams of thought can be decimated and demolished. Far more perilous is sheer opportunism, and Candace Owens’s life history is a masterclass in the art of the steal.
To understand how conservatives across college campuses and Fox News hosts embraced a woman who changes opinions like most people change underwear, you have to understand the birth of Social Autopsy, the public catalogue of people who made the grave error of posting a problematic comment.
Candace launched Social Autopsy in 2016, after dropping out of college, a brief stint of working at Vogue magazine (yes, with those awful globalists!), a gig as an assistant at a private equity firm, and a failed founding of an editorial website which carried such high-minded and moral articles as ‘I Think Affairs Are Romantic’ and ‘I’m So Sorry Ladies, But We Can NEVER Stop Faking the Orgasm.’ The warring tribes of left and right both vehemently opposed Social Autopsy at the start. As New York magazine’s Jesse Singal wrote, ‘a rare degree of unity was achieved between various opposing factions in the endless internet culture wars,’ and the self-identified liberal Owens found herself once again at the fringes.
Following a brief break from the spotlight, she suddenly found herself ‘redpilled’ (that’s the right-wing version of the Awokening). Candace re-emerged on YouTube some months later, rebranding not just as a conservative, but specifically as a Trump devotee. Bite-sized, sub-10 minute videos such as ‘Mom, Dad….I’m a conservative.’ and ‘How to Escape the Democrat Plantation (an easy guide).’ accrued hundreds of thousands of views overnight. The vloggable format made sense. Candace is confident, attractive, poised, and black.
When Candace faced her first real, substantive, post-‘redpilled’ critique from conservative YouTuber Blaire White regarding Social Autopsy, Dave Rubin moderated the two in a live debate. Candace opened by refusing to address Blaire, who is transgender, with female pronouns.
‘I don’t want them to think it’s a catfight between two girls because it’s not,’ Candace said in the 2017 interview, insisting on referring to Blaire as a man rather than merely conceding that she invented Social Autopsy prior to her political awakening. Weird! Just two years earlier, in a piece gleefully anticipating when Tea Partiers will ‘eventually die off (peacefully in their sleep, we hope),’ Candace wrote that the debate over LGBTQ rights ‘WILL BE INSTANTLY OVER, DELETED, DONE.’
Candace’s rapid transition from vindictive left-wing blogger to vindictive right-wing hack is rife with these contradictions without provisos. Three years ago, she fiercely condemned politicians even mentioning the issue of abortion on the debate stage. This year she lambasted Planned Parenthood for training ‘us blacks to exterminate ourselves.’ In 2017, Owens called the NAACP ‘one of the worst groups for black people,’ claiming ‘it’s all about PR for them, so I’m sure if they’re involved then it’s got to be absolute BS.’ Candace of course neglected to mention that a decade earlier the NAACP helped her acquire a $37,500 settlement from the Samford Board of Education after Candace wrote a letter to them, begging for their assistance following alleged racial harassment she experienced in high school. In fact, when Candace launched Social Autopsy, she cited those student racists as part of her impetus. Yet even though she still refuses to denounce Social Autopsy, she laments the public shaming of her high school tormentors as rapists.
The only constants with Candace are her cult-like devotion to the Trump family and her commitment to vengeance. She wields and discards identity politics in a clown-nose-on-and-off routine, mocking the left for complaining about racism while repeatedly blaming the Democratic Party for the persistence of slavery. Don’t mention racism ever – except if you’re claiming liberals are ‘publicly lynching’ black Trump surrogates for being accused of only a teeny bit of sexual assault! Trump isn’t a president to Candace. He’s the ‘saviour’ of ‘the free world.’ Ivanka isn’t a public employee. She’s a martyr who ‘willingly gave up her successful fashion brand so that she could fully commit herself to serving America.’ (No wonder Ivanka texts her for public praise; if only we all had such loyal lackees.)
Candace will mock alleged rape victims and goad the family members of girls killed by illegal immigrants so long as she thinks the Trumps want her to. After all, she used a string of shoddy aphorisms to finagle her way into Monday morning stints on Fox & Friends and speaking gigs with Donald Trump Jr. She blocks half of conservative Twitter and has her boss, Charlie Kirk, issue memos demanding silence from Turning Point USA members who wish to publicly criticise her – though in the light of her spat with the Tibbetts family, some are starting to distance themselves. She’s a charlatan, not a conservative, and a short-sighted one at that. Luckily, just as the internet makes it easy for grifters to smooth-talk their way to the top, it’s even easier to figure out their flip-flops and opportunism.
Take it from the creator of Social Autopsy, Candace Owens, who said it best in her first interview about the website: ‘What we’re doing is taking that freedom of speech and archiving it.’
