The Monster They Brought to Life

Credit Image: © Stefani Reynolds/CNP via ZUMA Wire

Conservatives have always been desperate to find the elusive token model minority to deflect accusations of “racism.” With Candace Owens, they had a symbiotic relationship: They could point to a black woman who agreed with them every time someone accused them of racism, and Mrs. Owens became famous for being a black woman parroting their favorite slogans. By platforming and mainstreaming a woman whose blackness was her allure, the conservative movement created its own problem.

Mrs. Owens first got media attention in 2008, when she was awarded $37,500 in a settlement with the Stamford, Connecticut Board of Education for trauma she suffered from alleged racist threats by her high school classmates. According to local news, “At least one of the students alleged to have left the voice mails [was] arrested . . . the day that Ms. Owens returned to school, accompanied by representatives from the Connecticut NAACP.”

As a commentator, Mrs. Owens got her start in 2015 by registering a now-defunct website, Degree180. Far from promoting conservative values, Mrs. Owens wrote about the “good news” that Republicans were going to die, so “we can get right on with the OBVIOUS social change that needs to happen, IMMEDIATELY.” Other authors compared Trump to Hitler and speculated about his (small) penis size.

Mrs. Owens’ most notable contribution to Degree180 was an anti-cyberbullying project called Social Autopsy, and she used the media attention from her high school “racism” to promote it:

Degree180 CEO Candace Owens speaks about racism and bullying at her home office in Stamford, Conn. […] Owens was bullied with racist threats as a student in high school and is now launching an anti-bullying website, Social Autopsy, which launches its beta version on Friday, May 4 [2016].

In the video debuting Social Autopsy, Mrs. Owens complained about “hate speech” and bragged that Social Autopsy was “the first ever search database that compiles and allows the public to easily access the digital footprint of individuals and companies.” It was an unabashed doxxing website:

Our team has crawled through the public interfaces of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, creating real profiles for the individuals that lob hate speech over the web. These individuals are your teachers, doctors, neighbors, and business owners. And for the first time ever, you will be given the chance to run a real background check on them to see what these people represent behind closed doors.

In an FAQ, Mrs. Owens explained why it’s important to doxx children when they’re young, and compared internet free speech to lethal force: “It’s just like giving somebody a gun. You can kill yourself with it or you can kill somebody else with it.”

With the Social Autopsy YouTube videos came a Kickstarter campaign, in which Mrs. Owens asked for $75,000 to “save the virtual world.” She explained that her company had already archived 22,000 profiles of “abusers,” and wanted to bring that number up to 150,000. Donors got coasters, mason jars, T-shirts, and sponsorships, and the Kickstarter ended with this: Mrs. Owens was to give a TED talk called “The Truth about Your Activism.” She added that “it is slated to be the most important talk of our century, according to her mother. You will not want to miss it.” It now has over a million views. The Kickstarter, however, shut down on April 14, 2016, with only 54 backers, $70,756 short of its $75,000 goal.

Outrage over Social Autopsy was perhaps the only time both sides of the GamerGate fight came together. Both the Left and the Right condemned Social Autopsy and Mrs. Owens for her doxxing campaign. Mrs. Owens called at least one critical reporter on the GamerGate beat a scammer, fraudster, and a predator.

On July 9, 2017, just over a year after launching Social Autopsy, Mrs. Owens “came out” as a conservative. She told Dave Rubin she “became a conservative overnight” because she “realized that liberals were actually the racists.” In a since-delisted video covered by NBC, however, Mrs. Owens allegedly claimed, “Social Autopsy is why I’m conservative.” She has also said she will never apologize for starting the doxxing site.

The next year, BuzzFeed found and publicized the anti-conservative, anti-Trump articles on Degree180. Mrs. Owens accused BuzzFeed of threatening women, and wrote, “I will not submit to your version of what I should be as a black woman in this society,” and “Fear will no longer enslave black minds.”

Conservative media, which was swift to condemn Social Autopsy and the “social justice warriors” behind it, decided to embrace Mrs. Owens anyway. Paul Joseph Watson, who had written a 2016 article lambasting Social Autopsy, became one of her earliest promoters: “Who is this smart lady? I want to interview her,” and “Everyone give her a follow – she’s at @redpillblack!”

On August 29, 2017, Mr. Watson promoted her appearance on InfoWars with Alex Jones, adding, “We are all being manipulated to buy into this fake race war. Resist it. The amazing @RedPillBlack.” The adulation continued, with “The Alt-Left’s most feared enemy is smart, educated, successful black people. Meet Candace Owens . . . .”

Mr. Watson even rewrote history about his own reporting in order to defend Mrs. Owens. He claimed she started Social Autopsy “4 years ago”—not the actual one year seven months earlier — seemingly to make her conversion to conservatism seem more plausible and authentic.

Just a few months after she came out as conservative on YouTube, Mrs. Owens was scooped up by Turning Point USA (TPUSA). Charlie Kirk announced he was hiring her as “director of urban engagement.”

Her reaction: “By the end of 2018 I’m going to be one of the most well-known people in this country because I am going to lead the black revolution for the Conservative movement.”

On February 23, 2018, just three months after joining TPUSA, Mrs. Owens announced she was inspired by a meeting with Nigel Farage to start “BLEXIT.” Breitbart, which had blasted Social Autopsy two years earlier because it would “encourage ordinary web users to snitch on any friends, co-workers, or web acquaintances,” let Mrs. Owens puff BLEXIT to its readers.

Mrs. Owens then admitted she had uploaded her coming out as a conservative story only “one year ago.” She claimed this was her first YouTube video; conveniently forgetting Social Autopsy. Conservatives looked the other way.

BLEXIT got loads of conservative coverage, including by Fox News: “Blexit is the black exit from the Democratic Party. It’s the black exit from permanent victimhood, the black exit from the false idea that we are somehow separate from the rest of America.”

On Fox, Mrs. Owens also bragged about Kanye West’s help:

The campaign made headlines recently after it was revealed Kanye West helped her design the Blexit logo. “Kanye saw my original design, and said, ‘I can do it better,’” Candace Owens recalled. “It certainly was. He redesigned the logo with vibrant colors inspired by his trip to Uganda.”

Mr. West, however, claimed that “I have nothing to do with it [Blexit].” “My eyes are now wide open and now realize I’ve been used to spread messages I don’t believe in.”

Mrs. Owens says she started BLEXIT out of “Love of God. Love of Country. Love for my People.”

Ten months after Candace Owens came out as a conservative, President Trump called her part of a “group of very smart ‘thinkers,’ ” and said she was “so good for our Country.” He then met her at the White House.

Mrs. Owens became a household name when she joined PragerU in 2019. Roseanne Barr was the guest on the first episode of “The Candace Owens Show.” Ms. Barr now calls her “a lying grifter sociopath.”

When The Daily Wire announced it was hiring Mrs. Owens full-time in 2020, it reveled in her blackness, as “the founder of BLEXIT and author of Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation.” Ben Shapiro now calls Mrs. Owens “evil,” adding that, “If you watch Candace and come away thinking that you are smarter, better informed, or more moral . . . you are retarded. If you echo or excuse her evil and vicious stupidity . . . you are worse than retarded.”

In text messages Mrs. Owens sent to Mr. Kirk, she called Mr. Shapiro “racist” for tweeting that people who wear pants below their waists and have EBT cards won’t succeed in life.

In a recent interview with Hunter Biden, Mrs. Owens even said that if Mr. Shapiro supports something, she has always been against it. Mr. Shapiro once put up a billboard promoting the “Candace” show, hosted by his company.

Candace Owens’ fall from conservative movement grace came when Mr. Trump started blasting her on Truth Social. This was after Mrs. Owens called him a “chronic embarrassment,” criticizing the Iran war and his dithering on the Epstein files. She says people were “played” for supporting him. He now calls her “an extremely Low IQ individual.”

Mrs. Owens is now notorious for promoting conspiracies about Mrs. Kirk, the widow of her alleged best friend. Mrs. Owens built an eight-hour-long video series, “The Bride of Charlie,” accusing her of child sex trafficking, grooming minors, and “joked” that she might have murdered her husband. She tries to tie Mrs. Kirk to Jeffrey Epstein.

While many mainstream conservatives have soured on Mrs. Owens, she is still among the top 100 podcasters in the United States, and in the top 15 for news. She has not suffered professionally nor been censored or shadow-banned, as has happened to sites such as American Renaissance.

Within just five years, Mrs. Owens went from publishing anti-conservative articles and doxxing minors, to working for TPUSA, visiting the White House, being hired by PragerU, getting her own show with The Daily Wire, and becoming one of the most listened-to people in the country — to turning on everyone who helped promote her. If it were not for conservatives’ constant desire to appear non-racist, the people who elevated and puffed up Mrs. Owens would not be dealing with the consequences today.