From the Magazine: Candace Owens is the new face of black conservatism. But what does that really mean?
The lights must be low, the music deafening, the bass thumping — this is not your grandmother’s Republican mixer. No, really: Candace Owens knows that the grandmothers of the people coming most likely vote Democratic. Their parents probably do, too. Hell, the people who’ve shown up no doubt did as well, unthinkingly, before they opened their eyes and their ears and their minds.
A few minutes before she kicks things off, she finally stops running around, and we perch on black leather couches in the green room. “This means everything to me,” she says. She’s still on edge but feels better now that the theater has filled with patriots in red “Make America Great Again” caps and phones, so many phones, lifted in the air to document everything, even before anything starts. There are 500 or so people in the audience; it’s standing room only.
Owens backstage with her fiance, George Farmer. In the rear is conservative pundit Ann Coulter, who spoke at the event. Blexit was born from a chance encounter with Nigel Farage in February 2018. For her entire political career — at that point, seven months — Owens had dreamed of helming a black revolt against the left.
She says she doesn’t understand why critics think Trump is racist for calling certain nations “s—hole” countries , and questions the modern-day existence of the Ku Klux Klan. When I ask whether she believes white supremacy still exists, she shoots back, “Define white supremacy,” and then defines it as “third-wave feminism.” It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day when we meet for our interview, and she is certain that King would have voted for Trump.
Do you think a black, lesbian, disabled person, I ask, has it harder in life than, I don’t know, a white man? “First off, no. Let me tell you, if anything in this society, there’s almost a level of black privilege now.” She explains: “He can’t say anything” — she gestures toward Farmer, who’s white — or else “he’s called a racist. I can say anything that I want because I’m black.
These are not new ideas. Owens’s belief in the value of personal responsibility derives from Booker T. Washington, who called for black self-reliance and a strong work ethic. Washington argued that African Americans should accept discrimination for the time being while working toward economic self-determination.
Before the event started, Jacob James Adegoke was at the front of the line to enter, jumping up and down and leading his compatriots in a “Trump! Trump! Trump!” chant. The 48-year-old Nigerian immigrant told me he doesn’t believe Democrats care about black people. “It’s been a long time that I’ve been waiting for something like this,” he said.
Owens, who struggled with anorexia for years afterward, had unwittingly — unwillingly — become a poster child for racial victimhood. “I think it made her have her eyes a little more open as far as being in control of who she is and her image,” Davis says. “She will never allow herself to be presented as someone that’s weak.”
And in reality, friends say, she is much more interested in hearing new perspectives than her hard-line public persona suggests. “While Candace may appear to some people as this irrational person, I can assure you, at least from my own personal conversations, that is far from the truth,” says her friend Shermichael Singleton, a black Republican political consultant.
The day the Kickstarter went live, she got a call from Zoe Quinn, a target of the sexist online harassment campaign Gamergate. Quinn urged her to end the project. Owens believed that this — along with the influx of racist emails she received later that evening — was proof that Quinn was making up the harassment and was terrified that Social Autopsy’s technology would reveal her scheme. Owens told her side of the story to multiple outlets, including New York magazine and The Washington Post.
A few months after she posted her first video, she spoke at the David Horowitz Freedom Center Restoration Weekend in Palm Beach, Fla. Charlie Kirk, the founder and executive director of Turning Point, saw her speak. “Within 30 seconds of seeing her onstage, I said to myself, ‘Oh my goodness, I have not seen a talent like this in my six years of politics,’ ” Kirk told me. “This is a counternarrative. The media says people like her don’t exist.
Owens, who is communications director for the conservative student group Turning Point USA, has had a rapid ascent in right-wing politics. I was preparing for an interview with Owens on a Friday in February when a video of her began making the rounds online. In the clip, from a December Turning Point event in England, Owens responds to a question about the future of nationalism and globalism.
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