Candace Owens facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Candace Owens
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Owens in 2021
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| Born |
Candace Amber Owens
April 29, 1989 Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.
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| Education | University of Rhode Island (dropped out) |
| Occupation |
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| Years active | 2017–present |
| Organization | Blexit Foundation |
| Political party | Republican |
| Spouse(s) |
George Farmer
(m. 2019) |
| Children | 2 |
| Relatives | Michael Farmer, Baron Farmer (father-in-law) |
Candace Amber Owens Farmer (née Owens; born April 29, 1989) is an American conservative, author, talk show host, political commentator, and activist. Initially critical of United States President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, Owens eventually became known for her pro-Trump activism as a black woman, in addition to her criticism of Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Party. On several occasions she has claimed that the effects of white supremacy and nationalism are exaggerated, especially when compared to other issues facing Black Americans. She worked for the conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA between 2017 and 2019 as its communications director. In 2021, she joined The Daily Wire, where she hosts Candace, a political talk show.
Owens has promoted several conspiracy theories, mostly through her social media profiles. She has expressed anti-lockdown views and anti-vaccination opinions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Contents
Early life and education
With her siblings, Owens was raised in Stamford, Connecticut, by her grandparents from around the age of 11 or 12, after her parents divorced. She is the third of four children. She said her paternal grandfather Robert Owens, a Black American, was born in North Carolina. Owens is also of Caribbean American heritage through her grandmother who is originally from Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. She is a graduate of Stamford High School.
In 2007, while a 17-year-old senior in high school, Owens received three racist death threat voicemail messages, totaling two minutes, from a group of white male classmates. Joshua Starr, the city's superintendent of schools, listened to the voicemail messages and said that they were "horrendous". Owens's family sued the Stamford Board of Education in federal court, alleging that the city did not protect her rights, resulting in a $37,500 settlement in January 2008. She has a TEDx talk on the subject.
Owens pursued an undergraduate degree in journalism at the University of Rhode Island. She dropped out after her junior year because of an issue with her student loan.
Afterwards, she worked as an intern for Vogue magazine in New York. In 2012, Owens took a job as an administrative assistant for a private equity firm in Manhattan, New York, later moving up to become its vice president of administration.
Early career
Degree180 and anti-conservative blog
In 2015, Owens was CEO of Degree180, a marketing agency that offered consultation, production, and planning services. The website included a blog, written by Owens, which frequently posted anti-conservative and anti-Trump content. In a 2015 column that Owens wrote for the site, she criticized conservative Republicans, writing about the "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."
Privacy violation, Gamergate, and political transformation
Owens launched SocialAutopsy.com in 2016, a website she said would expose bullies on the Internet by tracking their digital footprint. The site would have solicited users to take screenshots of offensive posts and send them to the website, where they would be categorized by the user's name. She used crowdfunding on Kickstarter for the website.
The proposal was immediately controversial, drawing criticism that Owens was de-anonymizing (doxing) Internet users and violating their privacy. According to The Daily Dot, "People from all sides of the anti-harassment debate were quick to criticize the database, calling it a public shaming list that would encourage doxing and retaliatory harassment." Both conservatives and progressives involved in the Gamergate controversy condemned the website.
In response, people began posting Owens's private details online. With scant evidence, Owens blamed the doxing on progressives involved in the Gamergate controversy. After this, she earned the support of conservatives involved in the Gamergate controversy, including right-wing political commentators and Trump supporters Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich. Subsequently, Owens became a conservative, saying in 2017, "I became a conservative overnight ... I realized that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls ... Social Autopsy is why I'm conservative".
Kickstarter suspended funding for Social Autopsy, and the website was never created.
Conservative activism
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By late 2017, Owens had started producing pro-Trump commentary and criticizing notions of structural racism, systemic inequality, and identity politics – all positions she herself had been publishing two years earlier. In 2017, she began posting politically themed videos to YouTube. In September 2017, she launched Red Pill Black, a website and YouTube channel that promotes black conservatism in the United States.
On November 21, 2017, at the MAGA Rally and Expo in Rockford, Illinois, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk announced that Owens had been hired as the organization's director of urban engagement. Turning Point's hiring of Owens occurred in the wake of allegations of racism at Turning Point. In May 2019, Owens announced her departure as communications director for the organization.
In April 2018, Kanye West tweeted "I love the way Candace Owens thinks." The tweet was met with derision on the part of many of West's fans. In May 2018, President Donald Trump said that Owens "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!" She registered as a Republican in 2018, after the hearings following Brett Kavanaugh's nomination as a Supreme Court judge. She objected to what she termed the "social lynching" of Kavanaugh, on the grounds that to "believe women" was the reason "our ancestors got lynched", as she told a journalist from Philadelphia magazine. "No evidence, but believe all women".
Owens has appeared on fringe conspiracy websites, such as InfoWars. In 2018, she was a guest host on Fox News, and began to distance herself from the far-right conspiracy websites, although she refused to criticize InfoWars or its hosts.
In May 2018, Owens suggested that "something bio-chemically happens" to women who do not marry or have children, and she linked to the Twitter handles of Sarah Silverman, Chelsea Handler, and Kathy Griffin, saying that they were "evidentiary support" of this theory. Silverman responded: "It seems to me that by tweeting this, you would like to maybe make us feel badly. I'd say this is evidenced by ur effort to use our twitter handles so we would see. My heart breaks for you, Candy. I hope you find happiness in whatever form that takes." Owens responded, accusing Silverman of supporting terrorists and crime gangs.
Owens hosted The Candace Owens Show on PragerU's YouTube channel. She left PragerU in 2020 to host Candace, a show on The Daily Wire.
In April 2020, Owens announced her intention to either run for office in the U.S. Senate or to be a governor, and that she would only run against an incumbent Democrat, not a Republican. She did not reveal which specific office she would run for, or in which election cycle.
During The Daily Wire's coverage of the 2020 U.S. Election, Owens announced she would be joining The Daily Wire and would be hosting her own show. Owens later said in a tweet, "The rumors are true. I'm moving to Nashville and joining the Daily Wire!! This was a tough secret to keep. I couldn't be more excited!!" Her podcast Candace premiered on the platform on March 19, 2021. Its episodes are filmed in front of a live studio audience and air weekly. Notable guests include former United States president Donald Trump, UFC president Dana White, and U.S. Representative Jim Jordan.
In February 2021, Owens tweeted that she was considering a run for President in 2024.
Blexit Foundation
Blexit, a term originally coined by Me'Lea Connelly, is a portmanteau of "Black" and "exit" which mimics Brexit, the word used to describe the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union. The original Blexit movement was started in 2016 by Connelly with the goal of achieving Black economic independence by encouraging Black Americans to leave the traditional financial systems that have historically disadvantaged the Black community. In late 2018, Owens launched a different Blexit foundation, which featured a social media campaign to encourage African Americans (plus Latinos and other minorities) to abandon the Democratic Party and register as Republicans with the promise of freedom. At the time, 8% of Black Americans identified as Republicans.
At the launch in October 2018, Owens said that her "dear friend and fellow superhero Kanye West" designed merchandise for the movement, but the following day, West denied being the designer and disavowed the effort, saying "I never wanted any association with Blexit" and "I've been used to spread messages I don't believe in"; however, after an apology West is still putting his support behind Owens. In 2021, with dwindling donations, Owens was paid $250,000 for her foundation work.
Political views
Ideology
Owens said she had no interest in politics whatsoever before 2015, but previously identified as liberal. In 2017, she began describing herself as a conservative Trump supporter. Owens has since characterized Trump as the "savior" of Western civilization. She has argued that Trump has neither engaged in rhetoric that is harmful to African Americans, nor proposed policies that would harm African Americans. She said in October 2018 that she had never voted and had only recently become a registered Republican.
The Guardian has described Owens as "ultra-conservative", and New York magazine and the Columbia Journalism Review have described her as "right-wing". The Daily Beast has called her views "far-right" and the Pacific Standard called her a member of the "alt-right", although she has rejected both terms. She was influenced by the works of Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Carson, and Thomas Sowell.
Owens has said: "The left hates America, and Trump loves it." She has said that the left is "destroying everything through this cultural Marxist ideology."
Race relations
Owens is known for her criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement and has described Black Lives Matter protesters as "a bunch of whiny toddlers, pretending to be oppressed for attention". Owens has argued that African Americans have a victim mentality, often referring to the Democratic Party as a "plantation". She has argued that the American Left likes "black people to be government-dependent" and that black people have been brainwashed to vote for Democrats. She has argued that police violence against black people is not about racism, and referred to police killings of black people as a trivial matter to African Americans.
She has said, "Black Americans are doing worse off economically today than we were doing in the 1950s under Jim Crow", adding that this is because "we've only been voting for one party since then." She has attributed economic improvements for African Americans, such as a low unemployment rate, to Trump's presidency.
When asked if it was problematic that white supremacist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), support Trump, Owens answered that Antifa was more prevalent than the KKK. Owens has said that the media cover the KKK during Trump's presidency to hurt him. In a 2019 hearing on hate crimes, Owens referred to the KKK as a "Democrat terrorist organization". After the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Owens said that concern over rising white nationalism was "stupid". She has also called it "just election rhetoric" and "based on the hierarchy of what's impacting minority Americans, if I had to make a list of 100 things, white nationalism would not make the list." In 2018, Owens dismissed reports of a resurgence in hate crimes, saying "All of the violence this year primarily happened because of people on the left."
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During her April 2019 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on the rise of hate crimes and white supremacists in the United States, Owens made the claim that the Southern strategy employed by the Republican Party to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans was a "myth" that "never happened". This was disputed by several historians who said that the existence of the Southern strategy was well documented in contemporaneous sources dating back to the Civil Rights era, with historian Kevin M. Kruse, who writes about modern conservatism, calling Owens's statement "utter nonsense".
In June 2019, Owens said that African Americans had it better in the first 100 years after the abolition of slavery than they have since and that socialism was at fault.
On October 3, 2022, during Yeezy SZN 9 fashion show in Paris, Owens posed for a photo with Kanye West wearing a matching shirt with the "WHITE LIVES MATTER" slogan.
Women's rights
Owens is critical of feminism. Owens described the #MeToo movement, an international movement against assault, as "stupid" and said that she "hated" it. Owens wrote that the movement was premised on the idea that "women are stupid, weak & inconsequential".
LGBT rights
Owens supports same-sex marriage. On July 28, 2017, Owens stated she was in favor of banning transgender individuals who are undergoing sex reassignment surgery from serving in the United States military, but said that she did not oppose fully transitioned transgender individuals serving in the military. In April 2022, she called The Walt Disney Company "child groomers" and called for the boycott of the company, after Disney announced its opposition to Florida's Don't Say Gay bill.
In May 2022, she falsely claimed on Twitter that the gunman, involved in the Robb Elementary School shooting, could be transgender and that he was "cross-dressing". According to Owens, this was evidence that "there were plenty of signs that he was mentally disturbed".
In June 2022, Owens described Drag Queen Story Hour as "child abuse", arguing that parents who take their children to a drag queen story hour "are underqualified to have children" and "should have their children taken away from them."
Welfare
Owens opposes welfare programs, saying that they are a Democratic Party tool to keep black Americans dependent upon the government.
Immigration
Owens is a proponent of the Mexico–United States barrier, and believes undocumented immigrants to the United States should be immediately deported.
In 2018, Owens warned that "Europe will fall and become a Muslim-majority continent by 2050. There has never been a Muslim-majority country where sharia law was not implemented." She suggested that the United States would then be "forced to save" the British.
2020 election
After Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Donald Trump refused to concede, Owens promoted Trump's claims of mass fraud, saying, "the American election was clearly rigged."
Climate change
She has claimed that global warming is not "real", while in 2021 promoted paid ads on Facebook, calling the US government "modern doomsayers" who have been wrongly predicting climate crises for decades.
Personal life
In early 2019, three weeks after they met, Owens became engaged to George Farmer, an Englishman and former chairman of Turning Point UK. On August 31, 2019, she and Farmer married at the Trump Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia. Owens gave birth to a boy in January 2021. She gave birth to their second child, a daughter, in July 2022.
Filmography
- The Greatest Lie Ever Sold (documentary, 2022)
See also
In Spanish: Candace Owens para niños
 | José Calderón |
 | Diana Taurasi |
 | Pancho Gonzales |
 | Gigi Fernández |
