“The FBI told me about someone who set up a GoFundMe to kill Candace Owens,” she said, laughing, as we pulled up one morning in early March. Her patent stiletto rested against a bag of sweets—mints and candies and gum. She told me she sees humor in everything. “I was like, well, should I donate?”
The internet loves good and evil, good or evil, and there exists no one more Manichaean than Owens. For six years and counting, Owens, 33, has been a heat-seeking missile heading straight into the center of every controversial topic, or, better yet, creating a controversy where there wasn’t one. She’s an unlikely Republican—a millennial who studied journalism and interned at a fashion magazine, and a Black woman in an era when no more than 10 percent of Black voters identify with her party. The second point is particularly relevant, because the present-day Republican Party at best exists among racial tension and, at real, stokes it. When Owens says things that a lot of white Republicans in this country would not dare, they are able to say, “See?”
She appeared on Carlson’s show last fall to assert that the two worst things you can be in America today are a Black child in the womb and a straight white man. Around the same time, on her own podcast, she defended herself against people who say that she doesn’t understand Black culture. “I have to keep reminding you that I don’t want to be a part of this culture,” she said. “I want to destroy it. I want to destroy it further than it’s already destroyed itself. I want to go backward. Your idea of progressivism is clearly regressive,” adding, “This is a new plantation.”
In the era of the hot take, hers are the hottest. She possesses a mechanical understanding of outrage. It works, now more than ever, when gray areas, particularly online, do not exist. Even if you’re sure you absolutely deep in your bones disagree with her, you know even deeper that it would exhaust you to debate her. “Candace’s mode is always doubling down,” one person who works with her told me. “She is a very strong thinker whose motto is ‘Never apologize, never back down,’ ” an inversion, witting or not, of the royal family’s “Never complain, never explain.”
I sat down with Owens after she’d taped a show featuring a 10-minute monologue about how shame is a good thing and more people should feel shamed by their bad behavior at airports. I told her that this story is probably the most difficult story I’d ever reported. No one, I told her, wanted to talk to me on the record. Everyone was scared of her. Either they did not want to be associated with having known her or they did not want to risk having her go after them. “And I will,” she assured me.
In person, her face knocks you a bit sideways in its symmetry, perfectly made up, with the doe eyes of a Disney princess goneKilling Eve. “It’s a very good fear to have. I don’t take it sitting down and there’s a reason for that,” she said. “I should be a hero, but they hate me because they can only see Black people as a hero through the vein of victimhood.”
Much of her public messaging centers around the notion that the American left has made Black people believe they are victims, which she’s called “a mental plague on Black America.” Racism will always exist, she says—just not systemically; it doesn’t prevent her or anyone else from being able to do something. “The entire Democrat platform is built upon an everlasting stream of victims versus oppressors, and black America is their favored horse,” she wrote in her book,Blackout,which debuted at number two on theNew York Timesbest-seller list. This country does not have a police brutality problem, she has argued, “but we do have a black on black brutality problem in America.” The Black Lives Matter movement, she’s said, has meant more destruction of Black lives.
Anywhere a hot button exists, she pushes twice. She is resolute about not vaccinating her children and has called it “mutilation” when trans children suppress puberty. She was named in a manifesto by a white nationalist who cited Owens as his inspiration for killing 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand. In response, Owens tweeted, “The Left pretending I inspired a mosque massacre…is the reachiest reach of all reaches!! LOL!”
“I love Candace because her analysis is consistently deep and interesting,” Carlson, one of the only people who agreed to speak on the record, told me. “She’s not a shallow person, and she’s not afraid to see and describe what she considers the bigger picture. That’s a rare thing. I can definitely see why people would like her to be quiet, but I hope she keeps talking.”
It’s not hard to see why people believe that Owens, like Donald Trump and West and even Carlson sometimes, are simply playing characters in our political theater. They are unapologetic and unafraid and keenly aware of how to weaponize talking points to get what they want. Absolute certainty goes viral, and no one is more absolute or certain than Owens. But is it all deeply felt, or is it the performance of a lifetime? “It’s such an easy answer,” Owens said when I asked her which, smiling and blinking her eyes at me like I was the world’s greatest idiot.
Owens grew up in a low-income housing tower on the edge of Stamford, Connecticut, until she was in grade school, when she and her three siblings moved to a middle-class neighborhood with her paternal grandparents. There was a yard to play in, bikes to ride, and a comfortable home. It was Bible study every week, church every Sunday, prayers before every meal. Her grandfather was raised on a sharecropping farm in Fayetteville, North Carolina, during Jim Crow—he’d dodged the bullets of Klansmen. He went north when he was 16, married at 17, and devoted himself to work, faith, and family. When Owens lived with them, there were strict rules, early wake-ups, big expectations.
In school, Owens excelled. In elementary school she joined a program for high achievers. All of the other kids were white. She would get shoved, or teased for not knowing the lyrics to rap songs in the cafeteria. She felt her good grades and rule following were seen as a racial “betrayal.” “The idea that black children who perform well in school are somehow ‘acting white’ is in and of itself a racist assessment…. It fosters a culture where brighter black students must decide between wanting to be accepted by their race, or performing well in their studies.” (Owens lowercasesblack in her book; it isVanity Fair’s style to uppercase.)
In high school, Owens partied and dated and studied. She joined the cheerleading squad and track team, volunteered for Big Brothers Big Sisters, and performed in a poetry slam. She remembers sitting in her bedroom asking God why her family didn’t have more money, being angry for being dealt the wrong hand. “I had to have lived through certain things to inform my perspectives,” she told me. “Because you’re not given more than you can handle, believe it or not.”
She was a regular teenager, until she wasn’t. In the fall of 2005, according to old news reports, when Owens was in her junior year, she was attacked by three white girls. Per the reports, one of them left a voicemail on her phone, calling her a racial epithet and telling her that she “probably had a disease” because she was Black. Soon after in the school hallway, one of them accused her of having sex with one of their boyfriends and threatened a fight with Owens at cheerleading practice after school. That evening, the girls showed up at a local Blockbuster, where Owens was working at the time. When she saw that the girls who had threatened her earlier were outside waiting for her, she tried to run back inside, but they’d blocked the door. The store manager happened to look out the window at that point. He told police that when he ran outside to help her, Owens was lying on her stomach as the three girls beat her and shouted a racial epithet. One girl ripped out Owens’s earring. The confrontation was caught on a security camera. The girls were charged with second-degree breach of peace, second-degree unlawful restraint, conspiracy to commit breach of peace, and conspiracy to commit unlawful restraint and intimidation by bigotry or bias. They were tried as minors, meaning the hearings were closed to the public. The attorney for one chalked the whole thing up to boyfriend issues, not bigotry.
