Ok so hear me out... Candace Owens is not our friend

Unpacking the rise and alarming rebrand of the alt-right’s favorite commentator

"Omg, you have to see this!" I grimace as I click on the TikTok sent with the text, bracing for impact, seeing whose page the post leads me to: Candace Owens.

Instead of the wildest take cheering on white supremacy ever said by a Black person, I’m met with something even more nefarious: common ground.

In the video, Candace is scolding Ryan Reynolds for his controlling and jealous behavior, which is most likely the catalyst for the "It Ends With Us" drama. I laugh at her zingers against him, nod along as she lays out her evidence, and quickly scroll to the beginning of the playlist to get caught up on all the tea she has for us.

Owens shared that "It Ends With Us" has been her most popular content ever, with each TikTok garnering 1.5 million views. Her YouTube has quadrupled in views, reaching 4 million subscribers. Most of these gains have come from the one demographic she’s historically been very unpopular with: 20- to 40-year-old women. My personal TikTok has exploded with spinoff videos about the drama, all leading back to Owens’ evidence being what swayed their most recent opinions of the news and sharing how much they love her videos on the lawsuits.

In case you have no idea who this person is, Candace Owens is an alt-right political commentator. She has close ties to Trump, Breitbart, and hosted a show on the Daily Wire. When they coined the phrase: ‘not all skin folk are kin folk,’ they somehow knew Candace was coming.

Until this moment, as a Black woman liberal, Candace was my archnemesis. If she has no one actively scheming her downfall and wishing she would let go of that silk press for a month to give those ends a break, I’m dead. So you can only imagine how much I hate to admit I love her new videos too. I trust she is telling me the truth and not holding back since she is famous for being a straight shooter.

But with her recently established trust mixed with her new approach to blurring entertainment and politics, I worry she now has us right where she wants us.

To understand the deep terror I have for the rebrand of Candace Owens from alt-right figurehead to now-beloved celeb news commentator, we first need to go back to Candace’s shocking origin story.

The Before of C.O.

Candace Owens started her career as a staunch Democrat. Even more surprisingly, she was represented by the NAACP for one of their highest profile lawsuits in Connecticut in 2007.

In high school, Candace faced horrific racist threats from classmates. Students would leave her threatening voicemails threatening to kill her, calling her dirty, and stating they would burn her house down, along with even more disgusting attacks. Suing the school for not protecting her, Owens won a settlement for $37,500. From there, she entered a journalism program for college vocal about protections for Black Americans and the need to end systematic racism.

Post-college, she started a pro-Democrat, anti-conservative blog called Degree180. On the platform she openly criticized the Tea Party and spoke about the realities of racism. The platform also posted articles mocking Donald Trump.

In 2016, she began crowdfunding for a new app called Social Autopsy where trolls on the internet could be searched and exposed. The goal was to hold horrible trolls accountable for their online speech in their real lives, but the idea created a paradox: the trolls could use it against their targets as well.

When a series of notable (liberal) internet personalities posted their concerns about doxxing and worked to circumvent a platform because of safety concerns, a Twitter war broke out. The lore is deep and the tea is hot, but Owens’ first internet war, ‘made her to become a conservative overnight because the real racists were progressive.’

Candace’s descent into conservatism came because she was convinced these influencers called their fans to target her. This conspiracy theory was only believed by one media group: Breitbart.

The Rise of C.O.

Turning her back on everything that happened to her before, Candace dives deep into her political conservatism. In 2017, she launches Red Black Pill, a YouTube channel aimed at young Black conservatives, because honestly, there’s nothing Republicans love more than a misinformed Matrix reference. Her first video is a parody of “coming out” to her parents, entitled “Mom, I’m Conservative.” I forever screwed my algorithm to watch it, and if she weren’t pure evil, I would be able to admit that she is funny.

She got her big break in the Republican world after a major racist scandal broke out in Turning Point USA, a Republican group working to get more high school, college, and other young students into conservatism. She was hired to stave off the accusations of racism after a TPUSA leader texted, “I hate Black people, all of them.” I wish I was joking. I am not. Once in the leadership ranks, she was exposed to heavy hitters, including Trump himself, who sang her praises. In 2018, Kanye (RIP the old Kanye) tweeted his support, and the rest is history.

Her humor, media savvy, and unfilled niche led her to quickly rise to the top, enabling her to become your least favorite uncle’s favorite Black woman. She landed a commentator spot at The Daily Wire, where she hosted a popular show. From there, she began her Blexit campaign, working overtime to get Black people to defect from the Democratic Party.

The Candace Owens I know wears a White Lives Matter shirt at Fashion Week, said Harry Styles is making men too feminine, popularized anti-trans rhetoric in sports, claims Black people are inherently dangerous, implied George Floyd deserved what happened to him and had fentanyl in his system, said the KKK isn’t a threat to Black Americans, the NRA was founded to protect Black people, defended Hitler’s nationalism as fine except for “everything else,” and honestly, so much more.

To sum it up, the Candace Owens I know is bat-shit crazy, so who is this new version?

The Now of C.O.

With more than 4.5 million followers on TikTok, Owens is just getting started.

This is an aside, but the tea is so hot, so I have to share. Her love story with her husband is truly so unhinged. George Farmer, her now husband, was the head of Turning Point UK when they first met virtually to talk shop. No romance, no meeting in person, no dates, no inclination of interest. Then according to him, there was a divine godly intervention and he proposed after two weeks of talking on FaceTime, and the gag is she actually said yes!

(Yes this is all real. Her UKIP coded husband told me (us) on a podcast. The amount of YouTube videos of them speaking I listened to for this piece is as diabolical as they are. Also, George and I have the same birthday which depressed me for an entire calendar day.)

Fast forward through one major antisemitism scandal that got her removed from The Daily Wire (I will not repeat it but just know it was horrific and you can imagine how bad something must be to get cancelled by Josh Shapiro) and four kids later – here she is.

On Tiktok, she has found new popularity with a sprinkling of surprisingly liberal takes and then exploded with her It Ends With Us coverage.

Next for Candace is a new media platform called Club Candace along with dropping a book called ‘You Should Make Him a Sandwich.’ She is branching into a middle ground territory she didn’t seek before, looking to shift women’s minds about feminism. It’s not too crazy. She’s still a successful working mom, she believes you should be too, but like the trad wives that come before her, it’s all laced with patriarchal and white supremacist values.

This is why I am terrified by her million-plus following rise amongst women specifically, because so many are not aware of the full agenda that has been years in the making and algorithms are extremely intuitive.

The Warning Signs

After the fifth video where I agreed with her, I said ‘oh no.’ Now you may be wondering, Chanda, isn’t this great? Isn’t this the trend we hope politics go in? More understanding, less division.

Normally I would say, yes absolutely, but if there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s the fact Candace Owens is not shifting an inch left. I fear she has figured out an entry point to start moving more young women right without them even realizing.

Owens is an effective communicator, even if I disagree with every single thing she says, and has leveraged her journalism background to build a successful brand. I understand the itch to ignore the unhinged stances she has, such as ‘Black people must take responsibility for slavery,’ in favor of laughing along with her about Ryan Reynold’s cringe writing in Deadpool and Wolverine, but to do so is incredibly dangerous. She is an unabashed white supremacist, and to ignore that is playing right into her hands.

It’s odd, even for me, to see her and register the horrific rhetoric she spews. We aren’t accustomed to navigating the space she occupies, one where Blackness and bigotry are unified. It’s disorienting.

Culture has shifted to center women–especially Black women—in political conversations. Strategically, she subverts the progress us Black women fought for to wedge herself into conversations to stand up for ‘white rights.’ She also knows liberal women are girls' girls and exploits that, slipping past our defenses, just to argue we never belonged here in the first place.

That’s why I loathe her more than anyone, yes, even more than Donald Trump at times. She weaponizes her Black femininity to be a tool for the oppressor, an act that is unforgivable to me. She’s counting on us to extend our space of understanding to accommodate her, creating a faulty sense of trust to make us malleable to her darker ideas. It starts with believing her about Ryan Reynolds, but eventually, we trust her takes on womanhood, politics, and culture.

Candace is smart and understands that this is her opportunity to repackage her brand to make herself appealing to a key demographic that has long been just out of reach. It’s our job to stay vigilant and make sure we leave her platform while we’re still laughing with her – before she’s laughing at us.