Select date
Why I Do Not Support Candace Owens
4,166 words
Greg Johnson floated the idea of my writing an essay on Candace Owens being the Non-White Ally of 2023. I said no, because I think she is a snake. Has Candace Owens been saying good things lately? Has she been dabbling in Jewish-question territory, helping to bring some of our basic talking points to the mainstream and shifting the Overton window? I don’t deny that she has. But just because she has been doing some positive things lately does not mean that I am going to ignore a decade of cynicism, opportunism, ruthless careerism, lying, and jaw-dropping stupidity to bestow on her the official and much-coveted Trav Seal of Approval™.
Sometimes bad people do good work. I acknowledge that Richard Spencer’s debate with Sargon yielded positive results for the dissident Right. It kicked off the Internet BloodSports fad of 2018, and many pro-whites trace their red-pill journey back to that era of YouTube. But just because I concede that Richard Spencer did that one good thing does not mean that I therefore endorse Richard Spencer.
The problem with endorsing people is that you are then obligated to disavow them once they start saying and doing things that are indefensible. You can’t just quietly step away after an endorsement, because everyone is going to be nagging you by asking, “What do you think about what your boy did/said this week? Do you agree with that?” Even if you do then disavow such a person, you look like an idiot for ever having advocated for him in the first place — and the guy’s supporters are going to think you’re a traitor for changing your mind.
This is why I will not endorse Candace Owens. There is a high probability that she will say or do something extremely stupid in the future, and I don’t want to have that on my conscience when it happens. It is also my belief that she does not have any sincere convictions and is entirely a careerist in her motivations.
First, let’s address the elephant in the room: Candace Owens is black. That’s not my main issue with her, but it is also not a non-issue. Throughout the history of the dissident Right, there has occasionally been some debate as to what level of involvement non-whites should be allowed to have in the pro-white movement. What if a black guy sincerely believes in the cause of white survival and wants to help? What about mischlings? Are we going by the Nuremberg Laws? What if someone is half-white, but his work is amazing? Some hardliners might say that we must support only those who are completely white. Others might have more of a “big tent” philosophy. Others still might advocate a middle approach: non-whites can be in the audience, but not on the stage.
No one ever anticipated, however, that we would eventually be in the situation we are in now, where non-whites such as Candace Owens and Vivek Ramaswamy are the most prominent spokesmen of our talking points in the mainstream. While I generally lean pro-big tent, I find this somewhat problematic.
There is a saying which holds that “It took Nixon to go to China,” meaning that before Nixon there was no US President who was willing to give official recognition to Communist China because they were afraid that they’d be accused of being “soft on Communism.” Nixon’s anti-Communist bona fides were so unassailable, however, that he could get away with it. This is why there is probably some short-term value in having non-whites who are impervious to accusations of racism and white supremacy pushing our ideas into the mainstream. Candace Owens herself has said that she can say things that would get a white person cancelled, and she is certainly correct. But while this might be fine for the time being, it cannot be allowed to become the norm. One possible danger in this is that it can have a deradicalizing effect on whites, giving them false hope that multiculturalism is indeed workable. Thus, eventually Candace Owens, Vivek Ramaswamy, and their ilk will need to be pushed aside so that white people can start advocating for themselves.
It is my belief that Candace Owens was promoted by the GOP establishment as a deradicalizing agent. She is boomer catnip. Her job is to be a white-presenting, decent-looking-for-a-black-girl spokesman who repeats boomers’ opinions back to them. The entire point of Candace Owens’ #Blexit grift was to gaslight donors into believing that there was a lot more black support for Trump than there actually was. Jaden McNeil was at Turning Point USA when #Blexit was ongoing, and said that any black person who wanted to meet Trump could just ask TPUSA and that they would fly said black to Washington, DC to have his picture taken with Donald Trump. In 2020 there were delusional Trump cultists who were convinced that he was going to get a preposterous percentage of the black vote, and possibly win it. There are still people predicting Donald Trump will win the black vote in 2024. Candace Owens was a big part of that op.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s White Identity Politics here.
Some might say that “people can change.” Indeed, they can. And there are others such as Charlie Kirk and Matt Walsh who I think were red-pilled a while ago and were just waiting until it was safe to reveal their true power levels. I don’t begrudge them that, but with Candace Owens, it’s different. Her history is one of such naked opportunism and cynicism that no matter what she says, I still feel the need to remain on guard.
In her defense, Candace does seem to be something of a whitephile. Her parents came from the American Virgin Islands, and she grew up in an upper-middle-class gated community in Connecticut. I’ve heard that in her old social media posts, Candace talked about having some white ancestry by way of France. To borrow Tariq Nasheed’s term, Owens has no Foundation Black American ancestry, nor was she ever assimilated to that culture. She is also atypically non-ethnocentric for a black. She’s never dated a black guy in her life. Her entire romantic history since high school has been white guys, and her current husband is white. So if I am going to give Candace a thin sliver of the ol’ “benefit of the doubt,” I’ll say it is possible that Candace Owens may have some intuitive pro-white bias. She clearly prefers the company of whites to blacks. That’s fine, but knowing that makes her frequent playings of the race card seem all the more cynical, and her promotion by the GOP as an avatar for black America all the more disingenuous.
Now we are going to dive in to some Candace Owens lore. A lot of people don’t know that her story goes back a lot further than most people realize. So let’s step inside the Counter-Currents TARDIS and go back in time to where it all began.
Origin story
Candace Owens’ first brush with fame was in 2007, when she was a senior in high school. The story goes that one night, she received a series of racist prank voice messages. According to Owens, these messages included gratuitous use of racial slurs and one promise to kill her in a manner similar to how Martin Luther King was killed. The police were contacted and they were able to locate the perpetrators: a group of teenagers in a car. One teen was allegedly Candace’s ex-boyfriend, although Candace claims they were just friends of hers — one of whom was only 14. But most noteworthy is the fact that one of the kids happened to be the Governor’s son. Thus, it was a major local news story in Connecticut. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) even held a protest outside Candace’s school. The FBI was called in to confirm that Candace had not pulled off a hoax. Her family ultimately sued the school district and won $37,500 in damages.
This incident later caused some embarrassment for Candace following her 2017 conservative rebrand, as it was pure victim narrative and cancel culture. Owens would later attempt to recast the affair as a red-pilling event, saying that it was when she saw 14-year-old kids put through the meatgrinder and branded with the scarlet R which made her understand the evils of cancel culture. She would also attempt to dodge any responsibility for the affair, claiming that she had hated the attention and that the whole debacle had unfolded against her will. She claims that she had told a teacher about the hateful calls, and that the teacher then forced her to tell the Principal, who then called the police without her consent. I suppose some outside force also forced her family to sue the school district. As Owens later recalled:
If I was a Leftist or if I was a true Democrat, I would relish in victimhood. I would love that. I would say I’m black, I’m a woman, I can’t do anything, and it’s all your fault. That situation in high school would be the pinnacle of my life, but I hated it. I cowed away from it. It ate me alive, because I felt there was permanence in what was said about me.
This sentiment would seem to be at odds with her subsequent actions, when she did in fact attempt to carve out a career as a professional victim.
Social Autopsy: The doxing website
In 2016, Candace Owens set up a Kickstarter in hopes of raising $75,000 from likeminded liberals for the creation of a website called Social Autopsy, which she billed as an anti-cyberbullying website. You see, as a victim of cyberbullying herself, Owens wanted to make sure that no one else had to go through the same kind of traumatic experience. The website was to be a database of mean things that people have said about others online. If anyone saw someone engaging in “hate speech” on Facebook, for example, he could then create a profile for that person on Social Autopsy which would include their real name, location, school or place of work, as well as screenshots of the mean things they’ve said online.
Of this, Candace said:
The age of technology and social media has slowly disintegrated individual accountability, the consequences of which are devastating. We attach [people’s] words to their places of employment, and anybody in the entire world can search for them. What we are doing is figuratively lifting the masks up so nobody can hide behind, you know, Twitter handles or privatized profiles. It’s all real, and it’s all researchable. You can still say whatever you want to say on social media, but you have to be willing to stand by your words.
More alarmingly, Candace explicitly stated that you could create profiles of minors. This is of questionable legality. Thus, anyone would have been able to create a profile for a middle schooler who trolled about Hitler having done nothing wrong. This followed naturally from the premise that the site’s purpose was to prevent the kind of harassment that Owens had gone through in 2007.
Owens did not get the reaction from fellow liberals that she had anticipated. The Young Turks discussed the proposed website and thought it was a very bad idea. Owens was also approached around this time by one Zoe Quin, who was herself an anti-cyberbullying activist. Being the original bête noire of the Gamergate movement, Zoe Quin knew a thing or two about online harassment, as she had herself been harassed after her ex-boyfriend alleged that Quin’s woke video game Depression Quest received a favorable review from gaming website Kotaku because she was sleeping with the review’s author.
Quin claims that she approached Candace Owens with some concerns about Social Autopsy and pointed out the myriad ways in which her website could in fact make online harassment significantly worse. For example, SJW vigilantes could use the information they found on the site to dox people and contact their workplaces. As much as Owens would later deny that Social Autopsy was a “doxing site,” due to security holes in the website users on Kiwi Farms were able to access profiles due to security holes before the site went live. They proceeded to dox people just to prove that it could be done.
Zoe Quin was shocked by how ill-informed Owens was on the subject of cyber-harassment. Owens had never heard the term “doxing” before, nor had she heard of Gamergate. So uninformed about Gamergate was Owens that for a time, she appeared to be under the impression that Zoe Quin was the leader of Gamergate rather than its primary target. The exchanges between the two thus became more heated. As the controversy around Social Autopsy grew, Owens acquired a legion of detractors who bombarded her social media with messages of disapproval. Owens then accused Quin of orchestrating a troll campaign against her and proceeded to leak her correspondence with her. This brought Randi Lee Harper, another female game designer and Gamergate hate figure, into the fray.
Despite Owens being a liberal who had created a doxing website dedicated to fighting “hate speech,” her feud with Zoe Quin made her a darling with the Gamergate crowd, who were delighted to see a liberal black woman confirm their biases and make juicy accusations against the jezebel of game journalism. A poll on Kiwi Farms asked readers who they sided with, and Owens won with 81.3% of the vote. Gamergate grifters Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich in turn offered Owens words of support.
Owens made one last stab at making it in the liberal sphere as a professional victim. She gave a TED Talk about online activism that came and went with little fanfare. After that, she disappeared from the Internet for nine months. When she came back, she would be a very different Candace Owens.
Red Pill Black
Candace reportedly spent the time brushing up on conservative talking points. She read books by Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter, as well as black conservatives such as Ben Carson and Thomas Sowell. She was preparing for a rebrand. On July 9, 2017, Owens debuted her new conservative persona, Red Pill Black, with a two-minute = second video entitled “Mom, Dad . . . I’m a Conservative,” a comedy sketch wherein she “came out” as a conservative to her parents (played by herself).
I’ll just put my cards on the table: I do not believe that this was a sincere conversion. I think this a case of someone who, having failed to break into the Left-wing establishment, was now pandering to Gamergaters, the only people who had hitherto given her any good press. Playing the victim didn’t work for her, but feuding with an SJW got her a lot of attention and goodwill, so she cynically and opportunistically leaned into that. Some people just want to be somebody and are not too particular as to how they get there.
Owens’ rebrand as a black conservative was enormously successful, and her subsequent rise was meteoric. After only a handful of videos, she had already landed interviews with Alex Jones, Stephen Crowder, Stephan Molyneux, and Paul Joseph Watson (who had only a year before made a video about her doxing site). In November of 2017, only four months after the first Red Pill Black video, Charlie Kirk appointed Owens as Turning Point USA’s “Director of Urban Engagement” — which is hilarious if you know anything about her distinctly un-urban upper-middle-class background.
Not everyone in the conservative YouTube sphere was so eager to welcome the newly-rebranded Owens, given that while she was then parading around as a Right-winger, she was still hellbent on getting Social Autopsy off the ground. Having been rejected by the Left, she was now attempting to fundraise off of boomer conservatives for her “anti-bullying website.” This was insane and made it hard to take her conversion seriously. It is understandable why a liberal would want to create a doxing site to stop hate speech, but surely a newly red-pilled person would understand that such a site would be weaponized against the Right far more than the Left.
Owens’ most effective critic was another black conservative who goes by the name of Tree of Logic. Tree of Logic is a former police officer who grew up in the ghettos of Washington, DC. Some on the dissident Right might remember her for her 2018 debates with David Duke and Richard Spencer, as well as the fact that she also infamously — and amusingly — worked part-time as a professional dominatrix. While Tree of Logic is a philo-Semite, she has a pretty good nose for bullshit, and has made some of the most devastating takedown videos I’ve ever seen.
Tree of Logic made two video exposés about Owens and Social Autopsy. It was a personal matter for Tree of Logic, because apparently the site had a profile on her that was going to become public after it launched. This was a security problem for her since, as an ex-police officer, it is not unheard-of for criminals released from prison to try to track down and kill the cop who had put them in jail. More videos followed from Andy Warski and No Bullshit which questioned the sincerity of Candace’s conversion as well as the madness of an alleged conservative creating a doxing site.
These exposés caused a backlash against Owens on Right-wing YouTube, and commenters made their feelings known with extreme frankness on social media. Owens would then claim that the backlash against her was being orchestrated by — wait for it — Richard Spencer (who she claimed was secretly working for the Democrats)! Her evidence for this was that Richard Spencer had tweeted out the Andy Warski and No Bullshit videos about Social Autopsy. Thus, rather than acknowledging that the backlash against her had been started by black female conservative Tree of Logic, Owens blamed it on evil White Nationalists. Owens had a habit of making up lies about her critics as well as about what their criticisms were about and where they were coming from.
Social Autopsy was set to automatically go live once the site reached 100,000 profiles. It was at 95,000 when Tree of Logic published her videos, and Owens, finally seeing the folly of the venture, at last pulled the plug on the operation. The controversy still lingered, and so Dave Rubin offered her a chance to debate the issue. But rather than debate Tree of Logic — who Owens claimed was a crackhead being paid to lie about her by shadowy figures — she chose to debate Blair White, who had never made a video about her. Tree of Logic would have wiped the floor with her and her motives would have been harder to question, so she so chose Blair White with the intention of using White’s trans status as a way of biasing the conservative viewing audience against her opponent. Owens spent much of the run-up to the debate, as well as the debate itself, misgendering Blair White and referring to him as a man.
I first heard about Red Pill Black in early 2018, when she was first starting to get some serious buzz. She had started a YouTube page the year before and was already on the verge of breaking into the mainstream. She was a Right-wing YouTube success story, someone who had come from our circles and “made it,” achieving the herculean task of transitioning from the Internet into a real-world political career. And yet despite Owens’ growing popularity with normie conservatives, for whom based blacks are their personal kryptonite, no one in the YouTube community that Candace Owens came out of had anything nice to say about her or seemed particularly happy for her success. Having done the research, I have a better understanding of why this was.
But by the end of 2018, Candace Owens had become bigger than YouTube. FOX News began calling, and by April 2019, after having only been a conservative for a mere 22 months, she was testifying before Congress about white supremacy.
Weapons-grade stupidity
I’ve never followed Candace Owens all that closely, but on the occasions when she did come to my attention, it was due to her saying something eye-rollingly and sigh-inducingly stupid. One of the more famous examples was when she claimed that Hitler had been a globalist:
I actually don’t have any problems at all with the word “nationalism.” I think that the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don’t want. Whenever we say “nationalism,” the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. You know, [Hitler] was a National Socialist, but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine. The problem is that he wanted — he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German. Everybody to look a different way. That’s not, to me, that’s not nationalism.
You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s collection The Cultured Thug here.
From this we can see that Owens had absolutely no idea about what the terms “nationalism” and “globalism” even mean. To me it seems that she was merely playing a role and spouting a word salad of conservative buzzwords and catchphrases: “nationalist”, “globalist”, “make ____ great again.” Ben Shapiro was not wrong when he referred to Owens’ “faux sophistication.” She really does try to sound smarter than she actually is, but is attractive and charismatic enough, and a strong enough performer, that she comes off well even when she is saying complete nonsense.
I remember another occasion when Owens went to the southern border to cover a migrant caravan. She said that the migrants should be given citizenship in exchange for going on record that George Soros was funding their caravan. This strikes me as someone who at best understands conservatism intellectually, but doesn’t really feel it in their gut. I think most conservatives would rather not have the migrants become citizens than to have yet another thing to wave their fist at George Soros over.
The absolute stupidest thing I have ever heard Candace Owens say was something she said after a propaganda visit to a prison to talk to the inmates:
After visiting prison facilities last week & speaking w/ the inmates I feel passionately that they should be allowed to vote. I also feel passionately that if they could vote — they would be voting against the left. I will release footage of my interviews with them next week.
In hindsight, I think was a propaganda move to build public support for what would become Donald Trump’s First Step Act — but dear God, what a stupid thing to say.
Who remembers Hank Johnson? Johnson was a black Congressman from Georgia who became famous after a 2010 Congressional hearing during which he expressed concern that if too many American troops were sent to Guam that it might cause the entire island to tip over. He was apparently of the belief that islands are pieces of land that float on top of the water, and that if too much weight is placed on one side it will cause it to tip over, like an inflatable swimming pool raft. The incident went viral and it provided race-conscious whites with some schadenfreude, knowing that even the most elite blacks were still capable of jaw-dropping stupidity.
Now imagine if Hank Johnson had one day started naming the Jew, quoting salacious passages from the Talmud and musing on the Khazar Theory. I might then say, “Good for him.” I certainly would not stand in his way. But one thing I definitely would not do is pretend that he never said that the island of Guam would tip over if you put too many troops on it.
Likewise, I am not willing to pretend that Candace Owens never said anything as stupid as “convicted felons are natural conservatives, and if given the right to vote, would side with the party of law and order.” That is only marginally less stupid than talking about Guam tipping over.
This is why I refuse to endorse Candace Owens. If she helps to shift the Overton window, great, but I am sure that she will do that regardless of whether or not I endorse her. Who knows? Maybe she had a religious experience and her newfound j-wokeness is totally genuine. But then again, the burden of proof to be on me. She has a long history of lying, cynical opportunism, and stupidity which a priori disqualifies her from the official Trav Seal of Approval™. Maybe she can earn that seal in the future, but for the time being, I do not trust her.
