As a provocateur, Candace Owens stands alone. The recently fired Daily Wire host built a reputation as one of the few Black voices in rightwing media by tossing Black culture and Black people under the conservative bus. She embraced Donald Trump’s lawlessness while castigating Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Black victims of police brutality as “thugs” and criminals. For Owens, the January 6 insurrection was “virtually nothing”, while the Black Lives Matter movement “is about Black anarchy”. She told a congressional subcommittee that “white supremacy and white nationalism is not a problem that is harming Black America”.
According to her, everything wrong with Black America is caused by Black culture and white liberals, but affirmative action is an affront to whites. Like her former bosses at the rightwing youth organization Turning Point USA, Owens doesn’t believe in systemic racism because she’s “never been a slave in this country”. When it comes to anti-Blackness, she is as remarkably consistent as the angry throngs that spat on third-graders desegregating schools while painting the civil rights movement as “violent”.
