I Thought Going to Candace Owens’s Speech as a Left-Winger Would be Funny. I Was Wrong.

An actual poster retrieved from under the seat in front of me at the event (Okay, maybe it was a little funny). Photo by author.

In all honesty, I was excited to see my fellow UNC students handing out flyers for a Candace Owens speech right here in Chapel Hill. Not because I’m a fan of hers, far from it. I just wanted to get a look at what she and her audience are thinking. I expected a 2016-esque meme fest filled with “triggered”-s and a complete lack of self-awareness.

And for a while, I got it. For the hour between doors opening and the start time for the event, I was met with an eclectic playlist of hits like “Sunflower” by Post Malone and Swae Lee, “Cotton Eyed Joe,” and “We Are the Champions” by Queen. Notably, Queen’s original frontrunner was LGBTQ+ icon and AIDS victim Freddie Mercury. The band has repeatedly tried to stop its songs from being used at Donald Trump rallies and other conservative political events.

Finally, the real event opened with host and comedian Jobob Talefi. In a remarkably original bit, he promoted Turning Point USA’s “triggering” T-shirts, complained about an experience with “a blue hair,” and made a joke about unhoused people.

The actual speech, however, was much darker. Candace Owens is not, in fact, stuck in 2016; she is far from it. Instead, I found that the young conservatives in the room were much further down the path of far-right rhetoric than I had anticipated. 

On Feminism, Sex Ed & Birth Control

The first real topic of the speech was an attack on feminism as a whole and particularly reproductive freedom, including birth control. First, Owens attacked sex ed in public schools, claiming that sexual education curriculums are designed to “sexualize children.” In the 70’s, she argued, most students graduated without having had sex. Within a decade, this trend had reversed, with more students having had sex before 18 than not.

This part of the argument is true. According to the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), 40% of people surveyed who had been 18 in 1970 reported having had sex at the time. By 1980, this number had increased to 56%, and in 1988, 70%. 

“Sometimes you think that you're receiving an education, but actually the goal is to pervert you because there's sort of a financial incentive at the end of it,” Owens said.

To imply that this increase in teen sexual activity was caused by sexual education, however, is just a bald-faced lie. The first edition of the Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education – Kindergarten-12th Grade, the curriculum our current system is based on, was not published until 1991. Since then, there has actually been a “consistent, durable decline in teen sexual activity since the early 1990’s,” according to findings from the NSFG. By 2021, the number of high school students who reported ever having sex had fallen to 30%.

Teen pregnancy has seen a similarly steep decline since 1991, according to the CDC. 2019 once again set a record for the lowest rate of teen births at 16.7 births per 1,000 females. Decreasing rates of teen pregnancy can be linked to both decreased rates of teen sexual activity and increased use of hormonal and barrier birth control methods (thanks, sex ed) among those who do choose to have sex.

Of course, Owens attacked birth control next. I had predicted since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade that the Republican Party would come for birth control next, but I didn’t realize it was already so mainstream to be against both abortion and its best preventative. One study from the Washington University School of Medicine found that by offering access to birth control, abortion rates among women were cut by up to 78% relative to the national average.

To support her views on feminism and birth control, Owens proceeded to rant about Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. Her argument relied solely on a series of misattributed and misquoted statements from the birth control pioneer.

Owens smeared the entire existence of Planned Parenthood and birth control outreach as an effort to eradicate Black people and other marginalized groups. Her argument relied mainly on a quote from one of Sanger’s letters to NAACP founder W.E.B. DuBois, with whom she worked on expanding birth control access in Black communities: “We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”

In context, however, the quote is much less insidious than it would appear at first glance. Rather than an admission of evil intent, which would be a pretty foolish thing to admit to DuBois, Sanger was expressing concern over racially-based opposition to birth control. After all, Black Americans did–and still do–have very good reason to be suspicious of the medical establishment. 

Sanger did associate with the eugenicist movement to an undeniable extent. Sanger appeared to see eugenicists as useful allies in the pursuit of birth control access, but also critiqued the movement and was active in anti-Nazi circles. 

“To give them the means of helping themselves is perhaps the richest gift of all. We believe birth control knowledge brought to this group, is the most direct, constructive aid that can be given [to] them to improve their immediate situation,” Sanger once said of Black Americans.

Sanger did participate in some very objectionable activities, such as speaking at Ku Klux Klan events and espousing eugenicist beliefs. As a result, Planned Parenthood has distanced itself from her legacy. To disregard the value of family planning services as a whole as a result of the actions of a woman who lived and worked in the 30s and 40s is a logical fallacy, one which she later employed against Civil Rights-era democrats to imply that all democratic policies aimed to help Black people were inherently evil and manipulative.

“I don't know who did it better, Lyndon B. Johnson or Margaret Sanger in terms of just being so outwardly evil, and then somehow textbooks just erased the evil of it,” Candace said.

On LGBTQ+ People

Like feminism, Owens described the acceptance of LGBTQ+ people as an attack on the family. While she mentioned gay and lesbian people a few times, the main target of her ire was transgender people. 

“Well, we have to accept that men can be women and women can be men, or trans people are going to die,” Owens said mockingly in a rant about liberal fear-mongering about issues like climate change. 

In her analogy, she attempted to make the argument that the left uses the fear of death as a weapon to convert young people to their cause. Unfortunately, this is less of a manipulation tactic and more of an appeal to a real threat. LGBTQ+ youths are at a significantly higher risk of suicide than their cishet peers and transgender youth are even more so. Gender-affirming treatment, however, has been shown to reduce suicidality by 73% in one 2022 study. Despite this, Republicans have made a concerted effort to take this life-saving care away from trans children.

“I can't think of anything more Satanic,” Owens said when someone asked about her fixation on transgender people. 

“I am particularly angry when it comes to any issue that involves children, right? So that's why I have a whole series on vaccines. It's why I talk about transgenderism on my show, the way that I have been radically transformed as a poster speaker since becoming a mom. What you're noticing is the fault of their instinct and I will fight to the death to protect my cubs.”

Me too, Candace! Which is why I keep having to write about how your party is deliberately pushing rhetoric and policies that have the potential to kill trans children. 

One of Owens’ previous quotes regarding transgender people earned a spot in my article on Nex Benedict (he/they), a nonbinary 16-year-old who ended their own life just one day after being attacked by his classmates along with another trans student. 

In a podcast episode titled “Why Some People Deserve to be Discriminated Against,” Candace Owens said the following: “I openly discriminate against weirdos and freaks, and I encourage you to do the same."   

On Education

Perhaps the most upsetting takeaway from this speech, in my opinion, was Owens’s take on the education system. Owens railed against public education as a system intended to propagandize children towards statist and left-wing causes. 

“It's really important for you to just recognize that within the school system, the reason why they built the school system was to propagandize you and to to make you go out and to support ludicrous causes, causes that were evil,” Owens said.

Owens has an extensive history of attacking public education, often in downright apocalyptic terms. The government is coming for your children, and all responsible conservative parents must pull their kids out of public schools to protect them.

“... they are coming for your children. It’s about much more than mask mandates and forced vaccinations. Hyper-sexualization, communist ethics, common core math—I could go on,” Owens said in one Facebook post.

Communist ethics? Really?

While there is some merit to the idea that public schools are designed to create productive workers rather than critical thinkers, the idea that public schools exist primarily to push a left-wing agenda is ludicrous. Teaching Black history, which racist policies like segregation and slavery have objectively marred, is not indoctrination; a statement only rises to the level of indoctrination when an opinion is stated as fact.

The reality is most public schools are not as left-wing as many Republicans would have you believe. They might (and I do mean might) discourage racism or other discrimination among students. Still, for the most part, critical race theory and “gender ideology” just aren’t taught in public schools.

The primary goal of public schools in America is to promote literacy, math skills, and, ideally, critical thinking. These are precisely the resources students need to combat indoctrination they might encounter in school or elsewhere. Many of my teachers were Obama-level liberals at the strongest, and I most definitely did not passively converge on their ideas. Neither did many of my Republican classmates.

On several occasions, Owens called for the abolition of the Department of Education (DOE). In addition to structuring some educational policies and conducting research on outcomes, the DOE is a significant source of funding for public schools. Under the Title I School program, for example, the DOE distributes about $14 billion in funding annually to low-income schools that might otherwise struggle to provide adequate education. 

Perhaps most importantly for UNC students, the DOE is also the country's largest provider of student aid for undergraduates. Through its Federal Student Aid program, the DOE disburses over $100 billion annually in scholarships, loans, and work-study funds to make a college education more attainable.

Owens’ smearing of public education was, quite frankly, frightening to hear. While Owens didn’t make it entirely clear what alternative she had in mind for educating the nation’s children, it seems she would rather students be educated either at home by “traditional” mothers or through private schools.

“Our society was so much better when women were involved every single day with their children, before we handed them over to the Department of Education,” Owens said in response to a question about her views on feminism as a female political figure. “I do not see feminism as having accomplished anything in our society. I actually think it was a nightmare that's been repackaged in our textbooks.”

Notably, Owens has three children, the oldest of which is just over three years old. Unfortunately, she has not taken her own advice and stepped back from the public spotlight to educate and raise them full-time.  

In reality, many American families cannot afford private education or transition to a single-earner household to educate their children themselves. Most Americans’ savings can’t survive a single $1,000 emergency, let alone $10,000 in private school tuition. 

No matter how you slice it, getting rid of public education to protect good Christian children from learning about gay people would mean many children getting no education at all. To hear my classmates, many of whom benefitted from a free K-12 education and/or federal student aid, interrupt Owens mid-thought to applaud the abolition of the DOE made my heart drop.

“Gay Son or Thot Daughter?”

For those who were (blissfully) unaware, “gay son or thot daughter” was a common question for man-on-the-street interviews from, I don’t know, 2016 to 2021 or so? The Know Your Meme page mostly refers to a different question, but it was definitely prevalent for a while.

Prior to the Candace Owens event, Yikyak users seemed to agree that the most pressing issue of Owens’ appearance was that someone simply must ask her if she’d prefer a “homosexual” son or a “promiscuous” daughter.

To my surprise, someone actually asked this question. Owens refused to answer it, but it seems to me that she was leaning towards thot daughter.

“As a Christian, I think that homosexuality is a sin,” she said before ultimately waving off the question. To her credit, she did handle this in good humor.

On Religion

Owens focused heavily on the role of faith in conservative politics throughout the talk, expressing commonly held beliefs that Christians, the largest religious group in the nation, are persecuted by our disproportionately Christian government. 

“It's a spiritual battle of race in America, and Christians, we need to start fighting, and I don't mean like pick up your swords and run outside tomorrow,” Owens said.

She also explicitly espoused her Christian nationalist views. Christian nationalism is a religious and political ideology that proposes that America is a nation by Christians, for Christians that should uphold traditional values. This ideology is fundamentally opposed to the Constitution, which specifically states that the United States must establish no state religion. In addition to supporting the persecution of LGBTQ+ people, religious minorities, and women, Christian nationalism has been linked to increasing anti-democratic sentiment, including the January 6 attack on the Capitol Building.

There is nothing wrong with personally identifying with Christianity, or even voting in a way that reflects one’s faith. What is harmful is the idea that the separation between church and state should be eliminated in order to enforce Christian views on the entire population.

“I like to be called a Christian nationalist, I think it’s cool,” Owens said in her final comment for the night. 

Despite claims that college campuses are liberal strongholds hostile to conservatives and Christians alike, Owens’ comment was met with applause from the audience.

Final Thoughts

Listening to Candace Owens speak was a thoroughly unsettling experience. Many of her arguments were based on villainizing one person to dismiss entire movements, framing opponents as insidious, satanic threats, and just outright lying to her audience. While many attendees were visibly there out of opposition to her ideas, the 250-seat room reached capacity within about half an hour of doors opening, with many fans and opposition members alike failing to even get in. 

Listening to my classmate offer rounds of applause for the abolition of the DOE, calling transgender people satanic, and explicitly supporting Christian nationalism was alarming to me – and I was not alone in this experience.

“Ultimately, I came away feeling mildly distressed hearing my peers applaud blatant ignorance and hatred, especially toward individuals who don’t conform to the specific norms encouraged by Candace Owens and her brand of conservatism. After doing it once I do not have any interest in hearing her speak again, but I am glad to have had the opportunity to at least attend the event and consider new positions,” UNC junior McKenzie McCallop said when I reached out for public comment after the event. 

I hated just about every second of Owens’ speech, but like McCallop, I’m glad I went. It’s better to know what exactly you’re up against than not, especially in the lead-up to such a critical election season. That, and someone else didn’t get in because I did.