You might think it’s silly to say that an unpaid intern with six figures of student debt living in one of the most expensive cities in the world has power, until you know that the internship was at Vogue in the Devil Wears Prada era. Budgets were fat. Everyone was skinny. And that year, among the 20 interns buzzing around the fashion closet, Candace Owens was queen bee.
Yes, that Candace Owens.
“She never took no for an answer,” a Vogue alum told me. “She was organized and relentless, smarter than everyone—and knows that.”
“She was running the show and completely kicking ass,” a fellow intern said. “There was not some kind of formal hierarchy, but it was very clear that she was running the show. People loved her.”
If not her style. People who worked with her said that she would come to work wearing hats with animal ears or “girl boss power suits” with a bra under a blazer. “Very eccentric and not normal,” as one person put it. Yet they all described her as one of the best interns ever. Nobody expected her to continue on at the magazine, though. “She was not a fit at Vogue,” a former higher-up said flatly.
Yet nobody was surprised to see her at the center of the biggest controversy at Paris Fashion Week last fall. In a picture she posted to Twitter (and which remains to this day), she looks over her shoulder, beaming, next to Kanye West. The two are backstage at his fashion show, sporting matching shirts blaring WHITE LIVES MATTER. The spectacle echoed far beyond the fashion world and marked the beginning of West’s media spiral during which, among other hateful statements, he praised Hitler. The fallout cost West most of his business, rightfully, and thrust Owens into broad fame as a political flamethrower.
Owens and rapper Kanye West ignited global controversy when they wore “White Lives Matter” shirts at the Yeezy Paris Fashion Week show last year.@realcandaceo/Twitter.
A million and a half people subscribe to Owens’s Daily Wire show, which airs as both a podcast and a YouTube video through the conservative media company. For an hour, she holds forth with her scorching own-the-libs views on the news. It’s here that she recorded her response to Kanyegate, which led many people to question why she fell short of condemning what was very clearly hate speech. It’s where, in the conservative fiefdom, she’s become the It girl, enough so that just about everyone, including Owens herself, wonders if she has a future in politics. If you see how her staff stays glued to her as she commands their daily meetings, cracks up at her jokes during taping, how commenters online worship her, how the Republican media powers that be—Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson—feed off her words, nothing seems far out of reach.
The show tapes at a nondescript warehouse on the outskirts of Nashville, partly in order to fly under the radar of people who might show up to start something if they knew where to go. Every morning she arrives at 9 a.m. in a chauffeured black SUV with her security guard and her assistant, a Tennessee native named Savanna.
“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.
