When musician Kayne West made what may be one of the riskiest moves of his career — he tweeted out a few days ago, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks” — a social media firestorm erupted. Those on the Left were, and still are, upset and outraged.
“There is this liberal indoctrination,” said Candace Owens, a conservative commentator and communications director for Turning Point USA, on “The Ingraham Angle” Tuesday night. “They think they have a monopoly — not just on our students, which is what we deal with at Turning Point USA, but with also on the entire black race in America.”
“They have created a mental prison for all of us,” she told Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “And the second somebody runs off what I refer to as the ‘Democratic plantation,’ they send the dogs out,” said Owens.
Owens is a popular and outspoken conservative who happens to be black — and she flat-out rejects liberal ideology and the notion that black people are victims. That, coupled with her other conservative opinions, sets the Left’s hair on fire pretty regularly — but this time around, the reaction was far more intense because of Kanye West’s tremendous Twitter following (more than 17.4 million people).
Tom Arnold, for example, tweeted a response to all of this that was so foul he had to delete it. Arnold wasn’t the only one. The Left came down hard on both Owens and West.
On Tuesday, West offered some additional “controversial” thoughts in a conversation with Hot 93 radio personality DJ Ebro. These were even more specific and potentially incendiary — for those on the Left, anyway — than his praise of Owens on Twitter. And what was Tuesday’s gasp-worthy Kanye West utterance? “I love Donald Trump.”
Host Laura Ingraham pointed out that the Ebro show suggested West lived in a bubble, that he wasn’t thinking independently, and that he had no idea what was happening in the real world.
So “Because you don’t live on the streets, you can’t comment on anything?” Ingraham said.
Owens agreed, calling the radio hosts’ argument “fallacious.”
“To suggest that because somebody has money they can’t think or they don’t have any knowledge of facts or data makes entirely no sense,” said Owens. “In fact, you could argue that they may have more access to those things.”
Owens said she believes the end result of this controversy will be positive. “You create a conflict, and at the end of the day, it ends up waking up more people to an underlying problem, which is the fact that we don’t have enough diversity of thought within the black community.”
On Tuesday afternoon, Kanye shared this with his Twitter followers:
to be great is to be misunderstood
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 24, 2018
Interaction on the West/Owens situation garnered so much social media attention that Twitter included it as a “moment.” In its original moment headline and accompanying text, Twitter used the phrase “far right” twice in describing Candace.
Owens’ April 21 response to the Twitter moment is now pinned to the top of her feed.
Far right? Allow me to clarify: I believe the black community can do it without hand-outs. I believe the Democrats have strapped us to our past to prevent us from our futures. And I won’t stop fighting until all black Americans see that.
I’m not far right—I’m free. pic.twitter.com/wtqCuYPtM2— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) April 21, 2018
Twitter has since edited its moment headline and accompanying text. It appended this line: “UPDATE: After reviewing feedback from users, we have amended some of the language used in the previous version of this Moment.”
“Far-right media personality” in the headline became “right-wing media personality.” In the accompanying text, “far-right media personality” became “controversial conservative commentator.” Twitter also corrected the misspelling of her name.
Kanye says he likes the way right-wing media personality Candace Owens thinks
Whether one considers her “far-right,” “right-wing,” or “controversial,” Candace Owens’ passion, intelligence, and political savvy gives many conservatives great hope for the future.
The year of the Black victim is ending. If you have a vested interest in blacks jumping on top of cars, burning down our own neighborhoods, crying over the national anthem, boycotting H&M over monkey hoodies & screaming over hairdo appropriation—it may be time to short the stock.
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) April 23, 2018
3. More importantly though, she cares deeply about what has happened to the black community and wants others to see what Sowell, Elder and others before her have already seen. She doesn’t view victimhood as virtue. And this is where the modern Left is exposed.
— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) April 23, 2018
I stand with #CandaceOwens and #KanyeWest!
We need NEW ideas in the black community and we are NOT afraid anymore.
Proud to be off the #ProgessivePlantationhttps://t.co/tEWng0I9tL— Wendy Bellevue (@RealWendyBelle) April 21, 2018
Regardless of whether or not you agree with @RealCandaceO, everyone can agree that this is a disgusting way to treat a woman. @TomArnold I hope you apologize pic.twitter.com/opYfb80m0i
— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) April 23, 2018
Michele Blood is a Flemington, New Jersey-based freelance writer and a regular contributor to LifeZette.
(photo credit, homepage images: Candace Owens, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore / Kanye West, CC BY 2.0, by Peter Hutchins ; photo credit, article images: Candace Owens, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore / Kanye West, CC BY 2.0, by Pieter-Jannick Dijkstra)
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