The ugly conversion of Candace Owens The alt-Right promised her power and devotion

All this is revealing in its own right. But if, like me, you’ve been aware of Owens since her emergence into public life eight years ago, it’s also shocking because of how far she’s come: a one-time doctrinaire progressive turned radical rightist. A decade ago, Owens was an obscure figure who ran a liberal political blog in the punchy, snarky style of Gawker as-was or the Daily Show. In a 2015 blog, she had celebrated the “good news” that the “Republican Tea Party… will eventually die off”. Another article (not by her) vaunted a mock investigation into Donald Trump’s penis size.

None of this had won her much attention, though. Her first stint in the headlines came in 2016, aged 26, as the founder of an anti-online-bullying initiative called Social Autopsy. Like most such projects, this was broadly Left-coded. Anonymous abuse was associated with racism and misogyny, with the hate mills of anonymous image board 4chan and Gamergate (the broad collective of accounts that claimed to be mobilising for “ethics in games journalism”, but were in fact heavily focused on berating individual women in the games industry). It made sense that Owens — a black woman who had received a $37,500 settlement in 2008 over racist abuse she suffered as a high-schooler — would advocate against it.

But Social Autopsy was an odd and misconceived scheme from the outset. The idea, according to a promotional video Owens made, was to “attach [people’s] words to their places of employment, and anybody in the entire world can search for them”. In other words, it would have created an open-source doxxing database, and this was not a popular idea with anyone. Owens found herself criticised not only by the “trolls” she believed herself to be combatting, but also by the victims of online harassment who pointed out that attaching someone’s personal information to an accusation of trolling could be a very effective harassment tactic in itself.

This is where the Owens story really begins to take shape. As the backlash to her project spiralled into a classic online pile-on, she reacted in the self-destructive style of the classic social media victim: rather than take stock of the criticisms, or attempt to revamp her publicity strategy, she opted to feud with her opponents. And as she feuded, she began to discern a wider pattern: the abuse she was receiving (much of it racist and misogynistic) could, she believed, all be attributed to a network of secret accounts controlled by key anti-Gamergate figures seeking to protect their status as “professional victims”.

In Owens’s mind, the victims of the abuse were in fact the nefarious architects of it all. “I started piecing it together, and I was like, Oh my God, this is actually who these people are — this is crazy,” she told Jesse Singal, when he investigated the Social Autopsy furore for New York Magazine. Part of her supposed evidence was that one of the Gamergate victims who had criticised Social Autopsy had used the word “dox”. Owens had never encountered it before, and its appearance in subsequent abusive messages confirmed that they must all be coming from the same place.

There is an obvious through-line here to Owens’s later antisemitism: the false victim who orchestrates their own alleged abuse in order to gain privilege is a clear analogue for the Jew who supposedly fabricates the Holocaust in order to win power over gentiles. In Owens’s philosophy, the afflicted are always suspect. Unless the afflicted in question is Candace Owens, in which case she is a brave and brilliant truth-teller: “I consider the constructs of our society thoroughly, and often. I think analytically. Randi and Zoe [two of her critics and supposed harassers] really banked on my being dumb,” she tweeted at one point during the firestorm.

This is how Owens went from anti-bullying campaigner to pro-Gamergate figurehead, and a particularly valuable one, given that her race and sex offered an instant riposte to claims that Gamergate was inherently bigoted. (Her Barbie-doll beauty, which made her irresistible to TV bookers, was also an asset.) The most likely explanation for the abuse remained the most obvious one: Gamergaters were as fearful of losing their anonymity as their targets were, and lashed out at Owens in the terms they were already accustomed to. Nonetheless, once she declared for their team, she was embraced, and guaranteed a speedy ascent through the alt-Right commentariat.

Her conversion was Damascene: “I became a conservative overnight… I realised that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls,” she told conservative commentator Dave Rubin in 2017. She endorsed Trump, arrayed herself against Black Lives Matter, and rapidly became fluent in anti-trans talking points (in the Social Autopsy era, one of her main concerns had been anonymous accounts mocking Caitlyn Jenner).

The journey Owens has undertaken is baffling if you attempt to discern any ideological consistency in it. There is no shame in changing your mind — as Keynes reportedly said: “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions.” But in Owens’s case, her information did not change. Trump was the same candidate before her pile-on as he was after it; BLM had the same claims to justice, and the same frailties; Caitlyn Jenner continued to be a woman in exactly the same degree regardless of what was tweeted at Owens.

What changed was her understanding of where she could be most powerful. The liberal blogger space was saturated by 2016. Anyone as ambitious and articulate as Owens would need to look elsewhere to make her mark. Social Autopsy was her attempt to become an abuse entrepreneur; in the end, the fiasco she generated pointed her towards a whole new and unexpected arena in public life. Reinvented as a black conservative, she was suddenly elevated to the highest prominence. The more extreme she became, the more she was rewarded. In 2018, when she married George Farmer — director of the Right-wing campaign group Turning Point and former CEO of libertarian social network Parler — she became half of a radical-Right power couple.

The cancellation to zealot pipeline is well established. Jordan Peterson was a professor with some moderate reactionary opinions (and idiosyncratic takes on theology) before rough treatment from the left convinced him that his own personal hero’s journey was to tear the whole liberal edifice down. Kellie-Jay Keen was regular liberal feminist, chatting away in interviews about her sons’ gender-nonconforming interest in dolls in exchange for a plug for her upcoming clothing brand; her transformation into Posie Parker, gender critical Boudicca and scourge of boys in makeup in John Lewis ads, seems to have been spurred, in part, by her sense of having been slighted by a mythical class of “head girl feminists”.

These transformations have emotional benefits, as well as more tangible ones. They turn the experience of rejection or ostracism into proof of the individual’s particular importance as a martyr to their cause. They bring followers, attracted by the glamour of the self-styled crusader. And those followers bring commercial possibilities: there are books to be sold, merchandise to be shifted (buy a T-shirt for the cause!), monetised views to rack up. The more embattled you become, the more profit you can turn. An agitated base is an open-pocketed one.

None of which is to say that Owens was insincere when she claimed to be the victim of a vast liberal conspiracy: rampant egotism can lead a person into that kind of honest error. With the conservative organisations that made use of her, including the Daily Wire, it is harder to assume good faith. They always had access to Owens’s public statements. Clearly, her apologia for Hitler was acceptable to them. Only when she went so far that she became an undeniable liability did they choose to delegitimise her, and by then, she had already built her own platform and audience. She is ineradicable.

The internet is a radicalisation machine for a person like Owens. There are versions of her in any movement you choose to look at: the proud apostate, the sinner redeemed, the prodigal returned to whatever reality they endorse.

The temptation to succumb to that role is intense. Maybe you’ve felt it too: the raw pleasure of allowing yourself to become what the people who hate you say you are, so the people who hate them will love you more. The intoxicating pull of the role the internet has written for you in advance.

Not everyone falls. For those who do, the determining factor seems to have little to do with politics. The self-made extremist can be anyone from the “liberal mugged by reality” type to the Extinction Rebellion activist threatening to gridlock a city for the sake of environmental apocalypse. The specific beliefs are superficial; what they have is something deeper. Though their politics are very different, what they share is more important. A desire to be the hero. A longing for the validation of their audience. A willingness to shape themselves into whatever wins the most reaction. Feed that psychology into an attention economy, and strange monsters get made.

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Sarah Ditum is a columnist, critic and feature writer.

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