Candace Owens

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome host of Candace Owens, Candace Owens. First and foremost, I just want to thank you guys for having me back. It's always such an honor to speak on this stage. And I was thinking about it today. And unbelievably, I've spoken at CPAC five times. It seems to have gone by so fast. They've always welcomed me, Mercedes and Matt Schlapp, and I'm just so grateful for that opportunity. And I was thinking back to those first moments and how much my life has changed since five years ago. How much all of our lives have changed since five years ago. How much the global conversation has changed. Nobody could have fathomed five years ago. The COVID era, nobody could have fathomed so much global governance taking place. But I think the biggest changes in my life, obviously, have taken place on a personal level. I think about flying around the world, traveling with Charlie Kirk when I first started. And now I'm a married mother of two children, which is the best part of life, beginning for me. And so much changes when you become a parent. You hear it all the time, and it's so correct. And I think what really changes is your understanding of what matters in the world. You look at your children, you look at your family, and you understand that this is what really matters. But in the same vein, you could say that you also understand what doesn't matter, what's not important. And then you also understand what can't matter. And I want to talk about that for a little bit. Because when I say what can't matter, I'm talking about matter as a word, as a substant existence of something. Things that cannot materialize. I have this thought all the time. I'm so preoccupied with thinking about things that cannot materialize now that my children are in this world. Because the fight now seems so much more important. The battles now, we are deciding upon the future for our children, for my children. And I've never been more committed. So I wanted to first share with you something that a colleague of mine posted. Matt Walsh. He posted this onto his Twitter yesterday, actually. And I was really struck by it because I've read things like it from the past. And I think it really serves a reminder for everyone in this room as to where we are today in America. This is the passage. It was written during the Civil War. And this is a letter to a loved one from a soldier, an infantryman in Pennsylvania. He writes, Under the dark shade of a towering oak near the Dunker church lay the lengthless form of a drummer boy. Apparently not more than 17 years of age. Blacks in hair and eyes of blue and form of delicate mold. As I approached him, I stooped down. And as I did so, I perceived a bloody mark upon his forehead. It showed where the leaden messenger of death had produced the wound that caused his death. His lips were compressed, his eyes half open. A bright smile played upon his countenance. By his side lay his tenor drum, never to be tapped again. So again, to provide that context, this was written as just a letter to a loved one from an 18-year-old soldier. And why Matt was struck by this passage, and why I have been similarly stricken by passages like it, reading these letters that just soldiers, 18-year-old, 17-year-old boys were writing back home, is how poetic and how beautiful it is. This is not written by somebody with a formal education. It's written by an 18-year-old just saying, this is what I'm seeing on the battlefield. And yet it reads like a haunting poetry. And it begs the question, what on earth has happened where once upon a time in America, you had people with no formal education that were able to produce words and content like this. And now we are suddenly in a society where there's so much formal education. And do you think the average 18-year-old could describe what they're seeing in that way? This is not a stunning example. This is not a person that was exceptional. This was your average 18-year-old during the Civil War. So what's happened in American society today? We've given out so many degrees. We actually, as a fact, have never given out more degrees. And yet from an IQ perspective, we have never produced students that are this dumb. That doesn't make sense. I'm serious. I'm talking about their standardized tests. Children are getting dumber and dumber and dumber. And you have to ask yourself why or how that is. Also, the emergence at the university level of what Thomas Sowell refers to as soft subjects, right? People that are receiving all of these degrees, but getting them in bizarre subjects like gender studies. What is that? What do you do for four years when you major in gender studies? What do you do when you graduate with a degree in gender studies? Here, I'll ask you guys a question. Have you ever at any moment in your entire life, I want you to think of every single moment in your life, have you ever in a time of trouble or if you just had a basic question, have you ever said, man, I really need a gender studies major right now to sort through this? I'm going to guess the answer's no. Because why would we need somebody with a degree in gender studies? There's nothing that that person can do to contribute to our society once they leave college and they have mounds and mounds of debt. And so you laugh at these bizarre subjects that you're seeing that are popping up. So many different bizarre ones just like that. And yet these kids leave with their degree and they are the most egotistical, conceited children that you've ever seen. Certain that their degree means something until they're smacked in the face with the real world. Until they realize that it's not just the people in this room that laugh at gender studies majors, it's everybody. Nobody needs you, right? And then that person that spent all of that money and has all this debt and now has met the real world and realizes that they're not needed becomes a very angry individual. And let me tell you something, there is no person that is more dangerous than an angry person that perceives their own intellect, that believes that the world owes them something. Because how could these high school kids that didn't go on to college and just learned how to fix ACs, how are they making more money than me? Is what this person thinks, right? I have a degree in gender studies. How is Joe from my class back in middle school making more money and running a business? Oh, I don't know. Because personally for me, I live in Tennessee. Let me tell you something about Joe from middle school class if he's running a business. When the AC goes out, I will pay any amount of money for that person to come and fix an AC. Because he has a real skill and real skills are needed in a free market society. We will pay for people with real skills. I want to quote you something else that Thomas Sowell says about academics. Because again, I laugh at these people, but they do become dangerous. This is a quote. He wrote, people who have acquired academic degrees without acquiring many economically meaningful skills, not only face personal disappointment and disaffection with society, but also have often become negative factors in the economy and even sources of danger, especially when they lash out. In many places and times, soft subject students and quote unquote intellectuals have inflamed hostility and sometimes violence against many other successful groups. Here's another Thomas Sowell quotation. He wrote, there is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs, right? You need people in the academia. These people tend to go on and then become professors because that's all they can really do with these English degrees. And they become angry and they become dangerous. And if you look back at the last 100 years in American society, there's evidence for that everywhere. A true evil that has taken place in American society is always being thought up on a university campus. It's the academics and their solutions to problems, right? They come up with horrible ideas like during the progressive era, they came up with eugenics, they thought up Jim Crow. These people that you should be respecting are the ones that are in classrooms right now teaching themes like transgenderism. Of course, we shouldn't expect, we shouldn't respect them. They know nothing, they've done nothing. And yet they're convinced of their own superiority. One of the biggest uphill battles when I launched my YouTube channel so many years ago was that the number one critique that I was getting from journalists, aside from the fact that they thought I was a black white supremacist, people are so smart. They're really smart, guys. They're really smart. But they kept remarking on the fact that I hadn't finished college. Like that was what made them feel above me. Well, Candace didn't finish university. Yes, it's true. I had to drop out in my senior year because Sally Mae had a big collapse and my family couldn't afford it. So these elitists and their mentality mocked me for years until I eventually finished. But they mocked me and they felt better and smarter than me because they have a meaningless degree and that makes them feel that they are of some importance. And what they do when they are in these classrooms and when they get power, they understand what they can do and why they become dangerous is that they are raising up the next generation of people that we are going to have to contend with society. They are brainwashing them with more bad and dangerous ideas. I'll give you just a few examples of some that we are dealing with today, some things that have materialized in our society today. There is the battle of climate change, right? It's every couple of years, they change why we're all going to die. I don't know when I was in school. Global warming, maybe when you were in school, it was global cooling. There was the ozone layer catastrophe. They told people acid rain if you're from the 70s. They keep telling us we're all going to die every 10 years. We get it, right? And you wonder why is this a focus? Why are they obsessed with making students feel this fear? Why did they make me, try to program me when I was in high school to watch Inconvenient Truth and listen to Al Gore lecture us the planet was going to be gone in 10 years unless we, of course, listened to more governance. Another one of their big ones, obviously, which I touched upon earlier is transgenderism. Never thought we'd be here, never thought. There's no way, I do not care if you had a crystal ball, there's no way that you could have fathomed that you would be considered a bigot if you said that men cannot be women and women cannot be men. That's crazy. You can't even, that you would be considered a bigot. I've been called a bigot for saying that only women can give birth. These things are obvious, obviously true, and yet they are teaching students, people are earning degrees in categories like transgenderism to learn that no, actually, that's not true, that there's something other than reality that you can achieve. Another category, of course, is feminism, my personal favorites. It's just rinsing women to believe that they should hate men, that they should reject men, that every problem and ill that we face in society can be described by fluffy terms like toxic masculinity, right, these women that are marching. And you look at all of these things and I describe them as evils and things that we shouldn't laugh at because yes, the left is radical, but they are ever so intentional. They are Machiavellian and they know exactly what they are doing. They know what all of these things have in common, climate change, transgenderism, feminism. We look up and we go, how, why, what's wrong with the bathroom signs, why, why do they choose violence every day against random things that nobody cared about? Well, the truth is that their intentions are to go after the one thing that stands between them and absolute power and that is the family unit. And so we revisit those topics and I want you to remember this because it's so important. You will see it everywhere. An attack on the family unit, you revisit those categories and the things that they are raising up children to believe and you see how it destroys families. Climate change, of course, what they tell children first and foremost is that it would be irresponsible to have big families. It would be irresponsible to have children. AOC once said that she wasn't going to have children because of planet and climate change. She thought it was irresponsible. Now listen, I am not gonna fight her. I'm not gonna fight her on that one. But think about that. Think about the fact that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were awarded with an award, a climate change award for agreeing to only have two children because it's better for the planet. It's so evil. It's so sociopathic that this is what they are awarding people for. You revisit transgenderism and what better way to annihilate families than to annihilate bodies? You won't be able to produce families. You have men that are mutilating their bodies so that they can't reproduce. You are having women that are mutilating their bodies so that they cannot reproduce. You are having people that are confused, people that are taking so much medication after they realize, of course, that mutilating your own body does not change your sex. It does not do that. It's just mutilating your own body. These people become enslaved by big pharma. They take pills to try to make themselves happy, to deal with their own depression. But of course, that is an attack ultimately on the family. And then you look at feminism and you look at how radical it's become and the hatred towards men. And you see the way that women speak of men. Absolutely no respect the modern feminist has for man. And you see them confusing gender roles again, telling women that they need to be just like men. We need to go out in society. We need to climb the corporate ladder. Don't worry about your kids. The government will raise them. That's why we have the Department of Education, which, by the way, should be abolished. But you see, they understand that as they pressure women to go out and to pursue their careers and they simultaneously tell women that they don't need a man, they are, of course, attacking the family units because those children are no longer in two-parent households. At the same time, their fathers, ironically, are being told to act like women. Be more sensitive. Cry more. Get into your feelings, right? You can be just like a woman. You can literally be a woman, right? You're telling men that any demonstration of masculinity is wrong and backwards. You're producing a society where they want men to be like dogs with their tails in between their legs. And that is because they know that there is no society that can survive without strong men and there is no family that can survive without both strong men and strong women committed to their children. Family is what it's all about. And I think that has been my biggest understanding over these last five years that it is the most important topic. My husband gave a speech recently where he talked about cultivating a positive and healthy interior life, right? And I think about that often. I think about my household and I think that the best way to effectuate change is to make sure that you are cultivating a healthy interior life. You can control what happens in your household. We need more people committed to that. A friend of mine, Jack Posobiec says, if you want to be a rebel, start a family. I'm going to add to that and say, don't just start a family, keep a family. The interior life, your family is of the utmost importance. But closely following that, of course, is the exterior life. And here's what I will say. And I say this from the bottom of my heart, and I mean this well. If you are somebody who believes that we need to meet and sit down and break bread with the left on these various topics to figure out how we can come together, we don't need you. We need fighters. There is no middle ground on transgenderism. There is no middle ground on child booming. There is no middle ground on coming up with fluffy terms for pedophilia. There is no middle ground. And if you are offended because some of us have the courage to say what needs to be said, we simply don't need you. We don't need you. Ladies and gentlemen, I think I have made a career of fighting like hell. My promise to you always upon this stage and out in the world is that I will never stop fighting like hell, especially when it comes to family. Thank you so much. God bless you all.