Chapter 1Stamford

Foreword

For twenty-five years, the people I wrote about needed a building. A president needed a party and the party needed a hall; an operative needed a machine, a donor list, a committee that met in a room with a door that closed. Power, in the subjects I chose, was always something assembled — vote by contested vote, dollar by disclosed dollar, favor by remembered favor — and the assembly left a trail. I could follow the trail. I built a working life on the conviction that if you read the filings closely enough, you could reconstruct how a person had come to matter.

Candace Owens matters, and there is almost no trail of the kind I know how to read. She never held an office. She never ran a campaign that survives in a committee's records. She raised no money that a disclosure form would recognize. She built a constituency of twenty-four million people, larger than the electorate of most states I have written about, and not one of them is registered anywhere I can find. When I told colleagues I was writing about her, more than one gave me the look you give a man who has walked off his own map. She was, they meant, not a subject. She was noise. She was the internet. She was the thing that happens instead of politics, not the thing itself.

That was exactly why I wanted her.

Because if you have spent a quarter century arguing that power is institutional — that it moves through parties and courts and finance and the slow procedural machinery I have always taken seriously — then the most important person to understand is the one who appears to prove you wrong. Owens is the negative image of every subject I have ever chosen. She needed no building. She needed a couch, a camera, and the refusal to be dismissed. I did not believe that was enough to build real power. I was wrong, and I wanted to know exactly how wrong, and why.

I expected to find a provocateur, and I did, but the provocateur was the least interesting thing in the file. The record I worked from was the public one: her own two books, the court filings her career has generated — including a foreign head of state's two-hundred-nineteen-page complaint against her — the press archive that has covered her since she was seventeen, and the thousands of hours of her own broadcasting, which is its own kind of primary document, more revealing than any deposition because she never stops talking. I read it the way I read a campaign: looking for where the money came from, who arrived when the cameras did, and who was still there after they left.

What I found underneath the noise was a story I recognized. It began, as the assembled kind of power never quite does, with a wound: a seventeen-year-old girl in Stamford, Connecticut, whose worst night became public property before she consented to it, and around whom the institutions — the FBI, the NAACP, the newspapers — arrived to manage a story rather than to help the girl. Everything after that is, in some sense, a twenty-year argument with the institutions that showed up uninvited and left unmissed. I write about institutions for a living. I had never seen one indicted so patiently, by someone who understood from the inside precisely what they produce and precisely what they do not.

That is what makes her worth a book, and it is not her politics, which readers will judge for themselves. It is that she is the clearest example I have found of a change in how public power is made — the stage at which the individual replaces the institution, the commentator becomes the brand, and the audience is mediated by an algorithm rather than a committee. A biographer of the old machinery has an obligation to understand the machine that replaced it. I could not keep writing about the paperwork of power while pretending the person who proved the paperwork optional was beneath my attention.

I came to this book a skeptic — of her, and of the medium that made her, and of the idea that any of it would matter in ten years the way a Supreme Court seat or a tax bill matters. I leave it less certain of my own skepticism, which is what the good subjects do to you. They make you set your instruments down and look at the thing your instruments were never built to measure.

— Theodore Pemberton, Boston

Chapter 1 · Stamford

The voicemails arrived on a Thursday night in the winter of 2007, four of them in sequence, while Candace Owens sat on a couch in her boyfriend's living room watching a movie. She was seventeen years old. A senior at Stamford High School. A cheerleader and a track runner who spent more time racing home to read Harry Potter than learning the lyrics to whatever was on the radio. Until the moment her phone began buzzing with messages from an unknown number, her primary concerns were getting through the last semester before graduation and whether the next installment in J.K. Rowling's series would arrive before summer.

The first voicemail was two words. The second was longer. By the fourth, the caller had found his rhythm.

"Dirty N*gger. We're gonna tar and feather your family. I'm gonna kill you. Martin Luther King had a dream. Look at that n*gger, he's dead."

She would remember it, years later, as a physical sensation before it was an emotional one. "Like having the wind knocked out of my chest," she wrote in Blackout, "an unexpected force stealing my oxygen immediately." She did not cry. She did not call anyone. She sat in her boyfriend's living room, stunned into a silence that would last through the night and into the following morning, when she walked into her Senior Seminar philosophy class and, for reasons she could not fully explain even to herself, raised her hand.

"I don't know what prompted me to raise my hand and introduce what happened last night," she told Joe Rogan years later.

The teacher listened. Then he stood up, told her to follow him, and walked her to the principal's office. The principal called the police. Within hours, Candace Owens's face was on the front page of every newspaper in the state of Connecticut.

To understand what the voicemails did to her, you have to understand where she lived. And to understand where she lived, you have to understand that there were two Stamfords, and that the distance between them was two miles and infinite.

Stamford, Connecticut, sits on the Long Island Sound shoreline, forty miles northeast of Manhattan. In the 1990s, it was remaking itself as an alternative to Wall Street, luring financial services firms with tax incentives and waterfront development. The corporate Stamford was one of the wealthiest municipalities in the United States, a city of glass towers and hedgerow estates in the hills above the water. The other Stamford, the West Side, where the city's Black and Hispanic populations lived in older, denser housing, existed in proximity to that wealth without access to it. The proximity was Connecticut's special genius for cruelty: abundance arranged so that everyone could see it but not everyone could touch it.

Candace Amber Owens was born on April 29, 1989, in White Plains, New York, the third of four children. Her siblings were Ashlee, Brittany, and Dante. Her mother, Paula Owens, lacked a high school diploma and had become pregnant as a teenager. Her father's financial irresponsibility, as Candace later put it, "contributed to our economic instability." The family of six lived in a small three-bedroom apartment in what Candace described as a "run-down, roach-infested building" in Stamford. "Fistfights, police visits, and drama were commonplace." It was the kind of building where you learned to sleep through sirens.

When Candace was nine years old, something changed. Her grandfather showed up and moved the entire family into the grandparents' middle-class home.

The transformation was total. The new house had a yard. A long driveway where grandfather taught the children to ride bikes. A kitchen where southern breakfast appeared before dawn. The chaos of the apartment gave way to a household run on strict principles: Bible studies every week, prayers before every meal, rules enforced with the quiet authority of people who had survived worse than anything their grandchildren could imagine. The grandfather believed that discipline was love expressed in its most practical form, and the household he ran was love made visible every morning at four a.m.

The elementary school years offered Candace her first exposure to the gap between the two Stamfords. Her best friend Laura was blonde with blue eyes. The first time Candace visited Laura's house, it was a mansion in north Stamford with an expansive playroom, an immaculate bedroom, porcelain dolls arranged on shelves as though they were museum pieces rather than toys. "I was an alien visiting another planet," she wrote in Blackout. "I had assumed that everyone lived like me."

The assumption collapsed in Laura's playroom. It would never fully reassemble.

She scored high enough on standardized tests that her teacher recommended she skip from third to fourth grade. She cried and begged her mother to let her stay with her class. Instead, she was placed in the Extraordinary Learner's Program. All the other students in the program were white.

In middle school, the consequences of academic achievement in a racially divided system became personal and daily. Placed in predominantly white classes based on test scores, she was bullied by Black girls in the lower academic groups. They blocked hallways, shouted insults, bumped her shoulders in the corridors with the deliberate carelessness of people who want you to know you are being pushed without wanting to be seen doing the pushing. In the cafeteria one afternoon, a girl called her over to a table and asked, with the studied casualness of a trap being sprung: "If I were to say to you 'Holla,' what would you say back?"

Candace answered, "I would say hello."

The table erupted in laughter.

She was accused of "acting white." The accusation wounded her more than she let on to anyone, including herself. She was not interested in keeping up with popular hip-hop songs, "because J.K. Rowling had released another installment of Harry Potter, and I was racing home to read it every day." Years later, she befriended some of her former bullies. One told her: "I just thought you were stuck-up. I didn't realize you were cool." Another said, more directly: "I don't know. We just all thought you were a bitch."

Both of those conversations required more courage from the bullies than from the person they had bullied. The fact that Candace recorded them without bitterness says something about her capacity for forgiveness, a capacity that would be tested, used, and occasionally withheld in the years to come.

When her parents moved the family away from the grandparents' home before high school, Candace felt the loss immediately. "I wanted to be cool and liked and normal," she wrote, "so I slipped into a more secular existence that, with time, corroded my values." The prayers stopped. The Bible verses stopped. "No more prayers, no more Bible verses." She came to view her grandparents' teachings "as illustrations of my prior bondage." She had everything her grandfather had given her, and she put it in a box and stored it where she did not have to look at it. She was a teenager. This was the normal thing to do.

Then the voicemails arrived.

The investigation lasted six weeks. The FBI was brought in to analyze the recordings because no one would confess and a politician's son was involved. Candace's face ran on the evening news. Her voicemails were played "ad nauseam." A seventeen-year-old girl's worst moment became public property, broadcast to strangers who would form opinions about her suffering without ever learning her name from the broadcast itself, only from the caption beneath the photograph.

The callers turned out to be four teenage boys, led by a former friend named Zack, who had grown resentful after Candace started a relationship and had less time for him. Boredom and alcohol and the peculiar cruelty of hurt feelings that have not been named: that was the formula. One of Zack's friends was the fourteen-year-old son of Dannel Malloy, the mayor of Stamford and future Democratic governor of Connecticut. The political connection turned a local bullying incident into a statewide media event, and the statewide media event turned a seventeen-year-old girl into a symbol before anyone had bothered to ask her whether she wanted to be one.

The town split. Some people believed she was lying. Others thought she was accusing the wrong person. The NAACP came to the school, arriving with the institutional gravity of an organization that had been fighting exactly these battles for a century. They did not speak to Candace. "They never actually spoke to me," she wrote. "I never had an interview or a meeting with any of my so-called allies." They came for the cause. Not for the girl.

Six weeks later, the FBI cleared her. Arrests were made. Charges were brought. The city of Stamford and the board of education settled with the Owens family for $37,500.

"I was labeled, officially, as the victim," she wrote. "And then everybody disappeared."

The settlement was real. The official labeling was real. The disappearance was real. Each of these facts would travel with her for the rest of her life, folded into her argument about what institutions do and do not provide, about what the word "ally" actually means, about the gap between the people who turn up when the cameras are rolling and the people who are still there when the cameras leave. The NAACP's absence from her actual life, despite its presence at her school, was not a detail she would forget.

Consider what happened, from a seventeen-year-old's perspective, in the six weeks between the voicemails and the settlement. Her private pain was made public before she consented to that publication. Her phone calls were played on the evening news to people she would never meet. Institutions arrived to represent her interests without asking what her interests were. The FBI analyzed recordings of words that had been directed at her while she waited to be told what the analysis meant. Her former friend's family connections turned her victimization into a political story, which meant that the political story became the story and the victimization became the context rather than the subject. And when it was over, when the settlement was signed and the cameras moved to the next story, she was left with $37,500, a label she had not sought, and the knowledge that the institutional machinery that had arrived to protect her had, in fact, been there to manage the story rather than to help the girl.

This was not cynicism about the legal system or the civil rights organizations or the journalism that covered the incident. It was something sharper and more instructive: the observation that institutions exist to serve their own purposes, and that those purposes sometimes align with the purposes of the individuals they claim to serve, and that when they do not align, the institutions will serve themselves. The FBI was there to resolve a case involving a politician's son. The NAACP was there to be seen fighting racism. The newspapers were there to sell newspapers. Candace Owens was there because it was her life, and because the voicemails had been addressed to her, and because no one had asked her whether she wanted any of this.

"The media's surface analysis of that night destroyed five lives," she wrote. The observation was made from a position of remarkable generosity toward the boys who had called her what they called her. It was also made from a position of remarkable clarity about what institutions produce and do not produce. They produce stories. Sometimes the stories help the people in them. Sometimes they do not.

She would spend the next twenty years in a complicated relationship with institutions, and the complication had its roots in this six-week period when she was seventeen years old and the institutions arrived without being invited and left without being missed.

In the years that followed, the settlement money ran out. The damage did not. Candace developed anorexia. On the Joe Rogan Experience, she said simply: "I did not eat for like five years. I had anorexia because people took the narrative." She restricted how many calories she consumed. "The lighter I felt I could make myself physically, the lighter I felt mentally. I was losing more than pounds. I was losing myself."

She drank. She partied. She got into fights. "Everywhere in my life I created chaos because chaos came to falsely represent a state of freedom." She described this period in Blackout with the vocabulary she had developed for it: "leftism unleashed." By which she meant not a political ideology but a psychological condition. The condition of believing that your suffering entitled you to sympathy, that your victimhood defined you, that the world owed you something because the world had hurt you. The word "leftism" was hers, applied retroactively from a time when she had a political vocabulary precise enough to impose on experiences that were, when she lived them, simply pain.

The girl who cried through the night after the voicemails and the woman who built a career arguing that victimhood was a choice were not two different people. They were the same person at different ages, trying to make the same experience mean something that she could live with. The first version could not yet make it mean anything. The second version made it mean everything.

Her later reassessment of the incident was characteristically unsparing. Zack was a close friend who felt abandoned. His actions were "not inspired by deeply held racist views" but by hurt feelings, alcohol, and impulse. "The media's surface analysis of that night destroyed five lives," she wrote: "the four young boys, who were publicly stained as racists before they began their lives, and me, who was publicly labeled a victim before I had begun mine."

The reassessment was generous. It was also, in its refusal to accept the obvious racial dimension of racial slurs spoken by white teenagers to a Black girl, an early rehearsal of the argument she would spend her career making: that race was invoked to explain things that had other explanations, that the racism narrative obscured the human story underneath, and that the people who benefited most from that narrative were never the victims it claimed to protect. Whether the argument was right or wrong is a question the rest of this biography will address. What is certain is that it began here, on a Thursday night in Stamford, Connecticut, with four voicemails and a seventeen-year-old girl sitting in silence on a couch, trying to understand what had just happened to her.

It would take years, a death, and a designer handbag to break the cycle.

What matters about the Stamford chapter is not the hate crime alone. It is the distance between what the hate crime did to Candace Owens and what she later said it meant. The voicemails were real. The racism in them was real. The settlement the family received was real. And the later claim, that the media's framing of the incident had done as much damage as the incident itself, was also real, a genuine insight earned from the experience of being made into a symbol of something before you had any say in what the symbol meant.

There is one more scene from the Stamford years that belongs in this chapter, because it contains the seed of a quality that would define Candace Owens's public life more than any political position or media controversy.

In her senior year, not long after the hate crime investigation concluded, Candace was in a class when a classmate made a dismissive comment about the incident. The kind of casual cruelty that teenagers specialize in. The kind of remark that minimized what she had experienced and implied that she had exaggerated or exploited the situation for attention.

Candace did not cry. She did not leave the room. She did not report the classmate. She argued. She argued with the focused, controlled anger of a person who had decided that silence was no longer an option, that the girl who had sat stunned on the couch while the voicemails played was gone, and that the person who replaced her would not be silent when challenged.

The argument was not recorded. Its contents are not preserved. But the fact of the argument matters, because it was the first visible instance of the quality that would carry Candace Owens from Stamford High School to the national stage: the refusal to be dismissed. Not the refusal to be wrong. Not the refusal to be criticized. The refusal to be dismissed, to be treated as someone whose experiences and opinions were unworthy of engagement, to be waved away by people who had decided she was not worth taking seriously.

The refusal was, in one sense, the heirloom of a grandfather who had confronted his own father at a mistress's house, who had called Klansmen "boys," who had refused to acknowledge grandchildren who did not say good morning. Robert Owens's entire moral architecture was built on the refusal to be dismissed, and his granddaughter inherited the architecture and carried it into a world that would test it in ways the grandfather could not have imagined.

The refusal would serve her well. It would also betray her. Because the refusal to be dismissed, when it hardens into the refusal to be challenged, becomes something different. It becomes the inability to hear criticism. It becomes the conviction that every opponent is an enemy. It becomes the certainty that is, at its best, the foundation of courage and, at its worst, the prison of inflexibility.

Candace Owens left Stamford with the refusal intact. She carried it through a decade of public life, and the refusal made her famous, made her rich, made her influential, and made her unable, at critical moments, to hear the people who were trying to tell her something she needed to hear.

The grandmother had tried. "I feel like you are losing yourself." The warning was offered in love, in the hospital, over a designer bag, eleven years after the voicemails. It was received with the confident assurance of a granddaughter who believed she was fine.

She carried Stamford with her when she left. Both Stamfords. The wound and the foundation. The hate crime and the thermostat prayer. The girl who was told she was acting white for reading Harry Potter and the girl whose grandfather shot back at the Klan. She carried all of it north to Rhode Island, then south to New York, then wherever else the life she was assembling would take her. And the story of what she did with it is the story of the chapters that follow.

"Is it not peculiar," she would eventually write, "that those who lived through such evil can speak of those times from a position of such strength, while those who lived not a day of it choose to bemoan it with such cowardice?"

The question was for the country. It was also for herself.