Candace Amber Owens Farmer (29 April 1989-) was an African-American alt-right activist who founded the "Blexit" movement, calling on African-Americans to leave the "plantation" of the Democratic Party and join Donald Trump's Republican Party. She also spread COVID-19 misinformation and promoted pro-Russian propaganda amid the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Biography
Candace Amber Owens was born in Stamford, Connecticut in 1989, and she worked for a private equity firm in New York City before becoming CEO of the Degree180 marketing agency. Owens was initially a Democrat who was staunchly opposed to Donald Trump, but, after her attempt to set up a cyberbullying registry online to de-anonymize online harassers, she was attacked by both conservatives and progressives, and she blamed the posting of her personal details online on the progressives involved in the Gamergate controversy. As a result, she claimed to have become a conservative overnight, seeing liberals as the real racists and trolls. She became a pro-Trump commentator, and she promoted Black conservatism online and became a Republican in 2018. That same year, she founded the Blexit Foundation, which encouraged Black voters to leave the Democratic Party (which hitherto counted on the support of 80-90% of Black voters) and join the GOP. In 2021, she moved to Nashville to host a show for The Daily Wire. Owens criticized Black Lives Matter, the purported "victim mentality" of African-Americans, "cultural Marxism", Antifa, and the idea that the Republican Party employed white supremacist rhetoric to win over Southern white voters as part of its "Southern Strategy" during the 1970s. She also falsely claimed that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, attempted to reclaim the word "nationalism", claimed that COVID-19 deaths were overcounted and spread anti-vaccine misinformation, accused fellow Black conservative Kimberly Klacik of money laundering, claimed that the moon landing was faked, tweeted "Russian Lives Matter" amid the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and claimed that Ukraine did not exist until 1989.