Political pundit challenged Liberty students, welcomed with protestors

Amid protesters, political commentator Candace Owens used her story of experiencing hatefulness in her life to encourage Liberty University students to let bad experiences shape them, not
define them.

Owens, who has appeared on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, spoke to students in Convocation Sept. 26. 

“I have been smeared, libeled,” Owens said. “I have been protested. I have been kicked out of restaurants. I have been assaulted because I go around with a very simple message, which is that bad things happen to everyone. But a victim mentality is not something that you should possess because (of) a bad thing happening to you.” 

She believes people could achieve much more in life if they stopped seeing themselves as victims and instead started seeing themselves as the victor of their experiences.

Owens knows what it is like to experience hatefulness. Owens said in high school, she was living the best life she’d ever had, crediting that to her close friends and her first boyfriend. 

But her life changed one night when she and her boyfriend were watching a movie. Her phone rang four times from the same number during the movie, and she let it go to voicemail each time. 

When she got home that night, she discovered four voicemails from a group of four males, insulting her and threatening the lives of her and her family. The messages went on for a total of five minutes, and Owens said the first thing she did when she heard these messages was to break down in tears.

“I couldn’t think of four people who would say those words to me,” Owens said. “I couldn’t even think of one person who would say those words to me.”

The next day, when she went to class, they were talking about racism, and Owens told her teacher about the messages, playing them for the class. The teacher was so horrified that he took her to the principal, who immediately notified the police.

Owens believes this experience fueled her spiral into anorexia, which she spent the next four and a half years struggling to overcome.

“I was so scared (going into college) that people I was meeting were going to Google me and that they were going to find this story and find that I was a victim,” Owens said. “The only way I felt I could assert control over myself and over my narrative was by having anorexia.”

According to Owens, her healing began when she started taking yoga classes after college. She said that doing meditation caused her to think critically about why she was harming herself. 

“I wasn’t happy being a victim,” Owens said. “I was allowing it to eat me alive.”

Owens does not believe what happened to her was the result of racism. Instead, she believes it is because taking out the face-to-face aspect of communication makes it far easier to say

mean things.

 

“What happened to me didn’t just happen to me,” Owens said. “It also happened to those four kids who left me those messages. A 14-year-old, a 15-year-old, a person who used to be my former friend – they can’t be racist. That’s a heavy word. What they were was young kids trying out what it was like to be mean, in a generation that has smartphones.”

Owens challenged students to try to understand how everyone in these situations is impacted, instead of immediately labeling people as racist or a victim.

Owens also spoke about the controversial U.S. Supreme Court nomination process prior to the Sept. 27 Ford-Kavanaugh hearings. 

“(Women) are the people who have to carry men for nine months,” Owens said. “They are our little boys. They are our sons. They are our husbands. The idea that somebody can live a life in the way that Brett Kavanaugh has lived his life and to have what has happened to him happen over the last couple of weeks, should terrify everyone. This country needs due process, but more than that, it needs women to find their voices and to fight for our men, because what is happening right now is a cultural war on men.”  

 “Modern feminism is so toxic. It is singlehandedly deteriorating relationships and eventual motherhood. I will always speak out against what has become a rabid cult of misery. If you believe in equality between men and women, you cannot be a feminist today,” tweeted Owens on Sept. 25. 

Not everyone at Liberty welcomed Owens. Some students, who opposed Owens’s tweets against the #MeToo movement, protested on the Academic Lawn after Convocation.

Addyson Garner, Liberty senior class president, helped organize the protest.

“We should be coming along survivors and students who have come forward with the #MeToo movement,” Garner said. “These are sensitive issues, and our calling as Christians is to love and support these students. We should be giving them a place where they feel safe to share their testimonies and experiences with us, without worrying they will be shamed back into silence.”

According to Garner, she and AJ Strom organized the protest because they did not want others to think everyone at Liberty supported Owens’s disparaging remarks against #MeToo.

Owens has tweeted against modern feminism and the #MeToo movement, which has caused a disturbance online. 

“The entire premise of #MeToo is that women are stupid, weak & inconsequential. Too stupid to know what men might want if you come to their hotel room late at night. Too weak to turn around and tell someone not to touch your a** again. Too inconsequential to realize this,” Owens said in a June 11 tweet. 

“Owens does not represent us. I don’t want to give the world any reason to look down on Liberty University students,” Garner said. “I wanted to show up and make our voices heard. Most importantly, I know students on this campus — male and female — that have come forward with #MeToo. I wanted them to know they were supported and loved, regardless of who was on the stage.”