Candace Owens Just Made the Most Absurd Possible Argument Against Colin Kaepernick

It involves accusing Native Americans of cannibalism.

Evan Golub/Zuma

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Conservative activist and diehard Trump defender Candace Owens employed some impressively twisted logic in her tirade against “race hustler” Colin Kaepernick at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday.

Having taken objection to a Thanksgiving tweet from the former star quarterback which read, “The US government has stolen over 1.5 billion acres of land from Indigenous people,” Owens resorted to the same flawed rationale the colonists started using back in 1492: Native Americans needed to be civilized, because they were cannibals. “Did cannibalism get lost in Colin’s flowery depiction of Indigenous people?” she said. (Accounts of Aztec cannibalism come mostly from 16th-century Spanish explorers who exaggerated Indigenous people’s “savagery” to justify their conquest of the Americas—a point she reduces to “political correctness.”)

She then directed her vitriol at Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Ta-Nehisi Coates (whose name she mispronounced), CNN, the New York Times, and MSNBC. “To every single one of you race hustlers who have extorted black pain to line your own pockets,” she said, “who have blindfolded the black youth against seeing the opportunities that lay beneath their feet here in America in the land of the free, in the home of the free, in the home of the brave, I say this to you: There will be a Blexit. A black exit.”

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate