Conservative Candace Owens speaks at Michigan State, drawing protestors

EAST LANSING — Candace Owens, a well-known conservative commentator, attacked the "trans agenda," "climate alarmism" and higher education while speaking on Michigan State University’s campus Thursday night, drawing hundreds of spectators and student protestors.

Owens spoke as part of Turning Point USA’s Live Free tour, a series of events focused on bringing conservative figures to university campuses.

The free event packed a large lecture hall in the business college complex. Hundreds of spectators lined up hours before the event started, and some were turned away when the hall ran out of space.

While Owens had supporters, including some students, protests from MSU community members began in tandem with the event. About 20 protestors inside the lecture hall interrupted Owens minutes into her appearance, but were quickly drowned out by attendees. The protestors were removed by police after about two minutes of chanting.

Jesse Estrada White, an MSU sophomore who led several chants, said students showed up to send a message.

“This campus is for all people, but not fascists,” he said. “We welcome all people who aren't preaching hate on our campus. So we're saying to Candace Owens, that you can come here as long as you aren’t preaching hate on our campus. We say ‘come here speakers,’ but you can't come here if you're going to say that other people aren't allowed to exist as they are. That's our message.”

Mia Dimaria, however, a sophomore at MSU who attended the event, said she was moved by parts of Owens’ speech.

“I like how much emphasis she put on the importance of family because family and faith,” she said. “A lot of problems in America right now stem from lack of strong families and not advocating for families, and just lack of faith.”

Dimaria said she is part of a conservative family and was happy to see Owens representing a non-liberal view on campus.

Tensions in the MSU community were high going into Thursday's event. Four years ago, white nationalist Richard Spencer spoke on MSU’s campus, drawing supporters from the far-right and protestors with signs decrying Nazism and racism.

In her speech, Owens focused on gender, university education and climate change, but also touched on rapper Kanye West's recent anti-Semitic comments.

Owens called the “trans agenda” “an attack on family” and transgender children should be taken away from their parents.

“What better way to ensure yourself that somebody will not grow up and have a productive family than to encourage them to take puberty blockers that will forever fundamentally change their biological makeup?” Owens said. “It’s not about love — no, it’s about hate.”

She said universities are “almost like the fifth branch of government” and encouraged students to pursue trade skills instead of degrees.

“The entire purpose of creating the Department of Education is to create a bunch of minds that fall in line with every single thing that the government says so you have the media that's giving you the propaganda,” Owens said.

She also compared “climate alarmism” to the infamous Y2K scare and said environmentalism is a “death cult.”

Owens’ comments and stances on transgender people were a main focus of protestors outside of the event. In the hallway next to the auditorium about 200 protestors — mostly MSU students — gathered to chant in an attempt to drown out Owens’ speech.

Brandishing many homemade signs and a transgender and LGBTQ+ pride flag, protestors chanted “you fascist ****s have got to go,” “**** you Candace, **** you” and “protect trans kids.”

Estrada White said that while the protestors didn’t achieve their goal of interrupting the event from the outside, “we accomplished showing this community right here that there are people willing to stand up to her bigoted self.

“We told her that she's not welcome and we told Turning Point here that their fascism isn’t welcome on campus,” he added.

Owens made other comments on gender and family throughout her speech.

“I really do believe that the longer you stay in school, the more poisoned your brain becomes,” she said. “It's incredible. It's like you have almost have to go to school for 20 years to really believe that men can be women and women can be men.”

Owens said men are “having their hand slapped every time they act like men. They come up with these fruity terms like toxic masculinity, which was created by toxic feminists.”

“And what they are doing is destroying family, they are destroying the traditional roles, they are destroying the family unit, they are destroying the nuclear family — the concept of a strong man that leads the household. And men let me say this: there is no society that can survive without strong men,” she said.

Protester Natalie Harmon, a junior at MSU, linked Owens’ rhetoric to real-world consequences.

“We put this together because Candace Owens is quite literally a liar,” she said. “She has lied about facts that are objectively true and related to science, like climate change, things about the COVID vaccine, she's homophobic, and a lot of her comments have led to violence. For example, the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand and the Jan. 6 riots. So we are not welcoming to anyone who is going to incite that kind of violence at MSU.”

One of the gunmen in the 2019 mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, that left 51 dead said in a manifesto, “the person that has influenced me above all was Candace Owens. Each time she spoke I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness. Though I will have to disavow some of her beliefs, the extreme actions she calls for me are too much, even for my tastes.”

Owens did not mention immigration or Islam during Thursday's event.

Owens finished her main speech at about 8 p.m. and took questions until about 9 p.m. Protestors moved outside of the business complex. About 150 students continued chanting “**** you fascists” as police observed, eventually dispersing around 9:30 p.m.

Owens has been in the spotlight recently after linking herself with Kanye West, the rapper and fashion designer who has been drawing conservative praise in recent weeks.

West and Owens, who both are Black, showed up to West’s Paris fashion show wearing “white lives matter” shirts. West appeared on FOX News' Tucker Carlson show the next week to defend his message.

Several days after the appearance, West tweeted on Oct. 8 that he was going “death con 3 on Jewish people” after his Instagram account was restricted following a post where he insinuated another rapper was controlled by Jewish people running his record label.

Owens defended West’s statements on her online show, saying, “If you are an honest person, you did not think this tweet was anti-semitic.”

“It’s like you cannot even say the word ‘Jewish’ without people getting upset,” she said. Owens implied that West was simply referring to Jewish people in his personal life, rather than the community as a whole.

Owens appeared at Thursday’s event wearing a sweatshirt from West’s clothing line with Gap.

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Conservative Candace Owens speaks amid protests at Michigan State