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I sat down with Owens after she’d taped a show featuring a 10-minute monologue about how shame is a good thing and more people should feel shamed by their bad behavior at airports. “She is a very strong thinker whose motto is ‘Never apologize, never back down,’ ” an inversion, witting or not, of the royal family’s “Never complain, never explain.” “Candace’s mode is always doubling down,” one person who works with her told me. Even if you’re sure you absolutely deep in your bones disagree with her, you know even deeper that it would exhaust you to debate her. It works, now more than ever, when gray areas, particularly online, do not exist. She possesses a mechanical understanding of outrage. In the era of the hot take, hers are the hottest. Your idea of progressivism is clearly regressive,” adding, “This is a new plantation.” I want to destroy it further than it’s already destroyed itself. “I have to keep reminding you that I don’t want to be a part of this culture,” she said. Around the same time, on her own podcast, she defended herself against people who say that she doesn’t understand Black culture. She appeared on Carlson’s show last fall to assert that the two worst things you can be in America today are a Black child in the womb and a straight white man. When Owens says things that a lot of white Republicans in this country would not dare, they are able to say, “See?” The second point is particularly relevant, because the present-day Republican Party at best exists among racial tension and, at real, stokes it. She’s an unlikely Republican-a millennial who studied journalism and interned at a fashion magazine, and a Black woman in an era when no more than 10 percent of Black voters identify with her party. For six years and counting, Owens, 33, has been a heat-seeking missile heading straight into the center of every controversial topic, or, better yet, creating a controversy where there wasn’t one. T he internet loves good and evil, good or evil, and there exists no one more Manichaean than Owens. Her 2017 video titled “I don’t Care About Charlottesville, the KKK, or White Supremacy” sent her into the consciousness of right-wing hosts like Jesse Watters and Alex Jones. If you see how her staff stays glued to her as she commands their daily meetings, cracks up at her jokes during taping, how commenters online worship her, how the Republican media powers that be-Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson-feed off her words, nothing seems far out of reach. It’s where, in the conservative fiefdom, she’s become the It girl, enough so that just about everyone, including Owens herself, wonders if she has a future in politics.

It’s here that she recorded her response to Kanyegate, which led many people to question why she fell short of condemning what was very clearly hate speech. For an hour, she holds forth with her scorching own-the-libs views on the news. million and a half people subscribe to Owens’s Daily Wire show, which airs as both a podcast and a YouTube video through the conservative media company. Owens and rapper Kanye West ignited global controversy when they wore “White Lives Matter” shirts at the Yeezy Paris Fashion Week show last year. The fallout cost West most of his business, rightfully, and thrust Owens into broad fame as a political flamethrower. The spectacle echoed far beyond the fashion world and marked the beginning of West’s media spiral during which, among other hateful statements, he praised Hitler. The two are backstage at his fashion show, sporting matching shirts blaring WHITE LIVES MATTER.

In a picture she posted to Twitter (and which remains to this day), she looks over her shoulder, beaming, next to Kanye West. Yet nobody was surprised to see her at the center of the biggest controversy at Paris Fashion Week last fall. “She was not a fit at Vogue,” a former higher-up said flatly. Nobody expected her to continue on at the magazine, though.

Yet they all described her as one of the best interns ever. “Very eccentric and not normal,” as one person put it. People who worked with her said that she would come to work wearing hats with animal ears or “girl boss power suits” with a bra under a blazer.