Clemson TPUSA hosted a talk by conservative figure Candace Owens in Memorial Auditorium on Tuesday.
Owens started by thanking the liberal students in the audience for coming and being respectful, then praised Clemson University for its strong free-speech culture.
She then talked about her journey from a stalwart liberal journalism student to a conservative movement leader, dwelling particularly on disagreements with orthodox feminism blaming men during a women’s studies class. She continued to discuss how she lost faith in traditional news outlets during the election of Donald Trump, then shifted towards conservatism after diving into the work of conservative black intellectual Thomas Soell and a YouTube series he did with Milton Freedman.
Launching into her main argument, she claimed that left-wing policies had failed Black Americans and were designed to undermine families to make people more reliant on the government.
She also made the argument that the left is a “death cult,” with left-wing positions ranging from gender transitions for minors to not having children to stop climate change to modern feminism’s encouragement of putting one’s career first, which all lead, in her view, to people not forming families and not having children.
Despite the heavy security, only one concerned community member showed up to protest, with a wide variety of students and community members from all perspectives participating in the event.
“Everything went really well,” Clemson Police Chief Gregory Mullen said. “We had a good number of people here that were interacting with Candace. We had questions that came from both sides and everybody here answered and asked her questions very respectfully and from a security standpoint, we didn’t have any issues at all tonight.”