Conservative firebrand Candace Owens, the mother of two children under age 5, said her role as the matriarch of a growing family is crystalizing her belief that the greatest threat facing America today is its horrible education system.
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, Owens put much of the blame for the grim state of affairs in America today on failing and biased schools, colleges and universities.
She spoke of how becoming a mother and raising a family has really made the battles over education and other issues conservatives fight seem seem more important than ever.
She began her speech by referencing a recent Matt Walsh tweet highlighting a letter written to a loved one by an 18-year old infantryman who served in the Civil War.
Owens praised the letter’s “haunting” poetic beauty, acknowledging the fact that it was not written by somebody with a formal education or degree, but an 18-year-old recounting his time on the battlefield.
If you want to see how much the English language has deteriorated in modern times, go read the letters that random infantrymen wrote home to their families during the Civil War. These were young men often without much formal schooling who wrote naturally like poets. One example: pic.twitter.com/dcuJiq2c6G
— The Honorable Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) March 1, 2023
“It begs the question: What on Earth has happened, where once upon a time in America you had people with no formal education who were able to produce words and content like this,” she said.
“And now we are suddenly in a society where there is so much formal education, and do you think the average 18-year-old could describe what they are seeing in that way? … This was your average 18-year-old during the Civil War.”
“So what’s happened? We’ve given out so many degrees, we actually have never given out more degrees, and yet from an IQ perspective we have never produced students that are this dumb. That doesn’t make sense,” she said, prompting applause.
“Children are getting dumber and dumber and dumber and you have to ask yourself: Why or how that is,” Owens said.
She went on to critic the “soft studies” offered in higher education.
“We know the answer to that question is that colleges and universities are handing out these degrees to individuals studying bizarre topics like gender studies. What is that?” asked Owens.
“What do you do for four years when you major in gender studies? What do you do when you graduate with a degree in gender studies? … There’s nothing that person can do to contribute to society once they leave college and they have mounds and mounds of debt.”
Owens said she believes those graduates then become angry.
“When you look back at the last 100 years in American society there is evidence of that everywhere. True evil that has taken place in American society has always being thought up on a university campus. It’s the academics and their solutions to problems,” she said. “They come up with horrible ideas.”
These horrible ideas are what America is allowing to be taught in schools, she argued, citing examples like climate change, transgenderism and feminism. Owens added that the left knows “exactly what they are doing.”
“Yes, the left is radical, but they are ever so intentional,” she said.
“The truth is that their intentions are to go after the one thing that stands between them and absolute power, the family unit.” Owens said. “A friend of mine, Jack Posobiec, says if you want to be a rebel, start a family. I’m going to add to that and say, ‘Don’t just start a family, keep a family.’”
Owens added that “if you are somebody who believes that we need to meet and break bread with the left on these various topics and figure out how we can come together, we don’t need you. We need fighters.”
“There is no middle ground on transgenderism, there is no middle ground on child grooming, there is no middle ground on coming up with fluffy terms for pedophilia … and if you are offended because some of us have the courage to say what needs to be said, we simply don’t need you,” she said.
MORE: The higher ed bubble won’t burst in 2023, but it will definitely deflate
IMAGE: C-SPAN screenshot
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