Flashback: The Inside Story Behind How Blexit Was Born

What has ceding support for six decades to the Democrat Party done for black Americans?

That’s the question 29-year-old conservative firebrand Candace Owens says haunted her one February afternoon. The Turning Point USA communications director was standing backstage at the annual conservative convention CPAC in Washington D.C., when she heard British politician Nigel Farage deliver a prime-time speech about how he helped lead the fight for Britain’s exit — or Brexit — from the European Union.

“Oh my God,” Owens recalls saying to herself at that moment, “we need a Blexit.”

“Black people need to exit the Democrat Party,” Owens told me in a phone interview in early October.

While so many black Americans have reaped the social and economic benefits of mainstream American life, Owens said, there are still millions of us trapped in nearly unlivable inner cities that are suffocated by crime, and awash with shoddy schools and hopelessness.

What’s the connective tissue tying many of these declining communities together, Owens asked: they’re all run by Democrats.

“I had this concept in my mind that made sense. But I needed to move the idea from Candace’s brain to a room full of my peers,” Owens told me.

She began organizing a retreat, which would put nearly two dozen of the most influential black conservatives in one room to discuss how a Blexit would look.

“And then Kanye happened,” Owens said...

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