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Jan. 26, 2024 - Candace Owens
33:52
Why Women Are Wrong to Boycott Kyte Baby
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All right. Happy Friday, everybody.
You made it to the end of another week.
You know, they say that when women learn to conquer their emotions, we're going to learn to conquer the world, which essentially means that we are never going to conquer the world because there's no way we're ever going to conquer our emotions.
That's what this week has taught me.
Barbie! Boycott!
Angry! Oscars!
And then I see people saying, I'm no longer buying kite baby clothes.
Are you familiar with this controversy about a CEO who allegedly fired someone because her baby was in the NICU? Yeah, except that's not really what happened, and I am going to have to take the side of the CEO. Plus, later on in the show, have you heard about this Alabama inmate?
He was just executed with nitrogen gas.
People were very upset about that.
It's a new method of capital punishment.
What are your views on capital punishment?
What do you think? Good thing?
Bad thing? Should we do away with it all together?
All that and more today coming up on Candace Owens.
All right, so I opened my Instagram and then I saw a bunch of moms, love moms,
Moms follow me. I'm very into mom culture, obviously, as a mother of 303.
And moms are saying, we have got to stop buying Kite Baby onesies.
Now, if you're not familiar with Kite Baby, they're relatively new.
Their onesies are, in fact, amazing.
I own some of their onesies.
I own, actually, a lot of their onesies.
And the reason when we're making these videos and saying to boycott Kite Baby...
The reason that I was told was because they fired a young woman because her baby was in the NICU. Now, immediately for me, and I think that I'm a little bit different than other women, I just stop and just assess that altogether.
Like, do you really believe, just off the top, that a CEO said, you're fired because your baby is sick?
I don't know. It didn't really pass the sniff test for me.
Especially because I actually employ people.
I run a business, less than 10 employees, and I just didn't think that that would fly.
It doesn't even make any sense. So let me just back up and tell you something that happened to me years ago before we even get into what actually did happen with Kite Baby.
I used to employ a young woman, and the young woman got pregnant.
Things were great. She worked for me for two years.
And then she got pregnant, and towards the end of her pregnancy, things started I wouldn't say falling apart, but just changing.
You know, she had a lot of issues that were going on at home.
Her mother nearly died.
That's not a joke. Her mother literally nearly died, suddenly became sick, relatively young mother.
And we were very forgiving and understanding and allowed her to take the time that she needed.
And then her dad sort of had a psychiatric breakdown because of what was happening to her mom.
So it was just a lot happening.
And then, of course, she gave birth and she went on to maternity leave.
When she came back from maternity leave, she came to us and said, you know, first and foremost, she kind of had a bit of a traumatic birth experience, even though the baby was absolutely fine.
And she felt in her heart that she just wanted to spend more time with her infant, you know, that she needed to be home.
And she asked us if we would be willing to allow her to work from home.
And I said no, because that wasn't what we hired her for.
And unfortunately, as an employer, I'm not going to just allow you to change your job.
When we hire you, we hire you based under a certain job description.
And just because you're going through something emotionally or feeling like you need more time to spend with your infant, these are all admirable.
What that implies to me as an employer is that you need to make a decision in your personal life.
And obviously we are no longer a fit.
And because I believe in free markets and I believe in capitalism, you will find a job that allows you to stay at home.
There are tons of positions that are actually stay-at-home positions, but what we hired you for for the last two years was never that.
And we accepted her resignation and she moved on amicably.
What is interesting and something that I have realized because I employ both men and women is that women tend to take a lot of their emotions with the job and their personal experiences, whatever's going on at home, into the job position.
And I think that they share.
That's because we are women and we do like to share and we communicate.
And these are actually things that make us brilliant caretakers.
We like to know what's going on with other people emotionally.
And when they tend to be going on with something at home, they want to talk to their employer about it and they hope that their employer will be understanding.
In a different circumstance, we hired a guy who was great at his job, never gave us any problems.
And one day he walked in and he just handed us his resignation.
We were like, whoa, we really weren't expecting this.
We thought you were happy here. And it turned out, once we spoke to him, that it was because his commute was severe.
It was taking him nearly two hours to get to work and burning through the gas.
It no longer worked for him.
But rather than talk to us about his problem, He just offered his resignation.
His mind was different. He didn't expect us to understand his personal expectations or to maybe say, hey, we're happy to pay for your gas to get into work.
Very different the way that women deal with the issues at home and the way that men deal with issues at home.
They don't expect the work environment to meet them.
So again, I saw this Kite Baby thing trending.
We were making videos. Throw out your onesies.
Be done with Kite Baby.
This CEO is horrific.
And I said, this doesn't make sense to me.
The story does not make sense to me.
Namely, right off the top, why the story doesn't make sense to me is because your maternity leave policy isn't magically decided once you have a child.
People were saying she only gave this woman two weeks of maternity leave, and that is an outrage to How on earth could a company that prides itself on being family oriented, how on earth could a company that makes onesies for children, that says that it is owned and operated by women and that it's for women, only allow a two-week maternity leave?
Well, that says to me immediately that you've never run a company and you don't know what it means to be a small business.
You don't know what factors are going on in a CEO's head when they think about maternity leave.
People aren't doing things because they're evil.
They're doing it on the basis of what they can afford.
This is why I'm against federally mandated maternity leaves and paternity leaves because what it actually means is that an employee has to simply pay We're good to go.
So when a small business is considering how long their maternity leave is going to be, they are thinking, how long can I afford people?
How long can I afford to pay people while they are not actually being productive and doing anything for me in return?
It is an economic consideration, not at all an emotional one.
And here's the thing.
When you sign up and you say, yes, I accept this job position— We're good to go.
And before she went through that adoption process, as soon as she signed down the dotted line, she knew what their policy was and she already agreed to it and she was okay with it.
So let's now get into the details of this story.
The young woman was hired as an in-studio coordinator.
Her name is Marissa Hughes, and she worked for the company for less than a year.
Again, I'd like to remind you that when you sign your employment agreement, the company already has its maternity policy explained to you in it.
So she knew this going into it, that if she was going to take maternity leave, it was only going to be two weeks.
Another aspect at this particular company regarding maternity leave was that in order to receive those two weeks paid, you had to sign an agreement that That you would return to work for at least six months thereafter.
Now you might say, why would a company make you do that?
Because the truth, just like the story that I told you regarding my employee, is that a lot of women leave.
They just decide, you know what, I want to be a stay-at-home mom.
I don't actually want to come back to the workforce.
So what that means as an employer, again, I want you to put your business hats on, is that You could have a company filled with women, they could all get pregnant, and all of them are just going to take a paid maternity leave and never come back.
So what people have started doing is including policies that say, listen, we're happy to pay for you, two weeks paid, you might take more time thereafter, but obviously it's not going to be paid.
But our expectation is that you're going to return if we do this act of, like I said, fundamentally it's charity.
You're not doing anything for the company and we're still having to pay you.
So what happened for Marissa was she was in the adoption process, and the woman that she was adopting from had the baby early, right, at 22 weeks.
That's, you know, horrible, you know, to go through.
Thank goodness this baby survived.
Thank goodness we have medicine now that has advanced and that babies can survive when they're just 22 weeks out of the womb.
And obviously this is a huge life event that has happened for her.
That changes things for both her and her husband.
It doesn't necessarily change things for her employer.
This is not her employer's family.
So Marissa obviously is understanding in this moment that, wow, well, two weeks paid maternity
leave that I can take, but I'm also going to have to sign an agreement saying that I'm
agreeing to return in at least for six months.
And I don't really know if that's going to be my circumstance, because we weren't expecting
this to be what we were in.
We weren't expecting this baby to be born at 22 weeks.
So what Marissa did then was she called HR department, she called management, and she got on the phone with them, and she asked them about the option of working from the hospital.
Can I change my job?
The same thing my former employee said to me.
I realize that life gets in the way, and this is my circumstance, and I would like to change my job.
Her job, again, is an in-studio coordinator.
I don't see how you can be an in-studio coordinator out of studio.
The management was happy to have a conversation with her.
She talked about this in the today.com.
She did an interview with them. They had a conversation with her.
She felt positive about the conversation.
They talked about how it might work.
She was like, I thought it was a done deal.
I thought like, yeah, they were being so open and so warm about it.
And then the management hung up the phone with her.
They took it to the CEO and they said, would this work?
Allowing her to work from the hospital, your in-studio coordinator.
And the CEO said, no, that doesn't work.
We need an in-studio coordinator that is actually going to be in the studio because that's what we hired her for.
So what happened thereafter was they called her back and they told her that it was not going to work.
They actually said, but your job will be available to you when you get back.
So what are her options?
So the only thing left for her to do is what my former employee was going to do.
What she did, ultimately.
Offer your resignation because you can no longer do this job.
But instead, her sister decided to talk about it publicly and it created an absolute firestorm.
Here's a clip just sort of recapping what's going on.
I will never give Kybaby another dime of my money and I would encourage you to do the same.
These are the people we're supporting.
Kite brought this onto themselves after treating their employees so bad.
The Texas-based baby clothing company Kite Baby is under fire this morning for its handling of an employee asking to work from home to care for her adopted baby in intensive care.
Chief Executive has now issued an apology.
I wanted to hop on here to sincerely apologize to Marissa for how her parental leave was communicated and handled.
It was my oversight that she didn't feel supported as we always have intended.
A lot of people just said that first apology, Poppy and Phil, was not enough.
People said it wasn't genuine, that it was scripted.
And so the CEO came back and said, fine, I'll do another apology.
This was a terrible decision. I was insensitive, selfish. I cannot imagine
the stress she had to go through. I fully realized the impact of my action, my decision,
my short-sightedness. This all started in December of last year when Marissa Hughes
and her partner decided to adopt a baby.
That baby was born prematurely and because of health reasons had to remain in the NICU. The policy for Kite Baby for Marissa was that she would get two weeks of maternity leave We're good to go.
But they said they didn't feel that that proposed plan would fulfill the responsibilities of
her current position.
So they're saying that her job is there if she wants to return.
And not only that, but now they're saying they're also going to revise their company
policy because of all of this.
Marissa also released a video on social media.
We did acknowledge the apology that was put out on social media.
And while we don't think it would be appropriate for me to go back, we're really encouraged
to hear that there will be some changes made for current and future employees at the company.
So here's what's happened.
Marissa has started a GoFundMe.
It's almost at $100,000 because they see her as a victim.
They're like, your baby was a NICU, and the responsibility of your employer
is to simply pay you for a job that you're not doing.
An in-studio coordinator, she's supposed to just fundamentally change your job
and be understanding of your circumstances.
This is the world when it's run by women.
This would never happen.
This would never happen in male circumstances.
The idea that a CEO's responsibility is to be understanding of every single life event
that you're going through.
And let me be clear.
Let me be clear.
There are tons of them, right?
You could have an employee who has a child that has cancer and is fighting cancer for years.
You can have an employee whose mother is dying, right?
You can have an employee whose relative just died, an employee whose husband just died.
In the mind of women, I'm just asking, in the female hive mind, an employer
is supposed to be compassionate in every single one And by compassion, which I think they actually exercise by saying your job will be here when you get back, what women actually want is just pay her.
Just pay her and create a job, even if it's a job that you don't need.
Guys, this is just not how business works.
This is what happens.
Feminists demanded that women be allowed into the workforce.
Women were allowed into the workforce.
Then feminists demanded that not only should we be in the workforce, but the workforce
should create carve-outs for us when we want to be a mom.
Like when we are adopting and we want to bond with our baby.
And then that happened. And then you have maternal leave policies.
You have parental leave policies.
Now women are saying, okay, well, even in circumstances where we can't come back to work, we expect that you are just going to shift and shape and continue to pay us and create new roles for us because you need to be understanding.
Essentially, we're expecting you to be our family members, not an employer.
Again, what obviously is going to happen here is that women are going to understand, women that run businesses, that this is a major downside of hiring women.
Despite the fact that this CEO employs all females She's a fantastic CEO, literally.
She employs all females.
It's a very small business.
Despite the fact that she should be held up as a beacon of feminism, she even allows her employees to bring their children to work, she is now about to potentially lose her very small business because she made a perfectly understandable decision.
That's what's happening right now.
Has done very little relative for the company, if you really think about it.
They have decided that she's the victim, which therefore must mean that the CEO is a villain, despite the fact that she is herself a mother.
She has tons of children, despite the fact that she's employing all women.
You never think about what she's going for.
You never think about the headache that she may have, thinking, how is this business going to make money?
I now employ 15 people.
Here's the truth about that business.
This isn't some... We're good to go.
$14 million in revenue.
Let me tell you what that translates to.
$14 million in revenue is not before expenses.
That means altogether the business took in $14 million.
And from that $14 million, they must pay their 13 employees.
They must pay for rent.
They must pay for utilities. They must pay for supplies.
They must pay for shipping. You're deducting all of these costs.
That means that Kite Baby is not making a huge profit as it is, okay?
And so when this CEO who has to deal with the stress of thinking, how am I going to make sure that all of my employees can continue to have this employment?
How am I going to make sure that they are able to feed their families, all of these women that work for me?
No one thinks about her. No one thinks about the CEO and the stress that she has to endure, plus also being a mother because she didn't run to the internet and she doesn't cry on the internet and say, oh my God, you won't believe what happened to me.
So your sympathy only lies with the employee.
And you're castigating this woman.
And now on top of having to deal with that stress, again, not a lot of profit after you consider all of the expenses that they go through, she now has to deal with a mass boycott because she did something that was fair.
It was fair. I would have made the exact same decision.
It is so nice that they said to her that your job will still be here when you get back.
In my personal opinion, everybody should be supporting the CEO. But instead, what's going to happen is a boycott.
And this CEO is now going to have to lay off some of her employees.
Maybe those employees are also going through personal things, but nobody thinks about them because that's not how the internet works.
The first person to publish the sad story is the first person that gets all of the sympathy.
I also want to add here that now, of course, the left is seizing on this as an argument for why we should federally mandate parental leave, and that is an outrage.
We should not federally mandate parental leave.
Imagine if the federal government says, now every single employer must give women two months off paid.
You know what's going to happen? People are not going to hire women.
Or what's going to happen is small businesses are just going to be taken out and you're only going to have the Goldman Sachs and you're only going to have the Black Rocks who can actually afford to pay that sort of a thing because of their profits every year.
And then women are going to go, why are there no women?
Why are there no female companies out there?
Why aren't there more female CEOs in the world?
Because when we actually have one, we take them out based on our emotions.
We should try to conquer that in the future, but I know that we probably won't.
But I'm looking forward to some of you at least considering this argument.
And that's all I have to say about that.
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Okay, now it's time for some Topics du Jour.
♪♪ All right, guys, how's this for a story?
In 1988, a pastor, a pastor no less, hired some men to murder his wife.
And one of those hit men, his name was Kenneth Smith, took part in her execution and they stabbed her 10 times and they beat her to death.
Horrific. Well, the reason why Kenneth Smith is in the news again is because last night in Alabama, he was put to death and they used a nitrogen hypoxia to kill him.
And that was something that was up for debate.
So there were tons of articles, you probably saw this, of people just debating whether or not it was humane to put him to death this way because they said that there would be a lot of suffering.
And, of course, we always hear this debate.
People are on one side or the other of it, of whether or not the death penalty in general is something that we should still take part in.
And there are tons of arguments that are for it and tons of arguments that are against it.
I actually read a remarkable article that I'd like to point you guys to, and you should read it when you have some time.
It was published in the Mail yesterday by Peter Hitchens.
He wrote, And in the article, Peter Hitchens kind of unpacks what it was like for him watching two people be executed, one by the electric chair, and essentially saying on the electric chair, their heads just burst into flames.
Another person who was killed by a lethal injection.
People think that that's more peaceful.
He alleges that it's not, but he agreed that nitrogen, the nitrogen death would be much
worse and so he was against it.
It's an interesting one.
When you think about the woman who was killed, you think about what she went through being
beat and stabbed to death.
Why do we feel sympathetic towards her killer?
And I'm asking this, by the way, not as me, just asking, I guess, a more universal question
is why do people reserve sympathy for people who commit such heinous crimes?
And this is something that we've talked about on the show many times, is that we are starting
to become a nation in general that is soft on crime.
But there's always so much humanizing that takes place in the press when it comes to people that did rather inhumane things.
And I think one of the worst aspects of being on death row is that it takes forever.
You're on death row minimally, I think, always for 10 years.
As they're deciding your fate, pardon.
And there's obviously a mental trauma that goes with that.
They interviewed the pastor that spent so much time with Kenneth Smith in prison, and he said that he was terrified and that he was nervous.
The press is saying that he couldn't even eat his last meal, which was something that he had ordered from Waffle House.
He wasn't even hungry. So there was a lot of humanizing that was taking place in the press here, and they didn't really talk about the woman who he killed whatsoever.
So I'm asking you guys, what is your take on the death penalty?
Is it archaic?
Is it something that we should be doing?
I'll give you my personal perspective of it.
I think of what is the absolute most heinous crime that somebody can commit.
And for me, it is anything that involves a child.
So I do not feel anything when it comes to pedophiles, when I hear a story about children that have been raped, children that have been tortured.
It just unlocks something in me.
I think it is the mama bear spirit that possesses all women that have children. I felt this way even before I had
children, but wow Considering these circumstances now, it's so much worse and
I would feel nothing for a person if they were executed But I'm against the death penalty and I'll tell you why
because when I consider what that person does to a child and I consider that that
person now has to grow up and I Consider what trauma that does to the adults who know that
that child suffered it and I think death is too easy That's my perspective when I think about what that person
should have to suffer It sounds so much worse to be put into prison for the rest
of your life Solitary confinement knowing that you have also potential
fights you that you could potentially be raped in prison Death almost seems like too easy of an option
So whenever you get to point in your mind like this person deserves death, don't you kind of think that that's sort of
easy?
regarding Kenneth Smith and nitrogen hypoxia, it took 22 minutes for him to die.
So there definitely was a tremendous amount of suffering.
He was convulsing. But again, I challenge you to think about what that young woman went through who was murdered by him, what the pastor's wife went through.
Very interested to read your guys' comments regarding this.
All right, enough about murder and death.
These are two heavy topics. It's Friday.
We want something that's lighthearted to end your week.
And as you know, sometimes I am on the internet and the internet happens on the internet where you come across something that's so brilliant and it's so deep and it sends you on a thought spiral.
A couple of weeks ago, I revealed to you that actually Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, according to Black Twitter, was actually a thief and she was not the victim at all in that story.
And I agreed. Well, look what I have mined for you this week.
Think deeply about this.
This was a tweet by a gentleman named Zach Heltzel.
He wrote, Hmm.
Wow. Wow, Zach.
That is so deep, and it is so true.
I, again, am amazed at what you can find on the internet.
I thought about it, and I went, absolutely, of course, espresso martinis.
It's the exact same thing as a Four Loco, but you know that espresso martinis are being purchased by wealthy people, and they're dressed up, and they look classy, and they're sitting at the bar, whereas Four Locos are something that we used to be able to get at gas stations.
It's an outrage. I'm absolutely outraged.
I demand some law that we bring Four Locos back.
We need more governance in that category.
I thought that was really brilliant.
It really gave me a chuckle, and I hope that it makes you laugh and also sends you on a deep thought spiral.
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All right, guys, we're already almost up with time.
I don't even know how that happened.
I feel like that was very quick.
Let's jump into some of your comments regarding episodes past pertaining to the border crisis and the fact that we are kind of really actually facing a constitutional crisis.
You're good, Judy, writes, Yes, that is one of the things I think is the worst, is that it seems like people that go to work are just taking advantage of people that do the right thing, people that are paying their taxes.
Then you look at how they're spending your tax dollars, looking at how they're giving so many handouts to individuals for no reason.
Let go of the idea that these people are pursuing a better life.
Like I told you, you saw that young man that we showed you, which sounded terrible.
Terrible. When he was essentially lacing in a threat there at the border.
Something else is going on.
We don't yet know what that something else is.
Diane writes, There was a Cuban YouTuber who flew to Mexico and crossed the border.
She made a whole video explaining how to do this and encourages people to come in.
Very detailed steps of the process.
With prices of buses and everything, she blogged her whole experience.
You really gotta love that. What's allowed on YouTube?
She just committed a crime.
Tell everybody else, commit a crime with me, and she's still able to be on YouTube.
Yet, the policies that we have here, just amazing.
Another Diane writes, Candace is right about the whole migrant situation.
I'm Colombian and I can tell you for a fact that many Colombians and not the good Colombians are going to the US
Because they say it's so easy to cross right now and just imagine what they're gonna get when they get here
There's definitely going to be welfare benefits There's going to be no excuse for them to leave and again
It's going to be our children our neighborhoods that are going to have to suffer this influx of criminals that are
coming over at the border pertaining to the Taylor Swift porn AI story
This person writes, banning all internet porn would make it easy to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
I would ban all porn, but I don't see that going over well.
At least when we were kids, porn was limited to the pages of magazines and DVDs or videotapes that had to be purchased or rented with ID. Did some kids sneak to watch it?
Sure, but it was much harder to get a hold of.
We should work to make porn less accessible to kids, not more.
I agree with you.
Mary writes, I agree with what was said in the show about Taylor Swift regarding the AI explicit photos.
It is a scary world out there, and even when I am not fond of her, I can acknowledge that she is powerful enough to do something regarding the people behind creating explicit photos.
I have not supported her before, but if she does something about this, then I will totally have her back.
Something else that people pointed out in the comments that I do want to bring up was that people were saying,
well, it's not the same as sexual assault.
Listen, maybe sexual assault is too strong of terms.
But for a woman to be violated and to have real life porn created of them, graphic porn of them
created for consumers to just enjoy, and they believe it's real, that is how good the AI is.
It looks like it's real.
It is tremendous mental suffering that a woman is going through.
It's simply not fair.
Is it exactly like rape? No.
But is it some sort of an assault that a woman is suffering?
I believe so.
So maybe you think those are the wrong terms.
Maybe we can come up with different ones.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, unfortunately that is all the time that we have for today and thus this week.
As a reminder, a brand new episode of A Shot in the Dark drops later today on Daily Wire+.
We're going to be talking about the Hib vaccine, so be sure to subscribe right now.
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