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In furious post, SocialAutopsy’s Candace Owens attacks a WashPo story that isn’t there

Candace Owens: Taking aim at something that isn't there
There’s no there there

The already very strange Candace Owens story just keeps getting stranger.

In the week and half since her ill-conceived “anti-bullying” startup SocialAutopsy was kicked off Kickstarter- after being bluntly criticized by anti-harassment activists/GamerGate nemeses Zoe Quinn and Randi Harper, Owens has launched a veritable crusade against the two women, and against those she sees as their allies and/or co-conspirators.

She’s posted three weird and angry tirades on her degree180.com website (the first of which I wrote about here). On Twitter, meanwhile, she’s spewed forth literally hundreds of surreal tweets (some of which I’ve written about here) painting herself as the pure-hearted victim of some nebulous conspiracy.

Her latest post, which went up late last night, is her strangest and angriest yet — an overwrought attack on Washington Post writer Caitlin Dewey and her editor David Malitz for the imaginary crime of attempting to libel her in an article that the Post never published and that Dewey likely never even wrote. 

https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/724436591914176512

Later in Owens’ post there are surprise cameo appearances by Jeff Bezos and two white supremacists who longtime readers of this blog know well. We’ll get to them in a bit.

In the meantime, let’s take a look at Owens’ bizarre “attempted libel” charge, which turns out to be based on such slender evidence and tortured logic that it’s hard to even explain.

Owens relates a phone “interview” she gave to Dewey, in which she pointedly refused to answer questions or “specify which anti-bullying organizations we had dealt with.”

The SocialAutopsy founder’s reluctance to name even a single anti-bullying group seems a tad weird, since Social Autopsy’s now-defunct but still standing Kickstarter page openly proclaims that “we are proud partners and friends of the Tyler Clementi Foundation and their Day1 campaign.”

But Owens says she told Dewey she couldn’t mention any names because “anyone who had been even remotely associated with us had received some form of unwarranted contact.”

Doing some further reporting the story that, again, never actually ran, Dewey apparently called someone at the Tyler Clementi Foundation, or at some other organization that’s been publicly linked to Social Autopsy, in an attempt to confirm that they had indeed been harassed — that they, as Dewey apparently put it, had gotten some “hate mail.”

Here’s how Owens, cranking up the melodrama, reports what happened next:

At 7:23pm that evening Caitlin’s nasty plan was revealed

I was driving, and I received a phone call from an anti-bullying company. The phone call came from an individual very high up in command, and the tone of the discussion was unexpected.

He was angry, that I saw it fit to relay to the Washington Post that his company was acting as “consultants” to us on our app. He was also angry that as a result, I made a statement on their behalf, that their company had been receiving tons of “hate mail”.

It was a blatant lie. A flat out, disgusting, made up from thin air lie, and it was something that was incredibly opposite from what I had actually said.

Well, no, even by Owens’ own account, that’s not “incredibly opposite” from what she told Dewey. It’s more like “incredibly the same.”

Owens, you recall, told Dewey that she didn’t want to name names because “anyone who had been even remotely associated with us had received some form of unwarranted contact.” 

Dewey called one of those someones to ask if that was true. That’s not libel. That’s not even “attempted libel.” That’s reporting.

Owens cranks the melodrama up to 11 as she continues her tale of woe.

What happened next is something that I am loathe to admit, and so uncharacter [sic] of me in general: I cried.

Yes I pulled over my car to the side of the road and I cried to this unknown individual on the phone.

Unknown? Owens just told us he was “an individual very high up in command” at an “anti-bullying company.” We don’t know his name but she did.

Was it out of frustration? maybe. Was it out of genuine heartache and a final goodbye to everything that I had previously held true about journalism? perhaps. Was it a transition from naive Candace to angry Candace? Definitely. These people were willing to ruin my entire professional career and reputation, to protect the slimey images of Randi Lee Harper and Zoey [sic] Quinn.

And so Owens decided she “had to stop the lie before it was published.”

First, she “called Caitlin about 5 times,” then emailed her. No response.

Owens, apparently under the delusion that she’s narrating an action movie, informs us that “[t]his was at 7:35pm.”

Not 7:34. Not 7:36. 7:35.

At this point, unwilling to wait for Dewey to respond, Owens decided to get her thousand-plus Twitter followers to, well, harass the reporter. “I asked them to retweet my plea to Caitlin to have her please contact me, before publishing misinformation,” Owens writes. “There was no way she could ignore me.”

Dewey was apparently out with her aunt to a birthday dinner. When she sent an annoyed note to Owens three hours later, the furious Owens decided that Dewey was a “smug bitch” and that her email was “a pompous, arrogant, little bitch of a statement to make.”

Elsewhere in the post, Owens refers to Dewey as a “corrupt reporter,” a “smug individual,” a “terrible actress,” and “Caity-doll.”

You can read the rest of Owens’ outraged account of her interactions with Dewey if you’d like; the very thought of trying to summarize all this ado about nothing makes me weary.

Unsatisfied with Dewey’s responses, Owens also pestered her boss, WashPo Deputy Features Editor David Malitz. When he called her the next morning,

I told him that what I was accusing her of (journalistic fraud), was something that she had already been accused of in an article by Matt Forney.

You didn’t see that coming did you?

Yes. that’s right. Owens has apparently decided that MATT FORNEY — the schlumpy, white supremacist, woman hating MATT FORNEY — is going to be her guide to media ethics.

MATT FORNEY, who once wrote that “women should be terrorized by their men; it’s the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps.”

MATT FORNEY, who wrote (in that same post) that

Slapping a girl across the face isn’t just about hurting her, it’s a kind of neg. It says, “I can crush you like an insect, but you aren’t worth the effort.” It’s a tacit acknowledgment that she’s weaker than you, beneath you, and if she crosses you again, you’ll put her in the hospital.

MATT FORNEY, who responded to the San Bernardino shootings by Tweeting that we don’t need gun control but rather ““immigrant control, black control and Muslim control.”

That guy.

Forney’s accusations of “journalistic fraud” against Dewey are based on his tendentious interpretations of her writing — and his blatant and unconvincing attempts to whitewash his own.

At one point, Forney indignantly complains that

Dewey compares Roosh and me to deceased attention-seeking pastor Fred Phelps, Stormfront founder Don Black, Holocaust-denying preacher Michael Crook, among others.

In fact, those comparisons are actually pretty apt.

Both Roosh and Forney are raging homophobes. Last year, on Roosh’s Return of Kings, Forney tried to pin the blame for an Amtrak crash on what he called the “homosexuality and exhibitionism” of the train operator; the deck for the post suggested that “unchecked homosexuality is bad for society.”

Last Fall, Forney and Roosh attended an “identitarian” –that is, white supremacist — conference in Washingtnon DC together, with Forney declaring that the

speakers [were] fantastic, the atmosphere [was] convivial, and the experience of being in a room with close to 200 guys (and gals) who are on the same ideological wavelength like you is an experience you can’t pass up.

Oh, and both Roosh and Forney are good friends with Davis Aurini, who thinks that the the number of deaths in the Holocaust has been exaggerated, and that the Jews were sort of, kind of asking for it. Indeed, Aurini’s comments on the Holocaust inspired the editor of neo-Nazi internet tabloid The Daily Stormer to declare Aurini “a pretty cool guy” in an article titled — wait for it — “Davis Aurini is a Pretty Cool Guy.”

Forney continues, complaining that Dewey made these mean comparisons

despite the fact that neither Roosh nor I engage in illegal activity, encourage others to break the law, or write about anything other than masculine self-improvement.

Masculine self-improvement? Oh, so THAT’S what Forney is writing about in posts with titles like  “The Necessity of Domestic Violence.” “How to Crush a Girl’s Self-Esteem” and “Why Fat Girls Don’t Deserve to be Loved.”

I’m not seeing a lot of “journalistic fraud” going on here — except on Forney’s part.

Speaking of Davis Aurini, guess what? Owens also relies on a blog post by him in making her “case” against Dewey.

Most of Aurini’s unctuous — yet somehow also threatening — “open letter” is a deeply unconvincing defense of Forney and Roosh. His basic complaint about her coverage of Roosh’s Return of Kings isn’t that she misrepresented the site’s backwards gender politics, but that she didn’t recognize that women really

are far less feminine, far less loving, and far less chaste than they were fifty years ago….

You say that “the website ReturnofKings.com… advocates for gender roles even ’50s housewives would balk at,” but in light of our social deterioration, is this truly such a bad thing?

He’s also a bit offended that she didn’t notice his own “recent article on self-development and Leadership,” which I’m sure was quite the masterpiece of rational thought and good sense.

Aurini also complains that Dewey was unfair to poor Mr. Forney:

You criticize his article The Case Against Female Self-Esteem, but did you bother to read it? It’s been widely noted that there’s a huge problem with over-inflated self-esteem, driven by the “Everybody gets a trophy!” culture.

In the article in question, which I’ve read several times, Forney declares, among other terrible things, that

The idea that women should have self-esteem or need it, beyond a low baseline to ensure they don’t commit suicide or become psycho stalkers, is one of the most disastrous social engineering experiments of the modern era. A woman with excessive confidence is like a man with a vagina. It’s an attribute that is at best superfluous and at worst prevents women from fulfilling their natural biological and social functions.

This is the guy that Owens thinks is some sort of expert on ethics.

It’s not clear to me that Owens actually read these two posts. I will assume, charitably, that she did.

But it doesn’t appear that she made much of an attempt to find out anything at all about Dewey’s accusers. Indeed, she bases part of her assessment of the credibility of Forney’s and Aurini’s posts on the not-actually-true idea that they don’t know each other and wrote their posts independently of one another.

“I think it is safe to say,” she declares, “that if three individuals who are unknown to one another agree that she is abusing her position and telling lies, then somebody should look into it.”

Yeah no. Forney amd Aurini have known each other for years. They do podcasts together.

Forney is the bald douchebag wearing sunglasses at night. Aurini is the other bald douchebag wearing sunglasses at night.
Forney is the bald, pasty douchebag wearing sunglasses. Aurini is the other bald, pasty douchebag wearing sunglassest.

They go on hikes together.

Uh, yeah, the title. Aurini kind of revels in his racism.
Uh, yeah, the title. Aurini kind of revels in his racism.

Hell, in his post defending Forney and Roosh, Aurini referred to them as “colleagues.”

Ultimately, the WashPo’s Malitz decided to wash his hands of the whole thing, sending Owens this brief note:

sosorryThe declaration that SocialAutopsy wasn’t important enough to merit a story in the Post seems to have infuriated Owens even more than Dewey’s alleged “lies.”

Aside from attempting to ruin my life and career, the Washington Post was now telling me that I wasn’t even important enough, and that if they wanted to— they would indeed use Caitlin’s lie in the future. Yup. They had somehow purchased future rights to a lie.

And this is where Owens’ post starts to get really weird.

Later that day, Owens informs us,

The day was winding down and my head was spinning. I couldn’t process that I had just caught the Washington Post red-handed in a lie, and perhaps worse, thatnobody had felt it necessary to apologize.

So Owens decided that all of the villains in her little tale remind her of the bratty rich kids she’d encountered as a child growing up poor.

I began thinking about the sheer brattiness of everything that had happened to date, with Quinn, Harper, Singal, Dewey, and now, oddly enough David Malitz.

Who was their Daddy?

SPOILER ALERT: It’s Jeff Bezos. Yeah, that Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com dude. He’s their collective Daddy.

Well, sort of. Owens, who still insists that she’s no conspiracy theorist, explains that Jeff Bezos is their Daddy in the conspiracy theory that she might come up with if she were given to conspiracy theorizing.

Never mind that in her Twitter feed and in all three of her big blog posts she walks like a conspiracy theorist and quacks like a conspiracy theorist, she insists she’s definitely not one

But the totally hypothetical, totally not real, guys,  conspiracy theory that she comes up with is a doozy.

[I]f I were a conspiracy theorist, I would stop focusing on Randi Lee Harper altogether. I would give up any energy spent discussing Zoe Quinn, David Malitz, or [New York Magazine’s] Jesse Singal, [the subject of her last post], and instead devote myself fully to trying to discover who their figurative daddy was.

My sheer street-smarts would clue me in to the fact that none of these journalists are facing any repercussion from their jobs, despite having been accused of the same fraudulent offenses multiple times.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would focus on the fact Harper and Quinn have a long list of victims who have accused them, repeatedly, of harassment, and that these victims, like I, do not know one another.

She, personally, doesn’t “know one another?”

I would wonder how a figurative rich kid

A figurative rich kid?

could do all of that and still somehow manage to:

  1. Have the coveted Washington Post manufacturing lies for them.
  2. Work with Twitter to eliminate the very thing they’ve been accused multiple times (corporations usually will not involve themselves with controversial individuals)
  3. Have ties to Google, (in an effort to prevent online abuse, again ironic)
  4. Have a book coming out published by Simon & Schuster

WE’RE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS HERE, PEOPLE!

AGAIN.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXVE01oOTAM

I know, I used this in my past post, but seriously, there is nothing in the universe more apt than it. Or at least nothing on YouTube.

So how do the reverse vampires of Simon & Schuster connect to the saucer people at the Washington Post?

DADDY BEZOS.

“If I were a crazy conspiracy theorist,” Owens writes,

I would be intrigued by the fact that Amazon’s founder and owner, Jeff Bezos had, in an unprecedented move, outright purchased the Washington Post and all of it’s subsidiaries in 2014.

I would probably then recall an article I had read years before then which informed me that Jeff Bezos put up the initial investment in Google back in 2008, and so of course, owns a significant piece of that as well.

Which might only be interesting to a crazy conspiracy theorist if they had already considered the fact that he made an early, significant investment into Twitter back in 2008

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EqQEKjfYA0

Plus Amazon closed a multi-year deal with Simon & Schuster. 

THE PUBLISHER OF ZOE QUINN’S UPCOMING BOOK!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czvIhn2acVU

I’ve left out some of the details of this totally not real conspiracy theory here, but obviously I’m running out of really dramatic 4-second-long videos.

Yeah if I was a conspiracy theorist, I would be devoting a lot of time to taking a closer look at Jeff Bezos, a billionaire who could potentially produce such arrogant children.

Because who would apologize for almost ruining someone’s like with a lie if they had Daddy Bezos in their back pocket? Who wouldn’t feel confident enough to talk shit after committing fraud on twitter, with Daddy Bezos to go home to? And why in God’s name wouldn’t two women laugh and take credit for torpedoing a pathetic little Kickstarter campaign, if Daddy Bezos was who they had to fess’ up to?

With that many billions to count…who would ever feel the need to say sorry to the nobody Candace Owens?

Owens then tries another tack, suggesting — this time for realz — that

I do actually believe that Mr. Bezos needs to take a closer look at his acquisition. Seeing the Washington Post lose all credibility at the hands of a few bad reporters, would be a terribly ironic end, to it’s historical reign.

Owens’ post then takes on yet another radically different tone.

Noting that she is African-American, Owens compares her alleged poor treatment at the hands of the Washington Post — which, again, has published absolutely nothing about her — to the horrifying abuse her grandfather suffered at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, when

he was caught selling oranges on the “wrong” corner. As a resulting punishment, the Ku Klux Klan hunted him down, and branded him in the face (you know, like they do to cattle).

In the “postscript” to her long and fragmented post, aimed directly at the Washington Post’s Mintz, she declares that

I too have dreams. And all I’ve ever wanted was the opportunity to go after them. So you’ll have to excuse my general shock when you insinuated to me that you could take them all away one day, through the simple publication of a lie.

Yup. That snotty little e-mail was more than added insult to an injury– it was an idea that I couldn’t bear to wrap my head around; it was the idea that you and your fraudulent staff are somehow in ownership of every single thing that I have worked for my whole life.

Growing angrier by the word, Owens tells Malitz:

You thought you could instill power over me because you work at the Washington Post? The Washington Post, is now absolute shit in my eyes, and your placement there is little more than a confirmation of it’s dying brand.

Because when I close my eyes:, what you and Caitlin have done to me, feels like a branded warning to my face that I have infringed upon your figurative property.

Yes, that’s right. The fact that the Washington Post would NOT be running a story that Owens had decided would contain some terrible lie about her, and the fact that the editor she pestered about the non-existent story had decided not to “investigate” the non-writer or the non-story based on 1) Owens’ assumptions of what that hypothetical story might contain and 2) the completely unconvincing accusations of two literal white supremacists — these things, in Owens’ mind, are somehow comparable to HER GRANDFATHER BEING BRANDED IN THE FACE BY THE KKK?

Owens ends her post by telling Malitz

F**K YOU.

Leave me and what my family has worked for, the hell alone.

She says this at the end of a 4600-word piece viciously attacking the writer and editor of a Washington Post piece that does not exist.

Leaving people alone is apparently not something Owens is very good at.

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Her Grace Phryne Purriosa Fisher
Her Grace Phryne Purriosa Fisher
8 years ago

The best description for this sort of thing that I’ve ever heard was, “They’re at an obtuse angle to reality.” Seems appropriate here. And I agree, she needs better friends and other people surrounding her.

EurekaLemon
EurekaLemon
8 years ago

In the face of such a bizarre ongoing story, I can definitely understand the urge to investigate. It’s interestingly horrible (in that respect, this has been the gift that keeps on giving) and sleuthing is fun.

I suppose that I’m trying to deliberately take it all at face value because at some level, I do genuinely wonder if this is in part some troll job and that to spend time thinking about it is to reward the hypothetical trolls involved.

Lucia
Lucia
8 years ago

Does no one see how garbage everyone in every corner is behaving?

No?

Alrighty, then.

Loquora
Loquora
8 years ago

I’ve gone from pitying her when I first heard about this mess to being angry for the damage she’s doing and now right back to pitying her. I’m actually reading her newest post right now, I’m not very far in, but I can’t help but read this as a person who is laying the bricks of her own prison. All these people seem to be offering her salvation and she keeps scorning them to add another layer of mortar.

EverythingIsRidiculous
EverythingIsRidiculous
8 years ago

One of my major questions in this mess is, has anybody confirmed with the Candace Owens who was bullied as a teenager that this is in fact her, and not somebody who’s googled for a cyberbullying victim’s name to hijack and use in their strange campaign of whatever the hell is going on here?

ColeYote
ColeYote
8 years ago

It’s not clear to me that Owens actually read these two posts. I will assume, charitably, that she did.

Honestly, she looks worse if she has. That would imply she knowingly sided with one of the most detestable people in America.

calmdown
calmdown
8 years ago

@EverythingIsRidiculous

I have the same question.

somebody who’s googled for a cyberbullying victim’s name to hijack and use in their strange campaign of whatever the hell is going on here?

I am starting to feel that this is more and more possible?

Potential Human Bean
Potential Human Bean
8 years ago

This whole thing makes no sense to me. This huge conspiracy is absurd. Exactly what would be the point of it?

I hope that this mellows out swiftly with the people involved doing what is best for them to move their lives forward in a constructive manner.

ChrisH
ChrisH
8 years ago

The sad thing is, soon enough, it won’t matter what Candace Owen’s original intentions were. Whether she was a starry eyed idealist that wanted to help but didn’t understand or a cynical operater planning to cash in on GG welfare from the beginning….she’ll become the worst of everything if she doesn’t turn back from this path.

I anticipate Candace will get a regular spot as a Fox News consultant where she will explain how Black Lives Matter are the real racists. Because that’s the end game for the path she’s laid out.

I remembered the essay “Jackie at the Crossroads” by Fred Clark, where the hypothetical Jackie is challenged about a fact she assumed was true but was objectively false. Good Jackie has humility and accepts she was wrong and adapts. Bad Jackie gets defensive and digs in. It is a parable that closely relates to Candace, if we give her the benefit of the doubt.

Chiomara
Chiomara
8 years ago

Owens compares her alleged poor treatment at the hands of the Washington Post — which, again, has published absolutely nothing about her — to the horrifying abuse her grandfather suffered at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan

She is black, her grandfather was a victim of the KKK and, she not only sides with white supremacists, she also compares a not lie that was not published to what he suffered?

If I was Malitz my answer to her would be just:
Dear Miss Owens
Wtf? What in the name of f!? Have you been using drugs? Are you in your normal state of mind? Seriously, Miss Owens, seriously. What the heck. Sit on the corner and think about your life. Think before you dig even deeper. I wont write the article because I don’t think this Titanic needs help sinking.

And I DO hope she will wake up someday and when she does…. When she does, DAMN, will she feel ashamed.
Or maybe she wont. A black female white supremacist? Why not, I guess.

Jarnsaxa
Jarnsaxa
8 years ago

I don’t think this person is okay.

Shaenon
8 years ago

The bit about the anti-bullying group VIP calling her up and bring angry she’s claiming they’re consulting makes it clear in my mind that she has been delusional for a while. I’m betting that Social Autopsy was never actually related with the charities it claimed to work with.

That seems clear from her post. I’ve seen it happen before on crowdfunding sites, where people often have a fuzzy understanding of the difference between “I bet these people would support my project” and “these people actually support my project and I have permission to use their names.”

Shaenon
8 years ago

As someone who works in publishing, I think I’m most entertained by the part where she finds it sinister that Amazon stocks books by Simon & Schuster. A publisher? Selling books on Amazon? Unprecedented!

In fact, the Big Five book publishers, of which Simon & Schuster is one, have a famously frosty relationship with Amazon. The deal she mentions, which happened back in October, was a compromise over ebook rights, which was newsworthy because Amazon failed in similar negotiations with Big Five member Hachette.

Although I’m no great fan of Jeff Bezos, I sincerely doubt he’s signing agreements with major publishing companies to harass people on Twitter.

Flora
Flora
8 years ago

Somebody needs to develop a Drake equation for trolls.
Of all the people in the world, how many are on the internet?
Of those, how many use social media?
Of those, how many have never heard of doxxing/gamergate?
Of those, how many are concerned about cyberbullying?
Of those, how many have apparently well intentioned but poorly thought out plans to combat cyberbullying?
Of those, how many have difficulty distinguishing good information from bad information on the internet?
Of those, how many have a propensity to descending into conspiracy when confronted with opposing information, or are easily manipulated into the same?
Of those, how many would live Tweet this process?

Unlike the actual Drake equation, I’m pretty sure the answer is much higher than one.

Chiomara
Chiomara
8 years ago

@Flora

I can understand this all too well, because Candace Owens parallels exactly what my mother would do. Anyone who does not praise her must be “against her” and if they are “against her” there must be a reason which means they are all talking to each other which means they are all in it together which means she is the poor victim of a grand conspiracy… All because a few people did not immediately sing her praises or attempted to provide constructive criticism.

If you remove all agency from individuals and imagine everyone as existing solely in relation to Owens, it starts to resemble a coherent thought pattern.

DAMMIT, Flora, this reached DEEP to me. Are you my sister? My mother is the exact same. Relationship with her is very difficult, basically impossible. Tell me, does this come with a need to control your every movement? Because everything you do, say, feel or eat against her will is a direct attack to her? Not trying to be an internet therapist, but I happen to befriend a therapist and she gave me a book on personality types to understand people better. I put my mother to make the test and it says she has the Vigilant personality type, and probably “Paranoid Personality Disorder”. The book matches PERFECTLY and the therapist confirmed based on informations I gave her. Understanding that its not my fault and she may have a PD made me feel so much better. Not to mention the book gives you tips on how to deal with it and thought exercises for her to make. Maybe she could use therapy too but, if your mom is like mine, I bet she’d find the suggestion outrageous. :/

The name of the book is New Personality Self-Portrait, by John M Oldham, MD and Lois B Morris. Its NOT a scientific book, but the therapist said its excellent for understanding people a bit better. Ironically, Amazon sells it.

Are you reading this, Candace? Buy it too. It may help you. And also, if you are reading this, take a few days off and read this post MANY times, while thinking about your life, okay? It’s not too late to fix this.

Chiomara
Chiomara
8 years ago

Re-reading my last comment it sounds a lot like keyboard diagnosing. I am sorry, it is not my intention to diagnose anyone with a personality Disorder, not even my mother (since she was not properly diagnosed). I just meant to suggest that may be the strongest personality type (everyone has one, its not a Disorder) of Flora’s mom and maybe Candance, because life is difficult for people with this personality type and the people around them. I know this too well. I just wanted to help Flora as the therapist helped me. Sorry if I offended anyone or disrespected the policy, it came from a place of love.
Sick or not, “Vigilant” or not, I hope she will see reality.

AND GUYS, DID YOU SEE WHTM IS PARTNERS WITH AMAZON!?
DUN-DUN-DUUUUUUUUN!

kupo
kupo
8 years ago

@dreemr

I really haven’t seen anyone try to say he’s controlling her online behavior in any way. If I’ve missed it, please point it out.

I really don’t want to put anyone on the spot and my intention here is not to put anyone on the defensive, but since you asked, here are the comments I took issue with. They may or may not be the same as what Jo is objecting to.

@Freemage

I do strongly suspect her boyfriend has done a lot of active well-poisoning against Quinn and other GG targets. He may be deliberately trying to steer her into this mess.

As far as I can tell, this suspicion is based solely on her boyfriend being alt-right. It assumes she couldn’t have come to these conclusions on her own.

@Kat

Candace Owens does have agency. That said, if I’ve learned anything from domestic violence counseling, it’s that victims are not responsible for their own victimization. So if Candace Owens’s right-wing boyfriend thinks it would be lots of lulz to have Owens harass Zoe Quinn and Randi Harper, he might set Owens up to do just that. Abuse can take many forms, and it’s hard for the victim to see the abuse if her abuser is telling her he loves her.

Alternatively, Candace Owens and her boyfriend might be in on a plot together.

This assumes that a) she’s a victim of domestic violence and b) her boyfriend is controlling her through said DV. I see no evidence of either of these from what I’ve read of her posts, although I get a headache when I try to read her actual words, so I’ve mostly been reading what others have written about her, so I could be wrong, here.

@katz

I certainly understand the sketchiness of implying that her boyfriend is the big mastermind, but she does seem to credulously accept anything someone she’s dating says, if ryeash’s post is anything to go by.

I assume this is referring to the following:

“I’ve been dating a guy a few months now and we, like the rest of America, were discussing this very predicament last night. He said something that terrified me, and that every woman in the world needs to hear. He said;

“It’s difficult not to be sexist toward women when 9 times out of 10, when situations like this arise, they ‘PMS’. – I’m kidding with that term, but what I mean to say is that they simply fulfill the notion that they aren’t capable of thinking rationally, which is exactly what top-level management, at high corporations are supposed to do. For some reason, women struggle with it”

I want every women who felt angry as they read those words to take a second, and think rationally. Lay down your pitchforks, and really think about the implications of that statement, upon which I could quite possibly pen a novel.

Because he’s right.”

I feel like it’s a huge assumption to say she believes anything her bf says just because she agrees with him on this.

I think a lot of the questioning of how much of a role the boyfriend is playing is based on her claiming she’s feminist but then doing and saying things that are in conflict with that. If she were a man who claimed to be feminist and who had an alt-right girlfriend who he agreed with on very anti-feminist views, I don’t think the same assumption would be made. There are people who think they’re feminist but who are misogynistic in one or more ways. I think the only reason anyone thinks those ideas all come from her boyfriend is simply because she’s a woman and we don’t want to believe that a feminist woman of color can be that misogynistic, but that’s a bunch of bullshit. Women can have that level of inconsistent beliefs, even about their own gender.

Flora
Flora
8 years ago

@Chiomara

SOLIDARITY. It has taken many years (and many hours of therapy) for me to recover who I am from beneath the relationship my mother imposed on me. I’m fortunate in that she disowned me several years back (over my atheism, which was of course a direct attack on her belief in spite of the fact that I never discussed it with her). She still finds ways to send me letters/e-mail/social media messages about every 6 months to verbally abuse me for rejecting her, in spite of the fact that she rejected me. She stated in no uncertain terms that I was not to contact her again unless I was willing to leave my career, life, and now husband to be her personal minion. She perceives my ability to continue with on with my (much happier) life without her as continuous assault.

I would really hesitate to get fixed on diagnoses, however, for the same reason people are cautioning against internet diagnosis here. The professionals I have been working with have their suspicions, of course, but much like your mother, my mom has no desire to seek a diagnoses because everyone ELSE are the ones with problems. I will never know what my mom’s diagnosis is, and having a diagnosis isn’t really going to help me. I know the way her behaviour affects the people I love and I hold her responsible for that. I know she is unhappy but unable or unwilling to move towards anything which would help, and I pity her for that. I know that if she ever decides to seek a mutually respectful reconciliation, I’m happy to have a distant relationship with her – that’s the best I can hope for.

Know that you’re not alone, know that it’s not your fault, and know that you are not responsible for helping her find happiness. Keep yourself safe first. I found Walking on Eggshells helpful for boundary setting back before she disowned me – I’ve loaned it out to friends many times, because even though it’s a book about borderline PD, boundary setting is so important in ANY relationship.

Grace of Spades
Grace of Spades
8 years ago

Cyberwulf
April 25, 2016 at 4:06 pm
Let me set aside my desire to give someone a good slap and ask, is it possible that the Candace Owens who is shrieking her head off and seeing conspiracies everywhere is not the same Candace Owens who was bullied by five kids including the mayor’s son and ended up suing her bullies? Is it possible that some troll assumed her identity? It just all seems too perfect. Here’s Gamergate slowly fading into obscurity, and along comes a black woman who’s also a bullying victim with plans for a doxxing site who claims to know nothing at all about Gamergate going in, but eagerly laps up every trickle of warm diarrhea that spews forth about it?

I’ve been curious about this after the post that included her imaginings (recreations?) of Zoe Quinn discovering her site, which sounded less like a 20 something woman writing about another woman than a middle aged man fantasizing about a woman in her bedroom on the internets: hair-twirling, spit-take, pillow punching while throwing herself dramatically to the floor. I was expecting a pillow fight with someone next.

FreneticFerret
FreneticFerret
8 years ago

Okay, I’ve been reading WHTM for a few months now and am glad I found it. I generally make a habit of not commenting on articles or just doing much socializing at all in highly public places, because the internet community at large has sapped my tired old body of the capacity to contend with people and all the horrible things they say. I keep abreast of the drama, but I have other things to focus my emotional energy on.

But then, sometimes, I read something so completely bizarre that I can’t get it out of my head once the computer is off. I have to know more. The internet drama has pulled me in. I’m fascinated. I want to know, ‘How does a person get to be like this in the first place?’

I’ve been reading these SocialAutopsy posts, and looking at her twitter account, and what I think perturbs me the most is that by now I have literally no idea if I’m watching a mental breakdown or a really successful troll.

I can’t bring myself to believe that a young woman who has been harassed herself can be this perfect mixture of a) paranoid, b) lacking of self-awareness, and c) this ignorant of/out of touch with basic internet culture and terminology.

Is it satire? Is this a misguided attempt to illustrate that some people launch crusades against issues they haven’t actually researched?

Is it a troll? Has someone decided to see exactly how many people they can get riled up, and how long they can keep up the act?

Certain tweets make my say, ‘Well, obviously! If this is a joke, it’s completely transparent.’

Then, I read tweets where she almost really does sound like a young person who had good intentions that got derailed by, well, some kind of psychiatric breakdown, and then I feel sad, because she’s completely entangled herself with people who will tear her apart if and when she realizes she’s allied herself with the wrong crowd. Now that she’s accusing people of journalistic fraud, she might even find herself in great legal trouble. She might cost good people their jobs.

Are we watching the birth of a conspiracy theorist? Or are we watching a girl who needs some kind of outreach slowly ruin her life?

Or, alternatively, is it just a big stupid joke that no one will remember in a few months?

I genuinely want to know.

Man, this is why I stay aloof from internet drama.

joekster
joekster
8 years ago

I wonder, any chance that the boyfriend (or someone else close to her) has pirated her account?

Flora
Flora
8 years ago

Oh, just saw your follow up. Thanks for thinking of me. I’m doing well, and I’m in my medical residency now, so I’m familiar with the PDs. As an interesting aside, the perk of growing up around that sort of chaos is that I’m well equipped to deal with a lot of personality disorder features compared to others at my level of training. The psychiatric nurses comment to me about it regularly, and I just smile and say thanks. Inside though, I always laugh. Thanks mom!

dreemr
dreemr
8 years ago

@kupo – thank you for taking the time to go back and show me examples.

Well, I’ve fallen afoul of confirmation bias in this case, in that I probably only really paid attention to the comments that supported my own views of this issue.

I did read those viewpoints but dismissed them for one reason or another – I remember the DV comment in particular and thinking there just wasn’t any proof of that, but also that I am not super-well-versed in DV so maybe they were seeing something I didn’t recognize.

In any case, eye-opening. I still lean toward the theory (on a story that we are all speculating about) that the bf may be a factor but nobody really knows to what extent.

Things may become clearer in the future, or we may not ever know. I might be giving a little more leeway to those “opposing” viewpoints simply because none of us can do anything more than speculate in the absence of more information.

katz
8 years ago

I think the only reason anyone thinks those ideas all come from her boyfriend

Wait, who thinks that? Like I think maybe one person suggested that in the very first thread but literally everyone else has disagreed with it?

ETA: Okay, apparently joekster thinks that.

kupo
kupo
8 years ago

@Katz
I quoted the posts I got that impression from. Maybe using the word “all” was a bit hyperbolic, but seriously if you question where I got the impression that people think her boyfriend is feeding her ideas or coaxing her into this, please re-read my post.

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