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.
They go on hikes together.
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:
The 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:
- Have the coveted Washington Post manufacturing lies for them.
- Work with Twitter to eliminate the very thing they’ve been accused multiple times (corporations usually will not involve themselves with controversial individuals)
- Have ties to Google, (in an effort to prevent online abuse, again ironic)
- 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.
Oh my god, we have GOT to have the same mother. She expects me to leave the friends she doesnt like, to date the guys she would like (I already HAVE a boyfriend and she likes him! But she wants me to have more! Ever seen that?!). This week I HAVE to be an engineer, the next I HAVE to be a dentist, the other I HAVE to just work. If I study, she complains im not working, if I work, she complains I don’t study. And my depression has to stop RIGHT when she wants it, even though she fuels it daily. Her demands are not only stupid, they are impossible.
The worst part is the force feeding. Every since I am a child I have to eat exactly what she wants in the exact amount she wants. It’s not like I only eat junk and she wants me to get healthy, no, its the opposite. I want to eat salad but I HAVE to eat the pig ribs. If I don’t put it in my plate, she simply does it herself. If I complain, refuse to eat, make my own food, or look displeased, she cries and shit talks me for a week. I shouldnt care anymore, but I do. The stuff she says about me just break me. I was bulimic for a while because she force fed me junk food and I was really afraid of getting fat (I was a child. Im not fatphobic anymore). But when she did this and my siblings became overweight she started bullying them for that.
Its very difficult and very humiliating. Its not better that my personality type bases it’s happiness on the happiness of others and cares a lot about family. Depression also makes it hard for me to leave home. I have been trying to make my own income or enter a far away uni, but… Its difficult. Its very difficult. I feel drained for several reasons. I think you understand.
Are you a doctor? I wanted to be a doctor. Sigh.
Great another misogynistic feminist. Candace Owens has clearly been a gamergator from the beginning. This is not going to end well.
http://imgur.com/0wkBzyn
Please note the daily motion published that piece appears to be placed on a gamergate board. I m not sure what’s going on with these zoe harasses owens pieces.
https://www.change.org/p/new-york-magazine-new-york-magazine-s-jesse-singal-commits-fraud-article-in-question-should-be-recalled
A petition to take down an article? *sigh*
@EverythingIsRidiculous
I tried googling and I cant find anything that wont constitute doxxing soo no idea but she appears to be the real Owens.
UM, to avoid hacking and the site is on http not https, i am using a fake email.
I have a different theory. I smell a drug relapse… Meth maybe.
Too bad Candace Owens didn’t do any research whatsoever on her sources for her attack against Caitlin Dewey, or she’d have noticed that Forney has an article on how to destroy your enemy’s Google reputation that features the title of his article on Dewey with a different woman’s name plugged in as an example of how to title a blog post meant to mislead future employers. If my Kindle was working worth a damn right now, I’d donotlink the article, but it’s pretty easy to Google.
My favorite part is how the article was listed at the end of his Dewey article under ‘related’.
Since Owens is so desperately looking for recognition, I’d like to congratulate her on all the fine work she’s done for cyberbullies of every stripe. Truly, she has made the internet a better place for those who want to harm innocent people. My eye is not bleeding because of how hard I’m internally screaming, that’s unrelated.
I have to admit, I have little sympathy for Owens at this point. In my personal experience, people who:
-are overly enraged by seemingly minor slights or by being questioned in any way (a reporter trying to confirm your statement, for example)
-immediately shift their anger away from any SPECIFIC incident into grandiose metaphors or supposed patterns of misbehavior (“they had somehow purchased future rights to a lie” [what…what does that even mean?], comparing the situation to being branded by the KKK)
-blatantly twisting or misrepresenting facts to make yourself look better or make your position seem more reasonable (she tells us in the article that she mentioned all associated groups getting unwanted attention, then claims that the WaPo would be lying if they said she’d told them associated groups got hate mail)
-consistently claiming that everyone who dislikes or criticizes you is bad and that there must be larger forces at work to prevent you from getting everything you wanted (I really want to know what Jeff Bezos gets from her totally-not-a-conspiracy-theory)
…yeah, in my personal experience these types of people are not naive young folks whose youthful indiscretions are being broadcast by an uncaring internet. These people are JERKS. And they generally both know what they’re doing and are sincere. They sincerely believe that they are The Rightest and are therefore genuinely outraged when questioned. And they justify all the verbal and logical gymnastics as being in service to propping up their obvious Rightness.
@kupo
Yes, my theory does assume that she’s a victim of domestic violence and that her boyfriend is controlling her through said DV.
It’s not my unshakable belief. It’s just a theory, based on Candace Owens’s inexplicable behavior and the fact that she mentions an alt right boyfriend. WTF?! Here’s what Wikipedia says about the alt right:
Antidemocratic thought? I’m gonna not go out on a limb here and say that it’s entirely possible that Owens’s boyfriend doesn’t respect her–or anyone really, including himself.
I will reiterate that victims of domestic violence are not responsible for their own victimization. When someone says they love you, you tend to believe them–because why would they lie. That’s how an abuser gains their victim’s trust. You might become emotionally and financially dependent on the abuser. You might be living with the abuser, who then might start controlling you in various ways, possibly even forcing you into some reputation-destroying scheme on social media for their own amusement.
So who had Cernovich in the “what awful person is getting involved next” pool?
@Chiomara
I want to acknowledge that it’s challenging to have a Difficult Parent.
And I want to encourage you to plan for your future.
Chiomara, I’m so sorry for you.
Has she claimed that Anita Sarkeesian is a very important and high-up member of this conspiracy yet?
@Kat
Why assume she’s a powerless victim just because she has a boyfriend with alt-right beliefs and because she has irratic behavior? Why are so many people assuming her actions and beliefs are not her own but that they stem from her boyfriend? When Paul Elam acts irrationally does anyone assume someone else is abusing him to cause it? Does anyone assume he’s being fed his ideas by his significant other (assuming he has one–I don’t keep current on his relationship status)?
@Chiomara
I am a resident doctor now and she disowned me during my first year of medical school. She didn’t cope well with me leaving for medical school, even though she was the one that suggested it. And in terms of her doing your career planning, boy do I get that. When I finished my graduate thesis, she wanted a printed copy (normal parent behaviour) and would take it off the shelf to show it to people as one of her accomplishments (NOT normal, obviously). All of my successes were her accomplishments as a parent, all of my failures were due to my own weaknesses. My career goals were never about my happiness or satisfaction at my job for her, they were about how high the social standing would be. When I got into med school, she had already “decided” that I would finish and then do a PhD, because a “double doctor” was so much more impressive sounding than a MSc. MD. I get the impression that your mom would be much the same, given that she’s suggesting careers with high social status, and not necessarily things that play to your strengths/loves. If you became a dentist by magic tomorrow, it still would not be enough. Don’t forget that that is her problem, not yours.
My mom didn’t do the food control thing, but there was a running “joke” in my household that my brother and I should “go put on a sweater because your mother is cold.” It was sort of a joke? Except not at all actually?
It’s okay if you can’t get away, and it’s okay if she gets to you – she’s had a literal lifetime to learn the best ways to get under your skin and knows just how deep to twist the knife. You should do what you need to do to be safe. That doesn’t always mean walking away. Not running away screaming when you know it’s a bad situation feels like weakness, but, like I said above, can be a time of learning great strengths. I feel like we should take this conversation privately – how can I share my e-mail address without having a horde of misogynist trolls descend upon me?
Don’t know why I’m weighing in on this, I guess I’m just as intrigued as everyone else…
I haven’t read all of her writing in the original, just what David has highlighted, but this is the part that struck me most:
‘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.’
I mean, I’ve had a pretty lucky life, but bad things happen to me once in a while. I get overwhelmed, or people do mean things to me. And sometimes I cry about it. Most of the time I get it out, get it over with, have a think about what’s going on, and (attempt to) move on. Every once in a while I’ll talk about it with a friend. It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to find a therapist and maybe get some expert help dealing with some things. But what it never occurs to me to do is let the entire Internet know I cried, and expect…what? That the whole world will care?
‘When Paul Elam acts irrationally does anyone assume someone else is abusing him to cause it?’
I wouldn’t think so, because Elam’s ‘irrational’ behaviour a) supports his personal identity and b) benefits him. We’d only think about positing alternative explanations if neither of these things were true.
How can she have 629 signatures on her change.org petition?
@Commentariat
‘This woman is making odd, unsubstantiated claims, presenting the flimsiest of connections as part of an Occam defying grand theory. So ridiculous, right? Hmm. So, just so we’re all clear, ‘Candace’ (if that’s her real name) is a internet doppelganger with a number of variable personality disorders, whose abusive fella (I mean, he’s right wing, and she mentioned him before. Therfore he’s obviously controlling her thoughts) is making her do it, or was, before he just took over her account, and-‘
Really, people? Really!? Just… The fuck, people!? #notallcommenters, but still
http://gifrific.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/NPH-dissapoint.gif
Nobody needs your theorycrafting. Aurini is a shit. Cernovich is a shit. Forney is a shit. Owens is, at best, a gullible shit or, at worst, a malignant shit. With no evidence otherwise, those are our options, and regardless, she’s still a shit. She doesn’t have to be forever, but she most certainly is now
You don’t do any good by imagining what her personal problems might be, even if having an ‘answer’ makes you feel better. Be pitying, if you must. Keep your faith in humanity. But if Candi has to be either a false flag, or some kinda sick, victimized, puppet damsel for you to do so, that’s your own fuckin problem
I’m starting to settle into the idea that she knowingly planned this whole thing, with help from other alt-righters, because she realised how valuable a sympathetic WOC would be to the alt-right. Imagine, an African American woman going on Fox or writing for Breitbart, excoriating her fellow women and POCs for their failings, explaining how right, straight, white, English-speaking, Protestant men are the real victims, suffering under the dreadful curse of political correctness (dun dun dunnn).
You can sort of see how it might happen. She has an alt-right boyfriend, and she mentions to him and some of his alt-right friends that she sympathises with their views, and somebody says off-hand “See, we need people like you in our movement!” The seed is planted, and they put their heads together to create the biggest controversial entry into the rightward end of online news and social media they possibly can.
I’m just speculating, I know. It could be that everything really is as it appears: she just doesn’t know what she’s doing and her mixture of delusion and arrogance is allowing her to be inflated by the worst people on the internet. It’s just such a perfect storm, though, that I can’t help but be suspicious of her motives. Fact is, the right has a LOT more money than the left. There is a gravy train to be ridden if you can get hold of a ticket.
p.s. I really messed up on the comments policy here and on another thread. The whole “crazy talk” thing is a bit of a blind spot for me, and I’m trying to do better. If I slip up again, please call me out.
I dont see any reason to speculate that she has a drug problem. I think thats not so different than speculating on mental health issues. She is behaving in an unkind and irrational manner… & it does seem suspicious, sorry/not sorry, theres just something about it that doesnt seem consistant, she just seems to know too much for claiming to kmow too little or something. … to some degree I have to wonder if it is even our business at all.
@Axecalibur
Thank you. Because this. Fucking this.
I don’t have any sympathy for Candace Owens. Only scorn and disgust. She’s an ignorant asshole at best, but this woman is a grown ass adult and her actions are her own. Through her own arrogance and denial (assuming she is actually ignorant) she is re-victimizing people who have been targets of internet harassment and bullying, and joined forces with well-known white supremacists and misogynists.
She’s an awful, awful human being and needs to be called out for it.
1 hour ago, someone posted this comment on Candace’ post:
Fortunately there was a voice of reason:
I assume that particular belief is not always, but frequently, osmosed from the primordial antifeminist internet conspiracy paradigm that gamergaters and alt-righters seem to tap into like an incredibly sexist Akashic record, so it might just be a matter of time. Alternately, whoever told her about gamergate might simply throw a reference in there by default.
Or maybe not. Owens’ rants seem a mite…self-absorbed, so maybe Sarkeesian (who hasn’t weighed in, that I can see) might just never come up.
EDIT: Ninja’d. Apparently that second sentence was the case.
Ugh, guys, I really hate speculation.
If armchair diagnosis is bad precisely because it’s pure speculation, WHY are other kinds of speculation ok?
You guys do realise that’s how rumors, myths and lies are spread, right? What is the point??
Why do you do this?? Stahp.
Chiomara:
What kind of “therapist” gives a diagnosis without even speaking to the person in question? And aren’t “personality type” models mostly regarded as pseudoscience now?
@Sally
It’s mostly to speculate on how exactly a person who by all means should be against these people on all accounts would do something that is absolutely perfect in keeping gamergate in the mainstream again. This form of speculation to the point where we take her agency with mental illness, controlling boyfriend and naivete is taking the speculating to the extreme. It’s a very common way to start diving into conspiracy theory. But, given the circumstances, I feel like this speculation is not completely unwarranted, we don’t know alot for sure. And typically having so much happen in a short period of time without enough concrete info is the breeding grounds for these sorts of discussions. We know for sure I guess
-she is real
-her past that is shown is real
-she’s currently posting the same old alt right rhetoric
-is a perfect poster child as the token right wing poc speaker
-came at a time GG is really starting to fade into irrelevancy
Anything else is pretty much fair game, assuming that she has full agency of her own decisions and is either or a combination of playing the long con/naive.
@Moggie
Cool your heels for a second, she already rescinded that post.
@Moogie
The kind of therapist dealing with someone who has a problematic relationship with someone who refuses to go to a therapist in person. As I said, and i’ll repeat: it was not a diagnosis, just as my comment was not one, nor attempt at one. It was a POSSIBLE explanation to at least give me a clue of what is happening and how to deal with it, and I really needed an explanation because I used to believe I was a terrible person for not doing what she wants. A good therapist (and friend), in my view,first and foremost, must actually care about people and do whats needed to help, even if its not 100% with their profissional ethics.
AND as I said and will ALSO repeat, the book is NOT scientific and she made it very clear. It over simplifies everything. At least its a lot more science based and sensitive than that silly Jung – Meyers stuff we find around, she said. And I don’t know if I understood it right, but it seems modern psychology still bases on personality types as a really rough outline. She is a behavioral therapist, not prone to pseudo sciences, and she’s studied her entire life in excellent places. She is one of my best friends, as I also said in my previous comments, so… Though I understand your concern, you did come off as very unnecessarily rude, and I don’t even know why, since I was very clear no diagnose happened, at least not on her part, she made that very clear for me. Plus, we are talking about personality TYPES on a self-help book, so how COULD a diagnosis happen if no disease is being discussed, only a really rough personality profile in a book?
But its ok. As I said, I understand your concern, though I think its unfounded. Maybe I just phrased things in a way that gave the wrong idea, as I often do.
@Flora
Yes! If I became a dentist she would blame me for not being a doctor.
That’s not a problem, I have a fake e-mail and don’t care about trolls. It’s “pchiomara” at Gmail. ^^ I will really appreciate talking to you.
@Chiomara
I thought people respected dentists because they get paid a bunch and are always needed. Anyways good luck to you on your endeavors.
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