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.
Chiomara,
Good to see you again! Hope things are going well.
Oddly, I was just about to ask for your email address. Which I now have. May I write you there? I wanted to follow up on one of our past conversations without putting it all in the comments here.
@Kat and Frickle
Sigh, thanks! I always randomly come to this blog and pour my problems all over, haha. Thank you all for always being understanding and patient and offering VERY good advice and cute animal gifs ^^
@Oogly
Oh? Really? Well, maybe its different here in brazil. Here its a normal profession with usually very normal salary. Glad to know its better wherever you are ^^
I’d easily be one. I don’t aspire for status. I aspire for helping people in a meaningful way, and as a doctor i’d be able to do that both with my knowledge and my money. I hope I manage. If I don’t, I guess I can still make meaningful money to help others if I am a dentist in the first world? That’s good news you gave me, thank you for that and the good wishes. And for the little dog ^^
@Orion
Sure!!! You all can feel free to send me e-mails.
Cool. I sent you something. My address has “orion” in it.
I just dipped through Owens’ Twitter feed quickly. Yep, she’s still retweeting eggs and anime avatars who agree with her, repeating that Harper and Quinn have no support because no one’s dogpiling her own tweets, and proclaiming that she is a frickin’ hero, just for experiencing all of this.
Her latest obsessions are i) flaming Jesse Singal, who thankfully isn’t engaging at all, for being a misogynist and a racist because he made a woman of color look bad in an article on the internet, and ii) singing the praises of Mike Cernovich for getting her a spot on his “documentary.” Whether or not Owens intended to scam people when she started out, she is squarely in that camp now and shows no inclination whatsoever to leave. And why should she, this is clearly the fame that she craves!
Side note: Singal’s piece casts Owens in a much, much better light than she casts herself with her blog posts and Twitter account. Hell, David’s posts cast Owens in a better light. Five minutes on her Twitter feed leaves me with absolutely no ability to credit any of this to naivete or ignorance. She has chosen to engage at the exact level that she wants to engage, and that’s with juice bros and white nationalists on paper.
I’d think the best way to “deal with” this clusterfuck is to take the woman at face value.
1. It’s entirely possible to be both naive and nasty at the same time.
2. She doesn’t even need a history of having been bullied in the past to explain her oddities. There are many, many people who have what I call one-way thin skins.
Super sensitive, always alert, to any conceivable, imaginary affront to themselves. Supremely oblivious to any hurt they may occasion to other people with susceptibilities plainly obvious to anyone with working eyes or brain.
Though that doesn’t help with making any sense at all of what she says and does if you usually like a coherent narrative or common sense or ordinary use of language (just one would do).
I just wanted to chime in with some other people upthread and agree that speculating about Owens as a person is not a good idea. Even if we manage to stay out of ableist territory, it doesn’t really benefit anyone. It doesn’t help deconstruct any of the troubling things she has said or done. It doesn’t even cast any of those troubling things into a new light. Her sincerity/insincerity/naivete/scheming/background/home life/whatever doesn’t affect how frothy GG is getting about this. It doesn’t affect what kind of backlash is being renewed against Quinn, Harper, and surely others as well. It doesn’t change what a terrible idea Social Autopsy was, or how tinfoil-hatty the ensuing conspiracy theorizing has become. It may change how we *feel* about it, but it doesn’t change what has happened, or what needs to happen, or how wrong it is.
I totally understand that feeling of needing to understand, to process, to rationalize what in the ever-loving heck could contribute to this disaster. I don’t know that it’s even possible to avoid having our own suspicions about what’s “really” going on.
BUT, exchanging our speculations about things we do not know really doesn’t help anybody. It actually puts us in danger of spinning our *own* conspiracy theories. Owens wrote a bizarre imagining of Quinn twirling her hair and melting onto the ground in tears, etc. etc.–is it really any more appropriate for us to, for example, guess at what Owens’ relationship with her boyfriend is like (especially whether or not there is DV involved)?
Things we know:
– Social Autopsy was a super duper bad idea
– Owens, at least the name, is a real person, who really was bullied as a child
– Owens has shown a mind-boggling lack of research at every level of this whole scenario
– Owens has bought into the idea of an SJW racket ruining the internet
– Owens has recently done some degree of hobnobbing with GamerGate/alt-right/white supremacists
– Owens’ responses have been illogical, disproportionate, and ultimately malicious (whether she is sincerely convinced she is right or not, she is out to destroy Quinn, Harper, et. al., which is malice)
– This whole debacle is being used to further arm internet bullies and further victimize people who already had targets on their back
Things we do not know about:
– Owens’ mental health
– Owens’ childhood, aside from the bullying
– Owens’ motives, beyond what she has said in her own words
– Owens’ truthfulness or dishonesty, naivete or cunning
– Owens’ boyfriend, aside from his existence and his fondness for alt-right media–he may have had any degree of impact on her opinions and actions, from none of it to all of it, but we simply don’t know
Talking about the things that we know is useful. It contributes to how we understand internet harassment to work, how we might address and correct it, the current proverbial DEFCON level of GG, etc. We can talk about how it makes us feel and how we hope it resolves. We can support the victims, we can clearly articulate why Owens is in the wrong, and what kind of damage she is doing/has done.
Talking about the things we do not know is a bit cathartic or interesting at its best, but it doesn’t actually change anything. But at its worst, we can end up concocting our own imaginary stories about a real woman–whether we vilify her or paint her as a helpless victim. At the extreme, we may even run the risk of invading her privacy. We also risk saying things that can harm other people who had nothing to do with any of this. Not only is all of that wrong in the general moral sense, it provides more ammo for Owens’ “Woe is me, the SJW-Illuminati-cabal is conspiring against me” tirades.
Having personal hunches and trying to figure out “but… HOW” is human, and it’s understandable, but we reeeeeally need to stop and consider if it’s helpful to hash it out in the comments. “To understand” or “explain” are not good enough ends in themselves in cases like this, because it doesn’t change the outcome or provide a means to fix the problem or even show us how to prevent this in the future.
Out of consideration to others who might be hurt by our theorizing, and to avoid saying things that we’ll regret later if/when the whole truth comes out, and out of a duty to be morally solid about all this, I think we’d do much, much better to stick to what we know.
Wow, looks like the comments section on her article is becoming its own little echo chamber with Dean Esmay and a bunch of #Gators complimenting her and suggesting she take her story to Breitbart or go after Anita Sarkeesian next. I have a feeling this story is only going to get weirder.
It’s like if Luke Skywalker wanted to stop the Empire, but had never heard of Darth Vader and just went with him to meet the Emperor, who tells him about a Rebel conspiracy to garner sympathy by blowing up their own planets and Luke just joins the Dark Side.
+1
Just RE: Owens being hacked/impersonated
I browsed through the degree180 site and it’s not a recent creation. There’s posting history going back to July last year and articles covering many different subjects. If that’s an impersonation, it’s a hell of a job.
On the other hand, if it’s a hack of an existing site, surely by now the real Owens would have noticed that articles are going up that she didn’t herself post.
So, I see no real reason to think it isn’t actually her. Chances are she’s just that clueless.
OMG y’all, wtf.
Your feelings and the comment policy are in conflict. Your feelings lose.
We don’t know a lot for sure? We know approximately as much about her as we know about anyone else who is featured here. Why does “we don’t know the entire story of her life from beginning to end” make you “feel like” it’s okay to violate the commenting policy, but only for this lady?
FeMRAs exist. Slate wrote up a trans woman who is a TERF. Fox News manages to find black people to talk up the Republican Party. Not sure why it’s so impossible to believe that there is one, ONE, WOC who agrees with the alt-right, and that we must explain that away with DV. People come in all walks.
Here’s another boyfriend theory: she and her boyfriend are together because they genuinely agree on this topic and get along fine. Occasionally they talk about it because that’s what lovers do with regard to topics about which they agree.
How is this a less plausible theory than her being a victim of DV or a naive waif who can’t think for herself?
@Kootie
http://static02.mediaite.com/themarysue/uploads/2016/01/bb8-lighter.gif
@Kootiepatra
{Insert gif of Orsen Welles clapping here}
Thank you for saving me a lot of typing by saying what I wanted to say, only better. Could you come round to my work and finish a report for me, too?
I was right. 🙁
Kootie nailed it
of interest, in understanding harassment/hate: GG is perfectly willing to make an ally of her bc her methods arent the problem, their fear theyd be the targets of the project was their only objection to it.
I kind of hope everyone just ignores her for a while. She’s unbalanced and extremely narcissistic, and has already worked her way up to some giant conspiracy theory involving Amazon and the Washington Post.
Let’s not help her push herself into the giant public meltdown she’s working on. She’s not well. If everyone can just ignore her, maybe she’ll stop, breathe, and realize that she had an idea that didn’t work because it sucked, and it’s not the end of the world.
*sigh*
bad behavior =\= illness
again.
Candace Owens has dived into all of this head first and with gusto. Who can really believe that she is just some enthusiastic ingenue after seeing all that she has said?
I’ve just been catching up with this and feel embarrassed at how compelling this is – and also a bit embarrassed that my first, FIRST thought whenever I try to read Owens’ stuff is “Learn to use the apostrophe, goshdarnit! It’s not that hard!”
(It’s the shibboleth of a little mind, I know, but also a professional injury – I’m a teacher and an editor, among other things. Sorry.)
Also: anyone writing straight-faced about “my sheer street-smarts” needs a better mirror.
I agree absolutely with kootiepatra and others about diagnosis. At the absolute best case it’s a fiction we are making about a real person and liable to be extrapolated to others who have NOT behaved so badly. At worst, it can be very damaging indeed.
I’m reminded that the world is like an eco-system in more ways than one. People need to find their niche in the environment. Owens seems to have tried this with her half-baked start-up idea, and has slipped or slid or jumped with both feet or all three into what may seem like a niche where people encourage her and take her seriously – it may even look like there might somehow be money to be earned at some point.
Unfortunately, it’s right in there with the bottom feeders and the vampire squid, but they sometimes thrive too. The suggestion of her ending up on FOX is priceless… yes, it’s exactly the kind of thing that could happen!
@ Chiomara and @ Flora oh lord I am sorry to hear this. And all the best to you for surviving so well.
It is horribly familiar, too. Perhaps all our mothers were related? Everything I did or did not do was a personal attack on her. Very rarely when I had achieved something she had pushed and pressured me to do (while predicting my failure, and sometimes literally sabotaging the effort – like the piano exam when I arrived to find she had shredded my music) such as scholarships and graduation, where she could not ignore it – and in fact bragged about it endlessly to other people and used it to make my brothers feel bad about themselves – she reacted as if I were making some unwarranted and outrageous claim on her.
She took in later life to telling me that the foetus she had miscarried at 18 weeks in the mid-60s, which she had never seen and about whose gender she had no information, must have been a girl, her “angel daughter”, much preferable to the actual one she had birthed. I don’t know, but suspect, she told my brothers it was an “angel son”…
I eventually realised she was not pleaseable, and that her unhappiness was sad but not my fault, and more or less stopped trying. I still struggle with wanting things, though, among other stuff.
I also realised that it didn’t matter what had “made her” like that (although her medical records, which I was able to access after her death, did show she had been diagnosed with depression and “anxiety” – though the symptoms were of agoraphobia – for which she was treated apparently by amateur hypnosis from the GP).
She died nearly 15 years ago, aged 80, estranged from my stepfather and three of her four children (and the fourth, my brother who she had cast as the “good child”, stressed near to distraction). It’s sad she couldn’t enjoy us more, but there it is.
It stinks, frankly. But you have your life to live, which is not your mother’s, or an extension of hers. She may not be able to tell the difference, but it’s important – nothing is more important, I think – that you be able to.
Anyway, forgive the oversharing, and all the best to you both.
@Lukas Xavier
Thank you for looking into that. I just want to clarify, in the case of my own comments about her identity, I was just wondering if I was way off in thinking it might be a troll. Honestly, I just don’t have enough knowledge about online troll warfare tactics to know if it was even possible, let alone likely. My main reason for wondering about this is simply because GG has used similar tactics before, particularly in the case of #notyourshield. However, I never meant to imply that I did not think it equally (or possibly more) likely that she is %100 real and *sigh* fully capable of making these choices.
I know yours is just one analysis from one person, not some kind of official “all clear” issued by the “CYBER POLICE”, but I appreciate the second opinion. I agree that it does seem unlikely at this point that it’s a troll account. I’m just going to tell myself this going forward.
Honestly, I was really creeped out by how unsure I was about her realness, the internet and troll armies now have me doubting everything and nothing feels real anymore. Ok, *deep breath* must not go through the looking glass. Maybe I need a break from the internet. Candace Owens definitely does.
http://i1064.photobucket.com/albums/u375/erica_cross2/tumblr_m7d792OuEY1qeweuno1_500_zpsoinanosd.gif
So I read through her blogposts, and suddenly I’m not really surprised by any of this. Almost to a letter they are so….so….I struggle to use any other word than ‘stupid’. Aggressively ignorant? Willfully ignorant? It’s this horrible blend of cocksure temperament and blinding idiocy rolled together with the end result being that she’ll run off at the mouth about whatever she thinks to be true, verification not required. And anything that might dissuade or prove her wrong is clearly a sign that she’s right. It’s absolutely mind boggling troll logic.
Heya everyone. For anyone interested, the nominees for the 2016 Hugo awards have just been announced.
Some good ones on there but it appears the angry, pissbaby splatpants (thanks H.Bomberguy!) have made their presence known. Vox Day has been nominated in the Best Editor Long Form category as well as in the Best Related Work category for ‘SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police.’
Jesus. Another Hugo clusterfuck.
David – I was wondering if you’ve seen any chatter. I refuse to go to these guys’ blogs.
She seems to be a familiar Internet type: the person who has a Big Idea that’s going to fix everything (including their own life), is convinced the idea is so perfect there’s no need to figure out how it would actually work, and perceives all criticism as an attack from enemies of the Idea. We saw the same behavior with the Sarkeesian Effect duo, except that they were already deep into Gamergating so it wasn’t a surprise when they blamed their comical failures on the machinations of those crafty SJWs.
Some people really would rather live in terror of a Jeff Bezos-funded, U.N.-backed global conspiracy than hear that their Kickstarter idea needs work. Strange but oddly common.
Also agreeing with Kootiepatra.
Same as with some other “trolls”, at some point it doesn’t really matter if they’re honest or just doing it for the lulz.
What I find impressive in terms of cognitive dissonance is that so many of the people fawning all over her still maintain that her Social Autopsy site is a terrible idea. They’re only supporting her because she’s feuding with progressives, if it wasn’t for that they’d be tearing her apart, like they were over on Breitbart twelve days ago. Candace Owens probably thinks Breitbart is in cahoots with Quinn and Harper too.
A billionaire like Jeff Bezos frankly doesn’t give a shit about Candace Owens and never will.