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By David Futrelle
Candace Owens — self-proclaimed “Red Pill Black” conservative — is having a bit of a moment, hanging out with new Trump fan Kanye West, posing for selfies with Don Jr., getting an effusive Twitter shout-out from Don Sr,, threatening to sue people who talk about her in what she considers the wrong way.
A lot of people have been left wondering just where exactly Owens came from. Well, there’s a bit of a story there.
Long-time readers of this blog first met Owens back in the days of Gamergate, after Zoe Quinn criticized her ill-conceived plan for an “anti-bullying” site that would have basically doxed a bunch of teenagers. After Quinn spoke out, Gamergaters spouting conspiracy theories quickly abandoned their own critiques of Owens and rallied around her. Owens began spouting conspiracy theories of her own, and, well, let’s just say things got very weird very fast, as they generally seem to do when Owens gets involved in anything.
In several posts, I tried my best to make sense of the whole surreal mess. I’m linking them here because I think they may illuminate a few things about Trump World’s newest heroine.
This post describes what happened immediately after Owens first heard from Quinn. Trust me, the headline (and the snippet from the post below) don’t fully capture the weirdness of the story.
Instead of listening to Quinn, Owens declared war on her, spewing forth dozens of angry and accusatory tweets, charging that Quinn and fellow anti-harassment activist Randi Harper … were somehow the puppetmasters behind a barrage of abusive, threatening, and often blatantly racist anonymous messages that Owens (who is black) started getting not long after news of Owens’ plans hit Reddit and 4chan.
Owens quickly began to sound like every other internet crackpot who sees conspiracies in every Twitter mention.
SocialAutopsy-Turvy: Candace Owens’ Twitter Trainwreck, Part One
(APRIL 24, 2016)
And quite a trainwreck it was. The story continued to get weirder, and at such a pace that I never had a chance to write part two.
In this episode, Owens writes an angry diatribe against an article she imagined that Washington Post writer Caitlin Dewey had written about her. No, really. She accused Dewey and her editor of attempting to libel her in an article that the Post never published and that as far as I know Dewey never even wrote.
Naturally, Gamergaters were thrilled to have such an, er, original thinker on their side.
NOTE TO READERS: Sorry for being MIA the last couple of days; I’ve been dealing with the double whammy of migraines and some really nasty lower back pain. Doing a little better today.
Boo another parasite intent on dismantling our democracy for attention and money.
Im just gonna say, food for thought… if Eldridge is Black, and you arent, you maybe might not get to tell them whether to use terms like that; so maybe slow down on the assumptions… Just sayin.
PS: to clarify, Ive only ever heard Black folks use that term. It has a specific meaning, & if you arent familiar, you prob arent Black.
@anon–I do understand where you’re coming from and I know what the term means. Although I am not a PoC, I grew up with many. That being said, this forum has rules of engagement, as it were, and one of them is the use of racial slurs. We don’t use them, simple as that.
FWIW, Eldridge follows me on twitter, definitely not a troll.
Cool. Thanks for the update David!
My apologies to Eldridge for the snap judgement.
Anon, I know the way your referring to the phrase being used, and it’s awesome that the only time you’ve heard that particular two word phrase is in the activist community.
…but, in my limited experience as a white person living in a pretty darned white state, the few times I’ve heard it used it’s been exclusively by racist white folks with a different connotation. It’s only been a couple times, but enough to be memorable.
I really appreciate your comments, though, and will definitely try to keep that in mind moving forward! Thanks for sharing, and I’ll try to do better.
Back to lurking, for me!
Thanks for this, and I hope you get well soon, DF.
Owens has always struck me as a total flake who needs a bright light shined on her.
Whew, havent been on here in a while. I hope everyone is doing well! Take care of yourself, David!
@Bina
Shes a troll but I wish that grown adults like her would stop “trolling” for a job or just stop hiding behind that as an excuse to be dispictable.
Um, so sorry OT question but has anyome been keeping up with The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu? I started later but finally got caught up. ( need to read the novel it was based on) Something that shouldnt disappoint me yet still does are the reactions from some folk who side with the men in Gideon and pity the wives like Serena Joy while demonizing handmaids and others. Granted, I havent seen much of that but it does come up every now and then on various sites
Oh, and thanks, folks for the nice thoughts. My sympathies to everyone else dealing with pain and upcoming surgery and spikes through their hands (fucking yipes, shadowplay!). I might have to get me one of those thumpers. I have a regular massager vibrator thing with a super-long handle that I use on my back and neck but it’s maybe a little bit too powerful? Or maybe that’s good?
@Haise:
Me too, but first of all, the Kochtopus (and all those other rich right-wing funders of troll factories) need to stop dangling all that cash for crapaganda. It’s just amazing how many takers they find who are willing to doff their dignity and spout utter bullshit for a few thousand bucks…
I follow you on Twitter, David, and I still do not believe that what Eldridge the Cleaver said was cool. Shrug.
I have one of those as well and works good for me, but it works even better if I get someone else to use it on me (usually my mom or my kid)
You can’t fully relax your back when your’re holding something big and kinda heavy in one hand. Oh wait, maybe I can’t.
Anyway, if it’s possible for you to get someone to assist you, I’d suggest that. I know not having someone for that is the main reason we tend to acquire such massagers, though.
So we can throw around slurs if we follow you on Twitter? I’m not really seeing the connection, there.
@everyone noticing health troubles getting worse:
I’m sorry you feel awful and hope that it feels better soon, or at the very least you are able to develop coping mechanisms to make the awful less burdensome
The thing is that hostile environments do make you sicker, faster. The term typically used is the social determinants of health, which encompasses all the way the world around you makes you healthier or less healthy. Feelings of powerlessness, lack of a social safety net, discrimination, being unable to afford to meet your own needs or access health care, etc all contribute. Having a healthy environment and community also makes the impacts of illness and injury far less dramatic. Your president’s administration, of course, believes none of this, but the data doesn’t lie.
I am misbehaving , and coming back after I said I was going to go back to lurking.
I took David’s post to be more a confirmation that Eldridge wasn’t here to race bait, and their usage was more in line with what Anon was getting at.
I still am personally deeply uncomfortable with the slur and it is still against the comments policy of this site, as someone else brought up earlier in the thread.
But, it did feel like I need it to acknowledge the fact that I did immediately jump to conclusions, and I need to do better.
In lighter stuff, sorry I haven’t been around as much and I am kind of sort of out of the loop of who all’s a regular now. Just finished the semester, but I am starting a internship next week and I am busy as all heck.
Hope you feel better soon, David. <3
(BTW, I'm still here too, just total burn-out on politics in general. The only Nazis I have any intention of seeing this week are the ones in Wolfenstein.)
Just to make clear, using the n-word isn’t cool here, but in this case it was mostly asterisked out and the guy who posted it posts a lot of anti-racist stuff on twitter and is I believe, himself black.
Basically, my stance is that people who aren’t black shouldn’t be using the word but that it’s not my place as a white dude to police whether black people use it. BUT this is the internet and people lie and I don’t want trolls coming here and declaring themselves black as an excuse to post it. So the rule is still: don’t use it here, though I’m going to let this one slide.
Chiming in as also uncomfortable with letting the slur go through like that. It’s not policing anyone’s right to say what they want; there are strict rules about the language that’s acceptable here, and that shouldn’t be waived because of extenuating circumstances most of us have no way of knowing about. They’re still completely free to use whatever language they want anywhere else on the internet.
EDIT: Like, if it’s being used to connote a specific meaning, they could just say the larger meaning which the phrase is supposed to encapsulate. That would also provide much greater context for all of us here who may be unfamiliar with the way it was being used in the first place, rather than just dropping what most of us know as a racist slur in a throwaway comment.
Well I’m as lilly white as they come, and possibly in danger of falling for the “I went to African American History museum two weeks ago so know what it’s all about” ism.
But holy hell – comparing political affiliation to slavery.
http://www.collinsho.me/pics/CO-HT.png
Having said that – I’ve just watched a couple of her videos, and I’m finding I quite like her. Not necessarily in agreement with all she says, but…
And then I read her twitter feed and go off her again.
Damn.
In the meanwile Zoe Quinn is nominated in this years Hugoaward (Best related work).
Good luck to her, and even if she is not succesful it is (now again) a big honour to be nominated.
I seriously could not care less about people telling me that using the term house [] (there I said it) is out of line.
I am black, and I am abso-fucking-lutely tired of Uncle Toms like Candace Owens pretending she’s somehow a deep original thinker while in reality she’s simply a [] who repeats the same kind of derogatory welfare queens myths that have been common since the 80’s.
Turning Point USA is a racist, classist hate group who’s director if Charlie Kirk, a typical conservative broflake who, despite being white, male and having inherited a shitload of money, thinks he’s the most oppressed person in America because universities don’t want to hear his opinions on why poor people are scum and how POC are whiners.
The fact Owens does business with these people indicates to me she’s a sell-out.
Do not tone police me. I’m tired of having to deal with all the racism and transphobia shot my way.
@contrapangloss
No worries!
@weirwood
So chronic low grade stress will definitely take a chunk out of your health, but I know for a fact that there’s one health-related thing the trump administration has caused.
So, one of the cognitive-behavioral therapies for stuff like anxiety disorders and things like that is teaching you to carefully pick apart your worries so you can see how irrational or unrealistic they are.
Many, many therapists have been reporting that this no longer works, because most of their clients with anxiety, when they lay out the things they’re anxious about, the therapists are basically forced to admit “yeah okay everything you’re freaking out about is realistic and perfectly rational to be freaking out about”.
It’s been a legitimate serious problem in the community, because a lot of CBT folk aren’t sure how to handle it when people’s overwhelming anxieties are actually perfectly reasonable and well-founded.
Hey there, Contrapangloss. Good to see you again.
I’ve been really bummed out recently. First, one of my friends has started bringing up xenophobic dog whistles, while insisting that she only intends the surface meaning of them. I’m trying to talk her around but it’s fraying at my patience. I’ve lost too many friends to the far Right recently, and I can’t go on like this.
Then, the British judiciary decided that torturing a pregnant woman was perfectly acceptable. I’m South African, I was born during apartheid, I’m accustomed to the courts defending the worst excesses of a racist police state rather than risk damaging the apparatus of state violence; but I expected better from Britain. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been optimistic, but I was, I went and marched and protested and everything, and now I feel like a fool.
I’m so tired, and every day there are more things to fight about.