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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.
Middle class people like Candace found out they could quit their boring day jobs and earn a living by spouting clichéd, recycled, tired old alt-right/alt-lite ideas on You Tube over and over and over and over again, day after day after day. The people who send them money are fools being scammed and probably deserve to be if they agree with such ideas. The only way these people will stop running this scam is if people stop sending them money. Then their bills would pile up and they’d have to go back to their boring day jobs five days a week and they’d have no time for You Tube-ing anymore.
Oh, I’m the worst, worst cat mom ever.
I live in a double bungalow with my grandmother on the other side. We had some family over for a mother’s day barbeque on her side.
Usually Dracy is such a wimp that she hides up in my mattress’ box spring even when people are next door and not in our side of the house. But today, when I went over, she was out and in the window. So, I figured because many of the people there had never met her before, I’d pop her next door, let everyone see her and then let her run away.
Big mistake.
She got so scared she peed all over me before running away.
She did come back out to eat dinner and a scoop of a tuna that I gave her as a peace offering. But when I tried to pet her, she ran back under the bed. She’s either mad at me or she’s still all freaked out. I feel so bad.
Thanks all, for your thoughts about my mom 🙂
@ Dormousing_it,
“I made a concerted effort a month ago to stop looking at any and all political news, but I was unable to stick to it. I also think it’s probably irresponsible, as a citizen, to disregard all political news.”
A good suggestion from a friend of mine: Switch to business news. They cover world events too, and it’s a lot less sensationalized.
IBT, Crains, similar, you can look up local and Int’l business news.
Our Miss T here says: Even AOL has better news. They paired up with HuffPo also. Which seems still semi interesting and serious, AOL itself still has much crap, IMO.
Kylie Somebody’s ass was hanging out? SCANDALOUS! GMAFB. Such crap is half of their “reporting”. As it goes for most “news outlets”.
Anyway, try various business news. More boring and “dry”, but that’s the point. You get sick of sensationalist crap. Agree that one should keep up with current events also.
Downside: business news is going to have a uniformly pro-business slant, so center-right neoliberalism will be the order of the day.
I’ve been getting most of my political/events news lately from a combination of here(!), Counterpunch, and Amy Siskind’s weeky list site. Anything important that’s not humans-did-something-to-humans is likely to crop up on the weather channel: hurricanes, earthquakes, that volcano that ate a suburb in Hawaii the other day …
@wwth
hugs
Sorry about how you and your cat’s been feeling.
I miss old Kanye.
Have a nice recovery, David, and hope both migraines and lumbago quickly disappear !
Moggie:
To be fair to the fans, I don’t think he will ever get over beeing the laughtingstock of the community for that post.
Is he still writting stuff? (On the downsite if I remember correctly he did quite well, when he was nominated before this started so SP3 was a good caraersiucide from my POV.)
Take things as slow as you need to, Dave! Your service here is valuable and if you’re laid up with migraines and back pain, your health comes first!
The indefatigable Driftglass has said before that if progressives (or just left-leaning folk in general) have a superpower, it’s that we remember things. I have a pretty powerful memory for information I consider important, and the farce that was GamerGate was one of those things because I recognized the festering boil that was going to be left on culture once the infection was cornered. Candace Owens was just another bacterium in that boil, but what separates her from the other germs like Carlgon or Dave Rubin–who are some mixture of sincerely-held grievance, stupidity and cynicism–Owens was 100% get-rich-quick look-at-me insincerity. She oozed desperation and insincerity with every fresh drama. Ian Miles Cheong was the same; he went from ardent anti-GamerGate to reactionary jackass in less than a year just for clicks and money.
So when Owens’ name graced my Twitter feed again, I was like “What? Her?! SERIOUSLY???!!!” Now she’s gracing Ben Garrison cartoons and as Dave mentioned, taking pictures with Wingus and Dingus up there. It’s pure reactionary grift.
Plenty’s been said about how ridiculous and pathetic this state of affairs is, but what I’ve noticed more and more is the lifestyle branding of this whole scheme. Peter Coffin points this out, but if I have any gripe about Coffin’s content is that he doesn’t point out examples as directly as I’d like, usually leaving his videos as part of a larger narrative. Which is important, but it leaves people with the impression “Oh, lifestyle marketing is for all those sheeple over there, with their hair care products and fancy handbags and Lululemon yoga pants. Clearly I, as a Rational Classical Liberal Logician (TM), am immune to such obvious pandering. Now where was I? Oh yeah, now that I’ve purchased my MAGA hat, KEKistan flag and BrainForce Plus, I can listen to another 13 hour Jordan Peterson lecture while I rant about Soy Boys on 4chan!”
Nope, it’s all part and parcel of a relatively new and very stupid kind of lifestyle marketing: Trigger The Libs Chic. Show how much you’re a free and independent thinker by buying products memed to death on Reddit and 4chan for no other reason than to antagonize people different from you.
I still have trouble wrapping my brain around that narrow of a mindset. I actually went out and got a library card for the first time since I was a kid and I was amazed and the amount of local history the branch that I went to had archived. All that information is just sitting there, totally free and accessible, yet these clowns are retweeting another pathetic Chad meme in the service of irritating those with altruistic politics? I just can’t imagine being that petty and small-minded.
@Talonknife
I thought Correia’s work was his local RPG sessions framed through bad gun porn personally, but if you want to read him without supporting his increasingly obvious sexism and homophobia, the library or buying used is the best way to go. Like most of Baen’s trashy novels, they are brisk trade in the dollar bin at most used book shops.
@Who?
Torgersen is currently framing himself as writing ‘blue collar spec fiction’, but really, other than his rants on Superversive, his productivity has cratered. I don’t think he’s published a short story since early 2016 and his next novel has been pushed back a number of times. Of all the authors involved in the Puppies, he’s likely done the most damage to his career, without even a bone tossed to him from Beale’s Castelia House, who provided a landing pad for Wright’s almost equally bad professional crash.
If I ever do write a novel, it will probably include themes of racial prejudice and exploitation, and I will make sure that there is a spaceship on the cover. Just for Brad Torgersen.
I mean my favorite Torgersen was when he said SF should be get back to beeing unpolitical. His example of unpolitical was Star Trek.
@Who? *sporfle*
‘War of the Worlds’ could put forward a good case for being the first ‘spacey’ sci-fi novel and that’s nothing but an allegory on racial prejudice and exploitation (and a bit of animal rights).
re: library books
I don’t know about other parts of the world, but in the EU I hear there’s a system that grants authors some small compensation based on how many times their books were loaned.
Here in Finland we apparently previously had a system where we didn’t do that, and instead used this kind of library compensation money for promoting Finnish literature, but the EU put a stop to that because it was unfair to other countries and non-Finnish writers.
When the system changed, I remember someone suggesting that if you did not want to “give money” to some writer, you could borrow the book from the library, read it quickly and then “loan” it to your extended circle, so that as many people as possible get to read it for the same amount of compensation money.
[*]Citations needed all around. We have a *heat wave* on (in May!) and I can’t even, let alone fact check.
Some non-political Star Trekkin’….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omega_Glory
Oh man, Omega Glory still has that classic Shatner-ian reading of the Preamble to the Constitution (complete with “domestic tronquility”), and Chief Cloud Caricature “not fully understand[ing].”
Kirk: “These words and the words that follow were not written only for the Yangs, but for the Kohms as well!”
Cloud William: “The Kohms?”
I just love how flabbergasted his is at that idea. Plus how American culture, complete with identical flag and documents, developed independently on another planet in the galaxy. It’s just silly enough to be great!
@Masse
I’m in Finland right now and yeah, heatwave much? When I packed to come the forecast said temperatures of about 15°C not 22!
Is this an unusual thing? What’s normal for May weather?
Due to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels exceeding 400ppm, “normal” has been suspended until further notice and the rule for weather anywhere is “anything goes”. 😛
Even if a writer intends their work to be apolitical, that doesn’t necessarily make it so. Their unexamined assumptions can make a political point.
A story set in the 22nd century, in which the “Pan-African Federation” is an economic powerhouse, will elicit groans from present-day white supremacists. A story set in the same period, in which the USA is the sole remaining capitalist economic superpower, will not. But there’s no guarantee that capitalism will survive the challenges of the next century enough to remain dominant, nor that the USA will not fragment or falter. So the latter story will likely seem less politically neutral to a reader in Bangladesh, say, than to one in Baltimore.
I recall complaints about ST:Voyager having a starship captain who is a feeemale. That’s an agenda! Kirk, apparently, represented no agenda, even though a lunkhead like Kirk should never have made captain, and even though we already have warship captains and astronauts who are women.
Always pay attention to what the writer thinks is the status quo. Because, as Dr Horrible said, the status is not quo!
Of course why I said it, is that ST (no matter what show) never was apolitical. I like Voyager last of all treckshows, but that has nothing to do with female Captain, more to do with not liking the characters, and to little done with an interesting idea.
You can’t be apolitical yes. Alan mentioned H.G.Wells. Another “apolitical” writer who should be mentioned is Georg Orwell I think.
@sunnysombrera
I’m Finnish and have lived in Finland all my life and no, this isn’t normal at all. It should be about half these temperatures at this time of the year. On the other hand, in recent years we’ve had warm Mays followed by a cold June and then a warm July, so this might be a passing thing yet again (2016 and 2017 had a week or two of “summer in May” and then cold, 10 degrees Celsius or thereabouts, all through June). So make of that what you will. Personally, I’m taking full advantage of the freakish warmth and have gone full capri pants and t-shirt, baby! 😉
I believe he was mentioned on WHTM before, but Antarctic Press has decided not to publish Diversity & Comics garbage human being Richard C. Meyer’s comic book.
https://www.bleedingcool.com/2018/05/13/no-enemy-but-peace-richard-meyer/
@Monzach
As a tourist this is ideal weather for me! Better than England right now. Though if I go back with a slight tan it’ll be weird to say “I got this in Finland.” ?
Granted the UK bank holiday weekend was also a glorious weather phenomenon (more than makes up for the snowpocalypse we had in March) so I can safely say I’ve had a happily hot two weeks or so.