candace owen 2

---

primary 2 26 to find ez

MAIN MISSPELL W S IS MAIN?

promoted to 2nd; pioneer? reboot?

html crotch

---

an 11 26

Macrons take Candace Owens to court in her home state

---

MMA FUENTE BEEF? 10 26

Podcast Wars: “Worthless” Candace Owens, “wicked and evil” Tucker Carlson, and “foreign spy” Ben Shapiro

---

AN 3 26

Joe Kent, President Donald Trump’s former National Counterterrorism Center Director, told right wing commentator Tucker Carlson on Wednesday that he believes a “foreign nexus” was behind the assassination of the late right-wing advocate Charlie Kirk.

“Things really got going on Tuesday when Kent told conservative writer (and two-time failed California gubernatorial candidate) Michael Shellenberger he’d be willing to testify in accused Kirk murderer Tyler Robinson’s defense that the FBI botched the investigation,” wrote The Bulwark's conservative pundit Will Sommer in an analysis of Kent’s comments. “Kent told Shellenberger he was warned his own inquiry into Kirk’s murder—which he operated from his government post, separately from the FBI—could hurt the prosecution against Robinson.”

Kent then told Carlson, “I was definitely warned of that over and over again. If I end up having to [be called as a witness], then I’ll do it. It’s not something I’m seeking.”

As Sommer pointed out, FBI Director Kash Patel reportedly was concerned about Kent’s investment in conspiracy theories about Kirk’s assassination as far back as October. Now that Kent has gone public with his accusations, he has become a “public player” in the ongoing debate.

“Kent’s recent theorizing about the case has raised questions about how Owens got her hands on group-chat messages Kirk sent just a few days before his death,” Sommer wrote. “Speculation that Kent was her source is now rampant. Those text messages, which Owens published last October, featured Kirk complaining to friends that Jewish donors were pressing him to support Israel in various ways, including banning Tucker Carlson from a TPUSA conference. They provided Owens with evidence for her earliest allegations that Kirk was killed by Israel.”

Separate from the role Kent has played in spreading these conspiracy theories, Sommer concluded that “the controversy itself signals that the right’s divide over Kirk’s death isn’t going away. In fact, the fissures could become completely unbridgeable if Kent’s comments about Kirk’s killing end up materially impacting” the trial of Tyler Robinson, Kent’s alleged assassin.

Historian Max Boot expressed concern for The Washington Post earlier this month that Kent will fan the flames of anti-Semitism by claiming Israel is responsible for the US war in Iran. He resigned as Trump’s National Counterterrorism Center Director earlier in March to protest Israel’s supposed involvement.

“As so often happens, the Jews — or, if you prefer a polite euphemism, ‘Zionists’ or ‘the Israel lobby’ — make a handy fall guy,” Boot explained. “What the right-wing fringe once whispered — that this was ‘a war for Israel’ — suddenly burst onto the front pages last week thanks to Joe Kent’s resignation as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. In a blistering public letter, Kent wrote that ‘Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation’ and that ‘we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby."

Speaking with AlterNet on the subject, Jonathan Sarna, emeritus professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University and author of “Lincoln and the Jews: A History” and “When General Grant Expelled the Jews,” told AlterNet that he shares Boot’s concerns, particularly when it comes to how the conspiracy theories parallel an infamous 1903 hoax, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

“If you go back to ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ — the great antisemitic forgery of the turn of the last century — that really began this sense that Jews are all-powerful, that they operate behind the scenes, and that whatever happens is ultimately their fault,” Sarna told AlterNet. “Before then, for centuries, the prevailing view was that Jews were persecuted and lowly because they had killed Christ, and that was what they deserved — they were powerless. That was their punishment. But ‘The Protocols’ flipped that.”

---

===

an 2 26

A recent meeting of President Donald Trump's Religious Liberty Commission rapidly devolved into a shouting match between commission members over the issue of antisemitism.

That's according to a Tuesday article by MS NOW's Ja'han Jones, who wrote that several conservative Christian members of the commission got into a "fit of infighting" when discussing antisemitism on college campuses. Commission members Carrie Prejean Boller (who was Miss California U.S.A. in 2009) and Seth Dillon — who is the CEO of conservative satire site The Babylon Bee — battled over far-right commentator Tucker Carlson and whether MAGA influencer Candace Owens is antisemitic.

"I have not heard one thing out of her mouth that I would say is antisemitic," Boller said of Owens, despite Owens being named "Antisemite of the Year" in 2024 by advocacy group StopAntisemitism.

Boller also argued loudly with several Jewish commission members over the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, the latter of which is typically defined by support for the modern state of Israel (though it is also seen as a coded attack on Jewish people). Boller, who is Catholic, proclaimed "Catholics do not embrace Zionism," and garnered boos from the crowd when condemning Islamophobia.

Now, Boller is facing calls from within the MAGA world to either resign for the commission, or for her to be removed if she refused to step down. This includes far-right commentator Laura Loomer (known as Trump's informal "loyalty enforcer") who called Boller's comments "disgraceful."

"The Trump administration should not reward individuals who openly spread anti-Jewish propaganda," Loomer tweeted.

Trump convened the Religious Liberty Commission last year, whose members include Texas Lieutenant Gov. Dan Patrick (R) and Dr. Phil McGraw, as well as former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, Rev. Franklin Graham, Pastor Paula White and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, among others. Their commission itself is set to disband on July 4 of this year, unless Trump chooses to extend it. Jones wrote that given the outburst at its latest meeting, the commission may likely sunset this summer.

"That MAGA world is engaged in this kind of circular firing squad over antisemitism is no surprise and, one might argue, the natural outcome for a political movement fueled by bigotry of varying sorts," Jones wrote.

---

===

Who’s afraid of Candace Owens?

A movement built to support Donald Trump can’t cordon off conspiracy theories

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 12/11/25

Long-simmering feuds among right-wing influencers reached a boiling point this week when Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika used an appearance on Fox News to denounce people she said were “making hundreds of thousands of dollars” by pushing conspiracy theories about her husband’s killing. Her plea for those individuals “to stop,” obviously intended for her husband's former colleague, the popular streamer Candace Owens, triggered an outpouring of criticism on the right against “extremists” promoting “hateful conspiracy theories” who had somehow been allowed into the movement.

But in a sign of the durable position such conspiracy theorists hold within the movement — and the immense demand for their work — many of the high-level pundits trying to lay down guardrails did not mention by name either Owens or her primary ally in the MAGA schism, Tucker Carlson.

“The Right’s media apparatus is how the Right teaches its followers how to think, and it’s currently getting consumed by conspiracy, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts,” The Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo said in one such salvo. “If left unchecked, it will turn the audience into the equivalent of a Third World click farm.”

Can you imagine?

It is patently absurd to claim that right-wing media figures injecting deranged lies into their audience is somehow a new phenomenon. The right is dominated by President Donald Trump, the poster child for “conspiracy, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts.” And Rufo’s ilk were happy to foster such insanity as long as it was pointed at the left in the service of electing Republicans.

But now the same tools are being turned inward, against other right-wingers, and while they’re furious that this is happening, the apparatus they helped build is so powerful that they are unable to name their foes.

A fight over Charlie Kirk’s legacy — and the Jews

Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel caused a split in a right-wing commentariat otherwise united around Trump. One side includes conservative Jews like Ben Shapiro and Laura Loomer, who supported Israel’s subsequent brutal campaign in Gaza and traffic in anti-Muslim invective. On the other side are “America First” figures like Owens and Carlson who both opposed the campaign and used it as an opportunity to revive noxious antisemitic conspiracism. The divide has repeatedly made headlines, particularly in November when Carlson gave a friendly interview to Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist streamer who regularly rails against “the Jews,” who he has claimed “are destroying this country.”

Owens has been claiming since Charlie Kirk’s tragic killing in September that at the time of his death, he was coming around to her view of Israel. Based on that premise (which Kirk allies deny), she has speculated that Kirk may have been assassinated by pro-Israel henchmen worried that he was turning on them, perhaps with help from elements within TPUSA and the U.S. military. These sorts of wild claims are typical of Owens’ oeuvre: She is currently being sued for claiming that the first lady of France is secretly a transgender woman, and has told her followers that she has been targeted for death by an assassination squad composed of French law enforcement and “at least one Israeli.” Her claims have been denounced by the likes of Shapiro and Loomer, but cheered on by Carlson and fellow traveler Alex Jones.

Erika Kirk appeared on Fox’s Outnumbered on Wednesday to address in part what host Harris Faulker described as “hate” and “conspiracies” in the wake of her husband’s death.

“Come after me, call me names, I don't care,” she said. “Call me what you want, go down that rabbit hole, whatever. But…when you go after the people that I love and you're making hundreds of thousands of dollars every single episode going after the people that I love because somehow they're in on this? No.”

“My message to them is to stop — to stop,” she concluded.

Neither Erika Kirk nor Faulkner mentioned Owens’ name. But Owens immediately recognized that the segment had been “about me.” And rather than stopping at the widow’s request, she doubled down.

The Fox segment encouraged other right-wing pundits who typically avoid weighing in on intramovement controversies to speak out — albeit without mentioning who they were talking about.

Fox star Sean Hannity used his radio show on Wednesday to call out online commentators for “saying the most incendiary, outrageous, bizarre, conspiratorial, in some cases, outright racist, white nationalist, virulent antisemitism, and they make money off the, quote, clicks that they can then monetize because, you know, people like the shock value of it.” After praising Erika Kirk’s Fox appearance, he lashed out at “people with no evidence spreading the most vile, hateful conspiracy theories about Charlie's assassination,” calling them “grifters” who are “not MAGA.”

The hosts of Fox & Friends likewise aired Erika Kirk’s remarks and criticized unnamed persons pushing conspiracy theories about her husband’s death on Thursday. “People are making money. They have unsubstantiated theories and are running with it,” Brian Kilmeade said.

MAGA slop king Benny Johnson also posted the video of Erika Kirk going “absolutely SCORCHED EARTH against evil people monetizing Charlie Kirk's death and attacking her family and the families of those close to Charlie and TPUSA,” adding: “Thank God we are finally here. The Demons are Screaming.” He has not mentioned Owens by name on X since posting in April 2024 about a potential Owens/Shapiro debate over antisemitism.

For Fox contributor Hugh Hewitt, meanwhile, this is a tempest in a teapot. Responding to a discussion started by Rufo’s post on Wednesday, he claimed that such (unnamed, of course) “grifters” only have the “illusion of influence,” while “center-right to conservative media is flourishing.” Citing podcasts with relatively small audiences and Fox’s Special Report, “the most watched news show by serious people in the country,” he commented, “A handful of extremists cannot pollute the sea of offerings but it’s still best just to ignore them.”

It is certainly possible in a fractured media environment for a Republican apparatchik with intellectual pretensions to find some voices who will make him feel good about the choices he’s made. But Owens and Carlson both host podcasts on Spotify’s top-10 list, and the latter spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention after shepherding the selection of JD Vance as the next vice president.

The guardrails are gone and all the conspiracy theorists are here

The MAGA movement that everyone on both sides of the divide supported during the 2024 presidential election worships a notorious fabulist who emerged in GOP politics thanks to his role as the nation’s chief birther, reshaped his party around the twin lies that he actually won the 2020 election and that the ensuing January 6 riots by his supporters were righteous, and is constantly lifting up the most noxious online slop imaginable.

Trump’s emergence speaks to both the willingness of mainstream right-wing institutions to accept a conspiracy theorist at the highest level of power, and the eagerness of the right-wing audience to buy the sort of lies he was selling. And his ascension has made it virtually impossible for the resulting movement to draw lines and fully cut loose people who promote deranged falsehoods and bigotries.

Owens and Carlson became right-wing stars by promoting the same types of feverish claims while climbing established institutional pathways. New York magazine detailed Owens’ conspiratorial habits of thinking all the way back in 2016, before her tenure at TPUSA, her nearly 200 appearances on Fox weekday shows over a five year span, or her time as Shapiro’s colleague at The Daily Wire. And Carlson had spent years mainstreaming white nationalist talking points as a Fox host before the network finally showed him the door. The pair assembled loyal audiences thanks to those right-wing institutions, which have found themselves able to take away their jobs but not able to stop viewers from following them to their new spaces.

And Carlson and Owens profited not in spite of their conspiracy theories, but because they fit neatly within a right-wing echo chamber that seemed purpose-built for their generation and propagation. People like Rufo and Hannity were happy to play along with bullshit about Haitian immigrants eating pets or the Democrats assassinating a party staffer when they could use such claims for the benefit of Trump and the GOP. But now that the same habits of mind that made a swath of the right into QAnon adherents are turned inside the tent, they are deeply concerned.

Meanwhile, neither Trump nor Vance seem at all interested in trying to reestablish guardrails. Indeed, their administration is filled with conspiracy theorists seemingly picked for that very reason, indicative of a political movement that is marbled through with crackpots and extremists. And the worst is surely yet to come.

MMA

### What are J.D. Vance and Sean Hannity so afraid of?

11/14/25 11:40 AM EST

### Candace Owens leaves as cancel culture comes to The Daily Wire

03/22/24 3:27 PM EDT

### A mask-off week for right-wing antisemitism

11/21/23

---

AN 10 25

UnHerd Editor Sohrab Ahmari tells the Washington Post that the ravings of the right-wing media's pundit class have lately gotten even crazier.

“Much of right-wing media now resembles star-child radio: a vast chamber of oft-malignant fantasies, where even once-reasonable minds go to get euthanized,” said Ahmari. “Each flick of the feed pulls up a paranoia-monger more wild-eyed than the previous, warning about the evil machinations of all-powerful ... apparitions of their fever dreams.”

It doesn’t’ matter that “the establishment” has been largely dethroned, Ahmari adds. “Populists are in power and still there seems to be no stopping the online right’s slide into irrationality.

Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, was wearing clothing that matched security images. There are also bullet engravings, messages to a friend, family members’ recollection that he’d grown increasingly militant in defense of certain causes and even a confession on an online message board. Despite this, some of the right’s biggest voices, like Candace Owens and others had their own theory of who’d killed Kirk.

“Turning Point will not release the footage,” said Owens, referring to the right-wing campus group founded by Kirk. She insinuated that Kirk’s own organization might have been in on the killing, while weaving in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and pro-Israel billionaire Bill Ackman, who, she claims, threatened Kirk over his growing skepticism of the Jewish state.

IFrame Content

“Years ago, your average amateur broadcaster raving about alien babies could, at best, hope for a few thousand listeners. Today’s star-child anchors command enormous audiences,” Ahmari said. “[Tucker] Carlson and Owens host the No. 1 and No. 3 news podcasts on Spotify (as of this writing). … Liberal America still generally tunes into mainstream outlets while much of the right half of the electorate seems hooked on star-child radio. As UnHerd columnist Richard Hanania concluded, ‘the right is in deep trouble.’”

Ahmari adds: “There is a difference between a progressive (or conservative) worldview coloring the framing of stories and the quest to ‘prove,’ as the some on the right have, that the president of France’s wife is a man.”

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter heralded a new X algorithm that “positively promotes the crank right,” said Ahmari, and the effects of that spread and others are exacting a toll on U.S. democracy.

“This media system promotes mental degeneration and a sense of learned helplessness that can only yield destructive politics,” Ahmari warned. “People convinced that an amorphous they controls events are unlikely to take political responsibility for the shape of our common life — and far more likely to fall in thrall to demagogues and dictators.”

Read the Washington Post report at this link.

---

Yair Rosenberg @ The Atlantic: The MAGA Influencers Rehabilitating Hitler

A growing constituency on the right wants America to unlearn the lessons of World War II.

REF

The story we got about World War II is all wrong,” a guest Tucker Carlson on his podcast two weeks ago. “I think that’s right,” replied Carlson. The guest, a Cornell chemistry professor named David Collum, then spelled out what he meant: “One can make the argument we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.” Such sentiments might sound shocking to the uninitiated, but they are not to Carlson’s audience. In fact, the notion that the German dictator was unfairly maligned has become a running theme on Carlson’s show—and beyond.

Last September, Carlson interviewed a man named Darryl Cooper, whom he dubbed “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” Cooper’s conception of honest history soon became clear: He suggested that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill might have been “the chief villain of the Second World War,” with Nazi Germany at best coming in second. The day after the episode aired, Cooper further downplayed Hitler’s genocidal ambitions, writing on social media that the German leader had sought peace with Europe and merely wanted “to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.” He did not explain why the Jews should have been considered a “problem” in the first place.

“What is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil?” the far-right podcaster Candace Owens in July 2024. “The first thing people would say is: ‘Well, an ethnic cleansing almost took place.’ And now I offer back: ‘You mean like we actually did to the Germans.’” A repeat guest on Carlson’s show, Owens defended him after his conversation with Cooper. “Many Americans are learning that WW2 history is not as black and white as we were taught and some details were purposefully omitted from our textbooks,” she wrote on X.

These Reich rehabilitators are not fringe figures. Carlson’s show ranks among the top podcasts in America. He spoke before President Donald Trump on the final night of the 2024 Republican National Convention, and his son serves as a deputy press secretary to Vice President J. D. Vance, who owes his office in part to Carlson’s advocacy. Owens has millions of followers on YouTube, Instagram, and X, and over the past six months, she has been interviewed by some of the nation’s most popular podcasters, including the comedian Theo Von and the ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith. Her output has attained sufficient notoriety that she is currently being sued by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, over her repeated claims that the French first lady was actually born a man. Cooper, the would-be World War II revisionist, publishes the top-selling history newsletter on the entire Substack platform.

Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right

Why does a potent portion of the American right seek to rehabilitate Hitler? The Nazi apologetics are partly an attention-seeking attempt at provocation—an effort to signal iconoclasm by transgressing one of society’s few remaining taboos. But there is more to the story than that. Carlson and his fellow travelers on the far right correctly identify the Second World War as a pivot point in America’s understanding of itself and its attitude toward its Jewish citizens. The country learned hard lessons from the Nazi Holocaust about the catastrophic consequences of conspiratorial prejudice. Today, a growing constituency on the right wants the nation to unlearn them.

Before World War II, the United States was a far more anti-Semitic place than it is now. Far from joining the conflict to rescue Europe’s Jews, the country was largely unsympathetic to their plight. In 1938, on the eve of the Holocaust, Gallup found that 54 percent of Americans believed that “the persecution of Jews in Europe has been partly their own fault,” and that another 11 percent thought it was “entirely” their fault. In other words, as the Nazis prepared to exterminate the Jews, most Americans blamed the victims.

The same week that the Kristallnacht pogrom left thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses in ruins, 72 percent of Americans opposed allowing “a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live.” Months later, 67 percent opposed a bill aimed at accepting child refugees from Germany; the idea never made it to a congressional vote. Many Americans worried, however illogically, that fleeing Jews might be German spies, a vanishingly rare occurrence. Those with suspicions included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who suggested in 1940 that some refugees could be engaged in espionage under compulsion from the Nazis, “especially Jewish refugees.”

This climate of paranoia and hostility had deadly consequences. In 1939, the U.S. and Canada turned away the M.S. St. Louis, which carried nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees. The ship was forced to return to Europe, where hundreds of the passengers were captured and killed by the Germans. Restrained by public sentiment, Roosevelt not only kept the country’s refugee caps largely in place but also rejected pleas to bomb the Auschwitz concentration camp and the railway tracks that led to it. When the United States finally entered the war, it did so not out of any special sense of obligation to the Jews but to defend itself after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

That indifference to the Holocaust was immediately dispelled when the Allied Forces liberated several of the Nazi camps where millions of Jews had been murdered. Entering the gates of these sadistic sites, American service members came face-to-face with unspeakable Nazi atrocities—rotting piles of naked corpses, gas chambers, thousands of emaciated adults. Denial gave way to revulsion. “I thought of some of the stories I previously had read about Dachau and was glad of the chance to see for myself just to prove once and for all that what I had heard was propaganda,” Sergeant Horace Evers wrote to his family in May 1945. “But no it wasn’t propaganda at all … If anything some of the truth had been held back.”

Timothy W. Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days

Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and future U.S. president, personally went to Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald and the first Nazi camp liberated by American troops. “I made the visit deliberately,” he cabled to Washington, “in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” Eisenhower then requested that members of Congress and prominent journalists be brought to the camps to see and document the horrors themselves. “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald,” the legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow his listeners after touring the camp. “I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.”

Two-thirds of Europe’s Jews had been murdered. American soldiers, drafted from across the United States, returned home bearing witness to what they had encountered. “Anti-Semitism was right there, it had been carried to the ultimate, and I knew that that was something we had to get rid of because I had experienced it,” Sergeant Leon Bass, a Black veteran whose segregated unit entered Buchenwald, later. In this way, the American people learned firsthand where rampant anti-Jewish prejudice led—and the country was transformed.

Americans began to understand themselves as the ones who’d defeated the Nazis and saved the Jews. Slowly but surely, anti-Semitism became un-American. But today, those lessons—like the people who learned them—are passing away, and a wave of propagandists with a very different agenda has arisen to fill the void they left behind.

:{:{Over the past few years, Tucker Carlson and his co-ideologues have begun insinuating anti-Semitic ideas into the public discourse. The former Fox News host has Ben Shapiro, perhaps the most prominent American Jewish conservative, and those like him as foreign subversives who “don’t care about the country at all.” He has also promoted a lightly sanitized version of the white-supremacist “Great Replacement” theory that has inspired multiple anti-Semitic massacres on American soil. }:

Candace Owens has accused Israel of involvement in the 9/11 attacks and the JFK assassination, and claimed that a Jewish pedophile cult controls the world. (Like many pushing such slanders, she has apparently discerned that replacing Jews with Israel or Zionists grants age-old conspiracy theories new legitimacy.) In March, an influencer named Ian Carroll—who has a combined 3.8 million social-media followers, and whose work has been shared by Elon Musk—joined Joe Rogan, arguably the most popular podcaster in America, to expound without challenge about how a “giant group of Jewish billionaires is running a sex-trafficking operation targeting American politicians and business people.”}:

Before America entered World War II, reactionaries such as the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and the Catholic radio firebrand Father Charles Coughlin inveighed against the country’s tiny Jewish population, accusing it of controlling America’s institutions and dragging the U.S. to war. “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government,” Lindbergh declared of American Jews in 1941. “Why is there persecution in Germany today?” asked Coughlin after Kristallnacht. “Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted.” For these men and their millions of supporters, behind every perceived social and political problem lay a sinister Jewish culprit.

Read: What Tucker Carlson’s spin on World War II really says

The 21st-century heirs of Lindbergh and Coughlin seek to turn back the clock to a time when such sentiments were seen by many as sensible rather than scandalous. These far-right figures have correctly ascertained that to change what is possible in American politics, they need to change how America talks about itself and its past. “The reason I keep focusing on this is probably the same reason you’re doing it,” Carlson Darryl Cooper, the amateur Holocaust historian. “I think it’s central to the society we live in, the myths upon which it’s built. I think it’s also the cause of the destruction of Western civilization—these lies.”

Carlson couches his claims in layers of intellectual abstraction. Others are less coy. “Hitler burned down the trans clinics, arrested the Rothschild bankers, and gave free homes to families,” the former mixed martial artist Jake Shields told his 870,000 followers on X last week. “Does this sound like the most evil man who ever lived?” The post received 44,000 likes. (Shields has also denied that “a single Jew died in gas chambers.”) “Hitler was right about y’all,” said Myron Gaines, a manosphere podcaster with some 2 million followers across platforms, referring to Jews last year. “You guys come into a country, you push your pornography, you push your fuckin’ central banking, you push your degeneracy, you push the LGBT community, you push all this fuckin’ bullshit into a society, you destroy it from within.” These influencers are less respectable than Carlson, but their views are precisely the ones that more presentable propagandists like him are effectively working to mainstream. After Carlson’s guest last month suggested that the U.S. “should have sided with Hitler,” Shields reposted the clip.

Had Carlson and his cohort attempted their revisionism 20 years ago, they would have encountered a chorus of contradiction from real people who had experienced the history they sought to rewrite and know where its conspiratorial calumnies lead. But today, most of those people are dead, and a new generation is rising that never witnessed the Holocaust firsthand or heard about it from family and friends who did.

Late last year, David Shor, one of the Democratic Party’s top data scientists, surveyed some 130,000 voters about whether they had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of Jewish people. Hardly anyone over the age of 70 said their view was unfavorable. More than a quarter of those under 25 did. The question is not whether America’s self-understanding is changing; it’s how far that change will go—and what the consequences will be.

Yair Rosenberg

Yair Rosenberg is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Deep Shtetl, about the intersection of politics, culture, and religion.

Explore More Topics

Adolf Hitler, Europe, Germany, Nazi Party, The Holocaust, Tucker Carlson, World War II

---

rww

07/24/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling @ The New Republic: Trump’s Relationship With Epstein Further Exposed in Bombshell Video

In resurfaced video testimony, Jeffrey Epstein was asked if he and Donald Trump ever spent time with young girls.

Will Sommer @ The Bulwark: MAGA Inches Closer to a Ghislaine Maxwell Alliance

Is perpetrating heinous crimes against children too big a hurdle for a political alliance of convenience? Maybe not.

Kathryn Wilkens @ Mediaite: Candace Owens Vows to Fight Macron Lawsuit Over Claim French First Lady Is a Man: ‘Obvious’ She ‘Has a Penis’

Candace Owens doubled down on her claim that French First Lady Brigitte Macron was born a man on Wednesday after French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife filed a defamation lawsuit against the right-wing commentator accusing her of spreading the conspiracy theory that Brigitte was born “Jean-Michel Trogneux.”

Amanda Moore @ The Intercept: Project 2025 Data Leak Shows a Paul Ingrassia Calling for Test for Voting and Halting Immigration

Trump appointed far-right loyalist Paul Ingrassia to head a Justice Department office responsible for keeping politics out of the civil service.

Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: So much for ‘looking forward’: Republicans launch yet another Jan. 6 probe

The GOP's Jan. 6 probe in the last Congress was an embarrassing dud. Rather than learn an obvious lesson, the party is going to give it a second try.

Jessica Mason Pieklo @ Rewire News Group: These Two ‘Culture Warriors’ Are Trump’s New Federal Judges

The conservative legal movement used Trump’s first term to seize control of the federal courts. Will it use his second term to rewrite the Constitution entirely?

---

RWW

7 25

Sarah K. Burris @ Raw Story: First lady of France sues right-wing firebrand Candace Owens over claims she's a man

First Lady Brigitte Macron is suing right-wing firebrand Candace Owens for a “relentless and unjustified smear campaign” that alleges Macron is secretly a man.

Hemant Mehta @ Friendly Atheist: Textbook publishers are largely rejecting Ryan Walters' MAGA curriculum in Oklahoma

Ryan Walters' far-right curriculum changes are getting snubbed by publishers who refuse to rewrite history.

Teo Armus, Samantha Schmidt, Helena Carpio and Arelis R. Hernández @ The Washington Post: U.S. deportees, freed from Salvadoran prison, describe ‘horror movie’

Three Venezuelans, released last week from the Terrorism Confinement Center, said they were repeatedly beaten and denied access to lawyers.

Julie Turkewitz, José Bautista and Frances Robles @ The New York Times: American Convicted of Murder Is Freed by Trump From Venezuela Prison

The Trump administration said it was protecting Americans unjustly held abroad. One of the rescued men, Dahud Hanid Ortiz, killed three people, according to court documents.

---

04/08/2025 rww

Kyle Mantyla

Ian Millhiser @ Vox: The Supreme Court just made it easier for Trump to deport people

On Monday night, the Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision tossing out a closely watched district court decision, which blocked President Donald Trump’s attempt to use a 227-year-old law — the Alien Enemies Act — to deport many individuals without due process. The Court largely voted along party lines, although Republican Justice Amy Coney Barrett crossed over to dissent with the three Democratic justices.

Angry White Men: Candace Owens: ‘The Beatles Was Totally A Psychological Operation’

In an interview with antisemitic conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll, Candace Owens claimed that The Beatles “was totally a psychological operation.” Owens also called Volodymyr Zelensky a “literal actor” who was trained by the CIA, and said Emmanuel Macron was “installed as president of France with the Rothschilds behind him.”

Jesse Eisinger @ ProPublica: No, President Trump, the Income Tax Wasn’t A Mistake. But It Was an Accident.

While instituting the largest tariff increase in modern history, Trump claimed that the income tax was passed for “reasons unknown to mankind” and caused the Great Depression. Here’s the real history.

Travis Gettys @ Raw Story: 'Gay beam machine': Right-wing pastor makes startling claim about airport scanner

Andrew Isker, who co-hosts with C. Jay Engel what he calls "the number one Christian nationalist podcast in the world," shared his unconventional and homophobic views on the Transportation Safety Administration's security scanners.

Kiera Butler @ Mother Jones: Christian “TheoBros” Are Building a Tech Utopia in Appalachia

A couple of years ago, Andrew Isker, a pastor and father of six, made a big decision. He would move his family away from Minnesota, where six generations of his ancestors had lived before him, to a rural community in Tennessee.

===

same wk husb fact checked trump on ukraine BS

mma

Candace Owens’ “transvestigation” series targeting France’s first lady is reaching new audiences on TikTok

Through “transvestigation,” Candace Owens has seemingly found a way to make anti-trans bigotry palatable to a wide audience

Written by Abbie Richards

Published 02/27/25 mma

On January 31, podcaster Candace Owens launched a new “investigative series” based on the debunked conspiracy theory that the first lady of France, Brigitte Macron, is secretly a transgender woman. Videos about the series, titled “Becoming Brigitte,” have been circulating on TikTok, garnering millions of views on both English-language and French-language content.

Right-wing personalities and social media users have spread these types of baseless allegations, often called “transvestigations,” for years, frequently targeting powerful women including Taylor Swift and Michelle Obama. And this is not the first time Brigitte Macron has faced the conspiracy theory. Last year, a French court found two women guilty of slander for spreading these same claims.

Owens has been pushing the conspiracy theory about the French first lady for nearly a year.

As of the time of writing, she has streamed eight episodes of her “transvestigation” series on YouTube — producing over six hours of conspiracy theory content centered around the Macrons. During the series, Owens questioned whether Brigitte Macron is transgender and also whether she is French President Emmanuel Macron’s biological father.

Owens has also been increasingly producing content about celebrity culture recently. The podcaster has developed a fixation with Blake Lively’s lawsuit against Justin Baldoni, for example, producing 16 videos analyzing the celebrity saga since January 8 of this year. She also recently her next “investigative series,” centered around Harvey Weinstein. This episodic format and pivot toward more pop cultural subjects like celebrity gossip and true crime appear to be working well for her.

The eight YouTube videos that compose the “Becoming Brigitte” series— some of which are monetized — have garnered more than 16 million cumulative views. In addition to YouTube ads that run before some of her content, Owens has used sponsor breaks in these videos to promote a tax attorney service, a gold and silver dealer, a mortgage lender, a supplement company, a greens powder, a home gym, a wireless phone service, a skincare company, a meat delivery service, an anti-abortion coffee company, and an anti-abortion charity.

Owens’ “transvestigation” series is spreading on TikTok, earning millions of views on English- and French-language content

The series’ true crime format seems to appeal to TikTok users, who have shared the content along with their thoughts, memes, and theories. Media Matters identified 37 videos referencing Owens’ series on TikTok, which have received more than 62 million cumulative views (more than 42 million views on English-language content and another nearly 20 million views on French-language content).

Appropriating the true crime serialized style

In “Becoming Brigitte,” Owens blends her typical conspiratorial content with true crime flare, using “facial recognition software,” obsessing over family trees, and even interviewing a French journalist who she says “has never before this moment appeared on camera.”

The episodic nature of Owens’ anti-trans tirade is familiar to audiences that have been consuming episodic investigative true crime since *Serial* popularized the format in 2014. Like popular true crime shows and podcasts, Owens’ series has been cultivating an “obsessed” fandom, with TikTok users building upon Owens’ grand conspiracy theory narrative and adding their own theories into the mix as though they were speculating about a TV show and not the genitalia of a global geopolitical figure.

In one video with more than 756,000 views, posted alongside the hashtags “womenoftiktok” and “momsoftiktok,” a woman says:

“Calling everyone who is obsessed with ‘Becoming Brigitte’ as much as I am. I have went all in on the rabbit hole and I need to know your theories. We’re over Diddy: guilty. We’re over Blake Lively: Guilty. We’re all in this, OK?”

Video

Citation

From a February 12, 2025, video uploaded to TikTok

The video has thousands of comments from users, many of them adding their own speculations.

The conspiracy theory that Brigitte Macron is Emmanuel Macron’s father also seems to be performing well in TikTok’s system of algorithmic amplification, which rewards inflammatory and sensationalist content. In a video with 4.9 million views, a woman speaks to the camera, covering her mouth in apparent shock:

“I’m going to throw up. I’m going to throw up. I’ve been watching Candace Owens. She’s covering the president in France, OK? Because she believes that the president is married to a trans woman. The president is married to his father.”

Video

Citation

From a February 8, 2025, video uploaded to TikTok

Users are also making memes about the series.

One video with more than 539,000 views is set to the Law & Order theme, with text that reads, “Me getting ready to watch candace owen’s prove bridgette macron is a man & ryan reynolds is insane all in one episode while she’s pregnant.”

In another video, with more than 478,000 views, a woman sits looking puzzled in her car behind text reading, “My brain trying to process that Candace Owen’s blasted the President of France for being married to his transgender father.”

One claim making the rounds asserts that the Macrons have tried to purchase Owens’ silence.

In a video with more than 480,000 views, one TikTok user alleges that the Macrons “made an offer to Candace Owens” that “in exchange for Candace Owen not publishing this documentary about Brigitte Macron being a man,” they “will pay Candace Owen $4 million plus $50,000 a month for life.”

Another video, with 1.7 million views, reads: “If she’s not a ‘man’ why are they offering Candace Owens 4 Million or 50,000 a month for the rest of her life?”

Media Matters could not verify this claim or its origins.

French-language transvestigation content about Brigitte Macron has also been garnering millions of views on TikTok. Media Matters identified 12 French-language TikTok videos about “Becoming Brigitte” with more than 19.6 million cumulative views.

A French-language video with 4.2 million views from an African-focused news account highlights Owens’ claims. Another French-language video, with 629,000 views, directs viewers to videos providing French translations of Owens’ original content.

Media Matters also identified other French-language content analyzing Brigitte Macron’s body and voice. One video with 3.1 million views opens with an image zooming in on the first lady’s pelvic area while she appears in a bathing suit.

Transvestigations and dehumanization

The series has prompted the spread of dehumanizing transvestigation content that analyzes and dissects Brigitte Macron’s physical features in an attempt to prove her body is deviant. This content is frequently accompanied by explicitly dehumanizing language, with some users referring to Brigitte Macron as “it.”

A video with 3.1 million views compares pictures of Brigitte Macron with pictures of a man with a similar face.

Another video, with 727,000 views, compiles dozens of images and videos of the French first lady, seemingly attempting to highlight masculine features.

TikTok users responded by scrutinizing Macron’s body in the comments, saying, “Those are not female legs or hips”; “A man and a groomer and what is scary he is the puput master. it’s 100% male”; and “The way it sits in the jeans at the start is definitely a male.”

Another video, with 2.4 million views, shows U.S. Vice President JD Vance meeting the Macrons above a skeptical-looking Candace Owens. The text reads, “JD VANCE doesn’t KISS BRIDGET…Becayse JD knows its a male PDF File.” (“PDF File” is TikTok-speak for “pedophile.”)

Transvestigation content is not new but rather a component of the broader hysteria fixated on the bodies of trans people. These conspiracy theories serve as tools for identifying certain bodies and minds as deviant and dangerous. They normalize subjecting trans people, gender-nonconforming people, and anyone perceived as existing outside a strict gender binary to invasions of privacy, mockery, and degradation.

The mainstreaming of Owens’ “transvestigation”

Through “Becoming Brigitte,” Owens has seemingly found a way to make right-wing, anti-trans propaganda palatable to new viewers. For instance, one TikTok user described how the TikTok content about “Becoming Brigitte” was pushing her to go directly to Owens’ channel and consume her content directly:

“This Brigitte Macron stuff has me in a freaking chokehold. And I keep seeing all these creators who share little pieces and parts of Candace Owens’ podcast where she’s going through all this stuff, but it’s never enough. And every time I watch one, I’m like okay get to the point, get to the point, get to the point, and it never gets to the point, and I know that that’s part of it and part of what keeps us hanging on, but I can’t take anymore. I think I’m going to have to go and subscribe to her channel or whatever I have to do to get the full information because at this point I’m obsessed. Like it means nothing to me, I know, and will never make a difference in my life, I’m sure but. … I need to know what Candace knows.”

Owens’ framing is also seemingly attracting a key demographic: women who enjoy true crime content. In one video, a woman speaks directly to other true crime fans:

“To all of my documentary, docu-series, crime watching girlies, if you have not watched ‘Becoming Brigitte’ on Candace Owens’ YouTube channel, you absolutely have to watch that series.”

In another video, shared alongside the hashtags “truecrime,” “truecrimetok,” “truecrimecommunity,” “truecrimetiktok,” and “truecrimestory,” a TikTok user speaks to the camera about her fascination with “Becoming Brigitte”:

“It is fascinating. I was, like, not interested when I first heard about it because it’s, like, about the French government, and I’m not into, like, super over-the-seas politics type things — that can go a little bit over my head. But when I was watching it, I was like, ‘Wow, this is super crazy.’”

The strategy seems to be working for Owens, who went independent last year after parting ways with The Daily Wire. This true crime approach, along with her recent focus on celebrity culture, may be helping Owens to soften right-wing extremism, making it more palatable to new viewers otherwise uninterested in overtly bigoted content.

Owens has claimed she’s achieved record levels of engagement in recent weeks, and according to publicly available data from the social media metric tracking service VidIQ, Owens has gained more than 300,000 YouTube subscribers since she started the series on January 31.

no lnx

:{:{Alternet}:

Social media shows Antioch shooter was influenced by Holocaust deniers, white nationalists

Antioch High School.

Jordan Greenand Raw StoryJanuary 23, 2025

The 17-year-old who killed a female student at a high school in Nashville before taking his own life was an African-American Reserve Officers' Training Corp member who hated Black people and identified as involuntarily celibate, according to a manifesto apparently posted by him online.

A document outlining the views was posted to the X account of the shooter, Solomon Henderson, along with a photo of a handgun in a backpack that appears to have been taken in a bathroom before he walked into the cafeteria at Antioch High School and opened fire around 11 a.m. Central Time. Henderson’s X account was still active, with the link at the time of publication.

In a question-and-answer section in the document, Henderson indicated the attack was motivated by “hatred” of Black people referenced through a racial slur. Europeans, according to the shooter, “need to be protected because they are conquerors, inventors and revolutionary’s [sic] thinkers.” It goes on to accuse Jews of subverting Europeans and imperiling their existence, echoing the racist Great Replacement theory.

ALSO READ: Trump's MAGA America revives a Confederate nightmare

The final page of a diary that was also posted on the shooter’s X account shows a photograph of Henderson, accompanied by the inscription: “God I am ugly. 4 hours to go.”

An entry in the position document on Henderson's opinions of Black people includes a litany of shockingly dehumanizing and ultraviolent descriptors of murder and atrocities.

Henderson credited less than a dozen internet personalities, mostly far-right influencers with radicalizing him.

The list includes Candace Owens, a Black conservative who left the Daily Wire website founded by Ben Shapiro last March following a string of increasingly antisemitic comments. In 2019, Owens testified before a House subcommittee hearing on white supremacist terrorism as a witness for the Republican minority. Owens lashed out at another witness during the hearing, saying, “The audacity of you to bring up the Christchurch shooting manifesto and make it seem as though I laughed at people that were slaughtered by a homicidal maniac is in my opinion absolutely despicable.”

Henderson wrote: “To expand on this, Candace Owens has influenced me above all. Each time she spoke I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped push me further and further into the belief of violence over the Jewish questions.”

Henderson also said he was influenced by Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist and Holocaust denier who dined with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, and Ethan Ralph, a far-right podcaster who helped stoke the Gamergate controversy, a culture war flashpoint in 2014 that proved to be a staging ground for a misogynist backlash against women’s participation in gaming and other male-dominated spaces.

Henderson describes himself as a "Groyper incel," using terms that respectively refer to Fuentes followers and the involuntary celibate, or incel, movement.

Fuentes responded to the shooting by acknowledging that Henderson called himself a 'groyper,' but distanced himself from the attack in a post on X.

The document also credits the rapper Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) with inspiring his violence and extremism.

Henderson's position document pays tribute to an array of white supremacist mass murderers, including Patrick Crusius, who carried out a massacre targeting Hispanics in El Paso, Texas, in 2019; Brenton Tarrant, who killed Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019; and Anders Breivik, who murdered young people at a youth camp in Norway in 2011.

Henderson's document expresses support for neo-Nazi ideals, which he described as "a better, neater, cleaner world by eliminating all undesirables." He added, "We must aid the Aryans regardless of our race."

Henderson’s diary indicates that he had initially planned to attack on Thursday, but decided to move it up to Wednesday because he wanted “to speed things up.” He said he was “scared of failing to kill myself and then going to jail,” and that his “goal was to kill at least 10 people.”

He wrote on X that he had saved money for a GoPro camera "but it was hard to explain to my parents why I needed it so I couldn't buy it." Henderson's X account includes a link to the streaming platform Kick.com, where three videos documenting his attack were posted. The videos have since been taken down from that site, although Henderson's X account remains active.

Henderson’s X account re-shares posts from four other accounts that promote violence, self-hatred, white supremacy and the incel movement. Some of the accounts show pictures of the users making the A-OK hand signal and writing, “Goodbye everyone.”

The similarities suggest some degree of coordination, although it is unclear whether the other account owners carried out attacks of their own.

Henderson said he had "connections" to some of the other shooters, although "only loosely via online messaging platforms."

In a section of his position document, Henderson paid tribute to what he called "new gen cases," including Natalie Rupnow, the 15-year-old girl who fatally shot two students at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, last month.

===

wired oct 21 2024

Russian-aligned propaganda network notorious for creating deepfake whistleblower videos appears to be behind a coordinated effort to promote wild and baseless claims that Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz sexually assaulted one of his former students, according to several specialists tracking the disinformation campaign.

Experts believe that the campaign is tied to a network called Storm-1516, which has been linked to, among other things, a previous effort that falsely claimed vice president Kamala Harris perpetrated a hit-and-run in San Francisco in 2011. Storm-1516 has a long history of posting fake whistleblower videos, and often deepfake videos, to push Kremlin talking points to the West.

The propaganda unit’s work has successfully reached the highest levels of the Republican party, with vice presidential candidate JD Vance repeating at least one of their narratives. NBC reported this week that the group has pushed at least 50 false narratives in this manner since last fall, which comes amid a broader Russian government effort to disrupt next month’s election with the aim of helping former president Donald Trump return to the White House.

Numerous figures in MAGA world boosted the Tim Walz assault claims, including Jack Posobiec, the Pizzagate promoter who is now a member of Trump’s campaign team, and Candace Owens, the popular right-wing podcaster. The claims went viral on X last week, when an anonymous account called Black Insurrectionist posted screenshots of emails from a purported victim. Other X users quickly debunked the claims, citing formatting errors in the images that suggested the emails were fake, but days later another conspiracist posted a video on X claiming he had spoken to one of Walz's supposed victims on the phone—without providing any proof. The video racked up millions of hits.

Then, on Wednesday, a video claiming to show a former student of Walz describing abuse by the former football coach spread widely on X. According to a WIRED analysis using several deepfake detector tools, the video was created using AI. The video, shared by a prominent anonymous QAnon-promoting account, garnered over 4.3 million views before it was deleted.

The campaign to attack Walz predates the video; it traces back to John Dougan, a former Florida cop who now lives in Moscow and runs a network of pro-Kremlin websites. Dougan appeared on Zak Paine’s QAnon show RedPill78 on October 5 with an anonymous man named “Rick,” who said he was a foreign exchange student at Mankato West High School in 2004 when Walz was a teacher there. “Rick” then claimed Walz assaulted him. Dougan did not respond to a request for comment.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Dave Chappelle | Summerfest, The World's Largest Music Festival ›

'As Far as I Knew My Career Was Over': Dave Chapelle Gets Candid

---

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/meet-the-twitter-verified-maga-influencers-spreading-the-qanon-gospel/

no lnx twt pix

Meet the Twitter-verified MAGA Influencers Spreading the QAnon Gospel

By Adele M. Stan | October 26, 2020

In July, Twitter—after years of unheeded warnings—removed from its platform more than 7,000 accounts that were tweeting conspiracy theories from the QAnon universe, a move estimated to have affected more than 150,000 accounts related to those that were purged. National Public Radio called it “the most wide-reaching and aggressive response to the pro-Trump conspiracy theory that any social media platform has ever undertaken.”

And yet, QAnon’s presence remains robust, thanks in part to the work of Trump-enabling hard-right “Twitter verified” influencers who advance QAnon talking points, often minus overt QAnon branding.

To you, James Woods may just be that actor who’s played a bunch of creepy roles. But to people on the hard right, Woods is a digital warrior, and maybe even a friend of Q, the mysterious entity whose cryptic messages on far-right message-board channels form the core of the central QAnon conspiracy theory—the false claim that top Democrats and Hollywood figures are running a Satanic child-sex-trafficking ring, and that President Donald Trump is working behind the scenes to “save the children.” Woods has 2.6 million followers on Twitter, to whom he has tweeted messages remarkably similar to those of QAnon adherents. Consequently, his is the favorite among Twitter-verified accounts of those posting from QAnon-related accounts. The non-profit research group, Advance Democracy, Inc., found that more than 50,000 QAnon-related Twitter accounts either mentioned or retweeted Woods approximately 1.6 million times between Jan. 1 – Aug. 2020. The research organization says that, as of September, all of those 50,000 accounts remained active.

And Woods is not the only Twitter presence with more than a million followers who plays this game. ADI identified five key players in Twitter’s million+ club who are involved in the propulsion of false claims embraced by the QAnon community. Each account bears a blue checkmark badge next to the tweeter’s name—Twitter’s signal to its users that the account is somehow significant. Twitter executives define the blue checkmark in a more understated manner: “The blue verified badge on Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic.” Twitter users tend to view it a sign of prestige and credibility. After all, by Twitter’s own criteria, the blue-checkmark account is “of public interest.”

In addition to Woods’, the accounts of Donald Trump Jr., Turning Point USA Executive Director Charlie Kirk, radio personality Dan Bongino, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton and BLEXIT Foundation principal officer Candace Owens are all Twitter-verified, have more than 1 million followers and advance QAnon messaging. With the exception of Trump Jr., each has been mentioned or referenced in a “Q drop,” one of the messages left by the enigmatic Q on the 8kun internet message board, a haven for those who wish to post anonymously. (Hence the “Anon” part of the movement’s name.)

Here are some of the public-interest bon mots offered by Woods:

Funny thing about that tweet: It’s a lot like a tweet linked to in a Q drop, and Woods’ tweet was made only an hour after the Q post appeared.

The Twitter link in that Q drop goes to this:

Then there’s Bill Mitchell, the Trump superfan with an online video show who got permanently booted from Twitter for creating a new Twitter identity in order to evade a previous Twitter suspension. He may not have had a million followers, but he had more than half that many, according to The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer, and he regularly regaled them with QAnon conspiracy theories—and, unlike others, freely bandied about the QAnon name. The QAnon community returned the favor, ADI found, yielding Mitchell thousands of retweets from QAnon-related accounts. One tweet featuring disinformation about the coronavirus—which Mitchell dismisses as a hoax—garnered more than 3,100 retweets from accounts in the QAnon community. Another favorite topic of Mitchell’s among QAnon adherents is the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, whom Mitchell tars with the usual tacit anti-Semitic smears one finds elsewhere on the right-wing internet. In a June 20 tweet no longer available on the internet, Mitchell wrote:

Arrest Soros, seize his records and freeze

his assets and 99% of this chaos you see on

our streets ends tomorrow.

Retweet if you agree.

That one got 1563 retweets from QAnon-related accounts. Until Twitter threw him out, Mitchell was a blue-checkmark tweeter. In July 2019, he was invited to Trump’s White House “social media summit,” which The New York Times’ Kevin Roose described as a gathering of “right-wing trolls.”

QAnon claims are so easily dismissed as too crazy to be believed that the danger posed by the movement, designated by the FBI as a potential domestic terrorism threat, is often overlooked. To understand the threat, one needs to focus on the second part of the narrative—the part that promises that all of these Democratic and Jewish leaders smeared by Q and Q’s followers will meet with bloody vengeance on the day that the hero Trump rounds them all up in mass arrests and executes them. Consider the impulses of some of the most unhinged of the conspiracy-minded. Remember Pizzagate? That was the internet conspiracy theory that posited a child-sex-trafficking ring involving top Democratic leaders that was ostensibly run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. A man drove up to the nation’s capital from North Carolina to rescue the non-existent victims, having armed himself with an AR-15 assault rifle and a pistol. He shot a round into an interior door as the families who had been eating inside fled for the exits.

And those are just QAnon’s central claims. The QAnon network is a transmitter of all manner of conspiracy theories, many of them part of right-wing lore for years or even decades: The purported war of the “deep state” against Donald Trump, the anti-Semitic trope of Soros as a puppet-master, and of “spygate,” a fantasy about a “deep state” that had it in for Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, the evidence for which is the fact that the FBI was keeping tabs on conversations between agents of the Russian state and Americans; some of those Americans, it turned out, were working with Trump campaign. Another common theme is that America is headed for civil war because of the savagery of the left.

Woods also advanced a phantasmagoric QAnon claim that the liberal Twitter influencer Chrissy Tiegen is linked to Jeffrey Epstein, and is a pedophile. The online assaults consequently endured by Tiegen made her “worried for my family,” she wrote on Twitter, so she deleted 60,000 of her own tweets, she said, and blocked some 1 million accounts from engaging with hers. (The QAnon spreaders had gone into her Twitter archives and pulled out tweets in which Tiegen stated her disgust with such exploitive television programs as TLC’s “Toddlers and Tiaras” in a sarcastic manner, promoting them as to be taken literally.)

With 2.4 million Twitter followers of his own, Dan Bongino is the fourth-most popular verified Twitter account within the QAnon community, according to ADI. (He also claims more than 3 million followers of his public Facebook page.) On Feb. 14, a tweet with a link to his show appeared in a “Q drop.” The research group found that between Jan. 1 – Aug. 1, some 4,700 QAnon-related accounts either mentioned or retweeted (or both) tweets from Bongino’s account.

Bongino, radio personality and coauthor of “Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump,” is a favorite commentator of the president’s, who gifted Bongino with a blurb for his book:

‘Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump,’ is terrific. He’s tough, he’s smart, and he really gets it. His book is on sale now. I highly recommend!

—President of the United States, Donald J. Trump

In 2016, the president took to Twitter to declare his appreciation of Bongino, as chronicled by The Daily Beast’s Maxwell Tani, Asawin Suesbsaeng and Lachlan Markay.

With 1.1 million Twitter followers, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton is a top influencer in the hard-right realm. Dating back to 2016, Fitton, who helms a non-profit organization that takes in tens of millions in donations each year, has been flogging the main claim of “Spygate,” with allegations that the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign on behalf of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, who is the top target of QAnon adherents. They want to see her executed.

Fitton has a knack for advancing exactly the kind of narrative that QAnon enthusiasts build upon. As far back as November 22, 2016, Fitton was calling on Trump to arrest the candidate who won more of the popular vote than he did. In fact, he claimed on Fox News that the Justice Department was “broken” for not having done so already.

In February 2017, Fitton took to the CPAC stage to claim that Michael Flynn—the retired general and Trump national security adviser who was fired after being accused of lying to Vice President Mike Pence regarding Flynn’s communications during the presidential transition phase with Sergey Kislyak, who was then Russia’s ambassador to the United States—had been done wrong. Flynn, it was learned, had been coaxing Kislyak not to respond to sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama administration in response to the federation’s intervention in the 2016 U.S. presidential race—with the inference that the Trump administration would lift them once Trump was inaugurated.

Flynn himself is a QAnon buff, even recording a video of Flynn family members and the retired general himself reciting the QAnon slogan, “Where We Go One, We Go All.” (Julian Feeld of the investigative QAnon Anonymous podcast tweeted it here; CNN has the full video and some backstory here.)

Travis View, who hosts the QAnon Anonymous podcast, noticed this tweet from Fitton, who accused Facebook of “censoring QAnon” in its purges of QAnon-related accounts.

In the time period studied by ADI (Jan. 1 – Aug. 1, 2020), more than 39,000 QAnon-related accounts either mentioned or retweeted Fitton some 721,000 times. Those accounts, the research group says, remain active (as of September).

The president himself retweets Fitton or @JudicialWatch with some regularity. Tweets by Fitton have also been linked in at least three Q drops.

Charlie Kirk is another favorite of the president’s; Trump gave him a shout-out during a rambling speech he delivered at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor, Md. Kirk is said to be close to Donald Trump Jr., and a 2018 fundraiser Kirk held at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida resort, is reported to have reaped $5 million in a single night with the help of Trump Jr., according to ProPublica’s Mike Spies and Jack Pearson. “Over the last year, the president has delivered remarks at the organization’s conferences three separate times,” they write, also noting that Kirk’s book, “The MAGA Doctrine,” was promoted by both the president and Trump Jr.

Conceived as a right-wing presence on college campuses, Kirk’s Turning Point USA has become a full-on Trump-boosting organization. It is also a tax-exempt non-profit. For Kirk, the Trump train has proven to be a gravy train. At TPUSA’s 2012 founding, his annual salary was $27,000; he’s now paid $300,000, according to ProPublica. Kirk is 27 years old.

Among Twitter accounts that are part of the QAnon infrastructure, Kirk’s is the third most popular Twitter account, according to ADI. And, as of August, his account was following some 557 QAnon-related Twitter accounts. Kirk’s name and image appeared on a flyer for Q Con Live!, a QAnon conference that was to have taken place in Fresno, Calif., this month, but appears to have been canceled.

rww

Twitter-verified MAGA Influencers Spreading the QAnon Gospel

October 26, 2020

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/some-among-trumps-white-house-south-lawn-audience-were-paid-to-be-there

hunter kos

Donald Trump has always been a game show kind of guy, so it's maybe not a surprise that his first public rally after his hospitalization for COVID-19 symptoms turned into a game show itself, of sorts.

Do you like prizes, kids? Do like prizes enough to listen to Donald Trump talk? Do you like prizes enough to risk your life during a deadly pandemic to listen to Donald Trump talk? Well then, you are in luck! Because conservative weirdo Candace Owens is handing out free travel and lodging to anyone willing to put on an oversized blue T-shirt and risk pandemic death on the White House's South Lawn.

Yeah, that's right. Donald Trump's White House rally on Saturday, the one that was absolutely not a campaign event, the one that featured Trump addressing an adoring teal-shirted and mostly maskless crowd wedged shoulder to shoulder, the scene right out of Evita 2: Mar-a-Lago Boogaloo, the ol' balcony Mussolini routine—an unknown number of those folks were paid to be there. ABC News reports that Owens' fake grassroots "BLEXIT" group offered to cover travel and lodging expenses for a "limited" number of people who showed up and were willing to wear the light blue T-shirts. Owens' group was already organizing a separate fake grassroots Washington, D.C., event on the same day; the White House crowd was gathered from there.

What seems to have happened, reading between the lines, is that Donald Trump was going absolutely stir-crazy and wanted to get back out on the campaign trail, contagious or not contagious, and like the previous "drive once around the hospital while unnecessarily exposing my Secret Service agents to my deadly illness," this was the hurried compromise offered to him by his staff and doctors. Bring an audience to him so that he would stay in the building a few more days rather than taking his coronavirus-infected, pneumonia-having self on a road trip.

Don't worry, though: It wasn't a campaign event. Just an event specifically for far-right voters, ones specifically gathered to encourage Black Americans to vote for Trump and Trump's allies, to hear a Donald Trump speech about "law and order," by which he means crushing the Black Lives Matter demands for police reform, with guest expenses paid by one of Trump's more visible and conspiracy-adjacent allies out of whatever slush fund first birthed the idea for their Washington, D.C. rally to begin with—one that Owens explicitly called an "anti-Black Lives Matter event," just in case people weren't clear about what the agenda was.

Eh. At this point it would be more surprising if some stunt Trump pulled wasn't a fake-ass reality show moment. The South Lawn just recovered from the totally nonpartisan (checks notes) Republican National Convention; now it's going to need repair again. It's you and me that will be paying for those repairs this time, by the way. Because all involved are insistent that this was a presidenting speech, not a campaign speech.

We do, however, have our answer. Yes, there are people willing to risk COVID-19 to see Typhoid Hitler lie to them in person, and especially so if somebody else is paying their bills. Seeing it on television is one thing, but if you go in person you can always hope that the man's spittle will land directly on you, infecting you with Dear Leader's own, um, pandemic superpowers.

Whatever. You do you, Trump supporters. Preferably over there—as far away as possible. The American version of the worldwide pandemic is slowly morphing into a partisan disease, a disease spreading most aggressively among Trump-supporting states and communities while Dear Leader rants about everything being a hoax and ... sigh. Whatever.

---

ref

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/candace-owens-blexit-group-pays-attendees-travel-trumps/story?id=73531036

no lnx pix vid

some guests for Saturday's White House event on the South Lawn, which will be President Donald Trump's first since testing positive for the coronavirus, had their travel and lodging paid for by controversial conservative activist Candace Owens' group BLEXIT, according to emails obtained by ABC News.

Supporters, who are also scheduled to attend a separate BLEXIT event earlier in the day, were invited to attend a "HUGE outdoor rally" by the group and asked to fill out a form that notified them that BLEXIT, a campaign urging Black Americans to leave the Democratic Party, will be covering travel costs.

Guests were later informed they would be receiving an invitation from the White House to attend an event with Trump.

In an email from Owens, obtained by ABC News, attendees were told "EVERYONE MUST BRING A MASK TO BE ALLOWED ENTRY ONTO THE WHITE HOUSE GROUNDS." and that "absolutely no exceptions" will be made.

[MORE: Trump planning to host 1st in-person event since diagnosis at White House on Saturday: Sources]

Still, wearing a face mask will not be required. Attendees will have to submit to a COVID-19 screening the morning of the event, which will consist of a temperature check and a brief questionnaire.

Guests will first attend a "BLEXIT Back the Blue event" on the Ellipse between the White House and the Washington Monument before heading over to the South Lawn for the president's remarks, according to a schedule obtained by ABC News.

When reached for comment, Owens told ABC News, "We are not interested in participating in your obvious media angle here to slander/attack the President regarding Covid-19." She added that Saturday's event "is about supporting law enforcement in minority communities." It is not immediately clear how many of those set to attend the event had their travel costs covered.

White House spokesman Judd Deere told ABC News the White House "is not involved in covering any cost."

Following Trump's remarks, the BLEXIT group is also planning a demonstration at Black Lives Matter Plaza showing "support for law enforcement," according to the schedule.

The White House plans to host an event on Saturday featuring Trump with hundreds of supporters and guests from Owens' group on the South Lawn discussing "law and order," ABC News previously reported.

MORE: 2nd presidential debate between Biden and Trump canceled]

"All attendees must bring a mask with them and will be instructed to wear it on the White House Complex. All attendees must submit to a COVID-19 screening tomorrow morning. This will consist of a temperature check and a brief questionnaire. The health and safety of all attendees is our priority and following CDC guidelines is strongly encouraged," a source with knowledge of the group's planning told ABC News.

Trump will deliver "remarks to peaceful protesters for law and order," according to an invite obtained by ABC News and confirmed by two White House sources familiar with the planning. The move underscores an effort to deliver the president a packed crowd of supporters for the event as he struggles with support among Black voters. Joe Biden led Trump, 88% to 9%, among Black registered voters, according to a Sept. 26 ABC/Washington Post poll.

Owens, who founded BLEXIT in 2018, told ABC News it is an organization "with the purpose of educating minorities about conservative principles (free markets, entrepreneurship, capitalism, etc) -- concepts and theories that can truly transform and uplift our communities."

[PHOTO: Political commentator Candace Owens introduces President Donald Trump, not pictured, during the Young Black Leadership Summit 2019 event in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., Oct. 4, 2019.

Political commentator Candace Owens introduces President Donald Trump, not pictured, during the Young Black Leadership Summit 2019 event in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., Oct. 4, 2019.]

"We stand in unapologetic, stark contrast to leftist ideologies that have destroyed our communities for decades," Owens said.

In an Instagram post last week, Owens promoted what she called an upcoming "anti-Black Lives Matter event," and urged followers to submit to attend in person. "We are giving away a limited amount of travel stipends to those that really them," she said in the post.

MORE: Trump itching to get back to campaign trail, but he and White House evasive on health questions]

"Our president doesn't want us to be fearful or scared," one person planning to attend Saturday's events told ABC News. "Look how he came out of it. He popped right back. We have got to stop being afraid of this."

"We got to take this mask off, we have to unmask America," the person added.

Attendees for Saturday's event were also told, "EVERYONE MUST WEAR A BLEXIT T-SHIRT (Which will be given to you ahead of the event) -- no exceptions."

---

6/20

https://www.mediamatters.org/fake-news/debunked-conspiracy-theory-about-black-lives-matter-actblue-and-democrats-can-be-traced

no lnx many pix

A false money laundering conspiracy theory regarding the Black Lives Matter movement's use of a payment processing company for donations has gained traction online among right-wing figures and can be traced back to far-right message boards.

The conspiracy theory alleges that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is some kind of a front to launder money to Democrats because the BLM website uses ActBlue to process its online fundraising payments. ActBlue is a payment processor used widely by progressive groups and organizations affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party has an equivalent processing company called WinRed. As the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics has noted, “many candidates use [ActBlue] to process donations but that money isn't pooled to be shared across candidates or groups,” and “a donation to BLM through ActBlue goes just to BLM, not any other group.” But the conspiracy theory still has earned well over a million shares and views on social media and has been amplified by a Fox Nation host.

A review by Media Matters found that before it gained traction, the conspiracy theory had been circulating for days on far-right message boards. The earliest mention our review found was at the beginning of June on Twitter, when an account that has pushed the slogan for the QAnon conspiracy theory repeatedly tweeted the claim on June 1 and June 2. The account claimed it had sent the conspiracy theory to the FBI and President Donald Trump, and it urged the Ohio Police Department to investigate the claim.

@OneVoiceUS

The conspiracy theory popped up days later on June 5 on TheDonald.win, a new forum for the subreddit “r/TheDonald,” which was known for violent rhetoric and was ultimately quarantined by Reddit. On TheDonald.win, a user wrote that “when you go to donate on the blacklivesmatter.com website,” you are redirected to ActBlue, which means entities “donating to Black Lives Matter are actually donating to ActBlue.” That means, the user wrote, that the donations may be “just going straight to fund the Democratic presidential campaign.”

The next day, another user on the forum wrote in a post that “BLM is a bait and switch fundraising scam” for the Democratic National Committee “by laundering money through Act Blue.” The user urged others to “tell everyone you know.” This post gained more traction on the forum than the first one, which it directly referenced in the comments. Similar language made its way to Facebook minutes later.

The Donald subreddit forum ActBlue1

Over the next few days, the conspiracy theory also began circulating on 4chan’s “/pol/” message board, a known hotspot for white nationalists, where users pointed to ActBlue to claim Black Lives Matter was “a fundraising apparatus” and a “slush fund” for Democrats. One 4chan user pushing the claim on June 8 used nearly the exact same language as the June 5 post from TheDonald.win.

4chan ActBlue claim

The conspiracy theory also continued to circulate on TheDonald.win on June 8 and reached the subreddit “r/conservative,” where a user called Black Lives Matter a “money laundering scheme” for Democrats via ActBlue. That post was later shared in a YouTube video.

The following day, on June 9, The Gateway Pundit, a far-right blog that has a history of publishing misinformation, posted that the BLM site “appears to be aninternational money laundering scheme used by the Democrats to raise money from an international audience,” claiming ActBlue appears to be “a funding arm of the DNC.” (The site’s owner Jim Hoft shared the post on Twitter, calling it an “exclusive.”) The post gave a “hat tip” to TheDonald.win for the claim. The post was picked up by multiple far-right figures, including by a QAnon-supporting former congressional candidate on Twitter, another QAnon Twitter account with a major following who keeps evading his Twitter ban, and by troll Milo Yiannopoulos on Telegram.

Gateway Pundit ActBlue claim

On June 10, right-wing pundit Candace Owens quote-tweeted an Instagram video pushing the conspiracy theory and accused Black Lives Matters of being a “shell company” for Democrats via ActBlue (Owens also posted the video on Instagram, where it received well over a million views). Minutes later, “Q,” the central entity of the QAnon conspiracy theory, posted a link to Owens’ tweet on 8kun’s “/qresearch/” message board. Owens’ post has been retweeted more than 64,000 times so far.

Candace Owens ActBlue claim

Following Owens’ post, the conspiracy theory began spreading to other conservative figures, such as Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch; a Florida Republican congressional candidate who has given credence to QAnon; Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier (who, like Owens, incorrectly called ActBlue a “Democrat super PAC”); Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk; and former editor-in-chief of Breitbart’s London bureau Raheem Kassam.

Additionally, two major conservative TikTok accounts, @therepublicanhypehouse and @conservativehypehouse, both posted videos pushing the conspiracy theory, getting more than 370,000 views combined (even though TikTok has an anti-misinformation policy).

The conspiracy theory also apparently reached Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren, who has a history of pushing claims from message boards. She tweeted, “When you donate to BLM you’re donating to the Dems.”

Tomi Lahren ActBlue claim

These tweets and videos combined have gotten hundreds of thousands of shares and views and have amplified the conspiracy theory far beyond fringe message boards.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/how-donald-trump-will-try-to-scapegoat-george-soros-to-win-re-election/

no lnx twt

How Donald Trump will try to scapegoat George Soros to win re-election

Written by The Conversation July 16, 2020

by Neil McLaughlin, McMaster University and Iga Mergler, McMaster University

When future scholars write the history of the administration of Donald Trump, he may end up being called — among many other things — the conspiracy theorist president. Trump famously began his ascent to power with the false and racist “birther” claim that Barack Obama was not really an American.

Trump and his followers have also legitimized bizarre conspiracy theories against Hungarian American financier and philanthropist George Soros. It now appears continued attacks toward Soros will be a part of the president’s re-election campaign.

Soros has been a punching bag for authoritarians, anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists around the world since 1992, when he became famous as “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England” by making more than US$1 billion by “shorting” the British pound.

Born in Budapest in 1930, Soros barely survived the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis. Living in New York City since 1956, he has combined a long career as a successful capitalist while doing philanthropy under the banner of his Open Society Foundations.

Anti-Semitic attacks

Attacks on Soros have circulated on the margins of mainstream politics for years, tinged with anti-Semitism and fuelled by half-truths and outright lies. Russia has always been at the heart of anti-Soros propaganda, and it’s now joined by China in promoting attacks, distortions and lies. Over the last few years, these conspiracies have entered mainstream debate in Hungary, Poland, Brazil and the United States.

The Trump movement attempted to scapegoat Soros as part of its Make America Great Again rhetoric. Trump supporters accused Soros, among other things, of supporting the caravan of migrants attempting to enter the United States from Central America, being behind the attacks on Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court nomination (a falsehood Trump himself tweeted about) and promoting an elitist globalist agenda that undermined American jobs and culture.

Most incredibly, in recent weeks Soros has been accused of paying Black Lives Matter protesters who demonstrated across the United States after the police killing of George Floyd.

Trump has major liabilities in his quest for re-election: his incompetent handling of the coronavirus pandemic, his polarizing opposition to protesters after the Floyd killing and the decline of the U.S. economy since the outbreak of COVID-19. Loss of support among suburban white women, members of the military elite and moderate Republicans are now a threat to his electoral prospects.

Attacking Soros part of the plan

Attacking China, stoking nationalist resentments, uncritically defending the police, claiming economic competence and bashing Joe Biden will be Trump’s major electoral strategy. But Republican attacks on Soros are also likely to circulate widely until the election.

Soros is a perfect foil to try to convince people that Trump stands for the average American. What better scapegoat than a wealthy, uber-liberal currency speculator who helped fund Obama and Hillary Clinton, supports abortion, gay and trans rights and gives generously to the electoral campaigns of liberal public defenders and prosecutors? In Trumpist rhetoric, Soros is soft on crime and promotes the values of cultural liberalism and global elites over the average American. [HE'S ALSO THE WHATABOUTISM CORP OLIGARCH FOR KOCH BOROS; I'M NOT CORRUPT YOU'RE CORRUPT KNEE-JERK REFLEXIVE ST'D MOVE

Soros’s history of supporting Palestinian rights and calling for a negotiated peace settlement created an opportunity for the White House to exploit. Rhetoric about big finance linked to a “globalist” Jewish philanthropist understandably concerns Jewish voters and others opposed to anti-Semitism, but anti-Soros rhetoric can unify evangelical Christian Zionists, pro-Israel Republicans, interventionist neo-conservatives and far-right extremists.

Attacking Soros is also part of a Trumpist appeal to conservative Black voters, now being led Candace Owens, a young media figure and Republican activist.

Owens spreads paranoia

Prone to gaffes that expose her ignorance about history and politics, Owens has gained a massive online presence among far right-wing Trump supporters by directly challenging the mainstream Democratic Party narrative on racism, police violence and poverty in America. She’s also attacked George Floyd’s character. What’s more, Owens has spread anti-Soros paranoia online, giving it a cooler, hipper and younger flavour.

The core of the Trumpist scapegoating of Soros is an attempt to blame Soros for the Black Lives Matter protests and calls for defunding the police. The lie that Soros is paying for the protests that have swept through the United States and is promoting riots is deeply corrosive to American democracy.

Conspiracy theories work best when lies, exaggerations and paranoia are linked to real things in the world that can be distorted by spin. Soros’s recent pledge of US$220 million to support civil rights and racial equality groups like Black Voters Matter will add fuel to extremist fire.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson will play a major role in all this. During a recent segment on his show, former Missouri governor Eric Greitens attempted to link Soros to anti-police violence and made reference to a “George Soros-funded prosecutor” involved in the case of the couple in St. Louis who stood in front of their house with guns while anti-racism protesters marched on their street.

None of this is likely to save Trump from going down to an electoral defeat in November. While there are legitimate criticisms to be made of the role of billionaires like Soros in politics and economic life, the divisiveness of anti-Soros paranoia will take years to repair.

The Conversation

Neil McLaughlin, Professor of Sociology, McMaster University and Iga Mergler, PhD Candidate in Sociology,, McMaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/candace-owens-departs-turning-point-usa/

Conservative activist Candace Owens has departed from her role at right-wing youth organizing group Turning Point USA as communications director to focus on her gig at Dennis Prager’s “Prager U” and to work on her own spin-off movement and book.

“I am both excited and sad to announce that I will be officially moving on from my role as Communications Director for Turning Point USA,” Owens wrote in an Instagram post yesterday evening. “My dream has always been simple— to wake up black America—To turn the lights on within a community that has been used and abused by the Democrat party for decades.”

She continued, “With the #BLEXIT movement, the Candace Owens podcast, and my upcoming book— I no longer feel I can be a dedicated communications director to an organization that is rightfully growing rapidly.”

Owens said that she will still be speaking at TPUSA conferences and will continue to chair TPUSA’s annual Black Leadership Summit.

In 2017, Owens began her career under the moniker “Red Pill Black” on YouTube. Her videos reached viral success and she worked her way to guest slots on Alex Jones’ Infowars outlet, going as far as to appear in-studio with Jones for a co-hosting feature. With her message that black Americans have been taken advantage of by Democrats, she eventually landed the role of Turning Point USA communications director and became a semi-regular guest on Fox News. Last year, Owen was given a major thrust into the public consciousness when rapper Kanye West tweeted, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks."

in recent months, Owens has started a podcast with Prager’s digital outlet called “The Candace Owens Show” and launched the “Blexit” movement, which encourages black Americans to step away from the Democratic Party and join the Republican ranks. She also appeared on Capitol Hill last month at a hearing on the threat of white nationalism in America, where she managed to derail what was planned to be a serious domestic terrorism discussion. Owens insisted that the Southern Strategy—the Republican Party’s well-documented post-Civil Rights Act plan for building power by exploiting racial resentment among Southern white voters—was a “myth,” a ridiculous and ahistorical claim she got from a Prager U video.

Tags: Candace OwensPragerUTurning Point USA

https://www.mediamatters.org/black-lives-matter/study-right-wing-fearmongering-leads-facebook-engagement-about-peaceful-protests

wow live video

The top post about protests is an 18-minute video from right-wing figure Candace Owens, who says she doesn’t “support” Floyd or see him as a “martyr.” She goes on to disparage Floyd and say that the Black community is “unique” because its members are “the only people that fight and scream and demand support and justice for the people in our community that are up to no good.”

addition to Owens’ live video, Media Matters identified the other nine posts about the protests from right-leaning Facebook pages that earned the most interactions. These posts reinforce narratives Fox News and other right-wing media outlets have promoted in response to the largely peaceful protests, including amplifying a small number of instances of violence from protesters, ignoring accounts of police instigating violence, and praising Trump for tear-gassing peaceful protesters.

---

https://www.the GUK .com/us-news/2020/apr/18/coronavirus-americans-protest-stay-at-home

no lnx many pix

Thousands of Americans backed by rightwing donors gear up for protests

Conservative activists to demand governors lift stay-home orders – and movement has been driven by wealthy conservative groups

Adam Gabbatt

@adamgabbatt

Sat 18 Apr 2020 06.00 EDT...

Many of the rallies have been inspired by a protest at the Michigan state capitol.

Many of the rallies have been inspired by a protest at the Michigan state capitol. Photograph: Matthew Dae Smith/AP

Thousands of people are preparing to attend protests across the US in the coming days, as a rightwing movement against stay-at-home orders, backed by wealthy conservative groups and promoted by Donald Trump, continues to take hold.

Conservative activists are demanding governors lift orders designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus, despite the recommendations of public health officials. Trump, who has clashed with Democratic governors over how soon to reopen the US economy, tweeted his support on Friday, in an unprecedented endorsement of civil disobedience by a sitting president.

Many of the planned rallies have been inspired by a protest at the Michigan state capitol on Wednesday, which was attended by thousands.

2:09

Armed protesters demand an end to Michigan's coronavirus lockdown orders – video

Yet while organisers claim the protests are grassroots- and people-driven, a closer look reveals a movement driven by traditional rightwing groups, including one funded by the family of Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos.

The rallies have drawn comparisons to the Tea Party movement, which sprang into life in 2009 following the election of Barack Obama and was driven in part by Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by rightwing donors Charles and David Koch.

As with the Tea Party, the anti-stay-at-home movement has been promoted by a rightwing media eager for the economy to reopen, including Fox News which on Friday aired a segment on protests in Virginia, Michigan and Minnesota. Two minutes later, Trump tweeted to his 77.4 million followers the need to “liberate” those states.

1:40

'They seem very responsible to me': Trump defends anti-lockdown protesters - video

A majority of Americans support the lockdowns, with a Pew Research Center poll finding that 66% are concerned state governments will lift restrictions on public activity too quickly. But protests, helped by media coverage, have spread around the country.

The two groups behind the “operation gridlock” rally in Michigan on Wednesday have ties to the Republican party and the Trump administration.

The Michigan Freedom Fund, which said it was a co-host of the rally, has received more than $500,000 from the DeVos family, regular donors to rightwing groups.

The other host, the Michigan Conservative Coalition, was founded by Matt Maddock, now a Republican member of the state house of representatives. The MCC also operates under the name Michigan Trump Republicans, and in January held an event featuring several members of the Trump campaign.

“Absolutely the Michigan event was a huge inspiration and it was a huge success,” said Evie Harris, organizer of a ReOpen Maryland protest planned for the state capitol on Saturday.

“That was the model for our event.”

Thousands drove to the Michigan state capitol in Lansing, while the Michigan Freedom Fund purchased Facebook advertising to promote the rally. Protesters, many waving Trump campaign signs, honked their horns and chanted for Governor Gretchen Whitmer to end the stay-at-home rules.

The protest was covered exhaustively by the rightwing media. Harris said her Facebook following grew from “700-800 people” to more than 15,000 members following the Michigan rally, inspiring her to organize “Operation Gridlock Annapolis” for Saturday.

Harris said her group had support from some elected officials in Maryland, but declined to name them.

While ReOpen Maryland might not have funding from rightwing advocacy groups, it appears to be linked to at least four other “reopen” organizations.

“Government mandating sick people to stay home is called quarantine,” ReOpen Maryland said. “However, the government mandating healthy citizens to stay home, forcing businesses and churches to close is called tyranny.”

That text is identical to text on Facebook pages calling for rallies in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Virginia. ReOpen Virginia aims to hold its own “gridlock” rally on Wednesday – again inspired by the conservative-funded Michigan event.

Despite ReOpen Virginia billing itself as a “grassroots group of people and small business owners”, founder Kristen Lynne Hall said the idea for the protest came from the organizers of the “Lobby Day” demonstration earlier this year.

That demonstration was organized by the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a gun rights group that has donated tens of thousands of dollars to politicians.

Hall, who said Candace Owens, a rightwing activist and favorite of Trump, had been in touch to discuss the event, said the president’s tweet about “liberating” Virginia was “great”.

“It could be spreading the movement,” she said. “Any support is appreciated right now.”

A decade ago, the Tea Party movement billed itself as “grass roots”, despite receiving money from the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity and the conservative organization FreedomWorks.

Jenny Beth Martin, who founded the Tea Party Patriots group, promoted this week’s Michigan protest. The Tea Party Patriots also supported the protest, in messages to its 200,000 Twitter followers.

Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog, said the similarities between the Tea Party and ReOpen movements went further, with rightwing media boosting both.

Fox News ran favorable coverage of the Michigan rally and hosts including Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro endorsed the protest.

“Fox gave the Tea Party a phenomenal amount of attention and promotion,” Gertz said. “It really sort of boot-strapped it to another level, and made it a political force, and we see something similar happening with these anti-stay-at-home order movements.”

Gertz said he was not “simply” concerned with “the conservatives having a strong election the next time out”.

“It’s a real chance for devastating consequences with regard to the coronavirus,” he said.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/dumbassery-conservative-editor-calls-out-right-wing-medias-bad-takes-on-deadly-coronavirus-pandemic/

no lnx

‘Dumbassery’: Conservative editor calls out right-wing media’s ‘bad takes’ on deadly coronavirus pandemic

Written by Alex Henderson March 17, 2020

As the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic continues to grow in the United States and many other countries, one thing The Bulwark can take pride in is the fact that — unlike so many other right-wing media outlets — it didn’t spend weeks trying to convince readers that coronavirus was merely a liberal hoax or “fake news” designed to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency. The Never Trump conservatives at The Bulwark always took the pandemic seriously, including The Bulwark’s senior editor, Jim Swift — who lambasts some of the incredibly moronic things that various Trumpistas and far-right media figures have said about coronavirus recently.

“The internet being what it is, and politics being what it is — and 2020 dumbassery being what it is — there are a lot of bad covid-19 takes floating around,” Swift asserts. And he cities Newsmax writer John Cardillo as a glaring example.

On March 13, Cardillo went to Twitter and said of coronavirus, “Treat it like the flu. The panic and hysteria created by the media is criminal. They are destroying lives, businesses, and the economy to make Trump look bad and again screw with elections.”

In response to Cardillo’s tweet, Swift writes, “Sure, John. The news media aren’t covering this story because it’s important and deadly, they’re only covering it because they want to take down President Donald J. Trump.”

In other words, treat it like the flu.

The panic and hysteria created by the media is criminal.

They are destroying lives, businesses, and the economy to make Trump look bad and again screw with elections. https://t.co/Pmclsy25wJ

— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) March 13, 2020

Swift also slams Liberty University’s Jerry Falwell, Jr. Appearing as a guest on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends,” Falwell argued that Americans are “overreacting” to coronavirus and that all the media coverage of the pandemic is merely an “attempt to get Trump.” Moreover, Falwell claimed that coronavirus is a North Korean bioweapon.

On Fox & Friends, Jerry Falwell Jr claims people are “overreacting” to coronavirus, the national response is “their next attempt to get Trump,” and the virus itself is a North Korean bioweapon. pic.twitter.com/2JPuNBW7C3

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) March 13, 2020

Swift goes on to lambast Infowars’ Alex Jones and “old-school televangelist grifter Jim Bakker” for “hawking” bogus treatments they claim will cure coronavirus. And Swift cites a March 12 tweet from The Federalist’s Sean Davis as another example of idiocy: Davis tweeted, “Corporate political media hate you, they hate the country, and they will stop at nothing to reclaim power to rule over you. If that means that they destroy the economy via a panic that they helped incite, all while running interference for the communist country that started it, so be it.”

Truly deranged, InfoWars level stuff from The Federalist. pic.twitter.com/FzBTldunsg

— andrew kaczynski?? (@KFILE) March 13, 2020

Sarcastically describing Fox News’ Ainsley Earhardt as an “aviation expert…. not to be confused with Amelia Earhart,” Swift notes her recent comment, “It’s actually the safest time to fly. Everyone I know that’s flying right now, terminals are pretty much dead.”

Ainsley Earhardt: “It’s actually the safest time to fly. Everyone I know that’s flying right now, terminals are pretty much dead.” (It is not the safest time to fly.) pic.twitter.com/a3BnajAbj5

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) March 13, 2020

AmGreatness’ Julie Kelly, who Swift describes as a “nutty, bad-faith operator,” has called social distancing a left-wing plot to “get control” that is “far scarier than any virus.”

Scientists and health officials say social distancing (reducing contact, temporarily) is an effective way to reduce infections. Naturally, some are claiming it’s a leftist plot to gain control of the country. pic.twitter.com/TDMJM6ddir

— Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) March 13, 2020

At this point I think you have a greater chance of being attacked by Joe Biden than catching coronavirus

— Julie Kelly (@julie_kelly2) March 10, 2020

China. https://t.co/VULqyrceUH

— Ron Coleman (@RonColeman) March 13, 2020

Good news on the coronavirus you won’t find anywhere else:

-China has closed down its last coronavirus hospital. Not enough new cases to support them.

-Italy is hit hard, experts say, because they have the oldest population in Europe (average age of those that have died is 81).

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) March 13, 2020

Swift concludes his article by warning that as coronavirus “spreads” in the U.S., Americans will do themselves a favor by not taking nonsense from Fox News seriously.

“Things are going to get worse — not only as the pandemic spreads, but as the bad takes spread too,” Swift warns. “If you’re stuck at home, I’d encourage you not to watch cable news — and encourage your family to avoid it, too. Especially Fox News.”

has came back endured pro hitler slap down

---

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/paul-joseph-watson-i-hate-conspiracy-theories

Paul Joseph Watson, a right-wing YouTube creator and editor-at-large at the prolific conspiracy theory outlet Infowars, wants you to forget the last decade of his career and to now believe he doesn’t like conspiracy theories.

In an interview uploaded yesterday to Dennis Prager’s digital media outlet PragerU, Watson joined conservative commentator Candace Owens on her podcast to discuss issues of social media moderation as interpreted through the right-wing lens that defines it as “censorship.” Watson was banned from Facebook earlier this year.

During the interview, Watson took issue with how the media has characterized the content he produces, often identifying him as a conspiracy theorist and sympathetic to the alt-right. Watson rejected being considered alt-right, since he said he does not believe in the pursuit of a white ethnostate, and similarly rejected being called a conspiracy theorist.

“I hate conspiracy theories. I think most of them are really dumb,” Watson said.

Owens chimed in that she doesn’t watch CNN because it’s a “conspiracy theorist network.”It’s worth noting that Owens got her start in right-wing media thanks in part to an in-studio appearance she made on Alex Jones’ Infowars show while she still operated under the moniker “Red Pill Black.”

Watson said, “I was a conspiracy theorist when I was a kid, like 15 years ago. That’s where I came from, so I know how those ideas—you take disparate bits of information and fuse them together to create a conspiracy. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some conspiracies. But I know how they’re created and I know mentally how people are lulled into believing them.”

After making his claim, Watson maintained his newfound anti-conspiracy theory position for about 10 minutes. Then, Watson and Owens theorized that tech companies were banning right-wing figures from their platforms because they are involved in a conspiracy to silence political dissidents and enforce homogeneous political thought.

Watson appeared in-studio on Infowars in March to talk about a new project he was working on to “generate the next generation of YouTubers, of young political commentators."

[vid]

Tags: Candace OwensPaul Joseph Watsonconspiracy theoriessocial mediaPragerU

---

did she amplify IRA collusion BS?

---

joe rogan debate

https://www.desmogblog.com/turning-point-usa

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/candace-owens-departs-turning-point-usa/

Owens said that she will still be speaking at TPUSA conferences and will continue to chair TPUSA’s annual Black Leadership Summit.

...[twit]

In recent months, Owens has started a podcast with Prager’s digital outlet called “The Candace Owens Show” and launched the “Blexit” movement, which encourages black Americans to step away from the Democratic Party and join the Republican ranks. She also appeared on Capitol Hill last month at a hearing on the threat of white nationalism in America, where she managed to derail what was planned to be a serious domestic terrorism discussion. Owens insisted that the Southern Strategy—the Republican Party’s well-documented post-Civil Rights Act plan for building power by exploiting racial resentment among Southern white voters—was a “myth,” a ridiculous and ahistorical claim she got from a Prager U video.

Tags: Candace OwensPragerUTurning Point USA

caught a lot of crap for pro hitler comments, but apparently black woman with some kid cachet too valuable to chuck: along w/ diamond and silk on trump ads

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2019/04/10/candace-owens-fumes-after-ted-lieu-plays-clip-her-remarks-hitler/3420977002/

Owens said Tuesday to House Judiciary Committee that Democrats' concerns about white nationalism were just a preview of their 2020 election strategy. Wochit, USA TODAY]

WASHINGTON – Rep. Ted Lieu was not happy that his Republican colleagues on the House Judiciary Committee invited conservative commentator Candace Owens to speak at a hearing on the rise in hate crimes and white nationalism.

To explain why, the California Democrat pulled out his smartphone and played a clip of Owens making some controversial comments about Adolph Hitler.

"In congressional hearings, the minority party gets to select its own witnesses. And of all the people Republicans could have selected, they picked Candace Owens," Lieu said during the Tuesday hearing.

"I don't know Ms. Owens. I'm not going to characterize her. I'm going to let her own words do the talking," he said.

In the clip, Owens, the communications director for Turning Point USA, explains that she thinks the word "nationalism" has been "poisoned" by "elitists that actually want globalism" and who conflate the word with Hitler's Nazi agenda.

Candace Owens of Turning Point USA testifies during a House Judiciary Committee hearing discussing hate crimes and the rise of white nationalism on Capitol Hill on April 9, 2019 in Washington.]

Candace Owens: Democrats' hate crimes concerns are just '2020 election strategy'

Hitler comment: After backlash, Owens clarifies viral Hitler comment

"You know, he was a National Socialist, but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay fine," she said. "The problem is he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German."

Lieu did not ask Owens to respond, but rather asked another panel member, Eileen Hershenov from the Anti-Defamation League, "When people try to legitimize Adolph Hitler, does that feed into white nationalist ideology?"

"It does, Mr. Lieu," Hershenov replied. "I know that Ms. Owens distanced herself from those comments later but we expressed great concern over the original comments."

In February, Owens had tried to clarify her comments, which had then gone viral. She explained that she considered Hitler "a homicidal, psychotic maniac" and that her point was that he was not a nationalist. But she added, "I stand by my statements. And that is that.”

Candace Owens interview: Her rapid rise defending two of America’s most complicated men: Trump and Kanye]

"I think it's pretty apparent that Mr. Lieu believes that black people are stupid and will not pursue the full clip in its entirety," Owens said Tuesday when she did get a chance to respond. "He purposely presented an extracted clip."

Her response prompted a rebuke from Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., who mistakenly thought she had called Lieu "stupid."

"I didn't refer to him as stupid, that's not what I said. That's not what I said at all. You didn't listen to what I said," Owen said, prompting a shrug from Nadler.

Owens then continued, saying Lieu was "trying to present as if I was launching a defense of Hitler in Germany when, in fact," she was trying to say that Hitler should not be characterized as a nationalist.

"A nationalist would not kill their own people," she said.

She said Lieu was trying to "create a narrative" and that it was "similar to what they do to Donald Trump."

ref

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/04/09/candace-owens-dismisses-white-nationalism-2020-election-strategy/3412604002/

WAINGTON – Controversial conservative Candace Owens said Tuesday during testimony before the House Judiciary Committee that Democrats' concerns about white nationalism are actually meant to send a message that "brown people need to be scared" ahead of the upcoming presidential election.

"Let me be clear, the hearing today is not about white nationalism or hate crimes, it's about fear-mongering, power and control," Owens said in her opening remarks at the hearing titled, "Hate Crimes and the Rise of White Nationalism."

She said the hearing was a "preview of a Democrat 2020 election strategy."

Last week, FBI Director Christopher Wray called white supremacist violence "a persistent, pervasive threat" during testimony before the House Appropriations Committee.

In November, the FBI released a report that showed a 17% increase in hate crimes from 2016 to 2017, although the bureau pointed out the number of law enforcement agencies reporting the data had also increased.

Candace Owens interview: He rapid rise defending two of America’s most complicated men: Trump and Kanye

More: Candace Owens fumes at Rep. Ted Lieu's use of her Hitler comments

There were 1,020 known hate groups in the country in 2018, the fourth straight year of growth, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremism in the U.S. Hate crimes, meanwhile, rose 30 percent in the three-year period ending in 2017, the organization said, citing FBI figures.

Owens said Democrats had "simply changed the data set points by widening the definition of hate crimes."

"What I mean to say, is they are manipulating statistics," she said.

Owens is the communications director for Turning Point USA, a conservative organization that aims to organize college students. She has pushed for more African-Americans to vote Republican, arguing Democratic policies have hindered, rather than helped, their community. She was invited to testify at the hearing by Judiciary Committee Republicans.

In her opening statement, Owens said many journalists had appeared confused about why she was speaking at the hearing. She said she was there because she had been the victim of a hate crime when she was in high school.

She said few people knew that about her because the news media and journalists "on the left are not interested in telling the truth about me because I don't fit the stereotype of what they like to see in black people."

ref

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2018/10/19/candace-owens-found-her-place-conservative-politics-age-donald-trump-alongside-kanye/1521771002/

many lnx twt pix

Candace Owens’ rapid rise defending two of America’s most complicated men: Trump and Kanye

Sean Rossman, USA TODAY Published 6:00 a.m. ET Oct. 19, 2018 | Updated 5:37 p.m. ET Oct. 21, 2018

Candace Owens shares the story of her rise to national prominence as a black conservative and plans to collaborate with Kanye West. Jasper Colt, USA TODAY

It’s a Wednesday morning at Liberty University and the basketball arena is packed with nearly 10,000 people. Students reach their arms skyward, eyes closed, entranced in deafening Christian rock music.

Backstage, administrators and students dote on Candace Owens, that day’s convocation speaker, who has quickly built a career trashing liberal politics with a millennial fierceness. She hasn’t rehearsed. It protects her authenticity. But she knows her beats.

Onstage, she speaks for about 24 minutes, calmly gliding back and forth across the stage in heels, attacking some of her usual targets: Planned Parenthood, feminism, the welfare system.

She builds to the moment. Then, she goes for it.

“Kanye West. Man, he’s a wonderful man,” she says to applause and cheering — breaking the quiet of what had become a calm, attentive audience.

“What is it that President Donald Trump, Kanye West and Candace Owens have in common?” she asks rhetorically. “Kanye West describes it as 'dragon energy' and to me I think it’s individualism. It’s believing in yourself. It’s standing up in the face of everybody telling you you can’t.”

Owens embraces her role as the young black woman defending conservatism, attacking liberals and praising two of America's more complicated men.

View image on Twitter

Candace Owens

@RealCandaceO

We just made history in Washington D.C.

I am so unbelievably proud of my friend and fellow warrior. Today was a glorious day for freedom.

And this is just the beginning.

Big announcement next week.

...

Since April when West tweeted, "I love the way Candace Owens thinks," she has never been far behind the star, playing his chief defender as he lurched from one controversial headline to the next. She accompanied West to TMZ when he said slavery "sounds like a choice" and posted a photo of herself with West after his headline-making White House visit last week. People ask her to autograph West's CDs.

Owens, 29, regularly appears on Fox News and travels six days a week to speak at college campuses. It's made her friendly with Trump and the first family, some of whom she's met for dinner.

But barely more than a year ago she was an unknown YouTuber.

What changed her life was a video about the Charlottesville rally, wherein she blames the media for creating racial hysteria. That video prompted Fox News host Jesse Watters to invite her on the network for the first time late last year.

Fox News amplified Owens, who was then hired by Turning Point USA, an organization aimed at bringing conservative ideas to college campuses. Her Twitter following quickly grew to 108,000. West's tweet brought hundreds of thousands more, ballooning her audience to 850,000 today.

The president also took notice. Trump said Owens "represents an ever expanding group of very smart 'thinkers.'"

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Candace Owens of Turning Point USA is having a big impact on politics in our Country. She represents an ever expanding group of very smart “thinkers,” and it is wonderful to watch and hear the dialogue going on...so good for our Country!

...

Her rapid rise gives her a massive political voice for someone with such a brief career – or even interest – in politics. Owens says she has never voted. Not for Trump, or any other candidate, and only recently registered as a Republican, but previously identified as liberal.

"I had no interest in politics whatsoever prior to 2015," she said.

Owens illustrates a political fact stamped and sealed by Trump: that strong voices can break through regardless of prior experience.

Owens defends Trump's comments after Charlottesville: "I still agree with him. There are morons on both sides." She doesn’t believe in white privilege and often criticizes Black Lives Matter. Feminism, she claims, has become radicalized. Planned Parenthood is "murdering" people using abortion, which has slowed black population growth. The media causes dissent. And lately, amid Kavanaugh's ascension to the Supreme Court: "I'm really passionate about defending men."

She's now preached politics to hundreds of thousands of students, said Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk. Her reach isn't contained to conservative havens like Liberty, where its president Jerry Falwell Jr. is an outspoken Trump supporter. Most recently Owens and Kirk spoke at the University of Colorado-Boulder, the University of Washington and the University of Georgia.

After the speech at Liberty, Owens jumped off stage and was hounded by a group of students, black and white, seeking selfies. Security had to step in to control the crowd. On Twitter, the speech was mostly praised.

Miss Lin

@Misslinlou

Hey @RealCandaceO I watched you Speaking at Liberty University Convocation, girl you killed it, I'm so glad we have you for our Voice, you speak with so much Common Sense, and I agree with you 100% #KeepItUp MAGA #BlessYou

...

But outside the arena at a small protest, Liberty senior Abigail Ferris held up a pro-#MeToo sign. It's the day before Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, testified before a Senate committee. Owens often dismisses the #MeToo movement as a Democratic political ploy and called Ford a liar who should serve time in prison.

"We're not directly protesting her," Ferris said. "But we are showing while she has made some disparaging remarks to the movement, that there are students on campus who respectfully disagree with her."

Luke Cromwell of Lynchburg, VA, holds a sign with a tweet from conservative commentator Candace Owens on the campus lawn of Liberty University. Owens was the school's convocation speaker on Sept. 26.]

More than anything, Owens preaches against victimhood, particularly among African Americans, a pull-yourself-up-by-your bootstraps mindset.

“I consider myself insanely privileged to be in this country," she said. "I try to tell people how much value there is in seeing yourself as privileged ... because if you see yourself as a victim, you’ll have that shade over your eyes in life and you’re not going to accomplish much."

She bolsters her message with an intriguing personal story, one that starts in poverty, involves a traumatic episode of racism and an I've-seen-the-dark-side political awakening. She sees it as the perfect antidote to liberal attacks on Republicans over race.

A 'victim' who hates the word

Owens grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, the middle child of three girls. Her father was a property manager and her mother an executive assistant. Even as a toddler, Owens didn't back down in a debate, her dad Robert Owens Jr., said.

The family grew up in poverty, she claims, living in a small apartment before moving into the home of her grandfather, who laid tobacco out to dry on a sharecropping farm at age 5 and faced the Ku Klux Klan.

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Candace Owens

@RealCandaceO

Happy birthday to the greatest man alive! I owe my spirit, my work ethic, and my “Owens temper” to you, granddaddy.

“the KKK used to come and shoot bullets at our house— and my daddy used to grab the rifle and shoot back at them boys!” ??

Never a victim! I love you.

...

"He is a man's man," Owens said. "That masculinity is now being taught as toxic, when in reality it's the one thing that grounded me as a child."

In 2007, Owens' senior year at Stamford High School, came an experience that shaped her personally – and eventually politically.

Four boys called her from a blocked number and left voicemails with racial epithets and threats of violence.

“They were calling me the N-word, they were saying they were going to put a bullet into the back of my head as they had done to Martin Luther King. They were calling me Rosa Parks. They were telling me that they were going to tar and feather my family,” she told the Liberty crowd.

The episode became enflamed because one of the boys was the son of then-Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy, the current Democratic governor of Connecticut. Owens, then 17, faced threats and harassment in school for weeks afterward, according to a lawsuit her father filed against the Stamford Board of Education. Robert Owens, in his filing, said the school district failed to protect his daughter from the harassment. The school board later settled with the family for $37,500, according to a settlement agreement provided by the board.

The Stamford Police Department said documents related to the case were sealed because those involved were minors and a spokesman would not confirm the outcome. But the Danbury News Times reported police arrested at least one student.

Owens was out of school for weeks because of the incident, which drew the attention of the NAACP, which defended her in the media. But Owens felt like a public relations pawn.

"I would come out of school and they would be outside with cameras and speaking, and I would stand there," she said. "It was really awful because then it sort of gave people that fire of like, 'she's doing this for attention.'"

The incident, Owens said, set in motion years of anorexia, which lasted through college and into her working years.

"It was really just a manifestation of trying to control something in your life," she said.

Candace Owens speaks at Liberty University, retelling her story from high school in which a group of boys left her voicemails with racial slurs and threats.

Candace Owens speaks at Liberty University, retelling her story from high school in which a group of boys left her voicemails with racial slurs and threats. (Photo: Jasper Colt, USAT)

Today, she complains about the media framing her as the victim.

"What it taught me was how little value there was in victimhood," she said. "Now, according to the left, that should have been the best moment of my life."

In 2016, she wrote an op-ed in the Stamford Advocate defending the boys, which hints at what has become her candid speaking style.

"I'll be the first to say I am sorry," she wrote, "To all of them, having to endure that experience; a group of children dissected and labeled."

Years later, Owens chalks up the voicemails to poor decision-making, not racism.

"They were labeled these racists, and I never felt that they were racists," she said. "I felt that they were people who did something that was really stupid."

She said some of the boys have since thanked her.

"People should be allowed to evolve," she said.

Doxxing and media distrust

After high school, Owens enrolled at the University of Rhode Island to study journalism, but dropped out in 2010 because she said her loan was declined. She then moved to New York City, and found steady work at a private equity firm, where she worked for four and a half years, starting off as an assistant and working her way up to the vice president of administration.

In 2014, she started the website Degree 180, a now-defunct lifestyle blog.

"I wanted to find my voice," she said.

The website sometimes touched on politics – one contributor wrote the idea of a Trump presidency "makes my skin crawl." But Owens, listed as the founder and CEO, wrote mostly about relationships and sometimes sex. She did say in October 2015 that she welcomed the end of the Republican tea party movement and their "crazy antics."

In April 2016 Owens started fundraising for another venture, an anti-cyberbullying website named Social Autopsy – the rapid downfall of which would embolden her political views and distrust of the media.

Social Autopsy aimed to connect people's social media comments to their places of employment as a way to hold people accountable. But to targets of GamerGate, an online harassment campaign led by video gamers, it sounded like "doxxing," the term for exposing someone's personal information online. Owens denies this was the intent.

When Social Autopsy launched a $75,000 Kickstarter campaign, it drew criticism in blogs and a lengthy piece in New York Magazine. Kickstarter suspended the project after two days, arguing the "project's plan to 'dox' people were in violation of our rules."

Social Autopsy's coverage in the media made Owens a conservative overnight, she told Dave Rubin on his YouTube show "The Rubin Report" last year. To USA TODAY, she describes her political switch as the result of a perfect storm driven by an intense distaste for the media and Trump's rise.

"There's this guy who I used to watch on reality TV who's running for president of the United States and he says they're fake news," she said. "It was happening to me at the same time."

Candace Owens made a turn to conservative politics after her anti-cyberbullying website Social Autopsy was shut down by Kickstarter. It created in her a distrust of the media, something she shared with President Donald Trump.

The incident drew her to conservative outlets she'd formerly cast off as fringe, like Breitbart.com.

She also started exploring the writings of black conservatives, such as Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Like Owens, Sowell has alleged liberal attempts to stifle free speech on college campuses. He slammed the "liberal media" in a column for the conservative National Review in late 2016 regarding Trump's picks for top White House positions.

"They would be worried about anyone who has not been brainwashed in the political correctness that reigns among the intelligentsia," he wrote.

Juan Williams: Donald Trump has black cheerleaders. But what he really needs are tough lessons on race.

Opinion: White people, just mind your business and let people of color exist

Out of her self-immersion in conservative media and black conservatism came a new outlook, which Owens describes like a calling.

"I want to make a difference," she said. "I want people t know my story so that they know that it can be their story, that they’re in control of their own destiny."

To do that, she'd use a 21st Century technique to push the ideas of Sowell and others to a social media crowd.

"I said, ‘How can I bring that message that they’re saying so brilliantly to a wider audience?" she said. "'Oh, I’m like a millennial. I can do a YouTube channel. I’m hilarious.'"

YouTube to Fox to Kanye

Owens began making a series of YouTube videos in July 2017. Her first post features her "coming out" as a conservative to her parents, who are aghast at the news. All characters are played by Owens. In her most watched video, with 1.6 million views, she mocks a list of demands Black Lives Matter made of white people.

The videos kickstarted a new career as a conservative commentator, earning her airtime on Fox and, eventually, West's attention. When he tweeted about her in April, she reacted like a fan, not the collaborator she is now.

"Please take a meeting with me," she tweeted to West just minutes later. "I tell every single person that everything that I have been inspired to do, was written in your music."

@kanyewest

I love the way Candace Owens thinks

85.1K

7:15 AM - Apr 21, 2018

Twitter Ads info and privacy

26.6K people are talking about this

Days later she appeared with West on TMZ, when he made his remarks about slavery. West drew widespread condemnation for his comments – including from other celebrities, like Stevie Wonder and Kobe Bryant – and later apologized.

But former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, another black Republican, defended him.

“People ought to be able to express their views,” she said. “Not all of us have to think politically the same way. I’ve said to people sometimes, ‘You know, I’ve been black all my life. You don’t have to tell me how to be black.’”

Not long after TMZ, Owens visited Trump at the White House.

Candace Owens

@RealCandaceO

This is the greatest President of our lifetime.

As a matter of fact, not opinion.

The honor was truly mine, @realDonaldTrump. #MAGA #KeepAmericaGreat

Owens doesn't think she's treated differently in conservative media because of her race, but does suggest there is a "sense of relief" with her in the fold.

"I think there's a draw. I think there's a validation," Owens said. "Imagine being a Republican and for years and years you try to say something and you get called a racist."

But Tasha Philpot, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, said Owens and West draw more attention because they're unique.

"They’re novel and so they can get media attention and coverage in ways that black Democrats can’t," Philpot said. "The idea that there is this special person, this aberration, exception to the rule, does certainly get you a platform that you wouldn’t have otherwise."

An exception because Trump's approval rating among African Americans lags at 10 percent, according to a most-recent Gallup poll. Just 8 percent of African Americans voted for Trump in 2016, which is slightly higher than Republican presidential contenders John McCain and Mitt Romney when they took on former President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012; but slightly lower than former Republican President George W. Bush's outcomes with African Americans in 2000 and 2004, according to Cornell University's Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

"There’s nothing particularly appealing, especially in this highly racialized political environment that would draw blacks over to the Republican Party,” Philpot said.

Trump often touts black unemployment, which has reached lows. Although, as The Associated Press has reported, economists have argued the success is not Trump's doing but the result of years of economic recovery started years ago. The White House also distributed false statistics saying Trump has created more jobs for African Americans than Obama, something for which the White House later apologized.

"At this point, wearing a MAGA hat is a proxy for not being authentically black," Philpot said.

Owens has her share of black critics. Black Lives Matter protesters have heckled her speeches. The news website The Root, which focuses on African American issues, often takes aim at her.

"Either they are delusional or they earned their Ph.D.s from the history, sociology and political science departments at the University of the Sunken Place," wrote Michael Harriot in The Root, referring to Owens and West while referencing the hypnotic abyss from the film "Get Out."

It's the comments from other African Americans that bother her father, Robert Owens.

"What really makes me upset are the comments she gets from her own race," said Owens, a registered Independent who did not vote for Trump or Hillary Clinton in 2016.

"We as African Americans need to stop believing that we can only vote Democrat," said Owens, whose daughter predicted a black exodus from the Democratic party on Fox News. "We need to stop using slurs against those that choose to vote Republican because, in my opinion, there are good people on both sides."

Philpot says black Republicans are different from black conservatives. Many African Americans identify as conservatives, which she ties to the importance of religion in black community. But, she says, not all of those black conservatives vote Republican.

“Usually (black Republicans) tend to have lower levels of group consciousness," Philpot said. "They define their conservatism not just in terms of being anti-government or reduced social spending but also in terms of blacks not relying on the government to get ahead.”

Owens insists she's not trying to convince people to become Republicans, but rather show them not to "blindly" trust in the media. She also comes out swinging against white progressives.

“Black people have become for white liberals like the puppy that they rescued from the pound,” she said. “White people that want to scream so much on behalf of black people that you can’t even hear what black people have to say. If a black conservative says, ‘No, thank you,’ they lose their minds because they’ve built their sense of worth on being the righteous white person.”

Changing minds

Owens' abrupt shift from liberal to conservative confounds some. Her critics often point to some anti-Trump posts on Degree180 to counter what she says on television.

“You wonder why did she flip her perspective," said Nikki Usher, a professor of media at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne. "Is it because she is somebody who genuinely has re-thought her ideological commitments or is this like a really good way to feed your ego and put yourself out there and establish a career?"

Usher suggests that a number of conservative pundits — Diamond and Silk, the black conservative duo popular on Facebook, as well as InfoWars' Alex Jones and the website's editor Paul Joseph Watson, whom Owens calls an "amazing friend and a true supporter" of hers — have found their way into the mainstream in a way "that didn't really exist before the internet."

Now people pay attention when someone is "taking very alternative positions that then gain attraction in the digital space and then cannot be ignored by sort of the more mainstream right-leaning sites," Usher said.

Owens bats down suggestions she has ulterior motives.

"It's just something that I believe in, and I love what I do," she said.

Candace Owen built a career as a conservative commentator in a little over a year. She started off on YouTube before being invited on to Fox News. She's since developed a friendship with rapper Kanye West. Here she is onstage during a speech at Liberty University on Sept. 26.

Owens' story of political conversion is part of her pitch. Such stories have appealed to people for generations and been used by famous leaders like Ronald Reagan, Hillary Clinton and Malcolm X, said Don Waisanen an associate professor of communication at Baruch College-CUNY who wrote a book about political conversions.

"This is one of the most convincing arguments you can make in politics," he said.

Waisanen said most conversions go from liberal to conservative. He argues it resonates better with a crowd accustomed to religious redemption narratives.

"It’s a way of kind of arguing in a religious way without the overt religious overtones that you are going from one paradigm to the other,” he said. “That form of ‘I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see,’ it’s still maintained in these narratives.”

Whatever the draw, Owens now boasts a bigger profile than her boss.

"No one in the modern era of American politics has accomplished such a meteoric rise in the cultural and political world," said Kirk, the Turning Point founder. "Commentating on the news and doing punditry is a very small piece of Candace Owens. She is a movement leader."

For now, Owens won't pinpoint a future. She's planning to launch a podcast that touches on culture and politics, but says "there's no destiny."

She doesn't plan on running for public office as long as she's satisfied with the country's leadership.

"If I wanted to be the president, I would win," she said "I hope we don't need Candace for president. I hope it just is that America keeps on this trajectory and just that these social battles can die down. They're a little insane."

Follow Sean Rossman on Twitter: @SeanRossman

https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/democrats.judiciary.house.gov/files/documents/Truth%20in%20Testimony%20Candace%20Owens.pdf

discloses nothing, even that she works for turn pt

says as VP to pvt equit firm in manhattan to its "administration" infamy "exploded" on youtube

liberal indoctrination at unis

who invited her? steve king?! mebbe not b/c he was de-platoformed/de-committeed

minority

Doug Collins, Georgia, Ranking Member

Jim Sensenbrenner, Wisconsin

Steve Chabot, Ohio

Louie Gohmert, Texas

Jim Jordan, Ohio

Ken Buck, Colorado

John Ratcliffe, Texas

Martha Roby, Alabama

Matt Gaetz, Florida

Mike Johnson, Louisiana

Andy Biggs, Arizona

Tom McClintock, California

Debbie Lesko, Arizona

Guy Reschenthaler, Pennsylvania

Ben Cline, Virginia

Kelly Armstrong, North Dakota

Greg Steube, Florida

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/trump-fan-candace-owens-goes-down-in-flames-as-rep-ted-lieu-plays-her-bizarre-hitler-remarks-in-a-public-hearing/

no lnx twt

For over a year Republicans and right-wing activists have been promoting the false claim that conservatives are being “silenced” and marginalized on social media platforms. GOP lawmakers love the idea, despite it being entirely false, because it allows them to continue the victimization belief that is at the center of Trumpism: “If only liberals and brown people weren’t part of America we could go back to the way things were” idea. Things were never the way they think they were.

On Tuesday the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Hate Crimes and the Rise of White Nationalism, which was also to “foster ideas about what social media companies can do to stem white nationalist propaganda and hate speech online,” according to the Committee.

Democrats invited representatives from the Anti-Defamation League, Google, Facebook, and other organizations. Republicans invited Turning Point USA’s communications director Candace Owens.

Owens is infamous for her remarks that appeared to be supportive of Hitler, in which she said: “Whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler.”

“But if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine,” Owens, speaking in London at a TPUSA recruitment event, said. “The problem is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalise. He wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German. Everybody to look a different way. To me, that’s not nationalism.”

In fact, Hitler didn’t want to just have “things run well,” he wanted to – and did – exterminate tens of millions of people, including Jews, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, and many more.

Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA) played those remarks during Tuesday’s hearing.

.@RepTedLieu plays recording of Candace Owens: "I don't know Ms. Owens. I'm not going to characterize her. I'm going to let her own words do the talking. So, I'm going to play for you the first 30 seconds of a statement she made about Adolf Hitler."

Owens responded, only to embarrass herself further. Her remarks were so offensive the Chairman of the Committee, Jerry Nadler (D-NY) was forced to interject and instruct her that she was not allowed to disparage Members of Congress during a hearing in the manner in which she did.

Embedded video

CSPAN

@cspan

Candace Owens: "I think it's pretty apparent that Mr. Lieu believes that black people are stupid and will not pursue the full clip…That was unbelievably dishonest…I'm deeply offended by the insinuation of revealing that clip without the question that was asked of me."

41.1K

10:55 AM - Apr 9, 2019

20.8K people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Owens accuses Rep.Lieu of being dishonest and playing a selected clip from the entire video. It should be noted that the question that was asked of her when she made her remarks appearing to defend Hitler had nothing to do with Hitler. She chose to bring up Hitler.

Her remarks when publicized were so offensive that Turning Point USA chapters wrote letters denouncing her.

Trump’s re-election campaign has been producing news-style videos featuring numerous media figures, including commentators for CNN and Fox News.

The president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump has been hosting the video series “Real News,” which includes guest interviews and campaign propaganda. The videos, which are posted on the president's Facebook page and carry “paid for by Donald J. Trump for president” disclaimers, ask viewers to sign up for mobile alerts from the campaign, a list-building activity that the 2020 campaign can use to raise money and organize get-out-the vote activities.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Jeremy Barr reported on March 19 that conservative commentators and sisters Diamond and Silk appeared in a recent video with Lara Trump. Fox News attempted to distance itself from the campaign video by stating that Diamond and Silk “license short weekly videos to Fox Nation – they are not Fox News contributors or employees. When they appear on FNC and FBN, they do so as guests." That explanation contradicts Fox News’ own identifications of the two as “Fox News Channel contributors,” “Fox Nation contributors,” and “Fox Nation hosts.”

Regardless of Diamond and Silk’s employment classification, several Fox News contributors have appeared in Trump campaign videos with Lara Trump. They include Deneen Borelli, Alveda King, David Bossie, and Mike Huckabee.

CNN analysts have also appeared in Trump campaign videos despite the president’s frequent trashing of the network as “fake news.”

[pix]

CNN's David Urban and Stephen Moore with Lara Trump.

David Urban is a CNN commentator who previously worked as a paid consultant for Trump’s 2016 campaign. During a March Trump video appearance, the campaign identified him as the president of American Continental Group, a major lobbying firm that lobbies the Trump administration and Congress on a variety of issues. (Urban has used his CNN gig to specifically push a lobbying client and its interests without disclosing the connection to viewers.)

In that video, which did not mention his CNN role, Urban spoke like a Trump surrogate. The Republicancommentator, who directed Trump's 2016 operation in Pennyslvania, said that “Pennsylvania is always a tough state to win. I predict, I'll say it here again, I think we’re going to win in 2020. It’s going to be close, but we’re going to win, the president’s going to put the time in; you know, we’re going to work hard and we’re going to win. I have no doubt that he will win in 2020 in Pennsylvania." He also lied about the Green New Deal, claiming that “you’re not going to have a car; forget, you know, no cows ever again.” (Urban’s firm does lobbying work on behalf of oil and gas interests.)

At the conclusion of the video, Lara Trump thanked Urban for “the job you do every single day out there fighting for the president. You really do an incredible job, and we are so lucky to have you.” Urban responded by saying that he loves President Trump and relayed that people tell him, “You may not hear it on the mainstream media, but we really like” the president. Urban also appeared in a June 2018 video and touted Trump ahead of the then-upcoming midterm elections.

Stephen Moore is a senior economics analyst for CNN who advises Trump (during a recent appearance, CNN described Moore as “an informal White House adviser”). He has made several appearances on Trump’s video program and promoted Trump’s economic message.

Other media commentators who have appeared in the Trump campaign’s videos include Fox 5 DC host, Daily Caller video columnist, and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Stephanie Hamill; Talking Point USA’s Candace Owens; conservative troll Dinesh D’Souza; and Trump sycophant Bill Mitchell.

---

3/19

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/trump-to-sign-executive-order-mandating-campus-free-speech/

no lnx

Trump to sign executive order mandating campus ‘free speech’

Trump to sign executive order mandating campus ‘free speech’ White House/Shealah Craighead

written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement March 21, 2019

255

At 3:30 Thursday afternoon President Donald Trump is scheduled to sign the executive order he promised while speaking at the far right Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) several weeks ago. The order, framed as protecting “free speech” on college and university campuses, is actually a direct threat to defund them by rescinding a wide array of federal grants for research and other programs.

Embedded video

CPAC 2020

@CPAC

“I will be signing an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research dollars” @realDonaldTrump #CPAC2019 #WhatMakesAmericaGreat

Trump isn’t actually advocating for “free speech,” he’s working to make it easier for far right extremist groups and their positions to enter the marketplace of ideas – unencumbered, and without context or warning, on the nation’s colleges and universities. It is a literal attempt to move the nation to the right – or alt-right – starting with college-aged Americans.

Leading up to the push for the executive order are several years of conservative outrage that came to national attention when far right wing or extremist pundits like Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro, and Milo Yiannopoulos saw their speeches canceled at various colleges, mostly due to overwhelming outrage from students who pay thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to receive an education.

According to the President’s son, Donald Trump Jr., today’s executive order is the result of a “push” from the far right wing group Turning Point USA (TPUSA), founded by conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Donald Trump Jr.

@DonaldJTrumpJr

Super excited today that @realdonaldTrump is signing an executive order today to protect free speech rights for ALL students!

Great work by @TPUSA and @charliekirk11 who have been pushing this since the first time I met him years ago

A big momentous day! #MAGA

41.3K

5:36 AM - Mar 21, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

17.2K people are talking about this

Kirk, perhaps best known for being a close friend of Donald Trump Jr., is also known for the embarrassingly false tweets he produces on a regular basis. Trump Jr. and TPUSA are closely aligned, as are TPUSA and the Trump campaign. Politico calls Kirk “Trump’s man on campus,” and The Weekly Standard called him “Kid Trump.” Trump last year was interviewed by Kirk at a White House event for college students hosted by an anti-gay hate group.

One year ago, almost as if publishing a prediction, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) warned of “Turning Point USA’s blooming romance with the alt-right.”

Fast forward to this past December.

Kirk and TPUSA’s Communications Director Candace Owens traveled to London to launch Turning Point in the UK, as Buzzfeed News reported last month.

Owens, in a discussion with potential recruits, brought up Hitler and, as many reports state, appeared to defend him, saying, “if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine. The problem is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany.”

Headlines encapsulated her remarks:

“Candace Owens: Hitler Was ‘OK’ Until He Tried to Go Global” (Daily Beast)

“One of Trump’s most vocal black supporters seemed to defend Hitler in a recent speech” (Washington Post)

“Candace Owens’ Bonkers Take On Nationalism Includes A Defense Of Hitler” (Huffpost)

“Candace Owens: If Hitler Was Just a Nationalist, He’d Be Fine” (Ebony)

One year earlier, in December of 2017, the award winning journalist Jane Mayer at The New Yorker published an article on TPUSA titled, “A Conservative Nonprofit That Seeks to Transform College Campuses Faces Allegations of Racial Bias and Illegal Campaign Activity.”

That lengthy and in-depth article includes this disturbing revelation:

As Turning Point’s profile has risen, so has scrutiny of its funding and tactics. Internal documents that I obtained, as well as interviews with former employees, suggest that the group may have skirted campaign-finance laws that bar charitable organizations from participating in political activity. Former employees say that they were directed to work with prominent conservatives, including the wife of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in aid of Republican Presidential candidates in 2016. Perhaps most troubling for an organization that holds up conservatives as the real victims of discrimination in America, Turning Point USA is also alleged to have fostered an atmosphere that is hostile to minorities. Screenshots provided to me by a source show that Crystal Clanton, who served until last summer as the group’s national field director, sent a text message to another Turning Point employee saying, “i hate black people. Like fuck them all .?.?. I hate blacks. End of story.”

This is the organization that President Trump, the Trump family, and the Trump campaign are not only intimately involved with, but now creating national policy with.

All Americans, but especially college students, educators, researchers, and actual civil rights supporters and advocates, should be extremely concerned.

---

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/the-shooters-manifesto-was-designed-to-troll/585058/

nl lnxtwit

In the hours after the horrific mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, people desperately searched the internet for any sign of a motive or meaning behind the attack. Early Friday, a number of unverified social-media posts surfaced, along with a bizarre manifesto posted to 8chan, rich with irony and references to memes.

Together, the posts suggest that every aspect of the shootings was designed to gain maximum attention online, in part by baiting the media. The shooter live-streamed the attack itself on Facebook, and the video was quickly shared across YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. Before committing the act, he shouted, “Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie,” a reference to Felix Kjellberg, who runs YouTube’s most subscribed-to channel. The phrase itself is a meme started by PewDiePie’s fans, and its goal is to be reprinted.

Read: YouTube extremism and the long tail]

Kjellberg, who has previously found himself embroiled in controversy over alleged anti-Semitism, disavowed the shooting on Twitter Friday morning. “Just heard news of the devastating reports from New Zealand Christchurch. I feel absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person. My heart and thoughts go out to the victims, families and everyone affected by this tragedy,” he wrote. By forcing Kjellberg to acknowledge the attack, the shooter succeeded in further spreading the word about the crime to Kjellberg’s tens of millions of followers.

@loudmouthjulia

"Subscribe to PewDiePie" is a meme that encompasses a misled belief that it's a fight for the disenfranchised; those constantly being pushed down. It's David vs Goliath. It's used on boards like 8chan as a rallying cry. It doesn't belong to PDP anymore — but we need to examine it...

Significant portions of the manifesto appear to be an elaborate troll, written to prey on the mainstream media’s worst tendencies. As the journalist Robert Evans noted, “This manifesto is a trap … laid for journalists searching for the meaning behind this horrific crime. There is truth in there, and valuable clues to the shooter’s radicalization, but it is buried beneath a great deal of, for lack of a better word, ‘shitposting.’”

[The Tech White Power Used to Go Viral

OLGA KHAZAN]

Shitposting is a slang term used to describe the act of posting trollish and usually ironic content designed to derail a conversation or elicit a strong reaction from people who aren’t in on the joke. Certain aspects of the shooter’s manifesto fall into this category. He includes Navy Seal Copypasta, a meme that originated on 4chan. He claims that Spyro: Year of the Dragon, a video game, taught him ethno-nationalism and that Fortnite taught him to “floss on the corpses,” referring to a viral dance move from the game. These absurd references are meant to troll readers

Jasmin Mujanovic

@JasminMuj

Replying to @JasminMuj

One more thought: the shooter makes repeated references to the “remove Kebab” meme, which is based on a propaganda video produced by Serb nationalist forces during the Bosnian War & Bosnian Genocide in 90s. Meshes w/ Obilic references & clear Breivik influence.

...

The shooter also credits the far-right personality Candace Owens with helping to “push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness.” Though the shooter could be a genuine fan of Owens, who has been known to espouse right-leaning views on immigration and gun control, this reference might be meant to incite Owens’s critics to blame her.

That doesn’t mean the racism expressed throughout the 74-page manifesto isn’t genuine. But the complexities of the crime are still unfolding, and as the New York Times journalist Kevin Roose cautioned, “The NZ shooter’s apparent manifesto is thick with irony and meta-text and very easy to misinterpret.” Unfortunately, when journalists report on these horrific acts, the shooter’s hateful messages are sometimes amplified in the process. But the origins of that hate and the shooter’s public postings do need to be examined, even when taking them at face value is difficult.

Mass killers have long exploited the media environments they operate within. The Zodiac killer gained notoriety by persuading newspapers to publish his cryptic messages. In 2015, a shooter in Virginia killed people during a live television broadcast.

As the internet and social media have democratized access to information, much of it spreads without necessary context. As the Verge writer Elizabeth Lopatto noted in 2015, “Our interactions with these killers were mediated by huge media gatekeepers—their manifestos were left at their homes, or sent to newspapers and TV stations. If the manifestos appeared at all, they were quoted from, rather than released in full. This is no longer the case.”

Read: The dangerous spread of extremist manifestos]

While this system of gatekeeping itself was undoubtedly problematic, since many of the gatekeepers upheld norms and power structures built on privilege, technology has upended our media environment so quickly that many people are ill-equipped to handle the new information environment. We’ve seen the consequences of this play out in the rise of fake news, thriving misinformation campaigns, and bizarre viral hoaxes warped by trolls to capitalize on people’s worst fears.

Before people can even begin to grasp the nuances of today’s internet, they can be radicalized by it. Platforms such as YouTube and Facebook can send users barreling into fringe communities where extremist views are normalized and advanced. Because these communities have so successfully adopted irony as a cloaking device for promoting extremism, outsiders are left confused as to what is a real threat and what’s just trolling. The darker corners of the internet are so fragmented that even when they spawn a mass shooting, as in New Zealand, the shooter’s words can be nearly impossible to parse, even for those who are Extremely Online.i

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/video-reveals-trump-loving-activist-candace-owens-suggesting-hitlers-plans-for-germany-were-fine-the-real-problem-is-globalism/

In a video posted on Twitter Friday by Media Matters for America’s John Whitehouse, right-wing activist Candace Owens shared disturbing comments about her views on nationalism and Adolf Hitler.

The video showed an event discussed in a BuzzFeed News article published Friday. It reported that the event, at which she was joined by fellow fan of President Donald Trump and founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, was held in December.

During the event, Owens was asked about her views of nationalism.

“I actually don’t have any problems at all with the word ‘nationalism.’ I think that the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don’t want,” she said. “Whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. You know, he was a national socialist.”

She continued: “But if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine. The problem is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German. Everybody to look a different way. To me, that’s not nationalism. In thinking about how we could go bad down the line, I don’t really have an issue with nationalism. I really don’t.”

Of course, Hitler is famously one of history’s most horrendous dictators whose plan to “make Germany great” involved committing genocide internal to the country, not just outside its boundaries. This was driven by his nationalism — which Owens says she has no problem with — a monstrous view of what it meant to be German and who the nation’s enemies were. And the fact that she so carelessly dismisses this vicious part of the ideology is a perfect example of why those defending supposedly new versions of nationalism should not be taken seriously.

Watch the clip below:

also

https://twitter.com/existentialfish/status/1093923658446323712

in vid above she refers to replacement rate of bbaies in UK, which //, as well as defense of term nat'lism

King also expressed his belief in the "Great Replacement", a conspiracy theory that nonwhite immigration is an orchestrated plot to replace the white population of Europe. He suggested that George Soros, the Hungarian-born liberal billionaire philanthropist and Holocaust survivor, is behind it, insisting, "if you trace it back, you can connect it to his foundation." [you/Jews will not replace us]

hmmn, correlation is not cause?

11.02.18

https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-propaganda-veterans-push-candace-owens-blexit-campaign

no lnx

We’re not saying that Russia helped make #Blexit trend, but Twitter accounts with a history of pushing Kremlin fake news are playing a disproportionate role in amplifying the call for African-American voters to hop on the Trump Train.

Blexit, the brainchild of right-wing personality Candace Owens, is a nascent movement meant to urge black voters to leave the Democratic Party.

Owens, the communications director for campus conservative group Turning Point USA, announced the campaign last Saturday at a Turning Point conference in Washington. But while Blexit is less than a week old, it’s already been beset with controversies. Owens initially claimed that rapper Kanye West, who praised her politics earlier this year on Twitter, designed Blexit’s “X” logo and the 90’s-style colors of its merchandise. But West claimed in a series of tweets Tuesday that he had nothing to do with Blexit, distancing himself from Owens and her group. Owens eventually apologized to West, but insisted that Blexit will continue.

Additionally, a pre-existing organization also called Blexit is threatening to sue over Owens’ use of the name. (Owens didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story)

Despite the hiccups, the torrent of tweets pushing the Blexit hashtag on Twitter gives the impression that African-Americans are rejecting the Democratic party in droves. Over 15 hours ending Friday afternoon, the Daily Beast captured more than 250,000 tweets amplifying the Blexit movement.

“40,000, or 16 percent, of the Blexit tweets we collected came from accounts that previously pushed Kremlin propaganda.”

There’s no easy way to tell how many of those tweets are swelling from Blexit’s target demographic rather than already-committed GOP supporters. But by cross-referencing the tweets with data The Daily Beast collected during previous tweet storms, we can tell a little about what the putative Blexiters supported in the past.

It turns out that approximately 40,000, or 16 percent, of the Blexit tweets we collected came from accounts that previously pushed Kremlin propaganda in one of two key Russian disinformation campaigns: one attempting to exonerate the Syrian government in a deadly chemical weapons attack, another targeting last year’s presidential election in France in support of a failed 11th-hour intervention by Russia’s GRU, its military intelligence agency.

RELATED IN TECH

Russian Trolls Sue Facebook, Their Old Propaganda Machine

New Russia Breach Claim as Global Lawmakers Shame Zuckerberg

Are Silicon Valley’s Autoreplies Taking Over Our Minds?]

The Syria-related campaign unfolded on the heels of the Syrian government’s April 4, 2017 chemical weapons attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun, in which at least 80 people were killed, including 20 children. In the aftermath, Donald Trump ordered an airstrike on a Syrian military airfield to retaliate for the war crime, while the Russian government rushed to the defense of Syria's Kremlin-backed autocrat, Bashar al-Assad. Russian trolls in the Internet Research Agency and in the GRU are known to have aggressively pushed a fake story that the attack was a frame up targeting Assad—a “false flag.”

“We consistently see Russia-linked accounts pushing Syrian talking points,” said Ryan Fox, COO of New Knowledge.

The “false flag” meme was pushed in a week-long storm of tweets from at least 88,000 different Twitter accounts, many of them since deleted by Twitter. Thousands of the surviving accounts, 7,427 of them, are boosting Blexit today.

A second Russian social media campaign came one month after #falseflag, when Russia’s GRU intelligence agency attempted to repeat its 2016 U.S. success in the 2017 French election, dumping emails and documents it hacked from the Gmail accounts of people connected to now-French President Emmanuel Macron using the hashtag #MacronLeaks.

BLEXIT BOOBOO

Pro-Trump Activists Blame Turning Point USA for Losing Kanye

Will Sommer]

Unlike the DNC leaks, “Macron Leaks” contained nothing of consequence, and were promoted most heavily on social media by Pizzagaters and pseudonymous accounts. Today, 4,461 accounts that amplified Macron Leaks during the French election are throwing their weight behind the Blexit movement. And 2,678 of the accounts using the Blexit hashtag amplified both #falseflag and #macronleaks.

Our monitoring captured 78,134 accounts pushing Blexit. In total, 12 percent of those accounts championed those earlier Russian disinformation efforts.

Russia’s Internet Internet Agency heavily targeted the black community before and after the 2016 presidential race. Most of the trolls’ Facebook ad buy was aimed at African-Americans, and the Russians enjoyed a sizable following on fake activism pages they set up with names like Black Matters US and Do Not Shoot Us. The IRA even recruited two men from Nigeria to pose as Americans in their own YouTube show, called “Williams and Kalvin,” where they tried to persuade black voters to support Donald Trump, just like Blexit today.

None of this means the accounts that promoted Kremlin causes and now push Blexit are all Russian trolls—Americans are uniquely receptive to foreign disinformation, and every Russian troll operation enjoys some level of organic amplification from its target audience. As for the Blexit movement, the size and shape of its genuine participants will become clear on Tuesday, when Americans go to the polls for the midterm elections—no Russian bots allowed.

Kevin Poulsen

@kpoulsen

Kevin.Poulsen@thedailybeast.com

Will Sommer

William.Sommer@thedailybeast.com

---

There were plenty of voices putting those ideas forward though, including on this site. Are they all Russian trolls, or did some people buy into it?

Some on the far left genuinely believe that the Democratic party is just as bad as the Republicans.

A good chunk of people honestly can't vocalize why they hate Hillary Clinton from a policy perspective, and a lot of that goes to years of right wing propaganda, including the 2016 rush.

The #WalkAway /CandaceOwens/Kanye stuff this year was so embarrassingly transparent after what we saw in 2016 that they got laughed out of the room.

The GOP gave up on that nonsense with LGBT voters and women, the mask was completely off this cycle.

---

The Russian campaign was the subject of Senate hearings last year and has been widely scrutinized by academic experts. The new reports largely confirm earlier findings: that the campaign was designed to attack Hillary Clinton, boost Trump and deepen divisions in American society.

The Washington Post reported last night that the Senate report also detailed efforts by Russia’s disinformation teams to target Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III as a threat to Trump, falsely claiming that the former FBI director was corrupt and that the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election were crackpot conspiracies.

New Knowledge gave particular attention to the Russians’ focus on African-Americans, which is evident to anyone who examines collections of their memes and messages.

The Internet Research Agency also created a dozen websites disguised as African-American in origin, with names like blackmattersus.com, blacktivist.info, blacktolive.org and blacksoul.us. On YouTube, the largest share of Russian material covered the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality, with channels called “Don’t Shoot” and “BlackToLive.”

The report does not seek to explain the heavy focus on African Americans. But the Internet Research Agency’s tactics echo Soviet propaganda efforts from decades ago that often highlighted racism and racial conflict in the United States, as well as recent Russian influence operations in other countries that sought to stir ethnic strife.

mason weaver it's ok the leave the plantation the new undergd rr?]

amplified by kanye

youtube monetized, HQ attack b/c woman thot blocked, rt has used better/1st? echo/escalator?

alt rt uses effectively see RAM and red elephant

---

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html

NYT bari IDW:

closest thing to a phone book for the I.D.W. is a sleek website that lists the dramatis personae of the network, including Mr. Harris; Mr. Weinstein and his brother and sister-in-law, the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying; Jordan Peterson, the psychologist and best-selling author; the conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray; Maajid Nawaz, the former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist; and the feminists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Sommers. But in typical dark web fashion, no one knows who put the website up.

...

But they all share three distinct qualities. First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.

“People are starved for controversial opinions,” said Joe Rogan, an MMA color commentator and comedian who hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the country. “And they are starved for an actual conversation.

...

no lnx

Ben Shapiro’s podcast, which airs five days a week, gets 15 million downloads a month. Sam Harris estimates that his “Waking Up” podcast gets one million listeners an episode. Dave Rubin’s YouTube show has more than 700,000 subscribers.

Offline and in the real world, members of the I.D.W. are often found speaking to one another in packed venues around the globe. In July, for example, Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray and Mr. Harris will appear together at the O2 Arena in London.

But as the members of the Intellectual Dark Web become genuinely popular, they are also coming under more scrutiny. On April 21, Kanye West crystallized this problem when he tweeted seven words that set Twitter on fire: “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.”

Candace Owens, the communications director for Turning Point USA, is a sharp, young, black conservative — a telegenic speaker with killer instincts who makes videos with titles like “How to Escape the Democrat Plantation” and “The Left Thinks Black People Are Stupid.” Mr. West’s praise for her was sandwiched inside a longer thread that referenced many of the markers of the Intellectual Dark Web, like the tyranny of thought policing and the importance of independent thinking. He was photographed watching a Jordan Peterson video.

All of a sudden, it seemed, the I.D.W. had broken through to the culture-making class, and a few in the group flirted with embracing Ms. Owens as their own.

Yet Ms. Owens is a passionate Trump supporter who has dismissed racism as a threat to black people while arguing, despite evidence to the contrary, that immigrants steal their jobs. She has also compared Jay-Z and Beyoncé to slaves for supporting the Democratic Party.

Many others in the I.D.W. were made nervous by her sudden ascendance to the limelight, seeing Ms. Owens not as a sincere intellectual but as a provocateur in the mold of Milo Yiannopoulos. For the I.D.W. to succeed, they argue, it needs to eschew those interested in violating taboo for its own sake.

“I’m really only interested in building this intellectual movement,” Eric Weinstein said. “The I.D.W. has bigger goals than anyone’s buzz or celebrity.”...

---

mma

Owens burst onto the scene recently afterKanye West praised her way of thinking. She is the communications director for Turning Point USA, a group for young pro-Trump supporters that once staged a protest where members all wore diapers.

Owens made more noise this week when she blastedthe #MeToo movement, claiming it was a witch hunt on men. Unbelievably, she also claimed that she talked to CEOs and men in politics, who told her that they were not hiring women. While normal people would be outraged by the admission of illegal hiring practices, Owens used it as a reason to attack #MeToo.

Owens' comments even received criticism from conservative women who pointed out that her rhetoric is damaging to survivors and victims. And that's not the only criticism coming from the right. A competing group for young conservatives wrote a memo calling out Turning Point as damaging. In return, Turning Point seems to have leaked information to a host at Alex Jones' Infowars who Owens has recently praised.

Also: Turning Point held a conference for women. It was full of sexists.

horo ucsc rep praise"

i know all is pol corr; take it from me, i was raised by commies, invent by Mao, greatest murdered; my parent say do not deviate from party line, not cute; waited 30 years, bootheels on necks of inner city blks; it wd take blk leader to break, and candace and kanye west, very courageous and accomplished; left are bullies, went after his adidas contract; if you do, i will take my fans of adidas and they backed down; his new album top 7 on spotify, so greAT WAR going on, earthshaking conseq if blk ppl take back __ mccarthyism call race traitor, it cd be great change;

wiki

Owens is an American conservative commentator, and activist.[1][2][3] She is known for her pro-Trump commentary, and criticism of Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Party.[4][5][6] She is the Director of Urban Engagement at Turning Point USA.[7]

1 Early life and education

2 Career

2.1 Anti-cyberbullying campaign and doxing

2.2 Media and conservative activism

3 Political views

4 References

5 Further reading

6 External links

Early life and education

Born to an African American family and raised in Stamford, Connecticut,[8] she is a graduate of Stamford High School.[1] In 2007, while a senior in high school, she received hurtful and threatening racist phone calls that were traced to a car in which the 14-year-old son of then mayor Dannel Malloy was present.[1] Owens' family sued the Stamford Board of Education in federal court alleging that the city did not protect her rights, resulting in a $37,500 settlement.[1][9]

Owens was pursuing an undergraduate degree in journalism at the University of Rhode Island.[8], but did not graduate. Afterwards, she worked for Vogue magazine.[1] In 2012, she took a job as an administrative assistant for a private equity firm.[1]

Career[edit]

Anti-cyberbullying campaign and doxing

Having experienced online harassment, Owens launched SocialAutopsy.com in 2016, a website she said would expose bullies on the Internet.[1][10] The site would have solicited users to take screenshots of offensive posts and send them to the website where they would be categorized by the user's name.[1] It was being crowdfunded on Kickstarter. The proposal was immediately controversial, drawing criticism and comment from a variety of sources on the propriety of de-anonymizing (doxing) Internet users.[11] The idea behind the Kickstarter in Owens' words:

“We attach [people’s] words to their places of employment, and anybody in the entire world can search for them. What we are doing is figuratively lifting the masks up so nobody can hide behind, you know, Twitter handles or privatized profiles. It’s all real, and it’s all researchable. You can still say whatever you want to say on social media, but you have to be willing to stand by your words.”[12]

According to The Daily Dot, "People from all sides of the anti-harassment debate were quick to criticize the database, calling it a public-shaming list that would encourage doxing and retaliatory harassment."[13] Zoe Quinn, founder of the Crash Override Network and an online bullying victim (see Gamergate controversy), called her to request that she stop her project.[12] Randi Lee Harper of the Online Abuse Prevention Initiativealso requested that she desist, suggesting that she did not fully understand cyber-bullying (due to Owens having referred to Quinn as a leader of Gamergate).[12] Owens responded that Social Autopsy was not meant to be a doxing platform and that no one making abusive posts anonymously would be "outed" by name or place of employment. Kickstarter suspended her funding campaign, and the website was never created, despite having created profiles on over 22,000 individuals (per their assertion).[12] The site has since been closed.

Media and conservative activism

Prior to 2017, Owens ran a website that frequently criticized conservatism and mocked then-candidate Donald Trump.[4][14] By 2017, she had become prominent in conservative circles for her pro-Trump commentary and for criticizing liberal narratives around structural racism, systemic inequality, and identity politics (the kind of content that her website previously trafficked in).[4][5][6]

In 2015, Owens founded the website Degree180.[4] The website frequently posted anti-conservative and anti-Trump content, including mockery of his penis size.[4] Owens said in one of her postings that it was “good news” that the “Republican Tea Party ... will eventually die off (peacefully in their sleep, we hope).”[4] In one article she wrote that the antics of the Tea Party Movement were "bat-shit-crazy".[15][10] When Buzzfeed News in May 2018 reported on the anti-Trump content on Degree180, Owens described the Buzzfeed reporter as a "despicable creature" and alleged that Buzzfeed had threatened the former writers of Degree180 (something which Buzzfeed rejects).[4]

In 2017, Owens began posting politically themed videos to YouTube.[4] She launched Red Pill Black, a website and YouTube channel that promotes black conservatism in the United States.[16][17] She is known for her criticism of Black Lives Matter.[6][18][3][19] She has described Black Lives Matter protesters as "a bunch of whiny toddlers, pretending to be oppressed for attention."[20] She has argued that African Americans have a "victim mentality" and often refers to the Democratic Party as a "plantation".[21][18] She has argued that the American left "like black people to be government-dependent".[22] She has argued that black people have been brainwashed to vote for Democrats.[5] She has argued that police violence against black people is not about racism.[18][20]

On November 21, 2017, at the MAGA Rally and Expo in Rockford, Illinois, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk announced her appointment as their director of urban engagement.[7] Turning Point's hiring of Owens occurred in the wake of allegations of racism at Turning Point.[4]

Owens is staunchly pro-Trump.[5][6] She has characterized Trump as the “savior” of Western civilization.[6] She has argued that Trump has neither engaged in rhetoric that is harmful to African Americans nor proposed policies that would harm African Americans.[21][10] Following Kanye West's return to Twitter in April 2018, West tweeted "I love the way Candace Owens thinks."[23] The tweet was met with derision among some of West's fans.[24] President Donald Trump stated that Owens "is having a big impact on politics in our Country...She represents an ever expanding group of very smart 'thinkers,' and it is wonderful to watch and hear the dialogue going on...so good for our Country!"[25]

Owens has appeared on The Rubin Report, Fox News and InfoWars.[26][10][5] According to The Guardian and the Daily Beast, Owens has referred to police killings of black people as a trivial matter to African Americans.[21][10] In May 2018, Owens suggested that "something bio-chemically happens" to women who do not marry or have children, and she linked to the Twitter handles of Sarah Silverman, Chelsea Handler and Kathy Griffin, saying that they were "evidentiary support" of this theory.[27][28] Silverman responded, saying "It seems to me that by tweeting this, you would like to maybe make us feel badly. I’d say this is evidenced by ur effort to use our twitter handles so we would see. My heart breaks for you, Candy. I hope you find happiness in whatever form that takes."[27] Owens responded, accusing Silverman of supporting terrorists and crime gangs.[27]

Political views

Previously a liberal anti-Donald Trump Democrat who "didn't care about politics", since April 2016, Owens is now a pro-Donald Trump conservative commentator and part of the red pill movement. She claims she was "always a conservative." She did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. She says she values economic issues over social issues.[26] She stated that “Being conservative is like being gay in the 1980s,”.[29] The Guardian has described her as "ultra-conservative", the Daily Beast has described her as "far-right", the New York Magazine and Columbia Journalism Review described her as "right-wing", and the Pacific Standard described her as "alt-right."[30][31][21][10][32] She states that liberalism and feminism is no longer liberal, but fascism, and true liberalism and feminism is classical liberalism. She opposes the U.S. national anthem protests and called for all NFL players who protest to be fired. She criticized both Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, along with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 that Bill Clinton signed into law. She is critical of the War on Drugs, habitual offender laws, stop and frisk, and supports legalization of cannabis. She supports school choice, abolishing the minimum wage, and deregulating venture enterprise.[26]

Owens opposes over prescription of pharmaceutical drugs. She is critical of affirmative action.[26][33][34] She praised H.R.1, supports same-sex marriage and called abortion "murder", although doesn't have a position on abortion per se. She wants Planned Parenthood defunded of federal tax dollars and claims it has "decreased" the African American population in the United States. She believes the pro-choice movement is just about "population control."[35][26][36][37][38][39] She states that she "1,010% support the transgender community." She's part of the drop the T movement, which seeks to separate the issues of transgender community from the LGB community. She believes there are only two genders and mocks the concept of more than two genders. She supports post-op transgender individuals serving in the United States military, but opposes transitioningtransgender individuals from serving in the United States military, along with the United States military funding sex reassignment surgery.[40][41][42][26] She attended the opening of the United States embassy in Jerusalem, Israel and is critical of the 2018 Gaza border protests.[43][44] She is a member of the National Rifle Association.[45] She is critical of open borders policies.[2] She supports Donald Trump's proposed border wall around Mexico's border.[46] She stated that "Every single illegal immigrant should be dropped from welfare programs, immediately."[47] She has called for the deportation of all recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.[48] She supports voter ID laws.[49]

Owens described the #MeToo Movement - which was an international movement against sexual harassment and assault - as "stupid" and said that she "hated" the movement.[50] Owens wrote that the #MeToo Movement was premised on the idea that "women are stupid, weak & inconsequential."[50]

In May 2018, Owens praised Louis Farrakhan's endorsement of Trump, describing it as “a really big deal” and “relevant.”[50] After Owens received criticism from conservative figures for praising Farrakhan - who has a history of anti-semitic remarks - Owens deleted the tweet.[50]

Owens appeared that same month on The Joe Rogan Experience and stated she did not believe in anthropogenic climate change.[51]

References[edit]

^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h Cuda, Amanda (March 5, 2016). "We were children. I wasn't the only victim". Connecticut Post.

^ Jump up to:a b Nagle, Angela (December 2017). "The Lost Boys The young men of the alt-right could define American politics for a generation". The Atlantic. Candace Owens, a popular young black conservative also known as Red Pill Black, has mastered new media platforms, but in service of advocating for something closer to a traditional strain of conservatism: She’s critical of the press, feminism, and open borders, but supports gay marriage

^ Jump up to:a b "In Kanye West, the Right Sees Truth-Telling and a Rare A-List Ally". The New York Times. 2018-04-27. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2018-05-18.

^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i "The Newest Star Of The Trump Movement Ran A Trump-Bashing Publication -- Less Than Two Years Ago". BuzzFeed. Retrieved 2018-05-16.

^ Jump up to:a b c d e Ohlheiser, Abby (2018-04-25). "Analysis | 'The mob can't make me not love him': How Kanye West joined the pro-Trump Internet". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2018-05-18.

^ Jump up to:a b c d e Kornhaber, Spencer. "What Kanye West and Shania Twain See in Donald Trump". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2018-05-18.

^ Jump up to:a b "In Liberal Illinois, TPUSA's Charlie Kirk And Other Speakers Strike A Chord With Conservative Crowds – Turning Point USA News". 2018-05-03. Archived from the original on 2018-05-03. Retrieved 2018-06-13.

^ Jump up to:a b "Red Pill Black (Candace Owens) on Her Journey From Left to Right (Live Interview)". The Rubin Report. September 28, 2017.

Jump up Danbury News Times: "Racist threats case filed by Stamford High student settled for $37,500" January 23, 2008

^ Jump up to:a b c d e f Zimmerman, Amy (2018-05-09). "Meet Candace Owens, Kanye West's Toxic Far-Right Consigliere". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 2018-05-18.

Jump up "The Strange Tale of Social Autopsy, the Anti-Harassment Start-up That Descended Into Gamergate Trutherism". Select All. Retrieved 2018-04-26.

^ Jump up to:a b c d New Yorker Magazine: "The Strange Tale of Social Autopsy, the Anti-Harassment Start-up That Descended Into Gamergate Trutherism" By Jesse Singal April 16, 2016

Jump up Controversial bully shaming database loses Kickstarter but will launch anyway. The Daily Dot, 15 April 2016

Jump up Sanchez, Luis (2018-05-15). "Activist praised by Trump once ran online publication that mocked him: report". TheHill. Retrieved 2018-05-16.

Jump up Owens, Candace (4 October 2015). "News Update: The Republican Tea Party is Led by the Mad Hatter". Degree180. Archived from the original on 23 August 2017. Retrieved 7 January 2018.

Jump up Watkins, D (September 25, 2017). "Candace Owens of Red Pill Black, the toxic right's newest African-American star". Salon.

Jump up Fox News: "Liberals sick of the alt-left are taking 'the red pill'" By Elizabeth Ames September 13, 2017

^ Jump up to:a b c "Who is Candace Owens, Kanye West's favorite new thinker?". The Daily Dot. 2018-05-14. Retrieved 2018-05-18.

Jump up "The ignorance of Kanye West". Vox. Retrieved 2018-05-18.

^ Jump up to:a b Scott, Eugene (2018-04-22). "Analysis | Kanye West's embrace of a black Trump supporter not well-received". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2018-05-18.

^ Jump up to:a b c d Lartey, Jamiles (2018-05-09). "Trump praises controversial pundit Candace Owens as a 'very smart thinker'". the Guardian. Retrieved 2018-05-18.

Jump up "'I love the way Candace Owens thinks'". NewsComAu. Retrieved 2018-05-18.

Jump up "Kanye West tweets that he likes the way far-right personality Candace Owens "thinks"". The FADER. Retrieved 2018-04-22.

Jump up "Kanye West Applauds Black Lives Matter Critic; Many Fans Revolt: 'This Is So Disturbing'". TheWrap. 2018-04-21. Retrieved 2018-04-22.

Jump up Shelbourne, Mallory (2018-05-09). "Trump praises conservative activist Candace Owens as a 'very smart thinker'". TheHill. Retrieved 2018-05-09.

^ Jump up to:a b c d e f The Rubin Report (28 September 2017). "Candace Owens on Her Journey From Left to Right (Live Interview)" – via YouTube.

^ Jump up to:a b c "Candace Owens Gets Gently Dunked on by Sarah Silverman Over 'Women Who Don't Marry' Tweet". SFGate. Retrieved 2018-05-18.

Jump up "Sarah Silverman responds to conservative's suggestion that single women without children are 'bio-chemically' affected". Retrieved 2018-05-18.

Jump up "Right-wing firebrand wows American Experiment forum - MN Spokesman-Recorder - MSR News Online". 16 May 2018.

Jump up "Why Is Kanye West Sounding Like the Alt-Right?".

Jump up Feldman, Brian. "Kanye West, Galaxy Brain". Select All. Retrieved 2018-05-18.

Jump up "Politics meet publishing in books by Chozick, Farrow, Goldberg, Tapper". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved 2018-05-18.

Jump up Boller, Jay. "Candace Owens in Minneapolis: Kanye's favorite 'free thinker' is coming to speak - City Pages". City Pages.

Jump up "The Problem with Candace Owens - Quillette". 8 May 2018.

Jump up "Candace Owens on Twitter".

Jump up Fouriezos, Nick. "This Conservative Convert Dishes Out 'Red Pills' Online".

Jump up "Candace Owens on Twitter".

Jump up Candace Owens (28 July 2017). "No Transgender People in the Army: Who cares?" – via YouTube.

Jump up "Candace Owens on Twitter".

Jump up "Candace Owens: 'Not a single elected Democrat is here to celebrate this historic event in Jerusalem'". 14 May 2018.

Jump up "Candace Owens on Twitter".

Jump up "Candace Owens on Twitter". Twitter. Retrieved 2018-06-13. Voter identification is a MUST....

^ Jump up to:a b c d Sommer, Will (2018-06-13). "Conservatives Turn On Candace Owens, Kanye West's Favorite Republican". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 2018-06-13.

Jump up "Joe Rogan Experience #1125 - Candace Owens". Player FM. Retrieved 14 June 2018.