Candace Owens, Great American Basket Case
With a set of boulders bigger than Brigitte Macron's, Candace Owens is single-handedly restoring pride in American conspiracy-theory craftsmanship
Was no one else bothered by this? Observe the following pair of videos, one from this past weekend:
Steve Kornacki has a neat on-air vibe. If I owned NBC I’d up his airtime, but rename his segment Nerd on Speed or give him a stand-alone show, instead of shoehorning him into both Meet the Press and Sunday Night Football. The poor guy must worry all the time if he’s degrading political news by comparing it to sports, or vice versa. It’s gaslighting audiences who’ve already suffered.
Life was confusing enough when we only had to worry about advertisers and the government pressuring three networks. In the new Internet multiverse, Fox is seen as a proxy for Republicans, CNN/MSNOW are Democrats, CBS is the IDF, podcaster A a mouthpiece for billionaire Y, influencer B funded by Middle East country Z, and so on. No one believes anything, a problem because it’s in the nature of people to need to believe something. A vacuum of belief makes prime hunting ground for any voice that projects the right combination of suspicion and conviction, while selling stories tailored to audience fears.
No one tops podcaster Candace Owens at this game. She’s a force of nature. It’s rare for a pure pundit to have deep impact on international politics, and even rarer for one to trigger lasting change of the sort now taking place in the Republican Party. Fighting through this week, she’s turned the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk into an epic that makes QAnon seem small-time. An underrated South Park episode from 2003 tried to make fun of conspiracy theorists by inventing a story too ridiculous to believe. The Matt Stone/Trey Parker idea was metrosexuality as an attempt to control the world by “crab people.” That was a laugh, but how about real-world applause for the Owens theory, Charlie Kirk blown away by bee people:
Owens showed the text messages she sent to friends about an “underground related to bees” with a September 1st time stamp, to prove she had concerns about “imminent danger” involving schools nine days before Charlie Kirk was killed at a school. (This brand of conspiracy lunacy — “Israel is full of garages, while Jack Ruby was shot in one. Coincidence?” — was once parodied even by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, but Owens has few comics on her tail.) Her story involves cops, Egyptians, FBI personnel, the French Foreign Legion, mysterious rich people in Orem, an airline services company a few miles from my house in New Jersey, Bibi Netanyahu, and Erica Kirk all engaged in a “psychological war” of the utmost sophistication, only planned in bee-speak maybe.
If you gave me a thousand takes I couldn’t deliver that theory with a straight face, but Owens is the LeBron James of deadpan. Her certitude is blowing a hole in the hull of the Republican Party, and that’s probably just for starters. That ability to impact world events with sheer balls and 100% Grade-A All-American Bullshit will someday give her a place among national legends like P.T. Barnum and Colonel Tom Parker. Pausing to express awe for America’s Outpatient-in-Chief:
