Candace Owens, Great American Basket Case
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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P. T. Barnum
15 min read
Taibbi directly compares Owens to Barnum as an American legend of showmanship and promotional genius. Understanding Barnum's actual methods of spectacle, hoaxes, and audience manipulation provides historical context for the modern media dynamics Taibbi describes.
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Lyndon B. Johnson
19 min read
Taibbi references the famous LBJ political anecdote about forcing opponents to deny outrageous accusations. LBJ's mastery of hardball political tactics and media manipulation is directly relevant to understanding the strategic dynamics Taibbi attributes to Owens.
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Yellow journalism
12 min read
The article discusses media manipulation tactics, sensationalism, and the erosion of trust in news sources. Yellow journalism's historical precedent of prioritizing sensation over accuracy provides educational context for the media landscape Taibbi critiques.
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 Lee Harvey Oswald 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
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