The Grift is On
April 28, 2021 By: Nick Carraway Category: Uncategorized
It’s difficult walking the tight rope between pointing out obvious shenanigans and avoiding those shenanigans to keep from giving them oxygen. That’s the life of commentating. Ultimately, we are all part of the same game. The name of the game is eyeballs. Once you get them focused on you then you get the sponsorship dollars, the speaking engagements, and the gravitas that comes with relevance.
There are those that have natural relevance because they come from a position of authority or they have something meaningful to offer. Then, there are those that use shock and awe to get their name out there. I suppose it’s not a horrible thing if that relevance is used for good ends. It’s problematic when notoriety is used for notoriety sake.
I’ve generally avoided commenting on Candace Owens on these pages. It is difficult to engage someone that is simultaneously making arguments they know are in bad faith while also profiting from those arguments. At least I assume they know better. It’s hard to tell with Owens, but I suspect that is the case.
For her part, Owens has successfully confused what Black Lives Matter is all about. That takes some talent. We’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating. There is a difference between a hero and a victim. Owens purposely conflates the two as a way to somehow impugn BLM.
This is particularly insidious and repugnant. There is a reason why we know George Floyd. It is the same reason why we know everyone else that has come across our news feed in the last several years. It is something the civil rights leaders understood from the get go. We tend to react to that which we see. We saw him die. We can’t deny it. We can’t explain it away. Although I guess if you are Owens you can twist yourself into knots trying.
The civil rights leaders wanted people to see them being mistreated. They wanted people like you and me to see them being peaceful and getting bludgeoned anyway. Yet, Martin Luther King Jr, included a sliver about self-purification in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. He did this on purpose. He knew instinctively what would happen. It’s what Owens has done with Floyd.
The fact that she is gaslighting her own is particularly unsavory. Floyd wasn’t canonized. No one called him a martyr. They simply pointed out the obvious. He’s dead and he shouldn’t be. Whether he was passing a bad twenty dollar bill, high on drugs, or had a criminal record doesn’t matter. He’s dead and he shouldn’t be. He’s dead because an officer overstepped his authority and exacted final justice when it wasn’t his place to do so. He did this as a training officer while his trainees stood by and watched.
What Floyd had done or not done up until that moment doesn’t matter. I suspect Owens knows this and is purposely being obtuse because she is novelty. She can make these bad faith arguments and get paid for doing it. The rest of us would be called racist and rightfully so. I hope she doesn’t spend those 30 pieces of silver all in one place.
An idiot can’t help being an idiot anymore than I can help being diabetic. I sure can live in a way that mitigates that condition and idiots can slowly learn and become less idiotic. What’s tragic are those that know better and choose to profit on the backs of those that don’t. Maybe they can drive their nice cars and go home to their gated communities built on an empire of gaslighting. They are the ones that have to live with themselves in the end.
Oh, I don’t think living with themselves is going to be a particularly odious sentence. Better that they face a certainty of faggots and pitchforks wielded by peasants.
1It’s not hard to find a conservative who turns on their own race to make a buck or gain fame. The list is long and undistinguished from Ben Carson to Candace Owens, to Tim Scott to Diamond and Silk ad nauseum.
2They have no difficulty living with themselves. It’s called psychopathy. Limbaugh, Alex Jones, any talking head on Fox….they make their money from lies and they do not care, because the rest of us are chumps who make them rich and that’s the only thing that matters.
They have no honor, no sense of duty or communal responsibility, no heart, no soul. They are dead men (and women) walking, and they leave a trail of destruction in their wake.
3I’ve been kind of quietly watching Candace Owns (watching…..not listening to) for some time and, I suppose, there are really two things about her person and actions that I see as sad. First of all, she appears to have monetized her race by painting herself as a Trumpian conservative to gain fame and money simply because there aren’t all that many women of color speaking out from that part of the spectrum so she chose a path that brought her the best return….whether what she says is true or not. The second, and perhaps even more sad, thing is that there are people that automatically validate the spew that comes from her mouth without question. Is that because she is black, because she’s a woman, because she “says” she’s conservative or all of these things.. I doubt that she believes much of anything she says, but she has found financial gain from saying them. Am I calling her a political mercenary? Maybe, I wonder what she would do if the “International Congress of Goat Love” offered her 3 times the compensation she’s getting as a the “designated female of color, uberconservative mouthpiece”, if she might be singing the praises of long term relationships with Goats. I dunno, but I also wonder if her followers would follow her “everywhere she went”……Dammit that was Mary and her little lamb.
4Another of the same stripe, but little known by most imo, is one Star Parker; who also seems to have made a profitable enterprise out of being a RW POC.
Quite a RWNJ [.. expurgated two word term that gets me in trouble], whose column is carried in our local RWNJ weekly rag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Parker
https://www.wilsoncountynews.com/category/editorial/
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