Candace Owens took the CPAC stage to thunderous applause today. She proceeded to trash Colin Kaepernick, discuss cannibalism(!), and finally, to implicate mass media as purveyors of racism.
So, in Candace's world, just another Friday.
A phrase she used caught my ear: mainstream media are "race hustlers." This is a vast improvement over "race-baiters," which lacks directness and specificity. Language is important. Just ask anyone peddling personal pronouns. No, Owens didn't coin the term, but to hear it on her lips is a moment worth noting.
Nike paying Kaepernick untold millions per year to act aggrieved (he just signed a 5-year deal in 2018, terms not announced for obvious reasons) is a deep hustle. A massive corporation giving money to an afro'd former football player to make sad faces is not activism. It's a hustle--to sell sneakers and gear. To draw false equivalencies between race and political parties. To signal.
Yes, she said "race hustlers." We should all embrace it.
Owens closed by pinning the loss of the traditional allegiance between black America and the Democrat Party on mass media. "Blexit is coming!" she roared, and MSM is one of several culprits.
Owens was hardly the only person of color to take the stage. It feels tacky to count, bust a percentage figure of people of color who took the stage today. That's what MSNBC would do, and their readers would argue the number because so-and-so isn't "othered" enough.
Suffice it to say that more than half of the speakers today weren't old white men. More importantly, it didn't feel forced. It wasn't signaling. It just so happens that there are a lot of black, Latino, Asian, and gay voices in the conservative movement today. Some are angry, some are proud, some are inspiring. The point is, they're part of the fabric now.
Contrast that with six white Democratic presidential candidates...
This is my first CPAC. It looks a lot different than I imagined. I didn't expect all these kids! Teens in MAGA hats, college-age groups in matching t-shirts, even a child journalist, maybe nine years old, in a fedora. Aww!
The bottom line: there are a lot of young people here. Inspired perhaps by different elements of the conservative movement on social media, they've turned out...at a political conference. Honestly, can any of you say that you were inspired enough as a teenager to travel to a rally for a political ideology?
It's a little odd, but more power to them. Perhaps they sense the gravity of this political moment in history, and choose not to react by piercing their faces and otherwise desecrating their bodies in primitive protest.
(Some of) the kids are alright.
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