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- [00:01]
A
Time is precious and so are our pets. So time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24. 7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow ups for up to five pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care.
- [00:30]
B
Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with Will Sommer of the Bulwark and my best friend Sarah Longwell, also of the Bulwark. Guys, I got some bad news for you right now, today, as we are taping, Candace Owens and Dinesh d' Souza are having a fight on Twitter. It's one of the saddest things I've ever seen. These two people, they used to be such good friends. And here Dinesh is saying that he. He doesn't even know what to say about Candace because I can't comment on Candace because it's quite obviously a freak show. It's like driving on the highway and seeing a farmer having sex with a sheep. You don't want to look, but you can't look away either. The problems begin when you try to analyze relatable. It is what it is.
- [01:20]
C
Super relatable.
- [01:21]
B
Candace replies. Who openly admits they wouldn't look away if they watched a person having sex with a farm animal. Why is everyone in politics so sexually perverse?
- [01:30]
C
She's making good points.
- [01:31]
B
At which point Dinesh just starts going like, well, I, I was just trying to be. It was humor. It was humor. And. And then Candace just backhanding him again. We just put up the screenshots. I don't need to read it. And. And then finally ends with Dinesh posting a picture of he and Candace Owens, Candace and me from happier days when I spoke at her blexit events, which is like the saddest ever. Sarah, before we go to Will, who is our resident right wing world expert, do you have any thoughts on this? You know, I have. I have some funny Dinesh stories which I can tell you someday. But like, how sad is this to you?
- [02:19]
C
So here's what's important and why. So just so everybody knows, we're only talking about this because we're all in the office together. And this is what we were talking about, all in the office together. So we thought we'd do it.
- [02:33]
B
We're taping from separate rooms.
- [02:34]
C
We're taping from separate rooms. But we are all physically together in this space. And this is an important story because it is about the humiliation of Dinesh d', Souza, which is very important. This is a guy who has been lying to Republican voters for a long time. He basically was one of the first people to go MAGA off the rails. Full conspiracy theorist. He made an entire documentary. I think it was called. You know, it's called, now that we're thinking about animal sex. 12,000 mules. 12,000 mules. I don't know how many mules they are. I'm worried.
- [03:08]
B
Janesh couldn't look away from all the mules. He couldn't stop staring at them. Oh, oh.
- [03:16]
C
But this is actually about Candace Owens dominance, and she is cucking Dinesh so hard here. And the reason he's posting that picture is to say, not just, please don't hurt me anymore, Candace, but I'm yours. Like, I recognize that you have all the power in this situation. You have the deranged fans. They are much more willing to, you know, respond to your sort of Pied Piper movements than they are to mine. And so. So he knows, like, she can put an end to him anytime she wants. The right on right MAGA influencer violence is a tough game because if you get kicked out of the club, you will find yourself, like, on the outs. And she is right now, like, she's the prom queen. Like, Megan Kelly won't denounce her. Yeah. People are, like, kind of scared of her. Even though she's a raging anti Semite and an idiot, she is now up some of the highest reaches of MAGA influencer dumb. But Will can correct me if I'm wrong about that.
- [04:20]
B
Yeah, Will. So tell me about it. Is she. Why is she weirdly untouchable?
- [04:24]
C
Yeah.
- [04:25]
D
I mean, so obviously the backstory here is this kind of the Charlie Kirk of it all and the fighting over his legacy. And she has been. Even before the funeral, she was just sort of saying, you know, implying that Israel murdered him. And now at the point of saying, you know, maybe he was betrayed by someone in Turning Point usa. But in terms of her platform, we'll.
- [04:42]
B
Get to that in a minute. In a minute. People. Stay tuned for that, because that is wild.
- [04:46]
D
Basically, she. She's very unique on the right. She has, like, a lot of issues that they're not that other people don't pick up, like Brigitte Macron being part of a trans criminal cabal. And I think she's just a lot more entertaining than a lot of People. And she's, she's younger, she's, she's kind of more energetic. I think she just puts out a better product. And she's will, like, you'll watch her show. I mean, I talked to a. Well, better.
- [05:09]
C
Let's define better.
- [05:10]
D
I talked to run one right wing influencer and he said, he's like, I'm just entranced by her, you know, like, that she's constant, willing to violate good taste, but keeps being successful while doing it. And I think that's built her an enormous audience. I mean, she has a freak show, if you will. Well, or yes, a farmer pick or whatever. But the one, the one thing I do want to note here about the Dinesh Souza thing is he also said to Candace, I'll wash my mouth out with soap. Which, you know, and Sarah beat me to it. But like, I don't use the word like cuckolding lightly here, but this is, this is a brutal humiliation.
- [05:45]
C
I don't even know this kind of language except for doing podcasting with JBL and Tim for so long. But jbl, this feels like whenever you start talking about, like, bring out the gimp, put the ball gag in your mouth, Dinesh, keep it there.
- [05:59]
B
But, but Dinesh is sleeping. Well, you best go wake him up. It's, it's, it's wild. So here's my question about. So a bunch of the other right wing influencers are clearly uncomfortable with Candace. They would clearly like to read her out of the movement, but they can't and will. When you started talking about this with me off air, I said to myself, huh, that kind of sounds like how they approached Trump in 2015.
- [06:31]
D
Yeah, I mean, I think that's the exact right example. I mean, Megyn Kelly is probably the most prominent figure here in terms of being someone with an enormous media profile who is clearly, I would say, terrified to take on Candace. I mean, people are saying to her, hey, you were friends with Charlie Kirk. You're, I would say, like top five top three right wing media personalities in this country. Do you think you might want to say something about all this anti Semitism Candace is pumping out and the way she's misusing his legacy. And she's, she said very openly, I will not discuss that. And has gotten very, she, she said, people asking me to weigh in on this. You're like BLM protesters saying, raise your fist. And you know, I'm barely paraphrasing here, and I will not do it. And so, I mean, she's clearly, she's trying to stay out of it because she knows that Candace just has a way of obliterating people. People have come at her before Jessica Reed Krause, who's much smaller figure, kind of a RFK junior Accolade. She started taking some potshots of Candace and Candace blew most of her empire up. So I mean it's, it's a brutal world as, as, as Sarah said, I mean it's, it's a lot about like if you get owned and, and she's the best at owning people right now.
- [07:34]
A
Time is precious and so are our pets. So time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24,7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow ups for up to five pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care.
- [08:04]
C
I just want to ask Will something that's been on my mind, which is, you know, we are children of the 90s and back then 90s, early 2000s, I would say one of the reasons that, you know, rap music, one of the ways that it sort of popped into mainstream culture was that there were feuds, right? And people could like engage in the feuds, they could pick a side and they were really happening like there were real world consequences when people died. And so. And it was in the music, right? You kind of knew who was aligning with whom. And the right wing, whatever influencer sphere seems to have an element of this where if, if your main metric is not. Is what I'm saying true? Is what I'm saying useful Is what I'm saying additive to humanity. If it's all just about what's my clout level in this, right? They understand that there is, there is both value for eyeballs in. Because people aren't, a lot of people aren't engaging in the sides meaningfully. They engage in them like the way you do, like, like it's a sport or like it's a musician, right? Something that's almost in pop culture. And so Megan Kel. And there's something. So there's one that, that has always struck me the way that they use the feuds almost to boost themselves and that it gets people who think they're crazy invested almost because you're like, oh, I, I can't stop looking away. I mean, Dinesh Dinesh's original point is it is a, a weird telling on himself thing that he uses to illustrate it. But the idea, what most of us might have said is like a car crash or something where you're like, oh, no, what's happening? Right? Or the. And I think as we come sort of acculturated to reality television and people flipping over tables, like, there's a demand for that from the influencers and in politics, and in order to stay relevant, you've almost got to like, be in the gang and then have a side. And Megyn Kelly, the older generation, the Dinesh, the Megyn Kelly's, the Laura Ingrams, all of the people who changed their personalities a great deal for Trump now see this new class rising underneath them that is like, really bonkers, really out on a limb. They took what that old guard did and they just ramped it up to 12. And now they've got to decide, do we try to reject them and be the gatekeepers, pull up the ladder for the crazy kids, or do we just lean in and say, no, we're with you, and like, pick a side. What do you think?
- [10:38]
D
Well, I mean, Nick Fuentes is another example. White nationalist podcaster is having an enormous kind of Candace, like surge. And while he doesn't have the same platform that she does yet, you know, Megyn Kelly has taken a similar approach where she had an interview last week where she said, I don't know, I hear he's an interesting guy, done some unsavory things. I'm not going to look into him more. But, you know, like Candace, a year or two ago, Megan was, she was saying, I can't believe this guy was at Mar a Lago. This guy's a Holocaust denier. This guy's a scumbag. But now that these people are getting hundreds of thousands of more followers, I mean, she used to take shots of Candace, too. Now she's saying, that person's off limits to me. And, you know, to pick up JBL's point about the Trumpism of it all, I mean, there is, this is exactly what happened in the Republican Party with Trump, where people look around and there's a majority of people who would really like someone do a little gatekeeping on this person, at least in kind of the operative media class. And they're saying, but I don't want to risk my career. I don't want to be the one who gets incinerated for being the first one to put my foot down, so I'll just let someone else deal with it.
- [11:35]
B
So I want to really put a fine point on this with an example of what you guys, I think are talking about. So with Trump, normal Republican elites elected, they had no way to deal with somebody who like would go on Alex Jones and just make up things, right. They were used to living in a world where what you said could be an exaggeration, but you couldn't just be like, like, yeah, I was with some aliens last night. Right. And with Candace, she is willing to go to a place, as a matter of fact, that I think no Republican media figures.
- [12:17]
C
Traditionally that's not true. Tucker has been a. He is a shotgun rider on the Candace Owens train to insane town. And so she's got a buddy in the cockpit. But please, sorry, if you clip.
- [12:31]
B
She does. But what I want to do is tee up a clip of Candace claiming a dream prophecy in which Charlie Kirk came to her and well, it's. I'll just let you guys listen.
- [12:43]
E
Had a vivid dream this weekend and Charlie came to me and he told me that he was betrayed. And so for me, you don't have to believe that, but I do believe that. And it was the immediate sense I got, actually. And I don't know who exactly it is that betrayed him, but I also felt in the dream that it is soon going to be revealed that it's actually inevitable that it is going to be revealed that there is nothing and no one that is going to stop the truth from coming out. And it is going to have international consequences. Take that to the bank. Quote me on that.
- [13:16]
C
Take it to the bank.
- [13:17]
E
Women tend to have a stronger intuition about people. I would say.
- [13:21]
C
Oh, it's women's intuition that's so.
- [13:24]
B
Well, it's a combination of like women's intuition and it is like a throwback, like 1850s America with the seances and, you know, oh, I hear them speaking from beyond. Like, I don't think a broadcast journalist like Megyn Kelly has an answer for that.
- [13:42]
D
It's an interesting empirical approach or maybe a non empirical approach. I mean, in the broader, in the longer video, she argues, she says when people are entering the world and leaving the world, they have a way of visiting people in dreams and spreading, spreading messages. And I know this because my, my assistant was pregnant and I got a visit in it from by her baby. And Utero visited me in a dream and told me it's gender, I think. And to prove this, I'm going to show you the text messages I sent my assistant about her baby visiting me. And so, okay, we've established that people, you know, entering and leaving the world do visits. And then she also said, well, look, Tucker said that his wife has women's intuition about bad guys. And so as a result, that's how.
- [14:20]
C
No, she doesn't. No, she doesn'. Let me talk. I talk about empirical proof. Tucker Carlson's wife does not know how to know when a bad guy's there. There's one right next to you. He's in the house.
- [14:33]
B
And this is why Megyn Kelly has no answer for this, because she comes from a world of like, fairly traditional. You know, you can be as grotesque as you want, but you don't talk about I was having a dream prophecy. You know, like it's Shirley MacLaine or something. She comes from a world where those sorts of like crystals and vibes and chakras are mockable. And Candace is just like, cool. I can roll with that stuff. It's New Agey. I can be both super evangelical and Christ focused and also supernatural. And it's all sort of, it all works together. And like you said, I just think they don't have the antibodies to understand how to handle someone like this, especially when that person finds an audience.
- [15:25]
C
Yeah, I mean, I don't think she's interested in handling Candace. I think she's interested in keeping Candace and Tucker on side. And that's the only thing that matters because Megyn Kelly's survival instinct is the strongest thing she has. And it is, uh, it is like I speak no ill of fellow right wing influencers, assuming they help. And my guess is, is like she goes back and looks at the audience. What's the audience overlap in the podcast world between Candace, Tucker, me. Oh, it's a lot of the same people, sorry. Not going to denounce them and also not going to get on the other side of this. And that's just an indictment. It's both an, it's obviously an indictment of kind of the old guard, but it's important and this is why this whole thing is actually relevant. This is where the right wing is going, right? Like they, there is, there's nobody who's going to put up a gate for this. And in fact, your point about the crystals and this, that is the red pilled phenomenon, right? This is not. They're not Republicans. They're not there for. There's not limited government and free markets and American leadership in the world. Red pilled and maga. They're like pretty. They're like siblings. And they've got this distant cousin which is those old guard Republicans and those, those guys like, but they're, but they're these, these influencers got famous and so the cousins like still come to the family reunion to gawk at their famous family members. They're not going anywhere.
- [16:58]
B
Will Whit, is there a ceiling on Candace Owens? Because I have a weird feeling that there isn't because she, correct me if I'm wrong because I'm not a connoisseur of her oeuvre, but my sense is that she, she isn't all politics all the time. She's a lot of lifestyle with then like, I don't know, 25% politics.
- [17:22]
D
That's right. I mean I, I think part of her appeal is that it's not just sort of traditional Republican Ben Shapiro talking points. She does a lot of entertainment kind of gossip coverage. She was big into like Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni stuff. And those are real gateways to get people in. And I mean she'll post these kind of random fans on Instagram all the time who are saying, you know, just doing my chores or like doing my commute and like rocking my Candace Owens, you know, and so I mean, I mean there is some ceiling, you know, I would hope for the country but, but I think it's at the level of like tens of millions of YouTube views per video.
- [17:55]
B
Sarah, I'm going to put you on the spot. You are a frequent conductor of focus groups. You spent a lot of time over the last like three years asking Republican voters who they would like to see run for president in 2024. The overwhelming response was always Donald Trump. But could you tell the people who was frequently mentioned?
- [18:17]
C
Candace Owen gets mentioned a lot. She has, she has a lot of young women as an audience because she does this sort of mix of politics and celebrity gossip. It has become almost just like where I don't even know that it's right wing. Like it is a. And this is why red, the red pilled phenomenon is so pernicious. It is a, it is a mix of culture and politics that is kind of culture first and also with a mix of reality tv, funny. Yeah. Freak show. And so you'd get these women in their like 20s and 30s would be like, oh, you know, it would be great. Candace Owens, love to see that.
- [19:04]
B
Yeah, that's great. How does anti Vax fit in? Is that part of this like the, in the same way a lot of. There seems to have been a lot of like yoga influencers from Instagram pushing people into maha anti Vax space. Natural. Like is this all part of it? Is It, Is it just anti institutionalism or like, I don't know. Do you have a grand theory?
- [19:27]
D
I think that's a lot of it, yeah. I mean, I think it's kind of this like political lifestyle and, you know, a lot of things that are, you know, sort of right wing coded, but not necessarily traditional politics. And so, yeah, I mean, I think she's obviously been very successful and, you know, we're seeing other people try to do this. I mean, certainly Megyn Kelly tries to do the entertainment stuff too, but I think, you know, she just does it in a very sort of compulsively watchable way. And she's kind of a figure in it herself. I mean, she's getting sued by the McCrones. She's kind of mixed up in the lively stuff. I mean, and so that makes it even, I think, more fun, if you will, for people to watch.
- [20:04]
C
Imagine, like some, in some ways, you got to give her credit. Like she, nobody else thought of saying, you know what his go, Charlie Kirk's ghost visited me. Like, that is, that's, that is entrepreneurial in a way that I couldn't even begin to imagine. Who, who could think that, you know, there's, there's these kids out there trying to claim the turning point USA mantle by going to college campuses and speaking if they just thought for five minutes, what if I just say he's visiting me in my dreams and he has anointed me as his successor. Guys, she's, I'm sorry, but she's, she's quicker than you guys are. She, she gets there first.
- [20:48]
B
And someday in 2032, that sort of thinking is going to make her president. Guys, we're going to be on the Candace Owens watch, I have a feeling for a good long time. How's that for a sunny thought? Sarah, Will, thanks for being with me. Everybody else, hit like, hit. Subscribe, follow the feed. We will be back with more of America's train wreck. It's a little bit like driving past a farm and any.