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Last week I published a widely-discussed article on YouTube’s growing climate of censorship, while noting one surprising exception. Over the last week, these disturbing trends have continued and possibly even accelerated.
- American Pravda: YouTube Censorship and the Curious Case of Candace Owens
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 26, 2024 • 6,700 Words
I regularly watch the podcast of Judge Andrew Napolitano, which has accumulated an absolutely top-flight collection of weekly interview guests from the highest ranks of our academic and national security communities. These figures include Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Ray McGovern, Chas Freeman, Lawrence Wilkerson, Douglas Macgregor, Alastair Crooke, and numerous others.
If circumstances were different, such individuals might currently be holding top-ranking positions in our government and its foreign policy and national security apparatus, or at least be welcomed as frequent contributors to the opinion pages of our most elite publications and as guests on our cable news shows. But instead of bending to Orwellian official lies, they have maintained their firm commitment to the reality of the world and to American national interests, and as a consequence they have all been completely blacklisted from government service and from our mainstream media.
Two decades ago during 2002 and 2003, America had similarly been lied into its disastrous Iraq War by the loud claims of Saddam’s WMDs made by officials of the Bush Administration, claims almost universally repeated by our dishonest media. At the time almost the sole exception to that thick blanket of fraudulent media coverage had been the courageous reporting of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, willing to declare that no WMDs existed, and I’d always been a little curious about how that one bit of honest reporting came about.
Col. Wilkerson had served as the long-time chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and in his latest podcast interview, he revealed—possibly for the first time—that he had been the secret source of that information, personally risking his career and possibly even his freedom in an unsuccessful attempt to save our country from its gigantic looming disaster. We all owe him a huge debt of gratitude for that heroic effort.
Unfortunately, Napolitano’s channel recently received a YouTube Strike and was suspended for a week, raising concerns that it may soon be eliminated by the world’s leading video platform.
Aside from those distinguished older guests, Napolitano also regularly features interviews with young progressive journalists Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté, and Anya Parampil of the Grayzone, which over the last few years has done important reporting on the Israel/Gaza conflict, the Ukraine war, the Syrian civil war, and other major global flashpoints. In a highly suspicious coincidence, their channel also just received a YouTube Strike, leading to its temporary suspension.
However, the Grayzone is now back in service and in their latest livestream broadcast a few days ago they focused upon the shocking case of British journalist Richard Medhurst. He had been arrested and temporarily held by his own government on accusations of supporting terrorism merely for doing the sort of honest Gaza reporting that his own country’s leading publications had completely avoided. There have been other brutal arrests of pro-Gaza activists by Britain’s increasingly totalitarian regime, and I would urge people to watch the beginning of that segment for the shocking details.
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The Grayzone journalists are committed young progressives, so I was hardly surprised that their discussion entirely omitted any mention of a far higher-profile wave of totalitarian-style actions by the British government, targeting individuals from the other end of the ideological spectrum.
Over the last few decades, Britain has experienced extremely high levels of foreign immigration from the Third World, a policy deeply resented by the bulk of the local population but maintained under both Labour and Conservative governments. Until three generations ago, the country had spent thousands of years as a racially-homogenous society containing only the tiniest sliver of non-whites, yet this ongoing wave of replacement-level immigration has been so enormous that recent trends suggest that within another couple of decades British whites might be reduced to a minority in their own ancient homeland, an astonishing demographic development with few historical precedents. Despite being totally dismissed and ignored by the country’s ruling political elites, this has understandably provoked deep resentment in much of the ordinary population.
The result has been the creation of a social tinderbox that finally exploded a month ago when a black African from an immigrant background suddenly attacked young white schoolgirls at a dance party, stabbing several of them to death and severely injuring others. The media attempted to completely suppress the horrific details of the incident and the identity of the killer, so mistaken rumors began circulating on social media that a recent Muslim immigrant had been responsible, leading to the outbreak of violent, spontaneous riots across the entire country targeting Muslims. There are even some suspicions that pro-Israel activists may have deliberately promoted such misinformation as a means of demonizing Muslims and thereby undercutting existing pro-Gaza protests.
In the past, the British government has often exhibited great reluctance to heavily punish serious crimes or violent protests by non-whites, so the extreme legal repression of similar behavior by working-class British whites was really quite remarkable. Although there were no deaths and apparently relatively few serious injuries, some 1,000 rioters and their online sympathizers were arrested, with many of them receiving extremely harsh sentences. The government boasted of sentencing one man to nearly two years in prison for merely shouting at a police dog, while someone else got more than three years for writing an online post calling for mass deportations and attacks on immigrant hostels.
This extremely one-sided police response led to a trending Twitter hashtag #TwoTierKier denouncing the Prime Minister for his blatant hypocrisy, and this prompted the British government to threaten Elon Musk with arrest for allowing such critical political speech on his social media platform. Britain’s prison system has long suffered from severe over-crowding, sometimes even leading to the quick release of convicted killers, so according to media reports, these mass arrests of white rioters have forced the government to make space by freeing some rapists and child molesters.
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The first half of my piece had discussed the growing climate of censorship on YouTube and other key Internet platforms, a trend that now threatens to eliminate the important public voices of the very knowledgeable individuals featured by Napolitano, the Grayzone, and other important channels, despite their restrained language and scrupulous adherence to factual discussions of major ongoing world events. Unfortunately, their ideological opponents such as AIPAC and the ADL can easily trawl through many tens of thousands of words in their transcripts seeking a mere sentence or two that YouTube censors can be pressured into declaring “hate speech” or “harassment,” thereby providing an excuse to purge those channels and thus permanently annihilate all their thousands of videos. I very much hope that this won’t soon occur, but I fear that it might.
Meanwhile, the second half of my article covered a rather strange recent exception to this pattern of strict censorship, namely the rapidly rising podcast career of Candace Owens, a right-wing 35-year-old black social media “influencer.” For the last few years, Owens had been an employee of Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, a staunchly pro-Israel conservative media organization very popular on Facebook and similar venues, though her lack of any substantive writings had left me only slightly aware of her existence.
Owens is a deeply committed Christian and early in the Israel/Gaza conflict, she became outraged at the brutal Israeli attacks on Christian churches and Christian hospitals, leading her to Tweet out a bit of biblical verse that appeared to suggest her support for a ceasefire. This and related remarks outraged Shapiro and many of the other hardline Jewish Zionists in his camp, who accused her of antisemitism, and a loud dispute soon erupted across the Internet, which is how she came to my attention. After weeks of controversy, Owens was eventually fired, and she told her side of the story in a couple of videos on her own YouTube channel, which now became her main base of media activity.
Although Owens had already been reasonably prominent as a right-wing pundit on social media, this very high-profile controversy caused her fame and notoriety to skyrocket. For years, she had been posting short videos on conservative themes at her personal YouTube channel, and these had generally attracted reasonable, sometimes strong viewership. But she now began releasing much longer video segments generally every couple of days, and these attracted vastly larger audiences, often 500% or 1,000% larger than those earlier ones, while the number of her YouTube subscribers quickly broke 2.3 million, along with 5.5 million Followers on Twitter. This subscriber base put her ahead of Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, which after a dozen years of steady effort had become one of the biggest left-liberal channels on YouTube.
Part of the secret to Owens’ huge success had apparently been the highly controversial nature of the topics that she covered in her new videos, some of which involved very sharp criticism of Jews and Israel. For example, she denounced Jewish groups for regularly and falsely accusing all their opponents of “antisemitism.” Other videos explored controversial alternative perspectives on important historical events relating to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and World War II or describing the strong evidence of Israeli involvement in the 9/11 Attacks. Just a couple of weeks ago, she endorsed and retweeted the claim that the ADL had been founded to protect Jewish child rapists and murderers from receiving their just punishment, a posting that attracted well over a half-million impressions.
In a recent conversation, Kevin Barrett seemed to agree that although Owens had only begun discussing 9/11 a couple of months ago, she had already become by a wide margin the most popular and highest-profile 9/11 Truther anywhere on the Internet, and I think the same might be said for the equally controversial issue of World War II “Revisionism.”
Although many of those views had once been quite common on YouTube, years of censorship orchestrated by the ADL and kindred groups have almost entirely purged them from that platform. Therefore, Owens’ remarks naturally attracted quite a lot of interest and support in certain ideological quarters. This included many of the commenters found on our very lightly moderated website, who endorsed her courage in the strongest possible terms, thus bringing her recent activities to my attention. I wasn’t aware of any other individual with such a substantial following on the Internet who dared discuss such topics, so I decided to more closely examine her work.
Taking bold public positions on controversial topics that very few others are willing to address obviously helps to attract huge interest and viewership, but the reason that other entrepreneurial pundits have not done the same thing is that those who did so were soon purged from YouTube. Given the enormous influence that the ADL and other Jewish activist organizations exert over that platform, I was less puzzled by her success than by her survival. After all, if the top academics and experts discussing the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza on Judging Freedom and the Grayzone received suspensions for their carefully-chosen words and might now be facing imminent deplatforming, how could Candace Owens get away with saying what she did without suffering any penalty at all? Her subscriber base was around 500% larger than that of those other channels and the same was true for the viewership of most of her videos, so surely the ADL would have prioritized her removal from the Internet.
Although I can’t be sure, after examining a good deal of her video content, I decided that her strange immunity from censorship might not be based upon the care and thoughtfulness of her positions but instead upon the exact opposite, namely her extreme lack of discernment and the absurdity of so many of her beliefs.
For example, across her entire video collection she seemed to have only spent thirty minutes or less on 9/11 and perhaps only a little more time on Hitler and World War II, though all of that work had been solidly done and even documented. Meanwhile, perhaps 50 or 100 times as much of her content was devoted to what struck me as eccentric, conspiratorial junk. This included a video claiming that our NASA space program had been based upon Satanism, loud rejections of science and an openness to the possibility that the Earth might be flat rather than round, and similar nonsense, along with her many interviews with other Internet celebrities such as Alex Jones, Russell Brand, and Andrew Tate.
Moreover, during the last few months, she has made one particular topic her signature issue, a cause that has been the centerpiece of many of her videos and upon which she has staked her name and her reputation. Through her unstinting efforts, she has become the world’s leading advocate of the theory that First Lady Brigitte Macron of France is actually a man.
When I first came across that notion somewhere on the Internet, I naturally assumed that it was just a joke of some sort, but I was entirely mistaken and have recently discovered that it has become a deeply held belief within various right-wing French conspiratorial circles. From these, it was eventually picked up by Owens, who has done her best to present and promote it to her millions of enthusiastic followers.
Indeed, her commitment to the issue has been so strong that earlier this year she declared in a Tweet that was viewed 7.6 million times that she staked her “entire professional reputation” on its truth:
This episode is blowing up so I just want to say—After looking into this, I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man. Any journalist or publication that is trying to dismiss this plausibility is immediately identifiable as…
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) March 12, 2024
Aside from seeing Mrs. Macron’s name occasionally mentioned in my newspapers, I knew nothing at all about her or her background, and such a remarkable declaration from Owens obviously got my attention. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the hypothesis that France’s most prominent woman was actually a man certainly falls into the former category. The numerous Owens videos promoting the idea had been viewed many millions of times, so I naturally assumed that they would provide powerful evidence making that case and carefully watched them only to be sorely disappointed:
But I found almost nothing at all. The main item she emphasized was the claim that there existed absolutely no record of Brigitte Macron’s existence for the first thirty years of her life prior to her alleged sex-change operation. Owens said she had originally come across this theory in Britain’s scandal-mongering Daily Mail, but when I Googled that publication I found various articles mentioning that Mrs. Macron’s birth had been reported in a local French newspaper as had been her first marriage at the age of 22. Mrs. Macron has three adult children and one of them was quoted in the newspaper expressing total outrage at the lunatics who were claiming that their mother was actually a man.
As an example, Owens seemed to find it extremely strange and suspicious that Mrs. Macron closely resembled her own brother, hardly a great mystery whether or not one has studied simple genetics.
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Laurent Guyénot is a longtime French conspiracy-researcher, who for nearly a decade has produced books and articles on the JFK Assassination, the 9/11 Attacks and numerous other controversial subjects, with many of his works published on this website. After reading my article, he endorsed my critique and expressed his dismay at the total gullibility of so many of his French colleagues:
Very useful analysis, which I will pass around to my French contacts. As someone deeply disappointed and worried by the success of the Brigitte=Jean-Michel hoax among French conspiracy circles, which will have long-term damaging effects on the credibility of many more serious controversial issues, I heartily welcome the concept of “promoted opposition”.
In conspiratorial circles, bitter disputes are quite common and these are often accompanied by harsh accusations that one’s factional rivals are actually members of the “controlled opposition,” namely individuals secretly serving the cause of the establishment by deliberately discrediting its critics and sowing dissension in their ranks.
Based upon the dozen or so videos I have watched, I very much doubt that Candace Owens falls into this category, and she instead seems entirely sincere. But as a young woman who majored in journalism at a very mediocre college and failed to graduate, she may be an overly credulous individual, lacking the knowledge or analytical skills to properly assess evidence, and therefore someone captivated by unlikely but very “exciting” ideas. She probably shares these characteristics with many of the millions who have apparently become her enthusiastic devotees.
In my article, I had noted that it seemed rather suspicious that while so many thoughtful, highly credentialed figures had been removed from YouTube, with Napolitano and the Grayzone perhaps soon becoming the latest victims, Owens remained untouched. Given her enormous popularity and her harsh denunciation of Jews, Israel, and the ADL, we might assume that the latter organization would have made her removal a priority, easily mining her wild, conspiratorial accusations for the statements necessary to procure her elimination. Yet she seemed completely immune from any such penalties, or even the shadow-banning that would reduce her reach.
However, let us consider the situation from the perspective of the ADL leadership. Although criticism of Israel and Jews can be heavily suppressed, it cannot be entirely removed from the Internet, and someone, somewhere will be ranked as the most prominent advocate of those ideas, as well as others such as 9/11 conspiracy theories. So if such a “leader of the opposition” must necessarily exist, perhaps a credulous college drop-out such as Owens would be the best choice for that position, given that she has already staked her “entire professional reputation” on Mrs. Macron being a man. In Lenin’s words, she serves as “a useful idiot,” who greatly discredits all the various theories that she promotes and advocates.
Just a couple of days before my article ran, someone posted a Tweet that succinctly summarized this hypothesis:
Nick Fuentes “it’s world Jewry”
Candace Owens – “it’s the frankist pedophiles, and the earth is flat and Macron’s wife is a man and we didn’t go to the moon and dinosaurs are fake”
The public – “ok nvm i think ben shapiro and jordan peterson were right. i love israel now”
— AF Hasbara 🇺🇸 (@afhasbara) August 23, 2024
Thus, the powerful establishment can use its control over the media and the major platforms to decide exactly which individuals will become its most prominent and visible public opponents. And I think that Candace Owens might have greatly benefitted from that decision, having been selected as a leading figure in this “promoted opposition.”
On Friday I had discussed all these issues on Kevin Barrett’s podcast:
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My sharp critique of Owens and her Mrs. Macron theory may have struck a nerve when it was released a week ago, attracting strong readership and many hundred of comments, with Guyénot immediately distributing it to his French conspiratorial colleagues. A couple of months had gone by since Owens had last focused on the issue in her videos, but within days she doubled-down on the theory, devoting an entire 38 minute podcast to promoting it and interviewing one of the French originators. In just the first 24 hours, her new video attracted 600,000 views on YouTube along with over 7,000 comments.
Watching it, I was hardly impressed. As far as I could tell, no additional solid evidence was provided in support of her wild hypothesis, although Owens and her French interlocutor both emphatically repeated their claim that “Mrs. Macron is a man!”
Moreover, Owens’ ideas seem to have now moved in even stranger directions. She began claiming that most Western governments were secretly controlled by networks of satanic pedophiles who merely pretended to be Jewish while viciously slandering as “antisemitic” anyone who challenged that deception.
Although I might agree with her that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Israel Lobby do control much of the American government, I’ve never seen any evidence that Netanyahu is a satanic pedophile, let alone that he is merely pretending to be Jewish.
Indeed, Owens’ latest accusations seem quite reminiscent of those promoted by the notorious QAnon movement of a few years ago, which proved wildly popular in fringe, conspiratorial circles before finally disintegrating. So perhaps Owens may now be seeking to revive QAnon, while positioning herself as its new global spokesperson.
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As it happens, there actually does exist some serious evidence that pedophilia and the blackmail based upon it may sometimes play an important role in the upper reaches of the American political system, and I analyzed that possibility at length in a 2019 article, published soon after the Jeffrey Epstein case exploded into the headlines.
- American Pravda: John McCain, Jeffrey Epstein, and Pizzagate
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 29, 2019 • 6,400 Words
But any sober exploration of this potentially explosive political issue is hardly assisted by the wild, lurid charges made by Owens in her podcast videos, and indeed the latter probably serve to discredit and obscure any solid examination of the evidence.
This closely relates to a general strategy often employed by the political establishment that I had sketched out a couple of years ago. Serious investigations of wrongdoing can be deflected by promoting a wide variety of competing conspiratorial narratives, especially wildly exaggerated or ridiculous ones, thereby concealing accusations that seem likely to be true in a huge blizzard of somewhat similar falsehoods.
- American Pravda: Alex Jones, Cass Sunstein, and “Cognitive Infiltration”
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 8, 2022 • 5,400 Words
Consider a notorious example from two decades ago. During the 2004 campaign, President George W. Bush was politically reeling from a series of devastating exposes broadcast by Dan Rather on Sixty Minutes regarding the Iraq War and Bush’s own tarnished personal background. But fraudulent documents were then leaked and carelessly accepted by that media outlet, which was totally humiliated as a consequence, leading CBS to terminate Rather and several of his colleagues. It was widely believed that operatives of the Bush campaign itself had cleverly orchestrated that successful ploy to destroy some of its leading media antagonists.
This naturally raises intriguing suspicions regarding the origins of the Brigitte Macron controversy. As summarized in the Wikipedia entry, the official story of the Macron marriage is really rather odd, given that she is 25 years older than her husband, whom she originally met when he was a 15-year-old student and she was a teacher at his school, nearly three times his age. I have also seen stories circulating on the Internet that Macron is widely suspected of actually being a closeted homosexual, who had undertaken a marriage of convenience with a much older woman in order to hide that situation.
Under normal circumstances, all of these interesting suspicions might have become the subject of serious investigation by anti-Macron conspiracy activists, but instead they seem to have been swamped and overwhelmed by the bizarre claims that Mrs. Macron is actually a transgender man. So I wonder whether this might not have been secretly orchestrated by Macron operatives in order to achieve exactly that result.
An obvious source for the Brigitte Macron controversy is American ideological influence. For many years, ultra-fringe American right-wingers have often claimed that Michelle Obama—the mother of two children—is actually a man, whom they frequently call “Big Mike.” Once again, I had always assumed that this was merely a joke until I discovered that considerable numbers of fringe-activists seem to seriously believe it.
What makes this American conspiracy-hoax extremely odd is that so much of Michelle Obama’s personal life seems very solidly documented. For example, she was certainly female when she was a student at Princeton University and prior to that when she attended public elementary and secondary schools in her native Chicago.
So when do these conspiracy believers assume she underwent her change in gender-identity? In pre-school? As a toddler? The whole idea makes such little sense that I suspect that a large majority of those promoting the theory do actually regard it as an amusing joke, but one that a small, gullible minority among them actually takes seriously. And given the national differences in cultural cues, many French right-wingers might fall into that latter category, concluding that if Americans had discovered that Mrs. Obama was a man then the same might be true of Mrs. Macron as well.
Although I’d never previously paid any attention to this Michelle Obama nonsense, I now wonder if it also might have been quietly orchestrated by Obama operatives, perhaps even including Cass Sunstein, as a shrewd means of distracting and confusing the more gullible anti-Obama activists.
During Obama’s original 2008 campaign I’d seen widespread claims floating around in fringe, right-wing circles that the candidate they despised was actually a closeted gay man, who enjoyed smoking crack with his various male lovers, but I never took any of these stories seriously or paid attention to such absurdities. Therefore, when Tucker Carlson suddenly revived them fifteen years later in a 2023 interview I was absolutely stunned, and began seriously exploring the issue for the first time.
👀 Tucker Carlson on How the Media Covered for Obama's Personal Pleasures in 2008
"In 2008 it became really clear that Barack Obama had been having sex with men and smoking crack and a guy came forward, Larry Sinclair, and said 'I'll sign an affidavit and I'll take a lie… pic.twitter.com/hMc7Th7jRG
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) August 30, 2023
A week or two of careful investigation led me to conclude that those stories were very likely to be true, and may have even involved one or more murders undertaken to conceal the deeply embarrassing political facts. I published a lengthy article setting forth all that shocking information, which actually helped clear up one of the lingering puzzles of his 2008 presidential campaign against Sen. John McCain.
- American Pravda: Mutually-Assured Political Destruction
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 18, 2023 • 7,700 Words
Now obviously it would be a huge embarrassment if Barack Obama were proven to have been someone who smoked crack with his male prostitutes or other gay lovers, especially if those dark secrets might have even been protected by murder. Under normal circumstances, right-wing activists would surely devote their time and effort to uncovering such important facts. So perhaps the best way of distracting those activists would be to promote an even more shocking and lurid story, namely the ridiculous claim that Michelle Obama was actually a man.
And those are my own speculative “conspiracy theories” regarding the bizarre conspiratorial hoaxes that have focused upon Brigitte Macron and Michelle Obama.
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