Just for Clicks?
Mainstreaming the Extreme Through Conservative Media Networks
By Data & Society Postdoctoral Scholar Francesca Tripodi
Once a relatively obscure YouTube personality, Candice Owens is now someone about whom the President of the United States tweets.
While many heard about Owens for the first time on April 21, 2018 when Kanye West asserted that he loves the way she thinks, my research of conservative media reveals that Owens is a central node in a highly influential group of conservative thinkers. This network weaves together outlets such as PragerU, The Daily Wire, Fox News, Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, and more extreme social media personalities like Stefan Molyneux, Lauren Southern, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Coach Red Pill. As a forthcoming report at Data & Society by Researcher Becca Lewis will demonstrate, this map of interlocutors is best defined as “an alternative media network.” Guests and hosts routinely make appearances on other shows, effectively cross-promoting central ideas and arguments in a concerted, intertextual marketing effort.
Actors in this network adamantly assert that they are not the “alt-right,” yet they repeatedly allude to this group’s memes. This rhetorical distancing legitimizes extremist ideas, while simultaneously maintaining their self-proclaimed posture as respectable media.
Conservative personalities also regularly assert that their arguments are rooted in science and facts, and that “the Left” is run by illogical groupthink. By framing liberals as a collective incapable of a rational discussion, they discredit their criticisms as emotional appeals devoid of factual evidence.
By framing liberals as a collective incapable of a rational discussion, they discredit their criticisms as emotional appeals devoid of factual evidence.
Thus, conservative media creators can draw on extremist content while simultaneously shutting down critique as irrational. As a way to map this circular logic, I unpack the tangled web these conservative media creators weave. By focusing on two influencers, James Damore and Candace Owens, I carefully demonstrate how they traversed alternative media landscapes — starting out as hosts or guests on YouTube series before finding a sympathetic home at Fox News. In doing so, I aim to provide further evidence that an increasingly visible group of conservative media personalities are intentionally creating affiliations with extremist positions, while simultaneously positioning the Left as the “creators” of the alt-right movement.
To be sure, some tactics of the Left are debatable and necessitate a reflexive understanding of their unintended consequences, but claiming that “The Left” are to blame for the rise of the so-called “alt-right” is equally problematic. Rather than blaming the current political climate on one side or another, what this post aims to illustrate is that more research is needed on how key influencers are undeniably connected to far-right content, commentators, and keywords.
James Damore
In July 2017, Google employee James Damore circulated a memo through the company’s internal mail arguing (among other things) that gender disparities in tech are natural due to biological differences between men and women: He argued that women are more social, artistic, extroverted, and neurotic. Sections of the memo were later published on Gizmodo and Damore was fired by Google. Four days later, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Damore in which he argued that he had been fired for raising questions about how cultural taboos cloud thoughts about gender diversity in the tech sector.
After the WSJ opinion piece, Tucker Carlson had Damore as a guest on his primetime television interview show, where he introduced Damore by way of a monologue touting his academic credentials and arguing that Google employees who suffer from “emotional outrage” are regularly censoring “right-of-center” content creators. Approximately two months later, Damore starred in PragerU’s “What Happens When Google Disagrees With You?,” a five-minute video in which he reiterated the points made on Carlson and claimed to just shed light on “the facts.”
While Damore claims to be a libertarian and eschews any overt relationship with the “alt-right,” many of his media appearances involve a symbolic connection to “alt-right” imagery, slang, or arguments. For example, Damore appeared on The Rubin Report (September 7, 2017) to critique liberal intolerance and reassert that his views were based on scientific evidence. During Q&A, Rubin read a question littered with “alt-right” references and smiled while he asked Damore if he would “join the people of Kekistan to create an algorithmic weapon to surpass Metal Gear.” Chuckling, Damore responded, “I guess I would.”
While Damore and Rubin laughed off the comment, Rubin’s decision to read the audience question aloud demonstrates his intent to signal to his audience. The reference to “Metal Gear,” the titular super weapon of the long-running video game, appeals to gamers–and “Kekistan” is a dog whistle referencing a fictional country created by users on 4chan’s /pol/ board. Certain white nationalists also discuss an ironic belief in a “Kek deity,” and I personally witnessed multiple “Kekistani” flags while I was doing ethnographic research at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In addition to his appearances on The Rubin Report, Damore also appeared on Milo Yiannopoulos’ (August 21, 2017), Stefan Molyneux’s (November 14, 2017), and Coach Red Pill’s (November 19, 2017) respective YouTube shows. In each of these videos, the hosts assert that Damore’s opinions are truth and backed by indisputable evidence. Molyneux goes even further, insisting that diversity is “pseudo-science.” Among all the hosts, there is a consistent theme: That Damore values “truth over comfort,” and that critiques of Damore’s memo are only emotional appeals.
Among all the hosts, there is a consistent theme: That Damore values “truth over comfort,” and that critiques of Damore’s memo are only emotional appeals.
In the Molyneux video, Damore argues that diversity initiatives are racism: “We want to avoid classifying people just by their group identity. That is racism, that is sexism.” Not only is this statement untrue, it inverts the concepts by stripping away the role of power in racist and sexist expressions. Similarly, in his August 21 appearance on “MILO Meets James Damore,” Damore reaffirms Yiannopoulos’ perspective that “social justice mania” prevents people from logically looking at problems. Damore further claims that YouTube openly censors conservative content. Interestingly, Damore’s evidence to prove this accusation is driven by, in his own words, anecdotes, “…the way that their bias goes into the actual algorithms that label which videos are harmful — that actually has a huge effect. And we’ve see it a lot, at least anecdotally with a lot of conservative YouTube uploaders.” While he has no evidence to prove that a blacklist of conservatives exists, even arguing that he’s never seen the document, he claims he has heard many people “talk about it.”
On multiple occasions, both Molyneux and Coach Red Pill describe how being a conservative in Silicon Valley is akin to being gay or “like the Jews in Nazi Germany.” In the words of Damore, “Those who aren’t ‘the Left’ feel like they need to stay in the closet and not reveal themselves, and actually mask and say things they don’t believe.” In several of these videos, the hosts ask the audience to support Damore by going to spaces associated with extremism. On Coach Red Pill, the host calls on the “angels at 4chan” to get access to the supposed blacklist of conservatives. During Molyneux’s video, the host urges the audience to support Damore on WeSearchr, a crowdfunding website created by “alt-right” personality Charles Johnson.
So while James Damore might frame his messages as straightforward, fact-based conservatism, his media appearances also simultaneously push audiences to search out spaces like 4chan and WeSearchr which host intolerant “alt-right” groups and active white supremacist figures.
Candace Owens
Candace Owens, also known as “Red Pill Black,” is a vlogger who rose from relative obscurity just last year after she made a video depicting her “coming out” as conservative to her parents. She tells them that she had to leave “the Left” because they were incapable of seeing facts that countered conservative “truths.” Her series “Myth of a Coon” (now called “The Declaration”) frequently calls on the same rhetorical strategies as Damore. While Damore focuses on countering claims of sexism, Owens’ central focus is arguing that racism no longer exists in the United States.
In one of her most popular YouTube videos, “I Don’t Care About Charlottesville, the KKK, or White Supremacy” (August 16, 2017) Owens diminishes the importance of the Unite the Right rally and, similar to the language used by the President, blames the violent acts of Charlottesville on “both sides” — comparing neo-Nazis and counter-protesters to the Bloods and Crips. Ultimately, Owens blames the media for inciting a “fake racial war” and claims that they only report on white supremacists to make Trump look bad, alluding to a similar conspiracy theory peddled by Alex Jones.
Like Damore, Owens also made an appearance on The Rubin Report (September 28, 2017), where she put forward similar central arguments: inequality is a myth, “the Left” is intolerant, and the mainstream media are liars. In doing so, she also normalizes extremist keywords.
For example, she makes frequent and flippant use of the phrase “red pill,” while claiming that associating the phrase with the “alt-right” is leftist propaganda. This move reduces the phrase’s power and contextual importance. Internal research at Data & Society has found that “alt-right” media outlets (e.g., The Right Stuff and Radix Journal) have devoted entire sections of their websites to the concept of “red pilling,” using the metaphor to describe an awakening into racist and anti-feminist thought. 4chan /pol/ users frequently argue that being truly “redpilled” requires embracing other more foundational beliefs (i.e., that feminism is just one symptom of a much bigger problem or that white males are subject to a broader campaign of diminishment). Interestingly, Fox News relied on Candace Owens’ convenient interpretation of the term, claiming that “taking the red pill” meant simply “leaving the left” and aligning with conservatism.
In addition to mainstreaming the concept of “red pilling,” Owens works for Turning Point USA — a conservative grassroots organization on college campuses — as their Communications Director. While gaining visibility through Turning Point’s network, she was recently the star of two videos for PragerU, where she furthers the assertion that racism in the United States no longer exists. In one video, titled “Playing the Black Card,” Owens suggests that the “Black Card” gets Black people out of personal responsibility. She states, “I left college with a mountain of debt and no practical skills. I had just $80 dollars in my bank account and very few prospects. I could have given up. I could have dug deep into my history and declared myself a natural product of ancestral oppression. I could have played the black card and absolved myself of all responsibility for my own stupid decisions.”
Ultimately, choosing to have guests like Owens or Damore on their programming allows organizations like Fox News, PragerU, The Rubin Report, and Turning Point to profit from extremist rhetoric despite their strategic positioning as simple purveyors of mainstream conservatism. This argument is further supported by pursuing the “related channels” section of YouTube. Drawing from an article on how Google suggests related content, the proof is in the algorithmic recipe.
The “related channels” on Owens’ YouTube channel places Fox News and The Rubin Report alongside the channels of Lauren Southern and Alex Jones. On PragerU’s channel, the related content includes other extreme viewpoints, like Stefan Molyneux and Carl Benjamin (a.k.a. Sargon of Akkad). These linked associations indicate that people are prompted to consume this media as part of the same ideological project. While conservative media channels like PragerU may try and strategically distance themselves from extremist thinkers, their use of cross-promoting guests like Damore and Owens algorithmically connects them.
Yet the question remains: What is really at stake in this media manipulation effort? During the 2017 “Restoration Weekend” put on by the Freedom Center, Dave Rubin led a panel titled “Second Thoughts: How Leftism Creates Conservatives.” He introduced his fellow panelists — James Damore, Candace Owens, and Tammy Bruce (former NOW President who regularly appears on Fox News) — and then put it succinctly: his goal was to “change minds.” Cases like Owens and Damore demonstrate how messaging designed to undermine efforts for social equity are turning into “everyday ideas” shareable via Facebook. The goal of this content is not to reach conservatives who already agree with their logic, but rather to expand their audience to include people who might not otherwise consider themselves conservative.
In order to redefine the political center, conservative media personalities use a two-prong approach: setting up “the Left” as overly emotional, all the while creating space for people to espouse far-right ideological positions.
Such an effort is clearly working, not only with celebrities (e.g. Rosanne Barr and Kanye West), but also academics and journalists — a number of whom are now routinely claiming that “the Right” is more tolerant of diversity and that the “hysterical left” is to blame for the country’s conservative shift. Even The New York Times, which conservatives routinely point to as a bastion of “the Left,” has written a few articles arguing that radical liberalism is the reason why the “alt-right” has gained traction. Not only does this kind of coverage reify one of the central arguments of this network, it also distances conservative media producers who profit from extremist ideology.
For additional research on algorithmic content curation and ideological amplification, read the author’s recent Data & Society report, Searching for Alternative Facts: Analyzing Scriptural Inference in Conservative News Practices.
