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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Ramsey. A couple of decades ago, a modestly talented writer of outsized ego named Tucker Carlson appeared on the scene.
He was a bowtie-wearing conservative, writing wise-ass profiles of George Bush and Hillary Clinton and the like. But he became, over time, the voice of the aging, angry white man. The voice of white nationalism and extremist politics. His audience got so large that Tucker Carlson has been talked about as a presidential candidate, a successor to Donald Trump.
Then we saw his emails and his text messages disclosed in Fox's legal battle with Dominion Voting Systems. Those messages made it plain that Carlson's cynicism is even larger than his ego or his ratings. In private, he actually despised Donald Trump, hated him passionately, he said. He expressed disdain for his bosses at Fox and talked about women in the most disgusting terms.
His behavior hurt Fox's case with Dominion, and we assume that was a big factor in that enormous financial settlement. Last week, it cost Carlson his perch at 8 p.m. on Fox, and he was fired on Monday. So what does this all mean for Fox News and for the brand of aggrieved right-wing politics that Carlson most effectively championed?
I'm joined now by two colleagues who are staff writers here. Andrew Morantz follows politics in the media very closely, and Kellef Asane wrote about Tucker Carlson in The New Yorker. Okay, about six years ago, you profiled Tucker Carlson, and I want to get a sense from you initially how he got to where he is today. The father, Coughlin, of...
of the right, of the far right, and a supporter of conspiracy theories and a great deal else. So how did he travel this path? Is it pure cynicism, or did he actually change? I mean, it's amazing. You're right. He did start off as a magazine journalist. He wrote what I think are some pretty great pieces for the Weekly Standard. He wrote a piece for Talk magazine, an early profile of George W. Bush, a short-lived journalist.
venture. And from what I understand, David, you're here as the editor of the New Yorker magazine to make an announcement, a hiring that's going to shock the media world. Is that correct? Is Tucker returning to long form journalism? Yeah. Imagine the tragedy. Imagine the tragedy and the traffic. So yes, he has this career as a writer. And then
sort of semi-accidentally, semi-on-purpose, becomes first a figure on TV and then a TV host. He's a host on CNN doing Crossfire, and he has this famous confrontation with Jon Stewart, who says, you know, you're hurting America. Um...
He has a short-lived show on PBS. He goes to MSNBC, where he's working for a time with Rachel Maddow, before she was well-known. And he starts working with Fox News. At the time I profiled him, his show was known for Confrontation. But as his show evolved, it became less of a site for Confrontation and
And it became more writerly, really. It became more known for what they call the A block, where he would deliver this long monologue. Funnily enough, it was similar in structure sometimes to Rachel Maddow. Yeah.
And doing that, he was able to sort of start to shape this identity. And this identity was a little more or a lot more populist, right? He was going to talk about immigration as a big threat to America. And it was also kind of weird. Tucker Carlson's show, more than anything else on Fox News, it failed.
It felt like this moment. It felt like the internet social media age where weird stuff was percolating through to the mainstream. I think that's really the signature of the Trump era. And he was able to express that on TV. And unlike a lot of his colleagues at Fox News, he was able to express that on TV.
He made news. He set the agenda. People are wondering, what is Tucker going to be saying tonight? Okay, now, Andrew Morantz, you've also written quite a lot about Tucker Carlson and a great deal about social media and its intersection with television. What danger did Tucker Carlson, in your view, pose to the Republic? How do you respond to...
The notion that he was dangerous to the public. Well, so that's... I think he was dangerous. And so I think one has to hold in one's mind both, you know, he's a talented broadcaster and also he's a kind of rhetorical demagogue. Which is exactly the description Dave Chappelle gave of Donald Trump. One can both revel and laugh at that, but, you know, I think it would be irresponsible to lose track of the fact that clearly Tucker was, you know, he was constantly...
Dog whistling is almost too soft a term. I mean, he would say immigrants make our country poorer and dirtier. He would say, you know, one more recent thing is that he didn't refer to transgender people. He referred to transgenderist people as if this isn't an identity. This is a nefarious ideology that's Trojan horsing its way into our culture. So I think that one of the things that a very talented demagogue like Tucker Carlson can do is...
put you on the back foot if you're critiquing him. And Trump is good at this, too, in a different way of never quite coming out and saying the thing, but coming as close as possible to saying it so that if you're then in the position of critiquing them, you say you sound a bit unhinged, right? You sound hysterical. He also and we're talking about him in the past tense, even though I have every inclination to think that there's something ahead for Tucker Carlson, I doubt very much. I think we'd all agree that he's going to disappear somehow.
He also had an incredible demagogic penchant for using the word you. Speaking very, very directly, you are being robbed. You are being replaced. You are being taken over. They're robbing masculinity from the American culture. You, you, you. Talk about that kind of rhetorical trick and why it appealed and to whom. Well, I think...
Two older, more conservative, generally white men or white women who wanted to support the patriarchy. I sound like a pearl clutcher making these critiques, right? But I think we should say it plainly when he would use phrases like legacy Americans or, you know, he would say that Ilhan Omar is being ungrateful because we saved her from a refugee camp and now she's criticizing our country. Okay.
Just grammatically, like, what do those things mean? Well, to hell with grammatically. Morally, it's disgusting. I mean, am I overreacting here? I think it is clear what he means, and it's clearly disgusting. And yet, I don't think that it is entirely reducible to that, which in a way makes it more dangerous. Because it's not like he just went on air every night and just said...
white men, take to the battlements. We must restore our country, right? That would be a boring show. And I don't know if it would get him kicked off the air. I would like to hope that it would, but who knows anymore. But he was more sly and subtle than that. So it's not that everything he said was reducible to that, but that was a ringing dog whistle underneath it all that he could have some shred of plausible deniability about, but everyone knew what he meant. And the white supremacists clearly knew what he meant. Now, Tucker Carlson, in your view,
Okay. Did he ever believe anything or is he purely an entertainer that's looking for the id of a big listenership and viewership? You know, I sometimes wonder if he entirely knew. You know, at the time, at the dawn of the Trump era, I sometimes thought that he thought of himself as a lawyer. Right.
Right. The sense that there was this big community of Trump voters and they didn't have representation on TV and he was going to represent them. He was going to challenge channel them because they deserve because just like any defendant is entitled to a good lawyer, maybe in his mind, like any political coalition is entitled to a smart advocate on TV. I am your voice for those people.
Yeah, I think. And then I think over time, you know, most of us don't love living with that kind of cognitive dissonance. And so most of us over time find ways to convince ourselves that the things that we're saying, we really believe it. And so I think it became more, I think it became less of him. So your theory, so he becomes...
the lawyer, quote unquote, for the great replacement theory and a certain kind of white nationalism, whatever you call it. And then he begins to embody it, represent it, symbolize it, and he is it.
Yeah, and I think especially in the social media era, there are these, you know, the way it works often is once you start saying something, then all these people who disagree with you come at you and yell at you about it. And it's really tempting to double down and say, yeah, those people who disagree are terrible. I'm going to say more of this. Okay, for the last year, Andrew's been, when he visits the office, he comes in and the first thing he says is, Tucker Carlson.
could be president of the United States. He could run and he could possibly win. Andrew, maybe elaborate a little bit on why you do come into my office and start talking about this possibility. Yeah. Look, the chair is obviously hugely important. That chair is the most powerful thing about him. But he's clearly rhetorically skilled. And again, to Kay's point, he's clearly weird and in touch with
future potential coalitions in a way that Bill O'Reilly is not and in a way that Megyn Kelly wasn't in a way that, you know, Laura Ingraham isn't. I mean, those people have the old school conservative DNA, but they don't seem to be willing to cast around for the newer, weirder thing.
In a way that Tucker did in a way that, frankly, Trump does, too, in a way that you could say, why shouldn't we nuke a hurricane? Why shouldn't we buy Greenland? Why shouldn't we? You know, all these weird things that we get used to Trump doing. Tucker was doing that night after night. And so I think that's a big source of his power.
I think arguably Tucker has been going around giving campaign speech. I mean, he spoke in Iowa in last year, shortly before the midterms at the Family Leadership Summit that you don't just accidentally get on a plane to Iowa. Right. He's clearly testing the waters. And when he gives those speeches, I think he's incredibly impressive. Again, impressive in an amoral mercenary way. I find it scary, but I think it's very impressive. He clearly has a touch that, you know, Ron DeSantis doesn't seem to have.
Okay, what do you think the future is for Tucker Carlson?
and be less influential, be a smaller figure. And I think that that is often the most likely path for people that are very popular and very skilled and they're leaving a big platform. There's a lot of opportunities for Tucker Carlson to go to a smaller platform and make a lot
of money and be really successful, be somewhat influential, but it's still a little bit different than being part of the Fox News being blasted into all these homes every night. I think the other interesting question is, what happens to Fox News? On the day that it was announced that Tucker was fired, there was precisely one person at Fox News who was willing to joke about
it. And that was Greg Gutfeld, who's a co-host of The Five, which is on some nights, on some days, their most popular show at 5 p.m., also has his own late night show at 11 p.m., which often beats the network late night shows in the ratings. And, you know, there's an argument to be made that now Greg Gutfeld is one of the defining voices of Fox News. And it's very different sensibility from Tucker's sensibility. It's snarkier. It's
sillier. And, you know, it'd be interesting to see if Fox News is going more in the Gutfeld direction in the post-Carlson era. I just, Kay, I have to say, you and I can civilly disagree about whether Tucker's a dangerous authoritarian or whatever, but I will never go with you into thinking Greg Gutfeld is funny. I'm sorry. I can't go that far. This is the real question. Those are the limits. That's where we set the limits here. Well, that leads me to this question.
Yes, he's fired. He's gone. Other people have been fired from Fox News. But we're also in the midst of a media revolution that continues to evolve, right? Cable television is declining. The average age of the Fox News viewer is...
It's at 70 or around there. Clearly, this constellation, this world is changing. We have on the New Yorker Radio Hour today another piece that Claire Malone is providing about Candace Owens. And she suggests a new world, a new generation, younger than Tucker Carlson, not white, not male.
Now, the economics of this, this universe is changing, but it all has to do with audience as well. Could Candace Owens, a young black woman, a conservative, succeed on Fox at 8 o'clock in the same way? What do you think, Kay?
I think Candace Owens would have trouble at this moment in Fox News because, not because she's Black, but because she's kind of unpredictable. You know, she's known, you know, partly for her broadcasting, but also for her feuds. I would guess that one thing that Fox News would want in that Tucker Carlson chair is someone who's a little more predictable, a
a little more loyal, a little less of a loose cannon. So I would think that would be the issue for someone like Candace Owen. Andrew? Well, look, I mean, you know, Tucker Carlson was doing almost explicitly a kind of white male identity politics on his show.
If that chair were to be filled by Candace Owens, she would be doing a different kind of show. But that's not to say that they wouldn't be able to make it work, right? These movements, these concepts, these ideologies, they can be pretty flexible, right? So it's not like when you had female anchors on Fox News, you know, the patriarchy was over at Fox News or otherwise. And if...
a person of color or a woman or both were to fill Tucker Carlson's chair, they would do it in a different way, but there would be a way to integrate that person's individual identity with the larger project.
You know, the whole time we're having a conversation like this, we're trying to, you know, guess what's in Tucker's mind or heart or whatever. And ultimately, that's not what matters. What matters is what he shows on the screen. And, you know, these words tend to lose meaning. Words like fascist tend to lose meaning because people throw them around at whoever they don't like. But if you watch The End of Men...
the Tucker Carlson original series about how sperm counts in the West, in air quotes, are declining. And what we need to do is get birth rates up so that well-ordered regiments of men can take back order and control. And the visual montages on the screen show
I say in the piece look like an Abercrombie ad directed by Lenny Riefenstahl. I mean, the aesthetics of it are fascist. I don't think he's got militias that he's controls. I mean, I don't I'm I haven't lost, you know, the scale of this here. But if the most powerful seat in conservative media is controlled by someone who is willing to put out aesthetics into the world that strike me as fascist aesthetics with a capital F, like the clinical academic definition, then
That's not a good thing. I don't think I don't think we need to jump to the conclusion that the country is doomed immediately, but it can't be good. But again, part of part of what was so significant about this is that it was happening in the mainstream. Right. Like this is this is one of the this is one of the defining qualities of politics over the last 10 years is that all this stuff that you think would be sort of fringy.
right, on the right, and I will say on the left, shows up in the mainstream. And so you have someone like Tucker Carlson, you watch his show, you know, especially as the major advertisers kind of fled. It's, you know, he's doing these kind of slightly weird monologues. Then you've got a bunch of ads for Mike Lindell, My Pillow, and then you're back on the show. It doesn't feel like you're watching like normal mainstream American TV. It feels like you've stumbled down a rabbit hole.
Andrew Marantz, Kelly Fasane, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Andrew Marantz and Kelly Fasane are both staff writers at The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come.
I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Earlier in the show, we talked about Tucker Carlson's ouster from Fox. The Dominion lawsuit laid bare just how afraid Fox News was of the competition, afraid of driving its viewers away with news they did not want to hear. Fox was for a long time the only big conservative news outlet out there, but there's now a whole universe of right-wing and far-right media. One of the major players here is The Daily Wire.
Along with news, it produces documentaries, TV shows, and especially podcasts. Podcasts that feature such voices as Ben Shapiro, who talks a lot about woke college campuses, and the men's movement guru Jordan Peterson. And in this largely white male group, Candace Owens stands out. Owens got her start on YouTube early in the Trump era with a coming out spoof that went viral. Mom, Dad, I'm a lesbian. I like girls.
Oh, sweetheart. We always knew. The bottom line, we just want our children to be happy. We love you regardless. Brave soul. Oh, thank you guys. Oh, also, I think I might be a conservative. I understand. She then emerged as a fierce supporter of President Trump. One more question, because I'm sure you've gotten this question tons of times, but are you going to run in 2024? And if so, can I be your vice president? Yeah.
Oh, that's very interesting. Wow, what a good choice that would be. That would be fantastic. Trump, Owens, 24. So, yeah, I think it's a great, you would be fantastic. And, you know, I really appreciate the job you do and everybody does. Owens commands an online following in the millions, and she's leading a movement to bring right-wing politics to a younger and
and more female audience. Our media reporter Claire Malone went to see Candace Owens recently at the offices of the Daily Wire in Nashville. Now, Claire, I just had a long talk about Tucker Carlson with our colleagues, Kelly Fasane and Andrew Morantz. And we talked about whether someone like Candace Owens could succeed in his time slot on Fox News. What do you think?
I think that's a really interesting question. And I think purely on the mechanics of that job, and by that I mean speaking directly to a camera, monologuing, not having other people you need to bounce off of, Candace can do that. She can do it in the same way that Tucker Carlson or Rush Limbaugh or any other conservative talk radio person can do it. So I think she could actually do the job. There are two other factors that I think maybe would prevent her from actually doing that.
One is, I would say, the sexism of cable television, right? I think
People at Fox, people who run Fox probably think that they need an anchorman in that 8 p.m. slot. I get a lot of notes whenever I'm on a podcast about the way I speak or my cadence. And I'm sure Candace would also get those. Lots of women get that feedback. So it's easier to pillory a woman in that way. And I think that would probably hold Fox execs back from giving a woman the 8 p.m. slot, personal opinion. Yeah.
Then the second factor, I think, is I don't know if Candace would want to do something like that. Even though the 8 p.m. slot on Fox News is a huge prestige spot in conservative media, she likes that she's speaking to a younger and specific audience on the Daily Wire. She gets to do her own thing. And I think she's got pretty free range. So I'm not sure if she would actually accept a position at Fox News. So, Claire, very often in...
A story like this, there's a rosebud moment, a pivot moment in somebody's life that turns them from one thing to another. Here's a woman that began her, at least in her youth, she was a pretty standard issue liberal, African-American, left-leaning. Was there a moment where she changed radically or where she sees that she changed radically? There's a really pivotal moment in Candace's life when she's a 17-year-old senior in high school in Stamford, Connecticut.
And she was friends with this boy at school. They had a falling out. He was suspended from school. He gets angry at her, calls her and leaves her very nasty, racist, threatening voicemails while he's in the car with three other boys. Now, as it turns out, one of those boys is the 14-year-old son of then-Stanford mayor Daniel Malloy, who would later become the governor of Connecticut.
it. And basically what happens is this turns into a good old-fashioned political scandal. And unfortunately for Candace, she is the 17-year-old at the center of it. She was out of school for six weeks. When she comes back, she's surrounded by her family members and the NAACP. There's a lot of local discourse about whether or not she's just, you know, faking all of this for attention. And I think what Candace took away from that
That experience was she didn't like being a victim. She didn't like feeling powerless. And, you know, I think there were a lot of there was a lot of personal fallout for her from that that moment. You know, she talks about it as sort of a moment where she lost control. She developed an eating disorder.
That is kind of your persona, right? Like, tough, tough girl. Yeah.
Tough life. You know? And I think that it sets me apart. It shouldn't. Like, you heard me speak to this today. I think it's really weird that we live in this society where everyone's hand is being held at all times and they're being told they're amazing and they're great and they're obviously not amazing and they're obviously not great. They could be. They could be better than they were yesterday. We all have bad days. I certainly have them. And so...
You know, life's tough, get a helmet, I guess, is kind of my perspective. If we all sat around and kumbaya'd and held hands like Drew Barrymore and Dylan Mulvaney, we'd never get off the floor. Okay, and to explain that last little jab, Drew Barrymore now has a talk show, The Drew Barrymore Show. And on it, Drew Barrymore had this sort of admittedly kind of awkward TV moment where she kneeled in front of this
sort of infamous in conservative circles, trans influencer named Dylan Mulvaney. And that's a kind of pop culture moment that Candace really latches onto because her thing now is talking about pop culture, being very fluent in it, but also telling her listeners, here's what's perverse about it. And Candace is very, very anti-trans. How does she differ if she differs at all other than the
the age of her audience from Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and that group? Well, I think perhaps first and foremost, though she came into our consciousness as this gung-ho Trump supporter, she
And sort of focusing on electoral politics, we were all glued to the Trump administration and what was going on. I think she's made this interesting shift, and she chalks it up to becoming a mother. She now has two kids, where she's focusing a lot more on culture issues. So pop culture, even things like, you know,
She's vaccines. She's not she does not believe in any kind of vaccination. You know, how the cleanliness of household products. There's a little bit of a, you know, a conspiratorial mindset at work. Right. Be suspicious of everything that's presented to you by mainstream culture. But Candace is really focusing on.
pop culture as something that conservatives have ignored and something that it's important for them not to ignore. And Candace and I talked a lot about her audience and what maybe makes it different from other Daily Wire hosts. So if you think about someone like Ben Shapiro, he has a pretty male audience. And she told me that Jeremy Boring, who's the Daily Wire CEO, he told her that her audience is actually special and different from other Daily Wire hosts.
Teenagers to 90-year-olds consume my content, which is super interesting. I think that one thing that we've realized is a lot of moms follow me. I have a...
A very strong mother demographic. And I think that's because a lot of stuff I speak about that I'm passionate about is children. Does that make sense? I mean, Yoga Pants, who's going to watch that and be like, ah, it's going to be moms. Which I have fun with. I am very proud of the work that I do, especially because a lot of it speaks to moms. I'm left and the right. So that was kind of a very exciting time for me. All right. So she's against Yoga Pants. First of all, I'd like to know what that signifies.
But when she talks about a mom demographic, what other topics is she talking about and why? Yeah. And just to quickly explain the yoga pants, Candice has a sort of half-joking, half-serious thing that American women look too sloppy. They need to try harder. They need to beautify themselves. And actually, it's silly, and she knows it's a little silly, but it's connected to this bigger thing of what she's talking to her audience about, which is basically...
She thinks that women should be women and men should be men. And Candace sort of acts that out via social media, via a podcast. This is what a woman should be. She should cook dinner for her husband. She should garden. She should beautify herself. And she should care about her children's school. What's happening? You know, what's what's what pronouns are they trying to get your children to use at school is an example that Candace brought up to me. So I think Candace is is she's actually talking about issues that
that a lot of Americans think about. Now, is the way that Candace approaches this smart? I don't know. She has really harsh language. She has really a lot of retrograde ideas. Someone said to me, like, I think of Candace Owens as sort of like the Phyllis Schlafly of the Instagram age. Because she's like...
pushing sort of traditional feminine roles. I love my femininity. I celebrate femininity. I tell women this weird culture of telling women to de-beautify themselves and to be more masculine. I mean, it's just bad. It's just bad. You know, I believe that femininity is an absolute gift. Um,
It should be treated as such. I am the opposite of Linda Dunham, I think would be fair to say. Like whatever she brought in, I am the opposite of that. You know, the like girls are like, I haven't changed my armpits and this is encouraging. And like, you know, I'm overweight and now I'm, you need to, if you don't like it, there's something wrong with you, you know, which I challenge you the other way. It's like, you don't need to be a size zero, right? There's opposite extremes and they're not healthy, right?
But to take care of yourself? When did we start looking down on taking care of yourself? Phyllis Schlafly, who, for those who don't remember, was a kind of anti-feminist activist who organized against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 70s. And then you have Lena Dunham, who, of course, was the originator and star of the show Girls, which projected, I would say, I think it's fair to say, a very different view of the world than Phyllis Schlafly is.
She thinks this is a winner. Is she wrong? You know, Candace, again, picks out these moments in pop culture where...
Yeah, you know, maybe an audience does have a reaction to not shaving your armpits or, you know, trans activists being on TV and talking about their experience. Maybe people are uncomfortable with those things that go outside, you know, the traditional, you know, to use the freshman year gender studies class term, the performance of gender. But again, she does it in this really harsh, cutting way.
Exactly.
Isn't there something she said for persuasion? You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. But I would also say that, you know, she the way she tells it, she's also trying to pierce this liberal Hollywood thought bubble. The problem when there is just an applause and you think it's great and it's a Hollywood applause and you see your favorite actors. Like if I was a kid and saw Denzel Washington applauding something, I'm like, oh, my gosh, well, I think he's so cool that it must be cool.
You have to answer that. You have to say it's not cool, actually. Let me actually make you understand what this really entails. Because if you go down this route and you decide to take puberty blockers, again, using the example of Daryl Mulvaney, because we're talking about trans issues, here's what can happen to your body. And here is why I bring you Walt Heyer. Here's why I bring these other people that went through this route. Here's why I bring people that are suing their doctors. You talk to culture because it needs a response.
And just so people know, Walt Heyer, who Candace is referring to there, is someone who lived for a few years as a transgender woman and then detransitioned. So you can't fight culture by refusing to talk about it. Right.
It doesn't even make sense. And this has been, in my opinion, a huge reason that conservatives ceded so much ground to the left because we stuck up our nose to culture. I don't stick up my nose to culture. I consume culture and it is very important for me to contextualize culture so that
for all the young teenagers that are following me, rather than just seeing Dylan Mulaney pretending to be a woman and receiving awards and being applauded by Hollywood and sitting down with Jamiro and thinking, wow, that's really cool. They now have somebody talking about this and saying, actually, this isn't cool. So now they can start thinking critically, which makes more sense to me. So she made some pretty explosive comments about gender during your interview, and she does that
routinely. She's also extremely provocative on race, like last fall when she and Kanye West, who she's close to, showed up to Paris Fashion Week in matching shirts that said, white lives matter. What kind of argument were those two trying to make?
This is the argument that has kind of been Candace's bread and butter since she broke out. She talks about how black Americans, in her phraseology, need to leave the plantation of the Democratic Party. And she's purposely provocative in that language. She's been extremely critical of the Black Lives Matter movement and about George Floyd in particular. Here's what she said on her show the day that the verdict was delivered for Derek Chauvin.
I have to appreciate people that were trying to create a pressure campaign for me on Twitter saying, I wonder what Candace is going to say. Even Republicans agreed that this was the right call. I don't care.
Who agrees that this was the right? I don't care if it's a Republican. I don't care if it's a Democrat. I don't care if it's a white person. I don't care if it's a black person. I am not so much of an intellectual coward that because the mob decides something, because the lie about George Floyd and the way that he lived his life has become so big that we just have to now accept it as the truth. And believe me, this is a lie.
So the lie she's referring to is what she sees as the media whitewashing of Floyd's personal shortcomings. She made a documentary that focused heavily on his history of addiction. And Candace continues to say that Floyd died from an overdose, though that was determined not to be the primary cause of his death. This is a hard question, but how sincere is she about what she says about George Floyd? Yes, we know George Floyd's life was complicated. Nobody is disputing that.
But isn't this just a naked grab for audience attention and everything that goes with it? You're right. It is a hard question. And I talked to Leah Wright-Ragor, who's a scholar who wrote a book called The Loneliness of the Black Republican. And she's someone who thinks a lot about Candace. And Leah puts Candace in this category of racial provocateur, of which there is a long history in the U.S. But
But I think what's different about Candace is the technology that she's operating with. Do I think she believes those very personal critiques of George Floyd? Yes, I do. I think that she's got a very contrarian, conspiratorial worldview. And she immediately reacted to what she saw was an undue hagiography of a flawed person. I also think she can be quite harsh in her judgments of people. I also think she knows everything.
very cynically, what subjects will go viral. And so being a provocateur, talking about George Floyd in this really mean way, she knows will go viral. And this digital age means that Candace's platform technology helps amplify what is a small group of right-wing Black Americans saying really outre things. In some ways, giving cover for
white Americans who think that the George Floyd story is a conspiracy to say, oh, well, look, a black person said it. You know, I'm not being racist if I say this thing. So Candace is providing cover. Finally, let's look at 2024. And I want to listen carefully to this exchange that you had with Candace Owens about what she thinks might be the crucial culture war issues in the presidential race coming up. I
I mean, it really mattered when moms started showing up at the school boards and realizing what was in the books. I think moms are starting to pay more attention to what's happening. And it's not necessarily just transgenderism. It's everything that's happening in the classroom. And suddenly it feels like we're in a custody dispute with the state for our children, right? And I think that moms are responding to that. So I do think that...
me speaking to mothers, I hope it will have real world implications in the election because it's usually moms that are opening up the mail, speaking with their husbands about who to vote for. I hope that I encourage mothers to be more tuned into that sort of a thing. I think that some of the toxicities surrounding feminism
and why I shirk away from it is that it encouraged mothers to just trust the state to raise their kids and you go get a job and be like dad and be like men and this will put you on equal footing. - You have a job though. - I have no issue with women having jobs at all. Obviously I have a job. I'm just saying that there was this pressure
um, that basically said to women that if you stay at home and you are instead spending all your time doing this, then it's because you're serving the patriarchy. And I had that brainwashing taking place in my, at my university when I was forced to take a women's studies class. And they basically, that was the whole point. Men are awful. Men are terrible. And the one way that you can beat men, um, is to compete with them at every level. I don't,
I don't feel that way anymore. I don't feel like I want to compete with men. And I, again, give women permission to aspire to be a stay-at-home mom. All right. Let's leave aside the assertion that she was forced to take a women's studies class. That bears checking. But she is using the word over and over again. It's like a mantra, moms, moms, I'm speaking to you. Do you think in the upcoming race—
that that could really help. You've got all these male culture warriors on the right. You've got DeSantis himself, who's making culture more and more and more at the center of his campaign. And Trump, of course. Do you think this works for the Republicans? I do think it works to appeal to women. I mean, Mitch McConnell, the night of the 2020 election, I believe, said, we lost too many women. I mean, I think this is something that the Republicans know exactly.
And I do think that there's something to be said for moms, for suburban women turning out in elections. We saw in 2016 and two years ago in Virginia when suburban women swung to the right and voted in a governor who campaigned on COVID era school closures and education policy. People vote based on real worry about their kids. You can't find any issue more personal than that.
And I think Candace is poised to have an influence on this group that her peers at The Daily Wire aren't. She's a mom. She's speaking directly to other moms, which is something that her male counterparts like Ben Shapiro can't replicate. That said, she has a really harsh tone and a conspiratorial mindset that I'm not sure would appeal to women in the middle. Claire, thanks so much for your terrific reporting on this. Good talking to you. Good talking to you, David.
You can find Claire Malone's article, The Gospel of Candace Owens, at newyorker.com. I'm David Remnick. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbess of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato and Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Brita Green.
The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund.
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