The Mess That Is Candace

Introduction

Up to a point, you can really understand the behavior of those many people who had friendships and connections with the folks at Turning Point USA as well as a friendship and connection with Candace Owens. These people were caught in the middle, you know? When the controversy first broke out, it seemed to make initial sense that some folks would simply want to say, “Look, I have friends on both sides of this thing . . .”

But there comes a point . . .

Suppose you went to a cocktail party hosted by one of your friends. And suppose further that another friend of yours came to the party as well, had too much to drink, and as the evening wore on, she became more and more erratic. First, she screamed at the hostess. Then she threw three cocktail glasses at one of the servers. Then she started telling people about the beetle people that were crawling around in her brain. Then it got really weird.

Now suppose that someone asked you to intervene. Somebody needed to take your friend home. There comes a point where it is no longer possible to say that you are friends with both the hostess and with this particular guest, and that you really think you shouldn’t take sides, that you should remain neutral. Nope, no dice. If you tried that trick, I would argue that by such a point in the proceedings the one thing you could not honestly say is that you were one of that woman’s friends. Actual friends don’t watch a disintegration like that and do nothing.

Neither can they wait until the implosion is complete, with nothing left but a smoking crater, and then acknowledge that they had been a tad bit worried a little while earlier. “There may have been some signs . . .” Some signs? What does she have to do? Bark at the wind? Chew on the carpet?

Yes, and the parable is about an actual someone.

Lest You Think I Exaggerate . . .

Many others have tried to hide behind a rationalization that goes something like this: “You know, I don’t agree with everything Candace says, but she has raised some important questions . . . the same kind of hard questions that have occurred to me as well.” I see.

Like what? Questions like whether or not Charlie Kirk was a time traveler? Questions like whether or not charges of murder and/or complicity in murder ought to be publicly raised on the basis of visitations in dreams? Like whether or not our government obtained technology from the ancient Sumerians that allowed them to see into the future? Like whether or not Elon Musk is related to the lizard people? Like whether or not you can make wild allegations against anybody in the world based on what movie you watched most recently? We passed by the “go home, you’re drunk” moment quite a long time ago.

Was one of your hard questions, “What is reality, actually?” Is that really the kind of question you want prosecutors asking when you are on trial for murder? Is that the kind of question you want the investigative reporter for The New York Times asking when he is doing an article on whether or not your wife has been having clandestine, adulterous, and treasonous meetings with the Klingon ambassador? When his article comes out, suggesting affirmative answers to all those questions, and you remonstrate with the author about that hit piece, would you be satisfied if he veered into a fog bank of amateur philosophy? At first semester sophomore levels? “When you come right down to it, what does the word truth even mean, man?”

If we don’t know what reality is, then this turns out to be pretty convenient for those who seek the liberty to say anything they want about anybody. Call it clickbait podcast traffic accelerant (CPTA). That would mean that we don’t know what evidence is, we don’t know what reasoning is, we don’t know what justice is . . . or any of those other outmoded boomer categories. Evidence, reasoning, and justice are all aspects of reality, and by this point who is to say what reality is? Aristotle, the boomers, and Moses all got their ideas of justice from the Sumerians anyhow.

So I haven’t even mentioned the Macrons. They have sued Candace for megabucks because she has been claiming that the First Lady of France was a dude, along with a number of other zesty details. And okay, that one had some initial plausibility because there really is a good deal of weirdness around that marriage. But the Macrons sued, which means that the process of discovery will settle the matter—trial by chromosomes—and the Macrons are plainly willing for such discovery to occur. So if that goes through, it looks like Candace is going to be on the hook for a large amount of cash . . . a large amount even for her.

By this point, I would guess that at least some on her team of attorneys may have started to check into whether insanity can be a defense in a civil case.

The Sad End to All of This

There is a much larger tragedy in this tawdry business, and that is that the damage has already been done. Candace has single-handedly destroyed a moment of glorious opportunity for the conservative movement. At some point in the near future, Candace is going to blow up, check into rehab or something, and her hallucinations will cease being broadcast. That will be terrible for her, and for more than a few reasons. So pray for her soul. At this moment, she is still useful to the Left, but that won’t always be the case.

But this tragedy has been much greater than the meltdown of one individual. When this blotcher bulldo moment happens for Candace, do you know what will not happen? The movie will not rewind to the days right after Charlie died, when we all knew that a Furry had most likely done it, and when the Left was most certainly celebrating it—and the idea that the Sumerians were somehow involved had not occurred to anybody yet. The actual dividing line was clear. Everything was stark and plain, but that moment, that opportunity, has now passed. There was a clear opening for conservative pursuit and unified action . . . until Candace filled the entire Conservative World Aquarium with squid ink.

But why can’t we go back to that moment?

The reason is this: Candace herself might be all checked in at Happy Acres, and she might even be making some progress, and lets hope that she is, but all the conservative cowards and right wing simpletons who enabled this nonsense to go on for months are still running around loose. They are all still right where they were, having revealed to the world that the right wing has a large horde of dopamine junkies that has just as tenuous a grasp on what constitutes “a reasonable take” as your average Bernie supporter.

And one of the things that large numbers of dopamine junkies always require is . . . more dopamine. And this is an area where the law of diminishing returns rules with an iron fist, and so the allegations have to get weirder and weirder in order to provide that rush that you have come to crave. There will come a time when Candace can no longer meet the supply, and so when she falls into the crevice of the space/time continuum that the Sumerians sent on ahead for her, their supply will be cut off entirely. Someone else will have to step up to service the weirdos. This is when the beetle people start arriving to inhabit your brain. Or perhaps the brains of your enemies, our lizard overlords. It’s hard to keep track anymore.

If you think this kind of thing is not a real possibility, just cast your mind back to the COVID madness, to the lockdown urgency, to the masking nonsense, and to the vaccine tyranny. How much damage was done during that time by how many zealous enforcers? And once the fit had passed, how many of those enforcers have publicly apologized? Some have, but it has only been a fraction of those involved in the frenzy. Such people like to pretend that the whole thing never happened.

The standard strategy adopted by those who love to blend in with the wallpaper is to . . . blend in. They cooperate with whatever is going on. If normalcy is going on, they be normal. If mass hysteria is going on, they be bug-eyed. If unhinged slander is mainstream, they are out there in the mainstream in their little kayak of conformity, and over the falls they go.

In a similar way, what Candace was doing should have been obvious to any sensible person just days into it. As time went on, and the allegations got progressively more unhinged, where were the adults in the room? There is a huge difference between having been an adult in the room and after the fact pretending to have been an adult in the room.

What is Unique About This?

We have always had cranks and weirdos. We have always had untethered conspiracy theorists. We have always needed to deal with splinter groups of true believers in the mysteries of the dark whatnot. Always. Nothing new about any of that.

What is new in our generation is the credence that is given to such people by society at large—by the leaders, rulers, pundits, and sages. It is not that things are hopeless when a demented emperor like Caligula makes his horse a senator. You have to budget for things like that. But you know that the disease is far advanced when the Senate puts up with it. There have always been boys who felt like they should have been a girl. The disease is terminal when the federal government, state governments, and every major corporation go along with such an insane delusion, punishing normal people—in the name of DEI, woke policies, inclusion of mental illness, and not having majored in biology.

And initially the recent reaction to all the woke nonsense was certainly heartening. The right wing rises! The based are not putting up with this crap anymore! They would never tolerate the idea that a boy could be born into a girl’s body. What utter nonsense. But it turns out they do want to leave open the possibility of an ancient Sumerian being born into an American body. In short, as we were passing our time in this leper colony of a generation, we were encouraged at first when a new batch of right wing doctors were flown in to treat us. But now it appears that their fingers are falling off too.

Reaction Is Not Repentance

So I need to leave you with this. I would urge upon you a distinction I have been making for many decades. There is a difference between saying that “politics is a savior” and saying that “politics needs to be saved.” There is a diseased form of Christian nationalism that is maintaining the former, and there is a healthy form of Christian nationalism that is maintaining the latter. Don’t be fooled. When Christ calls a man, He bids him to cease being a gullible chump.

If we want out of this madhouse, we will need to repent of our actual sins and call on the name of Christ. If we simply react to left wing madness, we will find that our reaction leads us straight into right wing madness. You are driving behind someone on a slippery road, and he loses control of his car. Your initial thought is that he is going to go off the left side of the road, but the nature of losing control means that he might quite possibly wind up in the right ditch. Scary to watch, but it happens.

But make no mistake. Politics does still need to be saved. Our repentance necessarily involves our political life together. Repentance means repentance of all our foul political stances—abortion, Obergefell, easy divorce, collapsing borders, all of it. Christian nationalism in its simplest form means repenting of having made God angry with America.

And so here it is. Christ is the Incarnate Son of God. The gospel is wrapped up in the person and work of the Lord Jesus. He was the Logos of God, born of a virgin, born under the law. He lived a perfect, sinless life, a spotless Pascal lamb. He challenged the corrupt authorities of His day without for a moment compromising with their corruption, and without for a moment reacting into an alternative form of corruption. He walked into the very sink of their Mammon worship, which they were pleased to call a Temple of Jehovah, and He started flipping over tables. They were furious and so they arrested Him at night, and tried Him in the middle of the night. They showed up at Pilate’s house first thing in the morning, very early, before the friends of Jesus could mobilize, and they demanded that His blood be shed. They pressed the point with bloodthirsty shouts, and Pilate reluctantly gave way.

Jesus was taken outside the city, and there He was nailed to a gibbet. All of this was beyond awful, but the worst was about to arrive. The Father was about to turn His face away. God was about to lay across His shoulders the iniquity of us all. The wrath of God that was more than due to the human race fell upon Jesus Christ, the Adam of the new human race. This is what the word propitiation means. The wrath of God, the holy hatred of God, the burning righteousness of God, fell upon Jesus Christ like a hammer blow. God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.

But mark this. Jesus did not die for left wing sins only. He died to satisfy God’s wrath against every kind of sin. Every kind. You name it, and God will forgive it. You name it, and the blood of Christ can reach that far. Are you a surgeon who made a bunch of money mutilating boys and girls? Come to Christ. Are you a therapist who destroyed marriages by convincing women they were being abused? Come to Christ. Are you a click-hungry podcaster, spewing Jew-hate layered over with Gentile ignorance? Come to Christ. Are you a gullible sap, believing stream-of-consciousness speculations and slanders? Come to Christ. Are you a online crusader for purity, secretly in bondage to porn? Come to Christ. Are you a feminist, a hater of men? Come to Christ. Are you a moron, pretending to be a sage? Come to Christ. Are you a black man, despising whites? Come to Christ. Are you a white man, despising Jews? Come to Christ. Are you a Jew, despising Christians? Come to Christ.

Whatever the sin is, it has made your hands filthy. And the message preached is “repent and believe.” Repentance means you must drop the sin, and you come to Christ. You cannot come in carrying the sin with you. You must drop it. But you cannot drop the stain it has made on your hands, and it is yet another sin to try to cleanse your hands all by yourself before you come. Drop the sin, but make sure to bring the guilt.

Christ will forgive it all. He will even forgive you for thinking that being based is the same thing as being holy.