Candace Owens expands her audience by mixing extreme political content with relatable topics like celebrity gossip and dating. This infotainment approach makes her seem entertaining and accessible to young people, who then get drawn down a radicalization pipeline, similar to how the National Enquirer once mixed scandal with news.
Related Insights
The public feuds between right-wing media figures are not a bug, but a feature. They create a 'soap opera' dynamic that serves as a form of political entertainment, keeping the audience deeply engaged and living entirely within that specific media ecosystem, reinforcing their worldview.
Algorithms optimize for engagement, and outrage is highly engaging. This creates a vicious cycle where users are fed increasingly polarizing content, which makes them angrier and more engaged, further solidifying their radical views and deepening societal divides.
Extremist figures are not organic phenomena but are actively amplified by social media algorithms that prioritize incendiary content for engagement. This process elevates noxious ideas far beyond their natural reach, effectively manufacturing influence for profit and normalizing extremism.
A/B testing on platforms like YouTube reveals a clear trend: the more incendiary and negative the language in titles and headlines, the more clicks they generate. This profit incentive drives the proliferation of outrage-based content, with inflammatory headlines reportedly up 140%.
Owens' persuasive technique involves overwhelming her audience with a high volume of small, unrelated, and "suspicious" details. This flood of information prevents critical thinking about any single point, leading listeners to conclude that the sheer quantity of strange occurrences implies a conspiracy.
America's political class is a gerontocracy, but young staffers wield significant influence. These staffers are deeply immersed in the most extreme online political content, effectively mainlining radical ideologies from platforms like X directly into the heart of policy-making.
The addictiveness of social media stems from algorithms that strategically mix positive content, like cute animal videos, with enraging content. This emotional whiplash keeps users glued to their phones, as outrage is a powerful driver of engagement that platforms deliberately exploit to keep users scrolling.
The idea of a simple "pipeline" to extremism is a flawed metaphor used by legacy media to discredit new platforms. It ignores that belief systems are dynamic and people often hold contradictory views, making political journeys complex and non-linear.
The allure of conspiracy theories is often less about the specific claims and more about the intoxicating feeling of being a contrarian—one of the few who 'sees the truth' and isn't a 'sheep.' This psychological reward makes the details of the conspiracy secondary to the sense of identity it provides.
The greatest threat to MAGA's cohesion isn't external opposition but internal conflict. Key media figures like Megyn Kelly and Candace Owens are publicly "beefing," signaling a fracturing of the movement from within that could mark the beginning of its end.