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Dec. 23, 2025 - Lionel Nation
18:50
Candace Owens' Radical Shift in Conservative Discourse Has Them TERRIFIED

Candace Owens' Radical Shift in Conservative Discourse Has Them TERRIFIED

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My friend, I'm saying this again because I'm constantly in battle with friends of mine in classic, prototypical, snail, antediluvian, paleolithic, usual news media who don't understand what is happening right now, who don't understand how Candace Owens and what has happened as of late just reconstructed everything that was considered to be at one point,
I guess, conservative news platforms.
Candace Owens is the queen of the internet and they created her and it's driving them nuts.
They're coming out of the woodwork, either claiming it, trying to destroy her, but it's true.
It's true.
I don't know if it's because she's black, she's a woman, she's smart, I don't know.
I went through the same thing when Rush Limbaugh came along and they said, oh, he can't be that big.
Yes, he was.
Candace Owens represents the first line of the new media.
And that fact alone is what has everyone so rattled.
Not because she's always right, not because she's always wrong, but because she absolutely is always operating in a space that the old media don't understand and can no longer control.
This makes sense.
She's not playing by legacy media standards anymore, by legacy rules.
She's not waiting for permission.
She's not asking to be liked by the gatekeepers.
She couldn't care less.
She speaks directly to an audience that has already walked away from institutions that once dictated who mattered and who didn't.
And that is the real story here.
And it is why figures like Ben Shapiro, who is devolving in terms of a heap of steaming irrelevance, why folks like Ben Shapiro sound increasingly panicked and freaked and defensive and strangely out of step with the moment they claim to lead.
They're done.
I mean, this is when you throw Ben Shapiro in to try to garner the new factions.
Oh my God, the old media model was neat and clean.
It was left versus right, approved conservatives versus approved liberals.
A handful of networks, a handful of publications, a newspaper here and there, a group, a handful of acceptable personalities who were allowed to disagree within carefully marked boundaries and lanes.
You could argue about tax rates or foreign policy tactics, but never about the legitimacy of the referees themselves.
Never about the narrative managers.
Never about the moral authority of the institutions.
The moment you questioned who decides what is acceptable, you were no longer debating.
You were committing heresy.
You were a heretic.
And that world is gone.
It didn't collapse overnight, but it did collapse decisively.
And little Candice Owens is one of the clearest examples that it is not coming back.
And I love it.
Not because of her per se, but because she is the bellwether of change, the pole star of change.
And what replaces it is messy by design.
It's uncomfortable.
It doesn't fit into a flowchart or a donor memo.
And it's not purely left or right.
It's not Manichaean.
It's not apodictic.
It's not good versus evil.
It's not sanitized for corporate advertisers.
And it's not afraid of asking questions that make benefactors nervous and allies squirm and movement managers freak out.
Okay?
That's why the new media figures who resonate most are not carbon copies of one another.
Tucker Carlson doesn't sound like Alex Jones.
Alex Jones doesn't sound like Megan Kelly.
Megan Kelly doesn't sound like Steve Bandit.
Candace Owens doesn't sound like any of them.
And yet, they are all operating in the same, and I'm going to use this word, ecosystem.
And they're not all perfect, but together they're this breakaway group that is defining how things are done.
If there is an answer, I mean, Barry Weiss, notwithstanding, she's trying, she doesn't know what she's doing, but bless her heart, she's solidly in Trump's camp.
This 60-minute story, I mean, if that didn't settle the score with a bunch of people, I don't know what does, but this, this, again, this ecosystem that we're talking about is built on audience trust rather than institutional approval.
It's really authenticity.
Authenticity over what?
Choreography.
Ben Shapiro is pathetic and he doesn't get it.
He comes from a different era.
And he's relatively young.
You would think and say, where have you been?
Because he lives in a parallel universe in this inertial bubble that doesn't exist within our frame of reference.
Oh, he's intelligent.
He's disciplined.
He built an empire using the old rules, dressed up in new packaging.
The Daily Wire is still a centralized operation with brand protection concerns and donor sensitivities and red lines that cannot be crossed.
You know what they are.
And if you do, you will suffer the consequences.
It's closer to a kind of a modern cable network than to a true decentralized media insurgency.
And that is not an insult.
It's simply a description.
The problem is that when the ground shifts beneath you and you insist on policing a battlefield that no longer exists, you start lashing out at people who aren't actually playing your game.
I mean, this is, you know, calling dissent cowardice is a tell.
It's the language of someone who assumes there is only one permissible moral conclusion and that deviation from it must be explained as weakness or malice or moral failure.
That assumption worked when there was a shared hierarchy and a common fear of exile.
And what's the opposite of hierarchy?
Anarchy.
It doesn't work when the audience no longer accepts the hierarchy itself.
Look at Megan Kelly.
She understands this even if she doesn't frame it in perfect ideological terms.
She's lived through the machinery of enforcement.
She's seen how quickly yesterday's allies become tomorrow's liabilities.
And her refusal to perform ritual denunciations, I think, is good.
It's refreshing.
It's not cowardice.
It's experience.
It's the new, the new flair, the bossa nova.
And the accusation that silence equals complicity is another relic of legacy thinking.
You see, in the old world, if you didn't say something, you were basically countenancing it.
In the new media environment, choosing not to weigh in immediately or choosing to listen rather than prosecute is not abdication or abnegation.
It's often the only responsible move.
And audiences are exhausted by performative outrage, pretend outrage.
They are tired of being told who the villain is before the facts are even agreed upon.
And they reward voices that show the process down rather than accelerate it for, I guess, applause or clicks or metrics just to slow it down.
It's okay to slow down, to decelerate, pump the brakes, as the kids say.
And this is where Candace Owens truly confounds the system.
And I love it.
She doesn't care if the story is inconvenient.
She doesn't care if she's talking about redline third rail subjects.
She doesn't care if it fractures coalitions.
She doesn't care if it makes powerful people uncomfortable.
Not at all.
That doesn't mean every claim she raises is correct.
It does mean, however, she is representative of a deeper shift.
And the audience no longer wants pre-packaged consensus.
They want to see the argument happen in real time.
And they want to watch people disagree without one side being excommunicated as somehow morally unfit, some moral ideological leper for asking the wrong question.
Alex Jones, still the number one, still the granddaddy, the grandpappy, the potter familiarist, the OG.
AJ understood this earlier than almost anyone, which is precisely why he was treated as radioactive long before others adopted similar instincts in more polished and perhaps socially acceptable forms.
Strip away the theatrics and what you consider to be theatrics, because that's really who he is.
And the core idea is simple.
Institutions lie, power protects itself, narratives are curated, and questioning those narratives is not insanity.
It's citizenship.
It's the right thing to do.
The new media figures who survive are the ones who internalize that lesson and adapted it to their own styles and temperaments rather than trying to suppress it or keep it down.
And what truly terrifies the old guard is not any single allegiance or any allegation, I should say, or theory or hypothesis.
It's the loss of enforcement power.
When Barry Weiss or Ben Shapiro declares something beyond the pale, it no longer ends the conversation.
It almost starts it up.
Sometimes it kind of amplifies it.
Sometimes it exposes contradictions in their own past positions.
And audiences have long memories now, my friends.
Clips don't disappear.
Tweets don't vanish.
Moral authority is audited continuously and often ruthlessly.
And this is why the reflexive branding of certain questions as illegitimate backfires so spectacularly and without fail.
People remember Iraq.
They remember weapons of mass destruction.
They remember being told that asking who benefits was irresponsible, qui bono, qui protest, about 9-11, pointing out irregularities.
They remember how certainty was weaponized against skepticism.
Remember COVID?
Remember that?
I'll never forget that one.
Oh, they beta tested us, boy.
That was biomedical tyranny, biomedical martial law.
When those same voices now insist that some topics are off limits, the audience doesn't hear wisdom.
They hear fear.
And the new media are not unified by ideology.
It's unified by posture, by position, a posture of suspicion, suspicion towards centralized power, a posture to position on a platform of openness to uncomfortable facts, a posture, a stature that says allegiance to truth matters more than allegiance to tribe.
And that posture, dear friends, is fundamentally incompatible with the old model of message discipline and reputational enforcement.
Balderdash.
You can't threaten ostracism when people no longer value admission to the club.
We don't care whether we're included.
Keep your club, keep your inclusion.
And Candace Owens is not dividing the right.
She's revealing its fault lines.
And those fault lines existed long before she came along.
They were papered over by shared enemies and carefully managed narratives.
And now they're exposed.
And some people want a conservative movement that behaves like a respectable institutional partner.
Others want a movement that sort of functions as a permanent opposition party to concentrated power, regardless of which party holds office.
And that's the real argument.
And it has nothing to do with personal friendships or motherhood or loyalty tests or any of that other nonsense.
The irony is that the new media figures are often far more tolerant of disagreement than their critics.
Tucker Carlson talks to people he disagrees with.
He doesn't.
Dick Fuente is a why aren't people talk to him?
Talk to him.
You're not countenancing what he's saying.
You're not agreeing to it.
Steve Bannon platforms heterodox voices.
Megan Kelly does it too.
She refuses to demand public penance.
And Alex Jones, again, the best.
In his calmer moments, especially, he emphasizes open inquiry over dogma.
And the demand for uniformity comes almost entirely from those who claim to be, I guess you would call it a defending principle.
And the latest proof that the legacy movement has completely lost the plot is this almost surreal idea of parading Erica Kirk into an interview with Nikki Minaj at a TPUSA event as if that is some kind of moral or strategic master stroke.
How much did they pay her?
When you respond and when your response to a credibility crisis is celebrity spectacle, you're admitting you have lost control of the narrative.
You've got nothing.
And you don't understand the audience you claim to represent.
And this is panic.
Panic dressed up as some kind of outreach.
And it exposes how obsolete Ben Shapiro and TPUSA and Erica Kirk and the rest of the MAGA managerial class really are.
I'm sorry to say it, but it's true.
They still believe influence is booked through stages and donors and sparklers and Gold LeMay and Schmaltz and Camp and vaudeville.
What are you talking about?
Joe Rogan made a fortune just sitting in this kind of desk with little things and what is this, the tonight show?
We don't care about that.
Candace and the new media have understood that trust is built through confrontation and transparency and refusing to launder stories through safe intermediaries acting as some kind of a filter or some kind of acceptable prison.
And that's what happens when dinosaurs try to cosplay insurgency.
They flail and they fail and they overproduce and they clutch pearls and they police tone and they lash out calling dissent cowardice while the audience quietly walks away and we have walked away.
Candace is not the problem.
She's the signal.
The problem is an old guard that can't stop confusing control with leadership and noise with relevance.
Every move like this just proves the new media already won while they're still arguing about seating charts and who gets to appear and who shows up.
That Amfest TPUSA was a cluster.
I mean, it was a joke.
What we're watching is a generational and structural shift, not a personality feud.
The old media right still believe that they can referee the movement.
They honestly believe that the new media knows there's no referee anymore.
They don't understand that we understand that.
And the audience is the arbiter, and the audience is not interested in being managed.
And that is why lectures fall flat.
And that is why threats ring hollow.
And that's why accusations of cowardice and desperation don't work.
As we say in the South, that dog don't hunt.
And this is not the end of conservatism.
It is the end of conservatism as a closed system.
What replaces it will be louder, messier, nastier, greasier, as Aretha Franklin says, and more experimental.
It will produce mistakes and excesses and new people and new voices.
Crazy, wild, exciting, dangerous, bold, reckless.
Genuine breakthroughs.
It will be driven by people who speak before they are polished and think out loud rather than behind closed doors.
Candace Owens, I'm telling you, she stands at the front.
She is your queen.
She is your queen.
She stands at the front of that wave, whether her critics like it or not.
And the old media can adapt or can harden or whatever they want to do.
I don't know.
It can engage arguments on their merits or it can try to enforce these stupid taboos that no longer make any sense or hold.
And history suggests which path leads to relevance.
The new media is or are not asking for permission.
It is already here.
Understand, my friends.
Do not blink.
Do not miss this.
You are seeing a change, a seismic, catastrophic, colossal change in the superstructure, in the structure of everything that's going on.
And I want to thank you for your kind words.
Thank you for following us.
Thank you for listening to my words.
It's exciting to think that I am perhaps maybe a part of a new iteration of a medium that I love and that's informational and opinion and analysis warfare, commentary as a form of martial arts.
That's what I want to do.
I thank you, my friends.
Please subscribe.
Please subscribe.
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And whatever you do, by the way, comment.
I've got some questions that I've put.
Your comments are terrific.
The interplay is sometimes better than this.
Hard to believe.
And I thank you, my friends.
We have a lot more to talk about.
Please don't let this moment go by unnoticed.
This is a revolution, and we have a front row seat.
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