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Jan. 11, 2026 - Lionel Nation
31:18
Permanently Silencing Candace Owens and Brave Americans

Permanently Silencing Candace Owens and Brave Americans

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Okay, let's talk about a case that I never really was that interested in.
You know, there are some cases I just, I mean, they're okay, they're interesting for a while, but there's no, there's not a lot of depth to it, at least I don't think.
Like the terrible shooting in Minnesota.
Okay, we talked about that.
The Rob Reiner murder.
Sad to say, nothing really there.
I mean, it's sad, but there's not a lot of, you know, issues.
A lot of cases are like that.
And when it came to when I first became aware of the various travails of one Candace Owens and her, the agonistes, I thought, okay, fairly straightforward.
But oh no, It's like Mandelbran's fractals.
You get closer and you dig deeper and it becomes more complicated and more complex, which is redundant.
But then again, so am I.
So when I first heard about the case involving Candace and the civil case with Brigitte Mechron and what she was saying about Brigitte Mechron and questions surrounding gender, my initial reaction was that it seemed unnecessary and rather distracting.
It was not something I, again, personally cared about.
I have no interest in anyone's gender other than my own and my immediate family.
And I genuinely mean that.
I genuinely believe that.
And I'm not trying to virtue signal.
I just bore easily.
But something about this situation still made me pause.
Because there were deeper issues tied to other matters, as I've said, power, history, and the unusual origins of the Mehron.
Notice how I say that, by the way.
It's very authentic, the Mechron relationship that has been quietly discussed for years.
Okay?
Because remember, there is very rarely the case when there is nothing to a rumor.
Very rarely.
I mean, it's happened, but sometimes it's dismissed and nothing, nobody cares.
It's just, but when a rumor persists, it's not that it's true, but there's something there.
Either the way it's handled, the way it's addressed or poorly addressed, what have you.
But everything changed when the lawsuit arrived, when the complaint was served, and I actually read the complaint.
22 counts.
It's fascinating.
It's not what you think.
And at that point, this stopped being about online commentary and became about how, again, power uses the legal system, perhaps a la la law affair, to crush speech.
Because defamation is in the eye of the beholder.
And defamation is a category of speech.
It is verboten.
It is the statement of fact, which is not true, and which causes damages.
Basically, that's it.
It's something defamatory.
And libel is recorded and slander is, you know, is spoken.
But it's still speech.
And sometimes in the past, not necessarily here, but people have used the process to shut somebody down, to threaten to sue someone, and it causes people to fold, but not in the case of Candace Owens.
Again, not to speak to the relevant, because I do not know any of the evidence.
I really don't.
But the facts, as adduced, matter.
Brigitte Mehron and her husband, Emmanuel Mehron, filed a 22-count defamation lawsuit against Candace Owens and her various business entities in Delaware Superior Court or what have you.
Not France.
Not a neutral venue.
Delaware.
And I understand, we know why, because her various entities are registered there.
I believe she may have done business or even filed litigation of her own based upon that.
I don't know, but there's nothing illegal with that.
But it's interesting.
And it's interesting to try to explain to somebody.
The president and his wife of France are suing in Delaware, Joe Biden country, for matters that were putatively and allegedly defamatory made here that affected them in France.
Imagine in reverse.
We sue in Lyon for something they said which affected Candace in Nashville.
I mean, it's not illegal.
It is completely logical within the confines of American juridicature, but still, it's interesting.
Delaware, a jurisdiction known to lawyers for being expansive, procedural, and unforgiving.
And dare I say, rather a little liberal, Joe Biden country.
Especially when they see the name of the style of that case, Candace Owens.
You mean the right-wing MAGA?
They always say that.
Right-wing MAGA.
I never hear people say left-wing, leftist, you know, Kamala-Harris-loving.
No, it's always the other way.
And apparently, the Macron's hired the most able Claire Locke, an elite defamation firm known for punishing speech through litigation and chilling dissent.
Well, that's the way some people say it.
Other people could say, well, what they're doing is they're basically reinforcing and they're enforcing the rights of others and trying to seek redress in a tribunal of competent jurisdiction to address defamatory statements that have hurt and have proved to be injurious.
That's one way.
If you're the object of that, you don't see it that way.
You're saying you're trying to crush my speech.
You're trying to crush who I am because of who I am and what I am and what it means.
And you're trying to do more than that.
You're trying to shut down people like me.
You're part of a bigger cabal, a coven, a convocation, a cadre, a consortium, of individuals trying to crush speech which proves politically disadvantageous.
Those are the allegations.
Not my ideas, mind you.
I'm a professional.
I don't think that.
Now, that choice alone regarding Delaware signals that this is not about correcting the record, so to speak.
It's about deterrence and control.
And we'll talk more about this, about how this could have been addressed.
Now, the lawsuit, remember this, and I keep saying it does not merely allege defamation.
It stacks claims, including false lies and, you know, to multiply risk, in essence, cost and duration.
But it also you stack, as they say, in order to cover a panoply, a range of causes of action.
Just like as a prosecutor, we don't just charge, you know, necessarily, you know, murder, might be murder and burglary and aggravated burglary and burglary over this and trespass and aggravate.
There may have been other particular issues that are not necessarily lessers included, but I digress.
You are saying this is law affair.
Law affair is in the eye of the beholder.
It is not about winning an argument.
It is about exhausting the speaker until retreat becomes the rational option.
And by the way, they're also suggesting lawfare is being done in cases versus warfare, where when land is being seized, rather than sending a salvo of soldiers over the border, you file a lawsuit.
You seek a declaratory judgment.
You go to the Supreme Court, you declare such and such.
So lawfare is, again, it's a pejorative when you are the target of such.
Now, in all of this, for a brief moment, this could still be framed as a dispute between public figures.
But then, as I said before, and I'll say it again, then everything changed.
The tenor, the vector, the direction, the emphasis, it all changed when France stepped in and showed exactly where this road leads.
You see, a Paris court convicted 10 ordinary people, eight men and two women aged from 41 to 60, including, I believe, a school sports teacher, an art gallery owner, a publicist, for online harassment of Brigitte Mehrot.
You're impressed.
As you know, their conduct was obviously not violent.
It wasn't threatening.
It wasn't incitement.
It was speech.
Rude, rude speech, statements and jokes and reposts and accusations.
And the punishments were real, mandatory.
I love this, kind of like re-education, awareness courses.
I want to make you aware, aware of what you've done.
It's like student driving school when you get a speedy ticket.
This is awareness.
Suspended sentences, fines, bans from social media, limiting your ability to speak.
Think about this.
What if they had banned your use for a telephone?
Think about that.
You would say, you can't do that.
This is the way I communicate.
This is the way I do business.
Well, well, well, well.
By the way, spoiler alert, social credit scores.
This is what they look like.
One man, by the way, received a six-month sentence to be served at home.
I like what they say that.
Served at home.
It's a community control or a house arrest.
Now, this is not a small foreign curiosity.
Let me tell you something.
It is not gossip.
It is not really about Brigitte Mehron, even though her name is the pretext.
What France demonstrated in this context is how a government disciplines regular folks for speaking disrespectfully about those at the top.
And that is a part of the tenor, the spirit, that which motivates this action.
How dare you.
There's also the how dare you component.
It's not that you've said something which is embarrassing and which is problematic, but the utter, the unmitigated chutzpah, the C.O. Jones, as we say in West Tampa, the gojonis.
How?
Interesting pun somewhere along this, but how dare you do this?
And Candace Owens recognized that immediately.
And that's why she challenged the media framing that suggested some biological or factual question had been resolved.
In reality, all that was proven in that France enforces cyberbullying laws that criminalize speech deemed harmful to dignity or reputation.
Fascinating.
This is alien to us for now.
Now that language sounds reasonable until you remember that dignity is defined by the powerful and enforced by the state.
And one little prefatory point, one little parathetical note.
As you know, in addition to this particular case, there have been people who have been merciless up to and including and starting with, or including, Joan Rivers regarding the status, shall we say, of Michelle Obama.
I think absolute cruel references.
Cruel.
But nothing was done, nothing, obviously, because our society, our jurisprudence doesn't provide for really anything directly because it was kind of an opinion and it damages.
There's the whole New York Times against Sullivan and defamation and malice.
And you also have our heretofore rich history.
I mentioned about the case involving Jerry Falwell and Larry Flint, where the parodies were just vicious.
So don't be surprised.
Remember I'm telling you this, that if this proves successful or deemed to be successful, don't be surprised if one day you don't see Michelle Obama or anybody else for that matter bringing a lawsuit under the same theory and to have that standard of care, so to speak, applied here.
Okay?
Now, remember though, once that door opens, there's no clear limit.
There's no closing it.
I mean, therefore, anything that embarrasses authority can be labeled harassment.
Not just gender matters, but maybe perhaps drinking problems, mental disorders.
The other day, AOC accused somebody of coming on to her and being sexually harassing her when he might have said something crude about, I don't know.
Do you see where this is going?
They're watching this very carefully.
The shadow government wants us canned, canned.
It's kind of a speech orchiectomy, a castration of thought.
They're watching very carefully.
Because remember, my friends, according to this theory, anything repeated can be called cumulative harm.
I mean, this is how free speech dies.
I keep telling you, not with soldiers in the streets, not Tiananmen Square, but with paperwork and fines and complaints and counterclaims and mandatory classes and platform bans and quiet house confinement and the notion of being put into Facebook jail and blocked.
I mean, it's just, it's endless.
But the most unsettling part, again, is how many people shrugged and said, well, this is France.
You know, they do the vive le France, vive le France.
Notice my French.
I know you're just amazed by the level of authenticity in my franchise, because I say to you, anyway.
Now, people are saying that's just France without noticing, however, that America, us, we, the good guys, are moving directly in the same direction, inch by inch, incrementally.
And lawsuits replace debate.
And venue shopping replaces argument.
And civil punishment via complaint and the like replaces persuasion.
Oh, it's coming, my friends.
Remember, I mentioned social credit score.
I mentioned you being shut down.
Remember we did a story, misinformation, disinformation regarding COVID.
Even you mentioned ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine.
Even if you called into question by reading the studies done of the efficacy of masks to stop virus transmissibility, that was considered to be verboten.
Oh, it's coming.
I mean, it's coming.
It's not when.
It's coming.
Now, Candace's role matters because she is not just defending her own right to speak.
She is defending the principle, the principle that citizens may mock, ridicule, doubt, and challenge those who rule them.
And that is the point of free speech.
It's not politeness.
It's not kindness.
It's not protection of feelings, protection of dissent, mockery, and uncomfortable questions.
That's the way I like it.
Freedom of speech is a bitch.
Remember that.
Now, she said plainly that France didn't prove anything about Brigitte Macron.
It proved it has laws that punish speech.
And her comparison was not provocation.
It was logic.
If the state can punish you for asserting an identity claim, convictions prove obedience, not truth.
Remember Rachel Dolezal.
Remember that one?
She said she was African-American, then they say she wasn't, and she got into all kinds of problems.
You could say you're transitioning from a man to a female to a they to an onion ring.
Nobody gets to question that.
Rachel Dolezal can.
So I wonder why.
Anywho, the reaction to all of this has been revealing.
Instead of debate, there's been punishment.
Again, ridicule and lawsuits.
Isn't that something?
Dispute it.
Just say, no, it's not true.
Dispute it.
End it.
The more you prolong it, the more people are saying, you know what?
Where there's smoke, there's fire, baby.
And the escalation matters.
You know, the Macron chose, of course, Delaware.
They chose Claire Locke, great law firm, and they chose a strategy, by the way, designed to send a message.
Speak out, and you will be buried in the process.
That's always a part of this.
Except Candace Owens isn't just your ordinary defendant.
And that's how civilians learn to police themselves.
Remember what I'm telling you.
Remember what old Uncle Lionel tells you.
It's not the thought police that scares me.
It's the thought vigilantes.
The stuff that we do to each other.
We have here at New York, we had 311, kind of our citizen 911 line.
And if you saw somebody in the back, your neighbor, you know, having a getting too close in the fire pit during COVID, oh, they'd pick up the phone and drop a dime.
I mean, it was horrible.
Once people see that questioning powerful figures leads to fines and bans and lawsuits and civil complaints and public shaming and all that other kind of stuff, the opprobrium, most fall silent.
You see, silence is the real objective.
Remember something also.
Remember what I'm telling you.
This is very important.
The left wants to control what you say, but the right wants to control what you think.
And don't think this is left or right.
Both sides are for.
Both sides are against Candace Owens, left and right.
The left-right paradigm is a joke.
Two sides of the same coin.
Now, Candace, by the way, knows this all because she has lived it.
And she has been attacked.
It's mere and a deplatformed.
And God knows what goes on in her life that we never even have any idea of in terms of threats and other things.
God bless her.
I hope she's careful.
By the way, she's a newly minted Catholic as a retired Catholic who spent most of my life in that particular regime.
I love when she said she had to do something.
No, she could do something.
And I'm telling you again because she had Holy Days of Obligation, Holy Day of Obligation.
I love that.
Cafeteria Catholics, never thinking about the Holy Day of Obligation.
Candace, good for you.
By the way, here's a question.
What's limbo?
In any event.
Now, remember, say something wrong, you get attacked and smeared and clobbered and de-platformed and silenced and siloed and exiled and targeted for years.
Yet she keeps speaking.
And that's why people listen to her and they respect her, even when they disagree.
Remember, this has nothing to do with agreeing with her.
If they did to AOC what they've done to Candace, I'll be right there as well.
And I mean that.
I don't have to agree with somebody.
I mean, it helps, but it's not about somebody who is consonant with you in terms of thinking.
You know, she's proved courage is rare.
Courage spreads.
And by the way, what France did should really concern Americans.
Because the same arguments are already being made here.
Speech must be limited for safety.
Dignity, dignity must be protected.
Harassment laws must indeed expand.
Misinformation, disinformation, bad information must be punished.
Each phrase is vague by design.
Vague standards are tools of control.
One speech can be punished for being offensive or embarrassing or destabilizing or and then real free expression ends.
Truth becomes secondary to order.
Now, as a lawyer, I am left with a simple practical question I want to share with you.
And this is something I want to know.
Irrespective, remember, I have no particular thought one way or the other rest of the veracity or the identity or the truth regarding gender allocation.
I know nothing about that.
But if conclusive medical, scientific, and documentary proof exists today, right now, which it is claimed does, and we have no reason to deny that or doubt that.
But if they exist, that Brigitte Macron is a woman, proof so strong it would win any lawsuit outright.
Why was it not presented immediately?
What are you waiting for?
Do you have it?
Yeah.
Show this.
End it.
Be done with it.
Make a fool out of Candace.
Make a fool out of her.
Months back, say, oh, oh, really?
Well, let me show you this.
Either a karyotype or something.
Here's an x-ray or whatever.
Here's the pelvic structure.
All of the morphological and phenotype and physiognomy references, whatever it takes, why not show it immediately.
In ordinary litigation, this positive evidence is produced early to end the case and minimize damage.
I don't know about you, but if I've got a personal injury case or something and I know that my client has suffered profound brain damage, I don't wait to trial then spring in on the jury, running the chance that something bad would happen.
I went the other side and know here.
And by the way, it's part of discovery.
Here, I want you to see this now.
Put an end to this.
Now, maybe it has.
Maybe it's been revealed.
I don't know.
But I heard one of Macron's lawyers say, we're going to reveal this in court.
Reveal it now.
Not to me, but I mean, you want to see Candace say, oh, oh, my bad.
You know, do the old Emily Littella.
Never mind.
He knows delay invites speculation.
The longer you put something off, the more people say, I have something to this.
And litigation amplifies rumors.
And arrest and all this other kind of stuff guarantee global attention, especially with what's going on in France regarding their citizens.
So, why choose the longest, most punitive, dilatory path?
Why choose a grinding venue?
Why frame harm as repetition, which treats, by the way, in essence, persistence as the offense?
Now, none of this makes sense if the goal is resolution.
It makes perfect sense if the goal is deterrence.
I guess.
Again, it doesn't make any.
I mean, if I just don't understand it, I don't get it.
What are you waiting for?
Why now?
Because throw that should have been done first because this torrent, this tsunami, as I mentioned, regarding the allegations in France regarding citizens, that's moving in as well.
And then you lessen the chance for, well, you increase the chance for either voluntary dismissal with prejudice, and maybe some paltry de minimis settlement just to say that a settlement was reached.
In fact, nothing was reached.
This moment matters because optics are matter.
Or optics matter, or there are matter.
They're anti-matter.
They're dark matter.
Public sentiment matters.
Juries matter.
Courts don't operate in a vacuum.
Vacuum.
I'm sure you've heard that before.
Americans instinctively recoil when they see citizens, our citizens, punished for speech and arrested, in essence, for mocking leaders from foreign leaders.
Think about that.
And France knows.
That reaction influences outcomes.
Candace Owens is increasingly seen not as a defendant but as a symbol of a basic American principle: the right to speak freely, even when it offends, even when it embarrasses, and targets the powerful.
Turn someone into a symbol, and you lose control of the narrative.
Now, this is not really about macron, as you know, or France, or even Candace alone.
It is about whether Americans still have the backbone, the guts, the temerity to defend the intrepidity, the cojones, to defend the principle that no ruler, no first lady, no president, and no elite is beyond ridicule or suspicion or challenge or rebuttal.
And until the simple question of why, again, allegedly conclusive evidence was not presented immediately, and you're going to wait until trial, until that question is answered, confusion will remain.
Unanswered questions invite speculation.
Punishment invites resistance.
And that is how stories grow rather than disappear.
I want to give you one more analogy because I like analogies.
I can't help it.
Do you remember when they came to our buddy, our dear friend Barack Obama, and they said, Are you an American citizen?
Are you a native-born American?
And he said, How dare you race it?
Are you or are you not?
Phew.
Do you have a birth certificate?
Well, I've got this.
And they first showed you a second or third generation copy of a newsprint somewhere in Hawaii or something.
I thought, what the hell is this?
It was like the penny saver.
Congratulations to the Obamas.
What's this?
That's the announcement.
What is this?
No.
Where's your birth certificate?
Well, okay, we'll give you the short form.
Remember that?
The short form?
What the hell is the short form?
I didn't even know there was a short form.
Do you have a birth certificate or not?
Yes, we do.
Well, let's see it.
Well, we're not ready yet.
Now, keep in mind, Obama and the shadow government has access to the printing presses of the government.
They could come up with any passport, any document, have it registered retroactively.
They could do anything.
They can forge.
They produced the various documents and they didn't do it.
It prolonged the question, which is what's going on here.
Answer the, what are you waiting for?
Imagine going to your own HR when you're getting paid and you set up for a direct deposit or whatever it is and they say, do you have anything that's, what was that?
Do you have a driver's license?
Driver's license?
Yeah, I've got one.
Well, can we see it?
I got a picture of me driving a car.
What is this?
It's the same thing.
What are you doing?
What are you waiting for?
Please tell me where I'm wrong.
Tell me how I'm missing this.
I don't think I am.
And I don't think you are.
And I don't think Candace is.
Now, ultimately, as I said, the Macron can, at some point, at some juncture, put on a team of the greatest physicians and show every conceivable medical document from one, two, three, and me, or whatever the hell that's called to pelvic x-rays, to karyotypes, to nuclear, whatever.
And Candace will say, oh, oh, well, my bad.
You know, we'll do it now.
Or nothing will happen.
I don't know.
None of it makes any sense.
None of it.
And to time this attack on these civilians and Ferris, I would have said, not now.
We'll do this afterwards.
I don't want people, because like I told you, that changed the focus of this case.
This case was pretty dormant for a while there.
At least for me, it was.
Now it's gotten even more interesting because, wait a minute, a lot of people are saying, there really is something to this.
Why?
Because you would have answered this before.
You wouldn't be.
What are you doing?
That's what this is about also.
Enjoy the beauty, the excitement of just reviewing issues.
If you've noticed with me, I like the question sometimes more than I do the answers.
I like the process of analyzing it, of breaking it down, of asking, yeah, what about this?
What about this?
What about that?
And that's what I like to do.
And I want to thank you for your comments.
It's been wonderful, fantastic.
I thank you for that immensely.
I also want to thank you as well for your very, very kind words.
I told you for years, I never read comments.
Never.
They were horrible.
I was like, what is this?
Who are these people?
But you've been so kind and so kind to my beloved wife at Lynn's Warriors here on YouTube fighting the fight against child predation and digital safety, forfeit digital safety.
So I thank you for that.
So my friends, what I want you to do is I want you to like this channel, like this, this piece, subscribe to the channel to Lionel Nation.
And also make sure that you hit that little bell so you're notified of live streams and new videos.
And I've got some questions as I normally do in the comment section for you to peruse with my input.
And whatever I want you to do, whatever it is, I want you to brighten my northern sky is a great Nick Dracon tone.
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