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Jan. 18, 2026 - Lionel Nation
32:41
Hating Candace Owens 101: A Study in Crowd Dynamics
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Time Text
The Phenomenon of Candace Hating 00:15:34
I am unabashedly fascinating.
Did I say fascinating?
I meant to say fascinated.
Oh, I am fascinating, true.
I'm not to say fascinated.
I am adamantly fascinated by the Candace Owens story.
Let me reiterate.
Let me clarify.
Not the story, not the issues.
Not even Candace, per se, with all due respect.
She's fascinating.
That's not it.
It's the phenomenon of this movement.
And I've always been like that.
When people want to, for example, talk about anti-Semitism or racism or jingoism or nativism or populism, name the ism.
Remember that gymnasium anyway.
But remember that.
The ism is about psychology.
It's about what you, the participant in this endeavor, receives from this endeavor.
If you want to be a racist or a populist, if you want to be a philanthropist, if you want to be a sports fan, if you want to, whatever it is, from love to parenting to being a good neighbor, you have to ask yourself, what about the psychology behind it?
Why does this, why does this appeal to you?
What do you get out of it?
People say, well, you know, I get, you know, the philanthropy, the beneficence.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But what does it do for you?
Well, it makes me feel good.
There you go.
When you hate someone or hate things, if you, and by the way, in our society, you can hate good things.
You could hate terrorism.
You could hate the radical left.
You could hate the trans community.
And the trans community could hate Trump.
That's another one.
This is TDS and Spades.
But the reason for it is what I'm going to apply today.
And this is, of course, one of my, I, of course, I'm a frustrated psychologist.
I'm a frustrated lot of things.
I'm a particle physicist, a numismatist, you name it.
But today's topic, if you will, is Hating Candace Owens 101, a study in crowd dynamics.
Now, you've heard me speak long, longing, no, at length, I should say, regarding my adoration for the concept of Gustave Le Bon, the notion of crowd psychology.
I told you, and I'll say it again, that as a young, young child, which is redundant, I suppose, an old child, but as a child, I would see these birds fly in this synchronized unison.
And I thought, how do they do that?
There's not one bird that takes off.
Even in a marching band, one guy will get the wrong instruction and the tube player will go this way.
These never do.
Why?
What is it?
And what motivates them?
These are birds.
But for some reason, they know to do this.
Anyway, so crowd theory became Gustave Le Bon.
Then there was the studies of Rousseau and Aristotle.
They had some thoughts.
But then there's notions of not only that, not only the crowd theory, but the idea of the crowd collective, about how it benefits us.
Because you have to understand the hatred, the absolute abject vitriol, the hatred, the uncompromised detestation of Candace Owens has nothing to do with Candace Owens.
I've never met Candace Owens.
I've never spoken with her.
I'm sure she's a fine person.
Maybe she is, maybe she is.
I don't know.
But it's not about her.
It's something else.
And that's the purpose of this address to you.
My thesis, my conjecture, by hypothesis.
You see, the vitriol, the hatred of Candace, often I think transcends simple political disagreement.
It's not that people disagree with her.
It takes on a character of, and I'll call it participatory hating, celebratory hating, choreographed hating, animus, some type of a synchronized animus, a sport where the act of hating is as rewarding for the group as the object of the hate is reviled.
So I've come up with, I think, 10 reasons for this.
It's part of my new treatise, Candace Hating Candace.
And by the way, after Candace, put in the next name.
I'm sorry, as much as I am an admirer of her, you could go back to the old days when Rush Limbaugh came along and others and the Beatles and just any type.
Just take the person's name out because the dynamics of the hatred remain the same.
The object may be different.
So, section one, the inertia of the unapologetic.
Pretty good, huh?
Candace Owens has created her own world of psychological inertia.
It's like her own gravity, her own world where the rules of gravity don't really apply.
She, as an aside, people believe that when UAPs or EBEs or UFOs or ETs would fly these incredible breakneck hard right turns and they'd be flying in.
They said, how could any organism exist in terms of the Gs by making these hard terms?
And it was suggested that they have their own inertial bubble, their own world that cushions them where they can fly.
So it's her own world, her own psychological inertia.
You know, most public figures bow when the pylon begins and they apologize and they soften their tone or they retreat.
You know, they give a you know, tone it down, Candace.
Please, please, we're losing affiliates, you know, that kind of thing.
By the way, this goes to show you the benefit of independence.
But Candace does the opposite by refusing to acknowledge the social tax.
I'm doing a lot of these, by the way.
And I used to hate people who do this.
I'm sure there's going to be some new form of carpal tunnel that I'm going to get from.
Anyway, but this social tax and it's typically levied on controversial figures.
You know, she creates a vacuum of control.
I mean, people hate what they cannot influence.
And her perceived and actual indifference to the mob's opinion creates a deep-seated frustration in those who believe they hold the moral high ground.
And they're most upset over the fact that she's not listening to them.
Number two, Gustave Le Bon and the contagion of the crowd.
Please, just, there's so many great YouTube summaries.
He's the Mac Daddy of this.
And since our surnames are sort of similar, anyway, according to the Le Bon group, The Crowd, his book is the seminal book is The Crowd, a study of the popular mind.
Now, think popular.
Popular doesn't mean popular, as in most people think in terms of popular being favored or famous.
No, popular, as in populace, population, pop, you know what I mean?
Anyway, according to LeBon, individuals in a group, and this is, I mean, this explains everything.
Lynch mobs, tattooing, you name it.
But individuals in a group lose their capacity for reason and they succumb to contagion.
There we go, contagion.
When a scrum, a group, forms around Owens, the individual's personal grievances are submerged and replaced and transposed and transmogrified and subsumed under the rubric of this collective impulse.
The love of the scrum is the love of losing oneself in a larger, seemingly righteous force.
And in this state, the crowd doesn't need facts.
It doesn't need data.
You don't even have to know who the hell she is.
It doesn't matter.
It's like Taylor Swift.
I know people who hate Taylor Swift, never heard a song of it, but they love hating.
They love being in the group of people who hate.
And the opposite of the fan, like the fanatic, the fan, because I know people, for example, who are they're equally Yankee fans and they hate the Red Sox, or maybe they used to, but either one, it was a part of giving yourself, sacrificing yourself to the collective cause of the group.
And it needs those people, it needs a totem to attack something.
And that's Candace.
Number three, the resentment of the unapologetic rise.
Now this is good.
Now, by the way, if you expect me to go through and do chapter headings of all this, you don't know me.
Just I'll make some reference to this, but I know what you're thinking.
Are you going to write this down?
No.
There is a specific brand of resentment that's reserved for those who rise outside of traditional permission structures.
Candace Owens didn't wait her turn or follow the established path of the legacy media.
This unapologetic rise triggers a sense of injustice in others, especially those in the business, those contemporaries of my commentary colleagues who've spent years navigating the system and they paid their dues.
And who in the hell does this dame think she is with this?
What are you talking about?
I've been doing this longer.
Sociologically, this is often viewed as the tall poppy syndrome.
Look this up.
It goes back as Australian, New Zealand.
This is where the crowd feels a natural urge to cut down anyone who grows too high, too fast, and too independently.
This is really, really critical.
And I mean, I, like I said, I have been doing this since 88, right?
What's this, 37, 30, 38 years?
Whatever this, you do the math.
This is my 39th year.
And I've seen this.
When Rush came along, you don't know what Rush did.
You, you don't know what it is.
I mean, he came in to talk radio one day.
Who the hell is this guy, Rush Limbaugh?
Who does he think he is?
And other people went crazy.
You know, there were people who were his antecedents, you know, the Joe Pines and the Bob Grants.
And we thought, well, we were here.
Why is he so different?
But yet, yet, Raj couldn't crack TV.
We'll talk about that later.
Number four, the professional anti-fan paid to attack.
Oh, oh, this is the agent provocateur.
This is the old Pinkertons.
This is getting people online to hate her.
We must acknowledge the industrialization of hate.
There is an entire economy of commentators and journalists and activists who are effectively paid to monitor and attack her.
You know who they are.
They're so obvious.
They leave, I mean, they leave footprints, fingerprints, cookie crumbs.
They're caught in the act.
I mean, they are, it is so obvious and they think they're fooling us.
People, you know, they say that the politics make strange bedfellows and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
You've got people who two weeks ago hated each other.
Now they're joining forces and attacking her because it's desperate.
And these stupid bastards don't understand that the more they do this, the more we love her, which is forbidden fruit, which is another one.
Now, this creates, as you know, a feedback loop.
Professional attacks provide the fuel for the amateur crowd and it legitimizes their anger and ensuring the target remains in the spotlight.
A brief word of this.
Very, very critical.
A while back, I've talked about this forever.
Moby, you know who Moby is?
Moby, what a dick.
Anyway, Moby, whatever he was, DJ or right, whoever, the bald pated dude, said that years ago, I think it's 2016, that the CIA or intel agents of that rank came to him and he alleges, can we borrow, hire, by your professional, your social media platform, lend it to us,
we'll use it, and we will then, I'm going to give it back to you, but we'll, we're not going to go on and hire new people.
Let's take people who are already loved, already affected, and those who affect, those who are citizen opinion generators.
Let me use your particular platform, and then nobody will be the wiser.
It's brilliant.
Brilliant.
Hey, how are you?
Come here.
What do you got about five millionaire?
How would you like to serve your country?
And he was alleging that they were trying to propose or to promote the Russia Gate issue or whatever it was.
I think Billy Corgan, by the way, who's really turning out to be a fascinating interviewer, said, I think something to that effect, though not exactly.
And it's brilliant.
And there are people right now who are...
Let me tell you something.
You've all heard the thoughts.
You've all heard the not accusations, but the beliefs and hypotheses of certain countries, certain PACs, and certain lobbies are paying inordinate amounts of money to social media influencers to promote certain war efforts.
And you know that routine, right?
Okay.
Here's what I would do.
If you're going to go after Candace, don't pick some, pick somebody's numbers, but don't pick somebody who you would expect.
Pick An Unexpected Critic 00:09:03
Pick somebody who would normally have nothing to say about her, but all of a sudden finds her to be problematic.
And also somebody who was not originally a part of the original group that you thought would say one.
Let me give you an example.
I'm mumbling here.
Ben Shapiro, in my mind, can never say anything without you saying, oh, Ben Shapiro.
Stop, stop.
It's Ben Shapiro.
Oh, oh, whatever.
Yeah, right, Ben.
Okay.
That's what you said.
With all due respect to Ben, you know who he is, you know what he's about.
Okay, okay, okay.
But get somebody that you wouldn't suspect.
Get somebody like, and I'm not saying this, but get somebody like an Alex Jones or a Nick or maybe a Megan Kelly or anybody.
Somebody that you wouldn't think would be what?
If you could get a Max Blumenthal or a Judge Napolitano or, oh, Michael, can you imagine if you got a John Mearsheimer?
That's like, what?
It's the novelty.
The person who normally is not associated with this.
And by the way, I'm making new, new, do I understand what you're thinking?
I'm making no accusations.
But that's what I would do.
Have a guess somebody say, you know how bad, you know how bad?
Candace says, what do you mean?
You know who's busting her balls?
Who?
Mearsheimer.
Yeah.
McGregor, Colonel McGregor.
What?
She must be bad.
See?
Get somebody who's kind of out of the realm enough.
Think about that.
Remember, if it happens next time, you heard it here first.
Number five, the natural clan.
I'm doing that again.
And in-group signaling.
What the hell does that mean?
Sociology teaches, by the way, sociology, group, psychology individually, they both are interchangeable.
Sociology, and by the way, economics works as well.
Sociology teaches us that groups define themselves by what they are not.
See, attacking a common enemy is the fastest way to build in-group solidarity.
For many, expressing hate for Owens, Candace, is less about her specific arguments and more about, and I will call it a digital handshake.
You can do it.
Do it with me.
A digital handshake to their own clan.
Signaling, I am one of you.
I hate the right person.
The real word is a shibboleth, a phrase, MAGA, cowboy bunga, buffalo bob, mega-ditto's rush, baba buoy.
I used to have people would, during my initial tenure talk radio, was be lock and load because I was a proponent of Second Amendment rights.
It's a way of saying, it's like wearing a lapel pin.
By the way, Lionel's special rule, the size of a person's flag lapel pin is inversely proportional to the amount of knowledge they have about said flag.
Anyway, next, number six, the psychological pylon as catharsis.
You see, for the individual participating in a massive online ratio, I love the word ratio.
Ratio, that's one of these great new, not new, but these, I guess, online or commentary terms where your particular commentary of something kind of redirects the attention away from that which was originally posted.
But anyway, online, the online ratio and the pylon offers a dopamine hit.
Don't kidding.
I mean, don't kid yourself.
It provides a sense of power and agency.
Agency is a huge consideration, which will be another video.
It provides a kind of the sense of, I don't know what it is, this power and control, an agency, if you will, that many people lack in their private lives.
It's a form of low-stakes heroism.
Attacking a powerful figure from the safety of a collective.
What is the old, what is the meme?
What is the idea?
You're sitting in your parents' basement wearing a wife beater covered in Cheeto dust, tapping away from the warmth of anonymity.
Number seven, intellectual jealousy and the conman narrative.
Oh, yeah.
See, because Candace Owens is articulate and high-functioning, not in the autistic sense, but high-functioning in the original sense, critics often resort to the grifter or conman narrative to explain her success.
You notice this?
She's a grifter.
She's sunk to a new low.
Can you believe what she's saying?
She's saying she's a time traveler.
She's a shaman princess from another dimension.
She never said that.
Well, she might as well.
They're saying anything just to provide entree to the group.
Is that good?
Well, come on, Ed.
It's almost like a speakeasy.
Who sent you?
Candace is a grifter.
Come on, Ed.
This is a psychological defense mechanism.
See, if her success is fake, well, then the observer doesn't have to reckon with the reality of her influence or the possibility that her ideas, however controversial, resonate with millions.
She's a fake.
She's a phony.
They did the same thing, by the way, believe it or not, with evangelicals, which is another subject I love, even though I am technically irreligious.
I digress.
Number eight, the difference between atheism and agnosticism of the mob.
Well, this is really good.
In the context of her detractors, there are the atheists, those who have a fundamental dogmatic rejection of everything she stands for.
That's an atheist.
An atheist says, there is no God.
Period.
End of disguise.
Versus agnostics, the passive participants who don't really know her work, but join the hate because it's the prevailing social weather.
You know, agnostics are often the most dangerous in the crowd because they provide the volume without the conviction.
And agnostics are saying things like, well, you know, no, it's like an epistemological thing.
You know, people, it's impossible for us to know God.
I'm not saying there isn't a God, but it's impossible.
That's another story, another video.
But that's it.
The agnostic versus the atheist.
Think about this.
Number nine, the fear of lack of control.
Oh my God, if there was one, this is it.
Candace Owens represents a break in the social contract of how a person of her demographic is supposed to think.
This perceived betrayal of group identity creates a unique form of anger rooted in the loss of control.
If the group, and I'm fighting back the air quotes, if the group cannot control its members' thoughts, then the group's power is at risk.
And people, sometimes I'll say, do you think there's any racism involved in it or sexism?
I'm sure there's a little bit of everything, you know, but not discernible.
You know, not discernible.
It's like anchovy paste.
Most of the time you never know what's in there, but you know when it's not in there.
Does that make any sense?
If it makes any sense, good, call me, because I don't know what the hell I just said.
Just kidding.
And number 10, oh, here we go.
The finale drum roll maestro.
The love of the scrum.
Ultimately, my friend, humans are tribal.
There is a primal evolutionary satisfaction in the hunt.
The scrum around a political figure allows modern people to engage in virtual stoning, a way to vent ancient aggressive impulses in a, I guess, a socially sanctioned digital environment.
Sense of Camaraderie 00:04:04
See, this is one of those things which is the most important.
The scrum.
I've talked to people before who love hunting, and I'm not a hunter.
I've no particular thought of it one way or the other.
Love handguns, pistols in particular, but not.
But I said, how do you go out there on the weekends?
You know, you're beloved weekends, you got time off, and you're in some blind and you're cold and you're drinking bad coffee and you're waiting for some, trying to outsmart a duck or whatever it is.
And people have said, you know, it's being together that matters.
It's not, I'm with my son, you know, we're bonding.
I say, can't you bond in home?
No, I got to put on this smelly cami gear.
And, okay, maybe that's it.
Maybe there's a sense of camaraderie.
Maybe there is a sense of, see, if you've noticed, my commentaries about Candace is really never about kind of what she says specifically, but the idea of so what.
So what if she said this?
So, so what?
I told you this before.
I alluded to this before.
I am.
There was a time in my life where I was absolutely positively just, maybe it was the show business part.
I don't know, but I, being in the South, I would come across some of the greatest evangelical speakers there were because I love religion and I love the psychology of religion and I love the participatory part of the religious scrum.
There was a time when I was in AME churches in Florida, black churches.
And, oh, those were magnificent.
I did this politically used to go, but on my own.
And they would always see me, not as the lone white guy, but as the new member of the congregation.
And they would have all these, this food afterwards, because if you could withstand, not withstand, but if you can endure this long, I mean, this is commitment.
I'd be first in line for the fortune ops or whatever it was.
But I loved the feeling of being in this.
I love the group part.
That's what I love.
I love to see the evangelicals.
I was slain in the spirit by Ernest Angely.
Personally, it didn't work, but I wanted to know.
One of the most incredible things, and I commend this to you, in Israel, in Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Christ is, purportedly, or they buried.
The tomb of Christ.
And you can feel where the cross was on the Via de la Rosa.
Now, I don't care what you believe.
I don't care if you're a Jew or an atheist or a Zoroastrian.
It doesn't matter.
When you walk into this site and you feel the collective energy, you can hear the not weeping, but the, it's silence, but a, but a.
And you'll see priests and clerics with beards and hats from Orthodox Easter.
You've never seen anything like this.
It is an event I shan't ever forget.
Woodstock.
Forget the music.
Most people couldn't even hear the music.
That wasn't it.
To be a part of an election, have you been to part?
Did you vote?
Did you get a sticker?
I always have this for you right now.
On the back of my Constitution, I have, these are all my stickers.
And you always say, I voted, and look at me, and you're part of the process, and you're looking at people like, I wonder if this guy's going to vote for that right.
Thanking Friends and Dynamic Groups 00:04:42
I love that.
It's the group, it's the dynamic.
Even malls, I've reinvented rediscovered malls, shopping malls, and just spend some time watching this.
Because what we're seeing right now regarding Candace Owens is so interesting and it's so emblematic and so representative of what I've seen my entire life.
I'm never going to tell you how I would counter her.
If my job were to really digitally neutralize her, and I don't mean anything physical, but I mean just in terms of her, to decrease, minimize, or dilute her influence, the way I would do it would be very almost apologetic, like I don't really want to do this, you know, but you're kind of making a mistake.
It's almost like, I love watching those shows on television where somebody will show you how a, how do I say this, how a magic trick was performed.
You know what I mean?
How a magic trick was performed.
How did they do this?
How did they do this?
You know, when you cut the lady in half, well, let me show you.
And then I show you the trick.
And it does two things.
Number one, it destroys the, not that you believe in the trick, but it destroys the bit.
But it also makes you appreciate the cleverness of it.
So the way you destroy anybody is to basically go after their opinion and the lack of facts, but not them personally.
Never give anybody the right or the ability to say to you that what you're seeing is based on hatred or mean-spiritedness.
In any event, my friends, thank you.
Thank you for this.
Support Candace Owens.
Support anyone who's brave enough and committed enough to go out into the front lines, irrespective of what they believe, and respect them.
Respect them for what they say.
I have said this before, and my friends go crazy.
Respect Joy Beher.
She's out there.
You're not.
Granted, what she's saying is gibberish, but it doesn't matter.
I respect the theater of opinion.
I may not like every show.
Look, my favorite album, I think, ever is Asia.
Steely Dan.
Do I like every song?
No.
But Deacon Blues in Asia, oh my God.
Forget it.
That's the way life is.
Respect the collective.
You don't have to enjoy each part of it, but just understand what we're about.
I loved Hawaii 5-0 when I was a kid.
Remember that?
In the end, they would have, at the beginning, they have Zulu as Kodo, you know.
And they had Cam Fong as Chin Ho, Chin Ho Kelly.
Remember that?
And Cam Fong had, or Chen had this weird, this weird accent.
And his one line was, one time he turned to McGared and he goes, we're all in this together, brother.
And that's what I say to you, my friend, we're all in this together, brother.
And sister, for that matter.
So anyway, thank you for this.
Thank you for following my endeavors.
Please, I've got to tell you this, please like this.
Please like this.
Make sure we're on the HOV lane of the trajectory of influence and the like.
I appreciate that immensely.
Please subscribe, subscribe, subscribe.
Subs are critical.
They love their critical.
Also, if you could and you would, I've got some questions for you.
I want to see your responses are terrific.
Thank you very much for your kind words and your participation in this.
Also, thank you for following and supporting my beloved wife, the bravest woman in the world, the bravest person, whose battle whose battle is to protect children.
Think about this.
Go to Lynn's Warriors.
It's about children, stopping human trafficking.
That's it.
And every form of predation from digital predation to actual physical, whatever you want to call it.
Please follow her.
It means a lot because that's a far nobler cause than anything I'm doing.
This is important.
But if we're wrong, well, we're wrong.
If she's wrong, children are lost.
So keep that in mind.
Not that I'm going to stop doing this, but we have plenty of room for additional devotion.
All right, my friends, have a great and a glorious day.
Thank you so, so, very much for watching.
I appreciate it immensely.
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