Discover Top Posts Tagged with #candanceowens

Conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro‘s comments calling retirement “a stupid idea” have provoked controversy online.

Full Story Here: https://uinterview.com/news/jets-qb-aaron-rodgers-denies-he-spread-sandy-hook-conspiracy-theories-amidst-vice-presidential-consideration/

#benshapiro #joebiden #candanceowens #politics #news

Candace Owens net worth sums up to be $2 Million. She has been working for so many social rights for women as well as welfare programs.

#CandanceOwens #NetWorth #Career #Politics #Lifestyle

Candace Owens net worth sums up to be $2 Million. She has been working for so many social rights for women as well as welfare programs.

#CandanceOwens #Career #NetWorth #Lifestyle

Gen-Z

Biters’ Remorse (Or Lack Thereof)

Most good horror movies have something to say, some social commentary to thrust upon attentive and thoughtful viewers, especially zombie movies. George A. Romero was perhaps the most prominent director of zombie movies in cinematic history, and that’s because he basically invented the modern, flesh-eating, slow-moving, undead variety of zombie that contemporary audiences hunger for (forgive the quip). With Night of the Living Dead, Romero’s first, and arguably most seminal, foray into the genre, he used imagery such as that of hordes of white people attempting to kill a black protagonist in order to comment on the racism endemic in America circa the 1960s. Ten years later, In Dawn of the Dead, Romero once again used zombies as a vehicle for criticism, but this time he set the action in a mall in order to tackle the issue of consumerism. The latter portion of Romero’s zombie oeuvre features a couple of entries, Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead, whose messages would undoubtedly resonate with modern audiences even though the two films were released almost fifteen years ago: The former features a fortified city separating the entitled from the rest of the embattled world, commenting upon the xenophobia and nationalism engendered by a post-September 11th America; the latter features individuals recording the horrors of the apocalypse with handheld cameras, an obvious allusion to the advent of YouTube (Diary of the Dead was released in 2007). If Romero were still alive, then I’m certain that he would still be making zombie movies, and furthermore I’m pretty sure that the criticisms he’d be levying would be directed at misinformation and its propagation on the web, among a plethora of other subjects (recent events would’ve given him plenty to work with, to say the least). The world is currently facing a real-life pandemic, COVID-19, and its spread is attributable to many factors, such as lack of hygiene, large gatherings of people, etc., but I’d argue that misinformation has also played an inordinate role in this crisis. In Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology And The Law To Lock Down Culture And Control Creativity, Lawrence Lessig states that “the internet has unleashed an extraordinary possibility…to participate in the process of building and cultivating a culture that reaches far beyond local boundaries.” Lessig isn’t criticizing the internet with his statement, but I’m indeed doing so with my quotation. That “reach” that Lessig referred to, it’s what ultimately makes it difficult to quarantine those infected by misinformation, and it in turn makes life more difficult for those trying to survive in the web’s hordes of misinformation/misinformed people.

The Survivors

Not all of the individuals I’m tracking carry pretensions of professional journalism, some are simply trying to live their lives as normally as possible during this national emergency. Having said that, considering the prominence of the novel coronavirus currently present in practically all matters of public discourse, much talk of the epidemic is present in almost everyone’s tweets to some degree. Of the individuals of my blog’s focus, Kashana Cauley and Patti Harrison are easily the least politically active and journalistically inclined. The Twitter accounts of both women have been producing a minor amount of content as of late, which makes sense considering they, like everyone, are likely dealing with the coronavirus situation and all of its associated complications upon quotidian life. Cauley’s only tweet from 3/12/20: In response to a quoted tweet from CNN journalist Ana Cabrera that read, “McConnell ally says Senate won't take up House #coronavirus bill until after recess. ‘The Senate will act when we come back and we have a clearer idea of what extra steps we need to take,’ Sen. Lamar Alexander told reporters.”, Cauley tweeted, “I don’t know why, but I think if the rest of us rolled into work & said ‘let people die until March 23rd’ we might get fired.” Cauley is obviously paying attention to the news, but not necessarily engaging with it in any major way. Harrison only tweeted twice on 3/12/20, and one of the tweets read: “Lying in bed bottomless, legs spread, patting my mound, my phone 2 inches from my face, arching my back and moaning with SINFUL anticipation for all of the front-facing character videos we are about to see when all these comedians get quarantined inside our houses…mmmm fuck!”. Harrison is responding to the news, but not intimating at criticism of said news like Cauley did in her aforementioned tweet, instead vying for the use of apolitical humor in order to entertain her followers.

Rick Wilson spends a lot of his time on Twitter attacking Donald Trump and the Republican party, and that hasn’t changed, as evidenced by his activity from 3/12/20: In response to a quoted Trump tweet that read, “Sleepy Joe Biden was in charge of the H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic which killed thousands of people. The response was one of the worst on record. Our response is one of the best, with fast action of border closings & a 78% Approval Rating, the highest on record. His was lowest!”, Wilson tweeted, “So this is how you want to play it?”. Wilson has never claimed to be a journalist, but he provides a lot of commentary on the news, especially news of a political variety, so it’s no surprise that a lot of his current tweeting pertains to the coronavirus considering its proximity to politics. Despite lacking in professional ties to the journalistic industry, Wilson is still playing an important role in the fight against misinformation by fact-checking and pushing against sophistic Trump/Republican narratives being circulated (https://www.vox.com/2020/3/12/21176750/trump-coronavirus-response-disaster).

The Quarantine

For all of the responsible web users who aren’t contributing to the spread of misinformation, there are of course those who need to be quarantined due to their being carriers and deliberate disseminators of said misinformation. Candace Owens is one of those individuals who needs to be quarantined, immediately. Twitter is by no means a newspaper, but it’s nonetheless a source of news for some, and when one has a following the size of Owens (2 million as of 3/12/20), then one has a responsibility to at least attempt to promulgate accurate information, especially when one likes to play at being a journalist. Owens has always fancied herself a journalist of sorts, but if she hadn’t dropped out of the University of Rhode Island while attempting to acquire a degree in journalism (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/youtube-tested-trump-approved-how-candace-owens-suddenly-became-loudest-n885166), then perhaps she’d understand that the journalistic institution has a code of ethics. One of the most basic aspects of journalism, an aspect that’s tragically being undercut in the modern era by irresponsible fools such as Owens, is so simple that a child could ascertain it: Get the basic facts straight. This is one of Owens’ tweets from 3/10/20: “One day, we will look back and study the impact of the coronavirus…Not the virus itself of course, but the mass global mental breakdown that it inspired…Because people think it’s novel that 80 year olds are dying at a high rate from a flu…This tweet will age well.” Not only is the information contained in her tweet plainly incorrect, but it’s dangerous. First of all, there’s a big difference between coronavirus and the flu (https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-vs-flu-which-virus-is-deadlier-11583856879), evidenced not only by the disparate terms, but by the simple fact that the flu doesn’t lead the World Health Organization to declare the presence of a pandemic every flu season (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-51839944). Secondly, while it’s been reported that it’s primarily older people dying from COVID-19, youth doesn’t preclude one from catching coronavirus and spreading it to those older people; not to mention those of varying ages with underlying conditions such as autoimmune diseases who could easily die via coronavirus (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/health/coronavirus-midlife-conditions.html). Owens is just an extension of a type web-user Christian Fuchs refers to in Social Media: A Critical Introduction: “Cultural communities are not automatically politically progressive...Facebook group[s] [exist]…for Norwegian right-wing extremists…[like]the fascist terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in the Norwegian terror attacks on July 22, 2011”. Owens isn’t a violent terrorist (that I know of), but the misinformation she’s spreading could nonetheless be responsible for far more deaths than that of Breivik. It’s no wonder that Owens is a pariah to the vast majority of professional news outlets and can’t find columnist work outside of conservative propaganda-peddlers such as Fox News.

The Anti-Quarantine

Graduate of the University of Oxford, host of UpFront on the Al Jazeera network, writer/podcaster for investigative journalism outlet The Intercept, frequent commentator on networks such as CNN, Mehdi Hasan is essentially the diametric opposite of Owens (https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/6/14/18678698/mehdi-hasan-intercept-impeachment-donald-trump-pelosi-kara-swisher-recode-decode-podcast-interview). Hasan is a serious, passionate journalist who takes the dissemination of information/news very seriously, whether it be on Twitter or otherwise. Hasan has been absolutely restless on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic, reporting on germane news as it breaks and fact-checking those who attempt to misinform. Here’s Hasan challenging NBC columnist Richard Engel on 3/12/20, less than an hour after Engel posted his tweet: Engel tweeted, “The reaction/overreaction in the US to the virus seems largely political. Trump’s critics have no confidence in him, so they panic. Others defend Trump no matter what he does and don’t listen to anyone else. Not a recipe for keep calm and carry on. When broken you can’t be strong”; Hasan quoted Engel’s tweet and responded with, “Please don’t ‘both sides’ the anti-science, failed-on-testing, pandemic-minimizing conspiracy theorist in the White House.” Hasan is the antidote to the infection being spread by individuals such as Owens; whatever the opposite of a quarantine is, that’s what we need to do to Hasan.

The Line

The line between amateur and professional may be blurred in some cases due to the rise of social media and the power of web-based technologies such as smartphones, yet in a lot of cases that blurring isn’t relatively important, but in the case of a pandemic such as COVID-19 and the blurring between amateur and professional journalism, the difference between an amateur like Owens and a professional like Hasan is of the utmost importance. Owens’ misinformation-spewing may well contribute to the deaths of actual people, and furthermore disrupt the important work of good-faith journalists like Hasan. What’s at stake here is clear: life and death.

Life and death were subjects very much on George A. Romero’s mind during his filmmaking career, e.g.: Romero’s cinematic universe, a patchwork of films loosely connected to each other by an overarching narrative a la the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was kicked off by Night of the Living Dead; the concept of the living dead of course remained a linchpin of Romero’s work until the end. Unfortunately, like the namesake of so many of his films, Romero himself is now dead, so I have taken it upon myself to propose the concept for the next film in his cinematic universe of the living dead. In Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture, Henry Jenkins talks about “the story of American arts in the twenty-first century [and how it] might be told in terms of the public reemergence of grassroots creativity as everyday people take advantage of new technologies that enable them to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content.” If I had more time, I’d certainly attempt to contribute to Jenkins’ perception of “twenty-first century” art via a short Romero-inspired film uploaded to YouTube or some similar platform, but I’ll settle for this faux-blurb instead: The year is 2020, and the world has rarely been more divided and vulnerable. Catastrophic weather events have ravaged the globe and displaced millions, spurred by a rapidly changing climate and subsequently decaying ecosystem. Political divisiveness has led to international protests and civil unrest with heretofore unparalleled levels of fervor. A highly contagious virus has begun spreading inexorably from country to country, slowly but surely infecting and killing an increasing number of people. Misinformation is running rampant on the web, leading to mass confusion and extreme skepticism of any and all information being disseminated. At the Biology department of a university in Fullerton, California, an accident is about to take place that will blur the lines between the living and the dead. For some, it’s felt like the end of the world for a long time, but those feelings are about to validated, and the world will be too distracted warring with itself, and the truth, for anyone to do anything about it. When the world already feels like hell, the living dead will feel right at home. Welcome to the world of…Gen-Z. Like those selfies while you still can. Coming to a theater near you…NOW! It’s already happening, so stock up on toilet paper…

#coronavirus #candanceowens #Mehdi Hasan #Rick Wilson #kashanacauley #Patti Harrison #zombie #georgearomero #genz #trump #night of the living dead #dawn of the dead #landofthedead #diaryofthedead

The Coming Storm: 2020 and the rhetorical war we’ve all been drafted into

As we (hopefully) all know, this year is an election year, and for some it’s the most important one of their lives. As it currently stands, America is more ideologically divided than it perhaps has ever been, and that division is sure to intensify over the coming months. It’s only the beginning of February, but already we’ve seen passions erupt over the tragic and unexpected death of NBA legend Kobe Bryant (along with his daughter and various others), the frustrating mess that was the Iowa Democratic caucus, and of course the acquittal in the senate of President Donald J. Trump; only the latter two of those examples are political in nature, but all three have evoked intense responses from individuals of all ideologies. It’s easy to imagine how the political occurrences can inspire bifurcated responses from the public due to the divisive nature of politics, but Kobe Bryant’s death also came with its share of controversy. It may seem to some that the Kobe Bryant tragedy could only create solidarity and evoke responses of compassion and mourning, but there are segments of social media that are applying focus to Kobe’s legacy as an alleged rapist; this is just an example of how any major occurrence can produce myriad responses and conflicts. As I said before, the year is just beginning, and people are already on edge due to the tumultuous nature of an election year, so I can only imagine what’s going to transpire as time inexorably marches forward and people respond to whatever it is that’s occupying news chyrons at that moment; my guess is that things will get far darker before the dawn.

The focus of my blog will be to monitor and report on the social media accounts (though primarily Twitter accounts) of select individuals in order to ascertain the current state of public rhetoric as the year progresses. The individuals I’ve chosen to analyze are a collection of men and women of various ideological leanings and cultural backgrounds. I’m certain that over time certain themes will begin to emerge in the rhetoric of the individuals I’ll be following, and I’ll be utilizing not only class-assigned readings in order to analyze those themes, but of course I’ll also be implementing various germane articles from a plethora of news sources.

The soldiers on the front line

I’ve chosen a total of five different individuals and their social media accounts to focus on: Kashana Cauley/@kashanacauley is a female writer of African American descent who writes for television (e.g., Fox comedy The Great North, and The Daily Show) and contributes to outlets such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, GQ, The Atlantic, Esquire, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone among others; I chose Kashana because she’s politically active, but not overwhelmingly so, and will likely provide perspectives on a diffuse range of issues as a result.

Mehdi Hasan/@mehdirhasan is a male British journalist/broadcaster/author of Indian descent who hosts Head to Head on the Al Jazeera network every week, has a weekly podcast called Deconstructed, and is constantly featured in the online news outlet The Intercept; Mehdi is one of the most astute voices in politics, and thus will provide sharp commentary on whatever political event is trending at a given time.

Candace Owens/@RealCandaceO is a female conservative commentator of African American descent who can be found primarily on Twitter, but occasionally appears on networks such as Fox News; Candace is not only a prominent voice in the world of conservative politics/activism, but she’s also a woman of color, making her representative of one of the least common demographics in conservative politics.

Rick Wilson/@TheRickWilson is a male commentator/author/former Republican strategist of Caucasian descent whose columns can be found in The Daily Beast, Politico, and The Federalist among others, and who often appears on political shows such as Real Time with Bill Maher on a semi-regular basis; as a former GOP strategist, Rick is very critical of both the Democratic and Republican political establishments, and subsequently serves as one of the few prominent individuals in politics/media who’s able to deftly walk the line between political ideologies.

Patti Harrison/@Party_Harderson is a trans woman of partial Vietnamese descent who practices comedy, acting, and writing (e.g., she’s featured as a writer in the upcoming season of Big Mouth), and can be seen on shows such as High Maintenance, Broad City, and Shrill; Patti, like Kashana, is not enmeshed in the world of politics, but is still politically active, and as a trans woman of color, her perspective on matters both political and otherwise is a unique and thus valuable one.

The beachhead

All of the individuals I’ll be monitoring and reporting on have substantial social media followings/influence, and for various reasons they’re each targeted often by social media users of all ideological leanings, making them perfect for my analyses. In addition to monitoring the social media content these individuals produce, I also will pay close attention to how other social media users react to said content. Individuals like Candace Owens, for example, represent a fascinating intersection between ethnicity and ideology that evokes intense passionate from some social media users, and the progression of that passion over time is something I’ll be paying very close attention to. These five individuals will surely be defending themselves on their respective social media beachheads over the coming months, and I’ll be there to count the bullets in the sand after every battle. Let the rhetorical war for the soul of America begin.