Ron Unz on “YouTube Censorship and the Curious Case of Candace Owens”

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Ron Unz discusses his latest, “American Pravda: YouTube Censorship and the Curious Case of Candace Owens.” Why are the YouTube censors, who purged my main and later backup channel some time ago (along with other alt-media channels) allowing Candace Owens to say equally controversial things about equally forbidden topics…and reach an audience of millions? Is it because Owens intersperses her courageous exposés of Israel’s genocide and  domination of US media, 9/11 (here and here), World War II revisionism, and even (gasp) Adolf Hitler…with Flat Earthand anti-science? Or maybe they just haven’t gotten around to bothering to nuke her channel yet?

Rough transcript:

Kevin Barrett: This is the second hour of tonight's live podcast of Truth Jihad Radio right here on Revolution.Radio. Revolution.Radio is the home of total free speech on the Internet airwaves. If it's not illegal, you can say it right here on Revolution Radio. And in fact, things that probably are illegal in various countries, such as saying, "hey, man, I support the Palestinian resistance, including Hamas. I support the Lebanese resistance, including Hezbollah. And of course, I support the brave Houthis of Yemen." Apparently, you're not allowed to say that in the UK anymore. But you certainly are allowed to say such things on Revolution.Radio. So please support total free speech by listening to Revolution.Radio.

I'm Kevin Barrett. My Substack is kevinbarrett.substack.com, and I appreciate any subscriptions, paid ones in particular, so I can continue this truth jihad—the all-out struggle for truth, no holds barred, and even including a little bit of goofy and or self-effacing humor now and then just to lighten things up. We were talking about that in the first hour, the importance of lightening things up every now and then.

Well, let's now light things up with some incendiary stuff with Ron Unz, who is really the king of incendiary articles on today's alternative media. And who better than Ron Unz to talk about this crazy crackdown on alternative media that we're seeing right now with everybody of any substance on our alternative wavelength is starting to get purged from YouTube and other platforms.

We just had a bunch of people arrested. Sarah Wilkinson and Richard Medhurst have both been arrested in the UK for the crime of supporting the Palestinian resistance or doing journalism that's at least somewhat sympathetic to the Palestinian resistance. And there are so many examples of this crushing of alternative viewpoints that one doesn't even know where to start.

But I guess a good place to start would be Ron Unz and his new article, American Pravda: YouTube Censorship and the Curious Case of Candace Owens.

Candace Owens, the former conservative mainstream pundit from the...What was it, Ron, you can help me there? When Candace was working with Ben Shapiro, what was it called?

Ron Unz: It's called The Wire, I think.

Kevin Barrett: The Daily Wire, yeah.  So now she's gone completely haywire instead of daily wire. She's talking about the stuff that I talk about on this show. Well, I haven't gotten into flat earth yet, but she's actually mentioned that.

So, so Ron, your analysis of the way this info where war works is really interesting in this article. So maybe you can introduce that.

Ron Unz: Sure. Basically what I did was start off discussing the tremendous technological growth of YouTube, which has permitted voices that otherwise would have disappeared when they were purged from the mainstream media to develop a huge following. For example, almost every day I watch the podcast of Judge Andrew Napolitano, who's accumulated really a large collection of very high ranking, credible mainstream figures: Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Professor John Mearsheimer, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, who had been the chief of staff to Colin Powell, Douglas McGregor—a very wide correction collection of these sorts of people who had been involved in the top levels of American decision making.

And these are the sort of individuals who under another scenario would be probably very close to the top ranks of the American government right now, or advising the government in its national security and foreign policy apparatus, or at the very least, writing op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, being interviewed on cable all the time. And because of their views on Ukraine, on the Israel-Gaza conflict, on those sorts of issues, they've all been totally purged from the American media.

If it were or years ago, they would have disappeared. Nobody would know what any of them felt about these issues. But instead now, I mean, they've developed very large worldwide followings on YouTube. Many times their videos get 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 views, which these days are numbers pretty comparable with a lot of cable TV shows.

YouTube really provides an opportunity for these very important ideas to get out to the broader public in the United States and the world without being filtered through what might be called the controlled media.

Unfortunately, YouTube over the last few years has started to become more and more willing to purge channels and purge individuals. And in fact, just this last week, one thing that prompted my article was that Judge Andrew Napolitano's podcast received a strike under YouTube. Now, I'm not sure exactly why, what the circumstances were, what you know was discussed that was considered improper. But it raises the possibility that these very high ranking individuals and the channel that they frequent will be purged from YouTube, which really is just outrageous.

And you know, one thing I should emphasize is that even though they have non-mainstream views—alternative views on the Ukraine war, on the Israel-Gaza conflict, on the situation with China and the South China Sea—they're very, very mainstream people and none of them ever get into any of the sort of touchy subjects that someone like you or someone like me to some extent really focuses on. There's virtually no discussion of the JFK assassination, nothing on the 9/11 attacks, nothing on World War II. In fact, many of them, most of them probably, seem to have very mainstream views on all those subjects.

So we're talking about basically purging, potentially, top-ranking former members of the establishment for their views that the Ukraine war was probably a mistake and that Israel is really getting away with literal murder in the attack on uh on Gaza. Napolitano received that one strike but his channel came back after a week, and so we'll see whether that's a sign of something more serious. If not, then it might be a one-off. But if people like that can be purged for having such mainstream views, it really represents very much of a totalitarian sort of atmosphere in the media.

So anyway that was the basis of the article. And I emphasized the purges of YouTube that developed over the last probably six or seven or eight years, that mostly started probably around the unexpected victory of Donald Trump. A lot of it was justified through the ridiculous Russiagate hoax. Claims were made that all of these channels, all of these left-wingers, right-wingers, and libertarians, were actually in the pay of Russia, which is utterly ridiculous.

But basically what's happened is more and more of these alternative channels, certainly including your own, have been purged over the years. And it's a very disheartening situation when you see such prominent figures censored. One example I cited was the case of David Irving's videos. David Irving probably ranks, with the possible exception of Arnold Toynbee, as the most internationally successful British historian of the last 100 years. His books have sold in the millions. And I think it was about five or six years ago that all of his lectures, his riveting lectures on YouTube about the Second World War, were purged off YouTube. They're no longer available on that platform. You can still find them here or there. But YouTube has such a larger reach than any of these other video platforms. It really is a disaster for somebody if they're removed from YouTube.

Anyway, a very strange situation recently developed. There's a black right wing pundit named Candace Owens, who, to be honest, I had barely heard of until a few months ago. I vaguely knew she was out there spouting very typical right wing views on a whole range of different issues. And then, apparently, the horrifying events in Gaza—the Israeli bombardment of churches, the massacre of civilian populations—really made an impression on her. And so she ended up tweeting out on her account some implied support for a truce, and statements sort of hinting as to the fact that pro-Israel donor money was the reason that more people were not taking that same position.

That got her into a lot of trouble with Ben Shapiro and some of the other pro-Israel right wingers on her outlet. And after a certain amount of controversy, she was fired. And then she ended up, naturally enough, starting her own YouTube channel.

And what really surprised me was that some of the things she started discussing on that channel were really very controversial things: Adolf Hitler, the truth about the second world war, who was involved in the 9/11 attacks—strong statements of very clear evidence of Israeli involvement in the 9/11 attacks...

Kevin Barrett: She's been stealing my stuff!

Ron Unz: I know. And at least very strong Israeli foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Now as I mentioned in my article, the sort of things she's discussing on either the Second World War or on the 9/11 attacks probably represent about 2 percent or 3 percent of what people who have really looked into those issues know about them. But that's two or three percent more than almost any Americans know.

Her channel's huge. It's probably six or seven times larger than Andrew Napolitano's channel, despite all the esteemed individuals he has on it. I think she has something like 2.3 or 2.4 million subscribers, and 5.5 million followers on Twitter. Most of her videos get a half million or sometimes a million views. And some of those videos tread into issues that you normally don't see on YouTube these days. You saw them maybe a few years ago before the purges began, but then basically all the people discussing them were purged.

So it just seemed very strange to me why she would still be on YouTube. There are a lot of people on YouTube who've barely discussed 5% of the controversial things she discussed and they've been purged.

Because she discusses those sorts of controversial things she obviously builds up very quickly a huge subscriber base. And in fact one thing that surprised me is one of the biggest left-liberal channels on YouTube is Amy Goodman's Democracy Now. Over 10 or 12 years it's built up 2.2 or 2.3 million subscribers. And from almost a standing start, Candace Owens has now passed it. She has more subscribers than Democracy Now!, which really is remarkable.

Kevin Barrett: Well, she's better looking than Amy Goodman.

Ron Unz: Yeah. So one thing that I really wondered about is why is she still on YouTube? Why hasn't she been purged yet? The fact that she hasn't been purged from Twitter yet isn't really all that surprising because Elon Musk is much more open these days than probably would have been the case a few years ago.

When I first came across her, when people started touting her, I really wasn't very impressed. Because, again, the things she was discussing about 9/11 and World War II are things that anybody who's looked into the stuff certainly knows about. And some of the other things that she discussed really didn't impress me that much.

And also, when I checked, I found out she basically is a college dropout who attended a very mediocre school and then failed to graduate. So she's not somebody whose views I would tremendously respect on these issues. But I ended up watching some videos. And the things she was saying about the Second World War and about 9/11 included very solid points. She pointed to the fact that five Mossad agents were caught red-handed celebrating the successful attacks. They were arrested by the FBI, interrogated for more than two months, supposedly failed all the lie detector tests they were given, and then suddenly under massive political pressure, deported back to Israel.

And she also mentioned the fact that that undamaged hijacker passport had allegedly been found on the streets of New York after everything else in the plane was destroyed. Those are the sorts of things that would certainly raise doubts about the official story in the minds of most sensible people, and certainly in the minds of her sort of young celebrity oriented audience. I'm sure almost none of them had ever heard of it before.

I ended up doing was just watching about a dozen of her videos. And, I'm not saying I know the reason that she's still on YouTube, but at least I have one plausible scenario. And that's that a lot of the subjects he discusses are very, very controversial, but very controversial in a very doubtful sort of way. For example, one of the videos is entitled "Satanism in the space program" or something like that. She basically argues that the NASA space program is heavily based upon or involved in Satanism, worship of Satan, which really is ridiculous.

She points to the absolutely undeniable fact that one of the early rocket engineers involved in NASA certainly was somebody involved in the occult and maybe Satan worship and something like that. But I mean, we're talking about one individual out of hundreds.

Kevin Barrett: Jack Parsons, I believe.

Ron Unz: To be honest, I'd never even heard of him before. You can always find one or two eccentric individuals in any organization. But to use that to claim that the space program was heavily involved in Satanism seems three or four steps too extreme.

Another thing in another one of her videos, she basically claimed that, for various reasons—she's naturally an extreme anti-vaxxer and everything like that—she actually said that she'd come to reject all of modern science. And because she rejected all of modern science she really wasn't convinced whether the Earth was flat or whether it was round.

Kevin Barrett: Let me step in there. Are you sure that's an accurate depiction of what she said? Because when I looked at the hit pieces—I didn't actually listen to her talk—but the hit pieces that described what she said, said that she kind of lost her faith in science. The way I would interpret that is that she is opposing scientism, which is a belief system that raises scientific procedures and knowledge to the status of the highest possible value in the way that theism looks at God. That, I assume, is what she meant. I don't think she meant that she was rejecting all scientific inquiry. At least I hope not.

Ron Unz: It really sounded like she basically said that science was simply a religion and she rejected it. As an example of her rejection she said—while she wouldn't say that she's a flat earther, she also wouldn't say that she's a round earther.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, that was the line that they got her with.

Ron Unz: Right. And so I mean the whole thing is when somebody says that you know they're not convinced that the earth is round, that's sort of another way of saying that they think at least it's possible that the Earth is flat.

Kevin BarretT: You could interpret it, though, as, "OK, I'm not a flat earther. I'm not a round earther. That is, I'm not just a believer in what somebody tells me. I am actually going to think critically and look into it, which actually means that she would be following the scientific method better than people who just accept that the Earth is round because they've heard it from credible scientific voices, meaning that they're actually just falling for the fallacy of authority. Maybe it's not a fallacy in this case, but often simply believing what authoritative sources tell you is fallacious. So, you can interpret it either way, really, can't you?

Ron Unz: Right. But I think for any sensible person in a public statement, a controversial sensible person, to say that they're absolutely not a round Earther, and mentioning Flat Earth as another theory out there without dismissing it, I think it's certainly putting themselves in a very vulnerable position.

And, aside from that, apparently...I didn't watch it, but in one of her other videos, apparently she rejects the notion that men never went to the moon or that there was any moon landing, which I know you might have certain views on...

Kevin Barrett: Well, yeah, I'm actually open to that one, having looked at that film, American Moon. I would recommend that, because it does, to me, look like there was some kind of chicanery involved, at least with the photographs.

Ron Unz: I mean, that's certainly possible, but again, the whole thing about it is, given so many issues that she was raising...I watched a bunch of her videos,

and a lot of them are sort of a mishmash of controversial issues. She talks about and denounces devil worship. She apparently believes that demons or Satanism are heavily involved in aspects of our society right now. I got the sense that she believes the demons are real and everything like that. If you're a committed Christian, I suppose believing the demons are real is not an unreasonable position to take. And Muslims too, right?

Kevin Barrett: In fact, the belief in the existence of jinn, entities that could be bad and demonic or they could be benign or neutral, is actually one of the tenets of the faith.

Ron Unz: Exactly. But, given the number of these, seemingly odd beliefs or at least controversial beliefs she raised in her different videos...And there were a whole bunch of them. Like I said, I watched probably a dozen of her videos, including the three or four that dealt with 9/11 or World War II issues, and did a pretty good job of it. In fact, one of the things she did was refer to a one-hour documentary produced and distributed by the BBC a few years ago on the aftermath of the Second World War, which I hadn't even been aware of. And I watched it. It was a very good documentary.

The problem is when you mix together those sorts of issues which are controversial enough, in other words 9/11 being a conspiracy probably involving or at least she strongly hinted that it involved Israel and Mossad and pro-israel activists. On the Second World War, I think the name of her video was something like "we've been totally lied to about everything regarding the Second World War, everything you know about the second world war is a lie." Those are obviously very, very strong statements to make on controversial issues. And then to mix them together with other videos about demons, the moon landing being a hoax, emphasizing the fact that she doesn't necessarily believe that the world is round, all these other things, to some extent may very much hurt the case of those who have controversial views on 9/11 and the Second World War, by mixing them together with other issues to produce such a collection of controversial ideas that I think most sort of casual observers would just reject the whole of them.

For example, there are individuals who have sometimes very, very controversial views on certain subjects.

But for sensible reasons, keep those views quiet when they're discussing other views that are sort of the central part of the topic that they're interested in promoting.

And Kevin, the point you made is a perfect one. I've never even been aware that because of your religious background, you believed in demons or that sort of thing. As you say, most religious Muslims do. Can you imagine a situation: you do a lot of shows on 9/11, JFK, the Second World War, controversial things like that. Imagine if most of your shows constantly talked about demons. Now, you may believe in demons, but I think you would admit that constantly discussing demons and demonology on most of your shows would probably not be the wisest political strategy or ideological strategy to follow.

Kevin Barrett: It's interesting you bring this up, because the trajectory I've followed since I became known as "that 9/11 truth professor" actually may have wandered a little too far in the direction that you're critiquing regarding Candace Owens. Because when I started in 2004 but then I hit the limelight in 2006 and my 15 minutes of fame went on for six months, because the neocons were trying to get me fired from the university and the university couldn't find a reason to fire me, so they just kept hammering at me, and I kept baiting them. So I did get a lot of media exposure for those six six months. And at that time, I did try to come across as reasonable and relatively mainstream. One of America's supposedly top PR people called me up, somehow got my number and said, "the more controversial your message, the more mainstream your appearance and style should be." And so I took that to heart for a while.

And then as time went on and I ended up doing these alternative podcasts and publishing and so on, I realized that it seemed to me, well, number one, the 9/11 issue leads to many other issues, just like what you've discovered in your American Pravda series. So partly to not get bored and partly to keep my audience from getting bored, I did start exploring other topics. And some of them got weird. For instance, I invited John Lear on my show. John Lear is the son of the man who invented the Learjet. And at the time, he was one of the, if not the most, highly qualified pilots on Earth. He had this incredible list of qualifications for piloting virtually every aircraft that exists—a very, very highly qualified guy, engineering background and so on. And he came on my show and said that we have secret bases on the dark side of the moon and anti-gravity technology.

And that was kind of news to me. And so I didn't push back as hard as I probably should have. And the next thing, you know, I was being attacked by the more conservative buttoned-down people in the 9/11 truth movement. I was actually kicked off my main platform at the time, 911blogger.com. Because the head of that operation, some anonymous individual, was so angry that I had allowed John Lear to say those things on my show, that I got de-platformed from the other side.

And so since then I've been exploring—basically what I've been trying to do is basically what you do at your American Pravda series only I have to admit, you've done it in a more meticulous, scholarly and well-organized way. But I've been doing it in a sort of a slightly more slipshod, haphazard way, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. But I've looked at more chaff, I think, maybe than you have. And I'm also willing to get into the "religious" dimension of things.

And regarding these issues like, do demons exist? You have to make a distinction between the religious dogma that the jinn exist in mainstream Islam, and the empirical evidence that consciousness not embodied in the nervous systems of living bodies is quite possible. And we find that in psi research, the evidence for reincarnation—I was just discussing with Josh Mitteldorf on the show the other day—there's actually very strong evidence for something very much like reincarnation: Four year olds that have knowledge of languages they couldn't possibly have learned and memories of things that they couldn't possibly know and things like that. So anyway, there's all kinds of weird stuff like that that you haven't explored yet. And maybe if you did, you wouldn't believe it. Or maybe you would. I don't know. There are a number of those kinds of topics where you and I probably have very different views. But anyway, I just look at all that stuff. But I try to stick with the most important stuff that is best documented that if people could figure this out, it would really make a difference. Things like 9/11 for example.

But this other stuff...So maybe maybe I've actually caused a certain amount of damage to my 9/11 mission by going off into some of these other areas. Anyway, your article did make me reflect on that.

Ron Unz: Sure, sure. The point I really was getting into, though,is that, if you just go through a random selection of Candace Owens videos... And by the way, you know, most of the videos, for example, have about 10 or 12 minutes of the main topic. And then the rest is sort of bizarre celebrity junk scandals: which celebrities are transgender, things like that. That gets into the single biggest thing that Candace Owens has been identified with. And that's the claim that the first lady of France is a man, which was one of the first things I heard about her when she came up on one of my common threads.

And it just seemed so outlandish...when I then checked and found out that she'd attended a mediocre college and failed to graduate, I said, well, she's probably just an idiot and her stuff is just nonsense. And when I actually went and looked at those videos on 9/11 or in the Second World War, it was really very solid stuff. But unfortunately she's done many, many more videos on the notion that the first lady of France is a man. In one of her tweets she said explicitly that she would stake her entire reputation on the first lady of France being a man, which is a very, very strong statement to make.

And so given the fact that I really haven't paid any attention to first lady of France...I know her name. I've seen her name in the paper a couple of times. And you know the story of how she was a teacher. She was the 40 year old teacher of Macron and they had an affair while he was a teenager and then they married. It is very odd that she's 25 years older than he. That's really all I knew about her.

So, given Candace Owens' statement that she would stake her entire reputation on it, I became curious. I watched a couple of her videos, thinking that she might have massive evidence behind it. And there really seemed virtually nothing at all. And then I contacted Laurent Guyénot, who's a sort of conspiracy-oriented person in France, to ask him what he thought about it. He thought the whole thing was totally crazy, that it was just this crazy thing that had taken over the right-wingers in France.

And basically, as far as I can tell, Candace Owens' main piece of evidence was that there was a photograph showing, allegedly, one of Mrs. Macron's brothers looked a lot like Mrs. Macron. Owens was saying it was actually the brother who had a sex change operation. Now, you know, the truth is, brothers and sisters sometimes do resemble each other. If that's one of the strongest pieces of evidence that's actually the brother, that's sort of ridiculous.

And then the other claim was that basically there was absolutely no record of Mrs. Macron's existence for the first years of her life. But when I checked the newspapers that Candace Owens had apparently cited as sort of her entree into the issue, they basically said that Mrs. Macron's birth had been recorded in a provincial newspaper, and mentioned that she was born into a reasonably prominent family. And I think her marriage had been recorded at the age of 22. She had three children and one of her children was quoted in the newspapers denouncing these crazy lunatics that are saying that their mother is a man.

Another thing I saw: One other recent piece that Candace Owens had pointed to, there's some photograph of Mrs. Macron, I think in her 20s, allegedly. The claim made is it's a fake photograph because she's wearing a hat that would not be worn in that sunny condition. Now it seemed like just an ordinary hat to me. And to say basically that that photograph is obviously fake because nobody would wear a hat on that particular sort of boat, on that yacht. That's really ridiculous.

So, from my point of view, if you're making extraordinary claims, you need to provide extraordinary evidence. And to claim that the First Lady of France, the purported mother of three adult children, is actually a man who had a sex change operation, is an extremely extraordinary claim. And when I found out, there was basically no evidence for it, and that Candace Owens had staked her entire reputation on that theory and she's now apparently been the leading worldwide proponent of the theory, where all the people in France mention her as being the main person in the world promoting that theory...That raised all sorts of issues in my mind, along with this other stuff about Satanism and demons and the Earth possibly being flat. Apparently she's also said she doesn't believe in the existence of dinosaurs. She doesn't think that they ever existed, or something like that.

So it seems to me, in my mind, that raised at least one scenario of why she's still on YouTube. And that's that raising all these other issues and mixing them together with 9/11 conspiracy theories and a different view of what really happened during the Second World War might be viewed by the ADL or organizations like that as an ideal way of tainting 9/11, of tainting the Second World War, of tainting all these other things. Because she's getting hundreds of thousands of views for her videos. You could argue that she's now becoming, at least on the video platform, the world's leading 9/11 truther, the world's leading World War II revisionist. And if she has staked her entire reputation on the First Lady of France being a man and if that turns out not to be correct, that I think could do very serious damage to these ideas.

If you keep her on YouTube and her audience grows and she becomes, by a very wide margin, the main proponent of all of these controversial ideas,  I think you may be doing a tremendous amount of damage to the ideas. You could say that the opposition, the sort of mainstream establishment, the ADL and groups like that—

they control the megaphone. And so they can go around saying that the number one supporter of 9/11 truth these days is somebody who believes in all these other ridiculous things. They could basically say that she believes the earth is flat. Now, that's probably, just as you were pointing out, not a fair characterization of her views. But I think it's close enough to being fair that it really does a tremendous amount of damage.

Kevin Barrett: It's close enough for the ADL, that's for sure.

Ron Unz: Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's not that they're making it up from whole cloth. They're taking statements, maybe somewhat exaggerating them or sort of spinning them in a certain way. But I think it's a bad idea for people who believe in 9/11 truth to make statements like that.

I don't think that there's any likelihood that Candace Owens is somebody who might be called controlled opposition. I don't think the ADL is telling her what to say. I don't think any of these groups are sort of controlling her or what she spouts off on her YouTube channel. But I do think there's another concept that I brought up, which is promoted opposition. In other words, I do think it's very possible that the ADL and some of these organizations have done everything they can to keep her on YouTube, to promote her, to make her as prominent as possible, with the idea that if these ideas—9/11, the Second World War, the JFK assassination—are sufficiently in circulation, that people hear about them,

there has to be one person who's the most prominent figure associated with them.

And I think the ADL sat down and thought about it a little bit and decided,

well, Candace Owens might be the best person they'd get to be the number one.

Kevin Barrett: But why not Kevin Barrett? I could stake my entire reputation on Kamala Harris being a man. "Come on guys, promote my videos!"

Ron Unz: To be honest, I'd always assumed this Mrs. Macron being a man was just a joke. And it was only probably a few weeks ago that I really found out...there are commenters on my website who are a hundred percent convinced of it.

So Candace Owens has a sufficiently large platform that individuals who may not look into the issue that carefully or may sort of have health problems like Alan Sabrosky, may be taken in by that because they agree with Candace Owens on 9/11.

Think about it. You have all of these conspiracy activists out there, many of whom may be more prone to sort of believing in certain controversial things than the average person, maybe even the average sensible person. They come across Candace Owens on YouTube. She has millions of viewers, she has millions of subscribers. She has many millions of YouTube (and Twitter) followers. Her YouTube videos get hundreds of thousands of views, and the ones on 9/11 really seem quite good to me. So somebody watches her 9/11 videos, somebody who's leaning towards 9/11 truth. And they say, my God, Candace Owens said such sensible things. She brought up such sensible ideas. And then they naturally look at a few of her other videos. And they become convinced that Mrs. Macron is a man, that our space program was founded on Satanism, all those sorts of things. And then they go around and discredit themselves. And they promote those things to their friends.

Kevin Barrett: "Beneficial cognitive diversity."

Ron Unz: Exactly. So groups like the ADL and similar activist elements decide that there has to be one person out there who's the leading promoter of 9/11 truth, of a different view of the Second World War, things like that. They couldn't ask for a better possibility than Candace Owens. If Candace Owens weren't there, it might be somebody with much more mundane views on those other issues. And so promoting or at least protecting Candace Owens' YouTube channel might very well be a decision that they made.

And the fact is that Candace Owens has a very spotty record in other ways. She denounced Donald Trump, then she became a leading supporter of Donald Trump. She's basically somebody who dropped out of a very mediocre college. From what some people say, she doesn't really come across as all that smart. So if you're looking for the number one 9/11 truther on the Internet, probably some of this group decided, if it isn't Candace Owens, it might be somebody worse from their point of view.

Kevin Barrett: It used to be Alex Jones.

Ron Unz: Yeah, exactly. And Alex Jones has been kicked over the internet. I'm not even sure if Alex Jones ever made claims about Satanism being behind the space program or,

Kevin Barrett: He did occasionally say some some goofy sounding stuff. But I think the ratio of of strong to goofy maybe was a little better with Alex. But Alex Jones never went after the Zionists and World War Two and so on the way Candace does.

Ron Unz: Exactly, exactly. In fact, that's a very interesting thing. Did Alex Jones ever get into that stuff about Michelle Obama being a man?

Kevin Barrett: He probably has had guests on talking about that kind of thing. I think what's going on there, Ron, is that people largely believe what they want to believe, and there's an attraction to believing this type of anecdote, because we look around us and we see all of this transgender lunacy, and then we see that there are these elites that seem to be in cahoots with a movement to promote this sort of lunacy for their own reasons. And so when we hear a story like (Macron's or Obama's wife is a man) it sort of reinforces our beliefs. It's like a little mythical anecdote that illustrates our beliefs, and we want to endorse it.

I did a folklore minor for my Ph.D., and looked at rumors and legends and conspiracy theories. And there's a book called I Heard It Through the Grapevine by an African-American female scholar who looked at rumors in the black community. And she found a whole lot of these rumors like "Church's fried chicken makes you sterile." Where does that come from? It's because the black community is a little bit paranoid based on things like the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and things like that. So their paranoia—and just because they're paranoid doesn't mean somebody hasn't at times been out to get them—so they want to believe this type of thing. And here comes this colorful anecdote about Church's fried chicken, and they gravitate towards it. And likewise with all of the gender lunacy around us, these stories about Michelle Obama being Big Mike and Macron's alleged husband or wife or whatever, they become kind of attractive ways of summarizing our sense of how crazy the world is and how a certain kind of elite is complicit in making it that crazy.

Ron Unz: Sure. By the way, the Mrs. Macron stuff, I think, clearly is based on the Michelle Obama stuff. Since it was so widespread in American right wing fringe circles, I think basically the right wing circles in France got the same idea. But my suspicion is that some of these things could actually be promoted as sort of Cass Sunstein type diversionary plots. For example, I remember back when Obama was running for the presidency, there were all these crazy stories going around that he was actually a secret closeted gay, that he was a drug user,that he was smoking crack. I always assumed it was total nonsense. And I think it was around that time that the "big Mike" or "Michelle Obama being a man" stories also got into circulation. I thought, oh, that's even crazier. And then it was only maybe six months or a year ago that I actually saw one of the people on Tucker Carlson's Twitter podcast. He was interviewed for an hour basically saying that he was involved with Obama as a male prostitute. And he came across as quite credible. So I then spent a few days really reading through it, checking all the stuff. And I think there's like an 80 or 85 percent chance that those stories were actually true.

Kevin Barrett: Once again, Ron, it took it took you over 10 years to catch up with me.

Ron Unz: Exactly, exactly, exactly. But the thing is: Imagine, for example, you're the Obama people and you want to kill off those stories, kill off those rumors. Basically, the guy swore an affidavit. He held a press conference at the Press Club in D.C. We're talking about somebody willing to speak on the record.

Kevin Barrett: Was that Larry Sinclair?

Ron Unz: That name sounds familiar. To be honest, I don't remember his name offhand, but that name sounds very familiar. It could have been him. So, we're talking about a situation where you want to destroy that sort of story. It seems to me circulating a wild rumor that Michelle Obama is actually a transgender man would be a great way of doing it, because it's even more of an exciting story. It connects to the other one and it circulates in the same sort of right wing fringe community. And, you know, you produce maybe a few doctored photos or something like that. I mean, it's very easy to do. And once it takes off, it totally destroys that other story, which I think is probably true. It completely takes over it since it's a more exciting story. It dominates the discussion. It pushes the other one out of the limelight and it utterly destroys the credibility of the people promoting it.

So in the same way, there are a lot of suspicions that Emmanuel Macron also might be a closeted homosexual. I haven't really looked into it. But there are all these sort of rumors or suspicions circulating. And certainly the fact that he married a woman 25 years older than he was is—that's not something that ordinary people...

Kevin Barrett: It's usually the other way around. The guy marries the woman who's 25 years younger.

Ron Unz: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, there's something...quite odd going on. So if you're somebody in his circle and you want to destroy those rumors...It's undeniable that he basically was a teenager and he had an affair with a 40-year-old teacher of his, which in the United States normally means you go to prison for something like that. So we're talking about a gigantic scandal that's part of the official narrative of Macron's background. So the way you distract people away from it is to basically leak the story that Mrs. Macron is a man. And you destroy the credibility of the people circulating it. And you completely divert them onto this other ridiculous thing where basically they go around saying it's a shocking, shocking fact that Mrs. Macron's brother resembles her. Which just shows how ridiculous all these people are.

So, I have no evidence for it, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if it were a clever Cass Sunstein type strategy, just like the Michelle Obama rumor might have been a strategy along those lines in the United States. We basically take something that might be true, but involves a shocking type of incident, a shocking type element of somebody's history. And you destroy it in public by diverting attention to something many times more shocking that happens to be probably ridiculous.

Kevin Barrett: Some people would say that that kind of scenario might be going on with some of the more exotic theories around 9/11.

Ron Unz: Exactly. I think that's very likely right.

Kevin Barrett: And it also reminds me of what happened to the George W. Bush cocaine story. There was a journalist named Jim Hatfield who was fed information about how George W. Bush was busted for cocaine and thrown out of the Civil Air Patrol or Air Force or whatever he was in. And they gave that to Hatfield because Hatfield actually had a murder conviction. Karl Rove was the key source who leaked that to Hatfield, and Hatfield published the book and got a 60 Minutes interview. And he thought that he'd hit the big time, but he got on 60 Minutes and all they wanted to talk about was his murder conviction. And from that moment on, the whole story of the Bush cocaine thing was toxic and none of the media would cover it.

Ron Unz: And 60 Minutes itself was mousetrapped in exactly the same way with Dan Rather. They were fed those fake documents about Bush's time in the Civil Air Patrol. The story itself was almost certainly true, but the documents were faked by the Bush people and fed to 60 Minutes through one or two intermediaries so that the 60 Minutes people believed it was true. They broadcasted it, and they were all fired. Dan rather lost his career over it, and it destroyed the story in the minds of the public.

So, I mean, those seem exactly the sort of clever strategies that experienced political consultants can certainly use. I'm not saying that Candace Owens is in any way deliberately promoting this Mrs. Macron story (for nefarious reasons). But I think she probably is what they call a useful idiot who people are deliberately keeping in the public eye, and doing their best to make the leading 9/11 truther on the internet. Would you say she probably has the biggest internet platform for 9/11 truth right now?

Kevin Barrett: I think so. I can't think of anybody remotely close, really. I don't know where Alex Jones is now (in terms of audience size).

Ron Unz: And it's exactly the same thing with the Second World War. And also remember, she's just starting her YouTube platform. Who knows what other things she might get into in the near future? And some of these groups could feed her very juicy material that would even be more outrageous than what she has said so far. And all that would basically taint 9/11, World War II and many of these other issues in the minds of many people.

In many ways, she's sort of the anti-Jeffrey Sachs. A couple of months ago, Jeffrey Sachs declared on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show that he'd become convinced that JFK was killed by a conspiracy involving the CIA. That's something that people have been following the issue have suspected or known for decades. But for somebody of that extremely high mainstream establishment rank to say it, that's an incredibly important step forward. Sachs was the one who broke the Nord Stream pipeline story a year or two before Seymour Hersh came out with his expose. Jeffrey Sachs basically has taken all these very strong positions on Ukraine and other issues. And he's somebody with extremely strong mainstream credibility.

So, if somebody hears about issues involving the Second World War or 9/11 or JFK from someone like Jeffrey Sachs or John Mearsheimer or even just mainstream academics, solid academics, that has tremendous credibility. But when they hear about it from somebody who's best known as being the world's leading advocate of Mrs. Macron being a man, that has exactly the opposite impact.

Kevin Barrett: So what can we do about this?

Ron Unz: That's difficult. I was about to say that's why, for example, David Irving's lectures on the Second World War were all purged from YouTube, while Candace Owen's statements about the Second World War, along roughly the same lines while covering one percent of the ground, remain on YouTube, and why I doubt that she's going to be purged. If anything, the more and more outrageous things she says about all sorts of issues, outrageous in a negative way,

the more likely it is that the ADO will do their best to keep her up on YouTube.

Kevin Barrett: So maybe what we need to do is to somehow infiltrate Candace's circle and give her good advice instead of bad advice and kind of whisper into her ear, "hey, back off on that Mr. Macron thing, and maybe take it easy on the Satanism unless you have good evidence," and stuff like that. So how are we gonna do that? Do we have any volunteers for somehow intercepting her somewhere and being her friend? Is she already married? I'm sure there are a lot of guys who wouldn't mind a date with her.

Ron Unz: Yeah, she's actually married apparently to some very wealthy British guy

Kevin Barrett: Oh, well, so much for that idea.

Ron Unz: When this controversy came up, people said it was sort of a very strange thing with him. It's like he decided to marry her within days of meeting her or something like that. I think what may have happened, is she was very active in the sort of right wing conservative circles, and he might have been drawn into that circle. And, you know, when you look at it, there aren't that many reasonably attractive young women of that age who have that sort of prominence in right wing circles. So you know that might have been why he apparently—I think he inherited some British title and some British fortune or something like that. I don't know the details. I don't even remember his name.

So I guess she'll continue to say more and more outlandish things until either finally she is kicked off Youtube or people stop paying that much attention. Even, for example, Alex Jones went over the line to the point where people sued him and he was finally kicked off YouTube.

Kevin Barrett: Well, I don't know if it's just that he went over the line. I think that there was a concocted decision to go after him on that basis. And I wouldn't even be surprised if the whole Sandy Hook thing were not, if not concocted from whole cloth, at least spun in such a way as to set bait for people like Alex Jones precisely to do that to him later.

Ron Unz: Sure, that's very possible. I think the issue with him is he had such a powerful media platform and he was such a strong supporter of Donald Trump, the establishment that wanted to get rid of Trump and get rid of Trump's biggest supporters felt that regardless of everything else, they had to destroy Alex Jones. I don't know how many YouTube subscribers he had, but I think he had a bigger platform than most of the TV networks. So it was the same sort of thing as Fox News being forced to basically dump Tucker Carlson, even though Tucker Carlson was Fox News' biggest star. He was the biggest star on TV, and he was purged because he was considered a threat to the establishment. I'd be very surprised if Candace Owens ever became viewed as that sort of threat.

Kevin Barrett: We're going to probably have to leave it there and find out in the future, because I believe we hear the bumper music in the background. And you very well could be right. I guess time will tell. We'll see what happens with the career of the curious Candace Owens, or rather the curious career of Candace Owens. Actually, it's The Curious case of Candace Owens. That's the name of the article by Ron Unz at U-N-Z.com. Thank you, Ron. It was great talking to you.

Ron Unz: Thank you.

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