Matt Bernstein

But because of Candace Owens' feud with Zoe and Randy over social autopsy, Candace fell into the arms of the people who were harassing Zoe and Randy, who were these Gamergate harassing, mostly young, very online men.

They were basically all misogynistic young men

who then convinced Candace that these Gamergate targets were lying about the abuse that they faced, that they were making money off the controversy, etc, etc, none of which was true.

It's interesting because within Gamergate, there are vaguely like anti-Semitic undertones of like these minoritized and oppressed people are actually your overlords who are responsible for everything bad that happens to you and they're making money off of it.

So it's interesting that from the beginning, Candace has the shape of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that she seems very susceptible and open to.

Right, exactly.

Candace's anti-Zoe and Randy crusade left her with a ton of right-wing bedfellows who also hated women in video games.

They hated women in general.

And she soon found herself on the phone with some of the earliest far-right influencers, Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich, who offered Candace support and told her to, quote, She would later describe this experience as, quote,

So I want to take a beat here because I think in examining her earliest kind of online output, even though it had no audience, you can see that she was susceptible.

Like my understanding of Candace Owens before I looked into all of this was that like a conservative guy was nice to her.

and offered her a bunch of money and like power and influence and access and then she was like okay well i guess i'm conservative then to an extent that is what happened but you can see that she also is ideologically like susceptible to being like this has all gone too far the left women minorities kind of all of that and i think it's important to mention and taylor if you want to take this like these right-wingers to this day they're so good at capturing someone in their most vulnerable moments like was social autopsy a really bad idea

Yeah, but it's also just really hard to be a person online who's getting a lot of heat for anything, even if it is a bad idea.

And conservatives love to take the grievance and angst you might be feeling as someone getting a lot of heat and being like, you know who you can blame it all on?

The people with the least power in society.

No, especially because...

because the broad understanding of cyberbullying in the 2010s was very, like, unmasked these people who feel so emboldened.

Like, I probably would have, as like a high school student, probably seen the idea for social autopsy and been like, yeah, great.

Like, you know, you shouldn't be able to say that without your face on it.

I think that's actually still a very popular opinion from people who don't, you know, think too hard about the implications of that and, you know, surveillance and all sorts of stuff.