Matt Bernstein

But you can see how this early inversion of reality for her would lend itself to becoming like a full blown conspiracy theorist, I think.

Yeah, yeah.

Candace also leans heavily into the idea that the political left exaggerates the existence and the threat of racism to coerce Black voters, and that the left is just hoping that Black voters never like wake up to realizing that what's actually in their best interest, as she claims, is becoming, you know, a right winger who...

picks themselves up by their bootstraps and magically stops letting white supremacy hold them back.

That's the basic thesis of her 2020 book, Blackout.

And it's also the main premise for Blexit or Black Exit, which was a term that initially referred to a nonprofit in Minneapolis.

that encouraged Black people to invest in Black-owned institutions so as to not rely on white ones.

It was like a positive thing for racial justice, but was co-opted by Candace in 2018 for her movement to encourage Black voters to exit the Democratic Party, which, by the way, has been copied, and there is now a jegxit.

which is a Jewish voters exiting the Democratic Party, which is led by right-wing Zionists.

And I see Jegzit posts shared all the time from people I grew up with on Facebook.

I'm so glad we're all having fun.

Are you having fun?

I don't know.

Totally.

And yeah, I mean, it's obvious why this messaging from a Black woman would resonate with a mostly white audience plagued by accusations of racism.

White conservatives love having members of minority groups tell them that they aren't actually racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc.

especially while they're supporting legislation that disenfranchises those very groups.

This part of her career, as I said up top, it makes the most sense to me because it's synonymous with so many of the conservative LGBT influencers I've covered on this podcast.

What's notable, though, to me is that despite the huge success of these figures, there has never actually been that much of a shift in the voting bases of the groups that they claim to represent.

Like more than 80% of Black voters and more than 80% of LGBTQ voters continue to vote Democrat as recently as the 2024 election, which is the same case that has been for decades and decades and decades.