Last Tuesday night, LSU’s Student Union Theater felt much like Tiger Stadium. There were standing ovations, t-shirt throws, screaming, manic fans, semi-obscene chants and people wearing their team’s colors. But instead of “Let’s Geaux Tigers!” people shouted “U-S-A!” In lieu of “Neck,” screamed “Let’s go Brandon!” and rather than wear purple and gold, donned InfoWars shirts and Tucker Carlson hats.
The excitement was all for Candace Owens, a controversial right-wing political commentator and the headline event for Turning Point USA’s current speaking circuit, the Live Free Tour.
Owens spoke with the passion of a charismatic preacher, delivering a sermon of good and evil, left versus right: “The left is Machiavellian,” she said. She spread the Republican gospel of small government and hard work: “Society will reward you if you are willing to work hard.” She decried the dangers of feminism: “I blame feminists for almost every ill that we have now.”
After seemingly every right-wing zinger Owens threw at libs, she received some sort of response from the crowd. When she declared that “representation is pandering,” for instance, “Yeses!” rained down from the crowd like amens in a revival service.
It’s a lucrative message, clearly. Those who share many of Owens’ opinions are currently profiting hugely from talent to animate the political right: Owens’ primary employer, The Daily Wire, is now a $100 million a year company, according to its cofounder Jeremy Boreing.
But lucrative is not synonymous with correct or good. On several instances, Owens’ talk devolved into a salad of words and ideas, devoid of much intellectual value, as vapid as logic she claimed to represent.
Once in the talk, Owens casually mentioned the dangers of “isms,” presumably referencing socialism, transgenderism, or some other typically left-wing cause, she wasn’t specific. Later, however, in the question-and-answer portion of the event, Owens was stumped by a self-avowed feminist and LSU student who asked her a very fair question: “Isn’t conservatism another ism?”
Instead of adequately engaging with a very good question or telling the student what conservatism properly understood is – a philosophy, not an ideology – Owens simply deflected and changed the subject, but with a twist, speaking faster and faster until her words hit a fever pitch. By the time one realized what rhetorical move Owens made, it was already too late, the point already gone.
Owens faltered again in the Q&A, when another disagreeing student challenged her about the existence of critical race theory in K-12 public schools. Owens insisted it existed but failed to cite a specific example. When asked to define CRT, or challenged with the fact that it developed in legal scholarship, not education, Owens came up with a low-level description: CRT is when “everything can be defined by race issues.” Highbrow stuff, indeed.
Some of what Owens said leaned towards the conspiratorial, too. Drawing a rhetorical picture of the grand schemes of leftism, she claimed that “what we are heading towards is a socialist society.”
All liberal policies were aimed at destroying tradition in order to make people more dependent on the government, everything from the family to climate change to welfare; the latter of which, she said, was apparently more harmful to Black Americans than Jim Crow ever was.
Owens cited no evidence for these claims other than brief, occasionally relevant anecdotes and the random statistic.
We should see Owens’ on-stage behavior for what it truly is: performance art. Owens moves the crowd with a passion for her cause that is no doubt genuine, but nonetheless misguided – perhaps not wrong in its conservatism, but fundamentally erroneous in its argumentation, presentation and logic.
Conservatism deserves better. It deserves better than stooping to the level of ad hominem attacks, cheap laughs, rhetorical frills or cherry-picking data. Conservatism is a long, deeply historical tradition, with philosophical roots dating back to the ancient Greeks. In fact, that’s largely the point of being a conservative: citing and knowing the past in order to better know the present and anticipate the future.
Owens’ visit to LSU was anything but that. It didn’t rely on reasonable, clear argumentation; it skipped from culture war issue to culture war issue. It didn’t cite the past as the basis or evidence of its claims. It relied on personal anecdote and bro science. It didn’t deal honestly with opposing claims. It caricatured them.
This isn’t to say that Owens’ views, at least in their conclusions, are damaging. CRT does, for instance, exist in K-12 education in places across the country – not just in laws schools or the upper echelons of academia. There has been a marked increase in the size of parts of the American government in the last fifty years. There are good reasons to think that welfare doesn’t do much to help people or instill personal responsibility throughout society. And there are problems with feminism, especially in its more recent iterations.
If Owens thinks she will convince anyone to join her political side, other than her fans, she has another thing coming. But perhaps that’s her intention. Maybe the point of performance art isn’t to persuade but make one think.
It still doesn’t make her anything more than a craven actor in the theater of politics.
Benjamin Haines is a 24-year-old graduate student from Shreveport.
