A few months ago, Dave Rubin (one of the best podcast interviewers on YouTube ) spoke with the African-American writer and producer Candace Owens about how she was “red-pilled” and became a conservative. Last week, Owens spoke at UCLA where she responded to the Black Lives Matters hecklers in the audience by rejecting the victim mentality that she says is crippling African-American success. In response, musical megastar Kanye West tweeted, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.” This caused the Internet to explode. In the more careful and nuanced words of Dilbert creator and mass hysteria explainer, Scott Adams, it ripped in a hole in reality. It’s one thing for Owens to be heterodox, but Kanye is a magazine-cover star, and an influential style and taste maker in popular culture — he’s supposed to follow “approved thinking.” In a series of videos, Adams used his famous whiteboard to explain the cultural significance of this collision of matter and anti-matter (or choose your own world-altering metaphor), which ‘Ye in turn retweeted, leading to the current meltdown by showing that his earlier comment about supporting Donald Trump was not an aberration.
This is actually a big deal. In the words of Quillette founder and editor Claire Lehman, buckle up!