https://www.frontpagemag.com/its-time-the-right-rejects-our-worst-online-influencers/
With the well-deserved collapse of public trust in the mainstream media, there has been a concomitant rise in popularity of online influencers as sources of news and opinion. The upside is, there is a lot to be said for giving a massive platform to independent journalists such as Andy Ngo and Michael Shellenberger. But there has also been an alarmingly high number of social media influencers on the Right amassing millions of followers but delivering everything from misinformation to conspiracy theories to propaganda.
The two most notable examples are, of course, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. When Carlson was fired from Fox News two years ago, conservatives including me were giddy that his independent platform would bring hope and change for a fearless conservative voice, and help bury the obsolete propagandists of the mainstream media. Instead, he has become the biggest disappointment for conservatives since Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. Carlson, with over 16 million X followers, now shills for every Western-hating Islamic power from Qatar to Iran, and supportively platforms subversives like former kickboxer Andrew Tate and “historian” Darryl Cooper (pictured above), who asserts that Hitler was the peacemaker and Churchill the villain of World War II.
Although a few like myself saw Candace Owens from the beginning as nothing more than a glib, low IQ grifter, she plummeted from Turning Point USA and Prager U stardom into a raging antisemite with a conspiracy nut’s shaky grasp of history, so much so that the Horowitz Freedom Center felt compelled to post a statement denouncing her and regretting having boosted her career early on. She has nearly seven million followers on X.