My original article covering Candace Owens details how she was targeted by Zoe Quinn and Randi Harper, individuals with a long history of abuse, as well as the failures of NY Mag journalist Jesse Singal. I stand by everything I wrote in the piece. It’s a quintessential example of journalistic bias and of a journalist being too close to the people they’re covering. With this in mind, I wanted to write a follow up piece to raise concerns regarding Candace Owens and her Social Autopsy project while giving Owens a fair opportunity to comment.

My concerns grew during my correspondence with Owens. She believes journalist Cathy Young is a plant; the implication being that Young has been pretending to be fair to GamerGate for the purpose of tricking us. The basis of these claims comes from a series of articles written by Young that were critical of Owens. More than this, Owens expressed a belief that Hillary Clinton is in some way involved in the negative media coverage of GamerGate (or at least, the ‘women under threat of harassment’ narrative). While this first struck me as extraordinary over-reach, I understand the basis of this belief regarding Clinton.

I first reached out to Owens on the 25th April. Our exchange took place via twitter direct message.

Owens: My shit was taken down by people with power. Washington Post does not contact anyone after two days on kickstarter because there are “concerns with the project”. It’s all bullshit. SJWS were sent to defeat my project and make sure it never saw the light of day. And since nobody got fired for it — you know there was power for it. The fact that Caitlin Dewey still works for the Washington post means I do not need to be looking at Randi and Zoe anymore. She’s (Cathy Young) in with Singal and Dewey and them — I’m just waiting for one of the GGers to figure that out. I figured that part out day 3 of my journey. She just plays you all. Kaine: I think she tries hard to be objective. I definitively think she’s too generous to Singal, much more than he would be in his own reporting. In my opinion, I haven’t seen anything from her that would show her to be malicious. She was one of the handful of journalists who covered the GamerGate controversy fairly. She was even one of the panelists at the SPJ Airplay meeting. If I may say so, some people would probably think the same of you, that maybe you say what we want to hear. I think the whole overall controversy has caused a degree of mistrust. It happened within GamerGate with people splitting off from the tag over time because of mistrust or people disapproving of other people’s tactics. Owens: I think all of that was planned. She was being fair but it was all planned. You have to remember — she was the first person to contact me after Zoe called me. I spoke to her about my suspicions about Zoe Quinn — before I knew ANYTHING.

Update: Since publishing this article, Cathy Young has claimed that it was Candace Owens who reached out to her.

Later in our conversation, I was attempting to find how I could verify that Owens has been in contact with lawyers and authorities. I was getting the sense that she was perhaps hesitant to answer. I asked directly if there was an attorney’s office or a police station I could contact to verify.

Owens: I think it was for Hillary Clinton. She’s friends with Jeff Bezos. He purchases half the media in 2014. And they start a story about how “women” are abused. Enter SJWs who are all team Hillary. That’s a really big thought and I can’t prove it yet which is why I’m watching this all go down. If she doesn’t get the nomination, we will see.

I was stunned by this, quite frankly. To me, it looked like she dodged my question, and was trying to direct the conversation the way she wanted it to go. Could it be a case of simple miscommunication?

Is the implication here supposed to be that Cathy Young has been planted by Hillary Clinton, or that Clinton has been behind the scenes manipulating the moral panic narrative that was part of what caused GamerGate? This is an extraordinary claim. However, there is some logic to the claim against Clinton.

GamerGate are concerned about cronyism, people in media being too close with each other. Among other facts, this was backed up by the GameJournoPros leak, undisclosed patreon donations, and the incredible timing of articles from competing games media attacking gamers.

Similar links between Jeff Bezos and Hillary Clinton have been exposed. While Clinton was Secretary of State, she announced a $16.5 million contract with Amazon. Bezos is the CEO of Amazon, and he also owns The Washington Post, which has ceaselessly attacked Bernie Sanders.

Pictured above, articles published within 16 hours of each other.

Between the cronyism in games journalism that sparked GamerGate, and the Bezos/Clinton connection, there are remarkably similar conflicts of interest at play. The only real difference is the level of power.

While the term did not originate with them, The Washington Post has been all over the ‘Bernie Bros’ meme, with stories such as ‘These 6 charts show how much sexism Hillary Clinton faces on Twitter’ and ‘ The sexist double standards hurting Hillary Clinton’.

Perhaps you may already be with me on this - ‘Bernie Bros’ is a fake, invented controversy. To the point that even the most ardent, true believer SJWs turned against the narrative. In his apology article, where of course Wil Wheaton must accept his sins before the church of SocJus and acknowledge his white male privilege, he displays a glimmer of awareness.

I know that this sounds like “hashtag not all Sanders supporters” but the Sanders supporters and activists I interact with daily don’t support or engage in that behavior. I honestly thought, after seeing “Bernie Bros” thrown around on a daily basis, that it was being used to describe all of us who believe in Senator Sanders’ platform, as opposed to a shitty group of shitty people (who I honestly can’t believe are genuine progressives like the rest of us who want Bernie to get the nomination).

Consider how close the slanders against supporters of GamerGate have been to that of this ‘Bernie Bros’ meme. The boys club strawman, the accusations of latent misogyny among Bernie/GamerGate supporters.

The Bezos/Clinton connection is an obvious example of corruption. Is it so much of a stretch that, on Clinton’s behalf, corrupt outlets would sow the seeds of ‘women facing harassment’, as something to build in the public consciousness, something to manipulate later during Clinton’s campaign?

Kaine: I’m pretty sure that Hillary can and will manipulate the current climate of identity politics in her favor.

The issue for me, and to be fair to Candace she admits this herself, is that the claim is short of its burden of proof. Without greater context (and this is something GamerGate has been accused of), it can sound like a shadowy conspiracy.

‘The elite - they obscure themselves in darkness, but the truth is still mine to reveal.’

To a greater extent, this is also a problem regarding her concerns with Cathy Young.

Owens: She reduced it (Owens’ experiences with Quinn/Harper) to one sentence. Any person who knows what GG is should have made that an entire story and she completely ignored it and instead talked about Social Autopsy. That day, I unfollowed her. I knew she was in with them somehow. And she’s apparently writing another article about me now. She contacted the “Wanderin Poet” for some reason.

Image with bleeped out contact details taken from Owens’ article.

Why the fuck would she contact the Wonderin Poet — who I don’t know — and not me, when she has my email address. It doesn’t make sense. She’s planted, and since you all perceive her as fair, you’ll consider what she says. Who is she writing for? Clearly not me. She hasn’t reached out or said anything. And any person saying that Randi is “Awful” but candace is “crazy”, is clearly not reading into the facts. Randi is a psychopath. That cannot be disputed.

Owens also stated that she had seen a picture of Harper and Singal drinking beers together, though I have been unable to find this. If someone knows if this exists and has a link, I will update this article.

Throughout our conversation, Owens emphasizes her belief that Young is in some way connected to Singal and Dewey, and her belief that Young has been scamming GamerGate.

The bulk of these concerns rests on how much focus Cathy Young placed on criticisms regarding Social Autopsy, how little she covered Owens’ concerns with Zoe Quinn, and the fact that Young shared privately that Owens is ‘either a loon or a scam artist’. I reached out to Young for comment.

Young: Wandering Poet approached me with his blogposts about the Candace Owens situation, I gave him my opinion based on my interactions with Candace. Kaine: In your subsequent follow up pieces on Social Autopsy, did you attempt to reach Candace for comment? If not, why not? Young: I didn’t. I was commenting on things that were going on in public, and based on her reaction to my previous blogpost I didn’t feel this would be a productive conversation. I also didn’t reach out to Randi Harper or Zoe Quinn.

The thing is, people aren’t obligated to give support to your story, they’re not obligated to ‘write for you’. When you go back in my timeline, you’ll see I was quite skeptical, as were others.

Disclaimer: I’ve been following @Tipsycaek on twitter for a while.

For nearly two years, GamerGate has been dealing with professional victims, a small number of people who cynically take advantage of people’s sympathy for the purpose of marketing. Another sign of the professional victim, as it is in Zoe Quinn’s case, is a constant and unhealthy need to be fed sympathy, with her followers as enablers.

I’m just not sure if Candace Owens realizes how she can come across.

Another individual I follow on twitter, who I had noticed was especially critical of Owens, was Angela Night.

I decided to reach her for further thoughts.

Night: I made it very clear from the moment I looked into the Kickstarter that I thought it was a truly terrible idea and nothing has happened since that has persuaded me otherwise. Candace Owens appeared to be coming from a place of good intentions, albeit incredibly naively. However reading her post after the Kickstarter was closed down I was stunned at the lack of knowledge and research from those hoping to “break the internet” about how the internet works and the cultures that exist within it. Social Autopsy would look at a person, judge them a harasser, then build a file of all their details (employer, school etc) from all the information posted online from various sites. Yet the person who would presume to judge someone a harasser has no clue what doxing is? Has never heard of Gamergate, one of the biggest stories included in the debate on internet harassment? Decides to tell her side of things to Ralph of The Ralph Retort, whose reputation is questionable at best? To me it seems that Candace Owens is rapidly becoming a professional victim, building her own story of mistreatment off the back of which to launch her own internet and media career. A professional victim of professional victims. I also believe that it is hypocritical to denounce Harper and Quinn as professional victims while rallying behind Owens, whether a professional victim supports the same thing or hates the same people as you do is irrelevant. We should not allow ourselves to be used once more to make the career of yet another professional victim, whether it be by a charlatan? Or by somebody well intentioned but naive and unwilling to accept the truth. And the truth is? Social Autopsy is a crap idea that will become a tool used by the very people it hopes to stop.

I had expressed to Candace that my intention was not to attack her. I’m positive that some of the criticisms raised here can seem unsympathetic. I think it would be dishonest to hide the criticisms that exist. I also think it would be cruel to pander. I believe Candace Owens is sincere; and if she is sincere, then criticisms can be something to learn from, or at least, it’s a way to understand where people are coming from. While I would have handled things differently from Young, knowing the history of Quinn and Harper, just because Cathy Young isn’t on board with Candace Owens doesn’t make her a plant. And really, no one is above criticism, I’m guilty of becoming too excited, of making mistakes.

Being skeptical of victimhood narratives runs the risk of seeming like you lack empathy, but what I hope my original article shows, it is a necessity. It’s a mistake to give people unquestioning support, which is the mistake Jesse Singal made, and it is not one I intend to copy.

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