Friday, April 10, 2026

The Empire Strikes Back

Last night:

President Trump lashed out at four right-wing critics of the Iran war Thursday, describing them as “NUT JOBS” and “losers” who will say anything for attention.

“I know why Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones have all been fighting me for years, especially by the fact that they think it is wonderful for Iran, the Number One State Sponsor of Terror, to have a Nuclear Weapon — Because they have one thing in common, Low IQs,” Trump wrote in a lengthy Truth Social post.

“They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!” the president raged. “Look at their past, look at their record. They don’t have what it takes, and they never did!

Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly both wore out their welcome at Fox, for reasons that have never been fully explained. Megyn Kelly has built her podcasts into something of a media machine; accounts say she has an army of producers nearly as big as she had at Fox, but she projects a breathless girlie-girl persona that's hard to get past -- and nobody's gonna want to cross the girlboss by telling her that. And ever since he left Fox, Tucker has struggled to find a center, and at 56, the preppie schtick is more and more incongruous.

Maybe Fox simply decided that no matter their eye and neck lifts, both had reached their sell-by dates. But Trump is always able to cut to the heart of the matter: "they have one thing in common, Low IQs". This brings us to Candace Owens. In this whole context, there's a strange data point. Michael LeBron, a YouTuber and standup comic who posts under the name Lionel, has recently hopped aboard the Candace Owens train along with Kelly, Carlson, and Jones. But not all that long ago, he had this to ssy on WABC New York:

Candace Owens, as you know, is this firebrand, African-American lady, who suggests, out of nowhere, and states, repeatedly, repeatedly, that Brigitte Macron, the first lady of France, is a man. WAWAWAWAWA! Born a man. WAWAWAWAWA!n Wait a minute! That's not it! You think that's it? I can't even go through the list of the crimes she has alleged. . . and one of the allegations that she has made. . . was that she is Macron's father. Sounds like "Luke, I'm your father", sounds like a
Star Wars episode. I mean, it's crazy.

I don't know exactly when Lionel made these comments, maybe sometime last summer, but since then, he's done a complete 180 on Candace Owens. As of last December, he was saying Candace Owens's Radical Shift in Conservative Discourse Has Them Terrified:

Lionel celebrates Candace Owens as the vanguard of new media, whose bold questioning of taboos exposes the obsolescence of legacy conservative figures like Ben Shapiro and accelerates the shift to decentralized, authentic discourse.

Ben Shapiro is just another relentless self-promoter in Conservative, Inc. You don't need to think Candace Owens is good to think Ben Shapiro is a hack. But this brings me to another question. Not only Lionel, but several other C-list YouTubers like David Freiheit, who posts as Viva Frei, and his frequent guest Robert Barnes, have all turned against Trump at roughly the same time, when they'd been supporting him well after the 2024 election. It would take some effort to trace exactly when this happened -- Lionel and Candace had done it before the March 1 Iran attacks.

On the other hand, Megyn, Tucker, Candace, Alex, Lionel, and Viva Frei are all B- and C- listers, and I'm not sure if they're worth the time to figure them out. But not only is Lionel anti-Trump, he's also singing the praises of Candace Owens, whom he'd previously skewered for claiming not only is Brigitte Macron a guy, but he's Emmanuel's dad. I'd been following Lionel since 2016. He's sharp. He's got a sense of humor. What changed his mind?

When I looked into Candace Owens not long ago, I learned that Candace married the son and heir to a wealthy member of the UK House of Lords, whirlwind courtship, and her net worth with her husband is now thought to be in the hundreds of millions. On the other hand, it's hard not to think that her B- and C-list colleagues, particularly Alex Jones, must need money, especially Megyn and Tucker, who are trying to run legacy-style media operations without legacy-style budgets. That kind of money can buy a lot.

On the other hand, Trump is a lot smarter than any of those, and he thinks the explanation is just low IQ. Occam's razor would support Trump's estimate.

UPDATE:

posted by test @ April 10, 2026   0 Comments

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