Fractal Skepticism

Why you can't debunk Candace Owens

Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination last September, Candace Owens has waged a podcast-and-Twitter campaign against Turning Point USA and much of the mainline conservative right. The claims have been outlandish and the evidence thin where it exists at all, but her audience is vast and devoted, and she has turned it into an army of badgering critics aimed at Turning Point, Erika Kirk, and anyone else within range.

Turning Point’s response was first to ignore her, letting surrogates fight it out online. Then Erika met with Candace directly, which did nothing to calm the temperature. Now the two camps have accepted a state of open social-media conflict.

The theory of victory on the anti-Candace side seems to be that she can be discredited: dunk on her enough times, disprove enough of her claims, and eventually the audience will drift away as supporting her becomes socially unacceptable.

It’s an unpleasant spectacle for us to watch play out, and an unfortunate one as this strategy this will not work.

Candace is deploying a weaponized form of doubt I call fractal skepticism. A fractal is a pattern that repeats at every scale: zoom in or zoom out, and the same structure appears. Fractal skepticism applies that principle to skepticism and doubt itself. First you doubt the official story. When someone debunks your unofficial theory, doubt the debunker. When the evidence contradicts you, doubt the evidence. When an ally pushes back, doubt the ally. Every answer spawns the same suspicious question one layer down, forever. Nothing can ever be established, so inquiry recurses on an endless loop, kind of like a fractal.

The pattern repeats horizontally. When you exhaust one line of doubt, an adjacent one is always waiting, basically identical in structure. And where genuine skepticism is a discipline that must eventually be turned against your own assumptions and conclusions, fractal skepticism only points outward.

This is why the dunking strategy fails implicitly. Inside fractal skepticism, a debunking is not really a refutation, the “skeptic” anticipates and wants it. The fact-checker simply becomes the next object of doubt, and to the faithful every fresh debunker is more evidence of how deep the thing must go.

Candace is the flagship example of fractal skepticism. Over the last few years she has questioned the moon landing, gone deep on “the Jewish Question,” and turned Kirk’s killing into a whodunit, to name only a few of her tall tales of various levels of creativity. Zoom into any layer of her “worldview” and you find the same move.

She will be mocked, her claims will be disproven, serious people will rightly ignore her, but nothing will change because for both audiences, fans and detractors, all of this is just more content. Candace makes fractal-skepticism conspiracy content. Her detractors make Candace-is-an-idiot content. Both products are consumed endlessly, and neither will ever run short of material as there will always be enough deviation from official narratives to give her more ammo, and enough nonsensical allegation to inspire her detractors. Rather than two sides of a debate, this is just two audiences sorted by content preference, and no performer can ever be truly wrong to his own crowd.

The only thing that reliably breaks a content loop is the total discrediting of the figure at its center, and that never comes from argument. Establishment names are defeated by encroaching irrelevance, and skepticism peddlers are defeated by personal implosion; a type of scandal or unraveling that even the faithful cannot parse their way around; as has happened earlier this year to Elijah Schaffer. It is a strange feature of the genre that an audience will follow a host through any number of debunked theories, but not through a crack-up.

Here is the good news: for Turning Point, almost none of this matters. The factions are camps organized around rival content products, and the overlap between their audiences is small. Some of her theories will leak into the broader political consciousness, but anyone still reachable by evidence was never lost to begin with. Turning Point never had Candace’s audience, and it does not need it now.

The feud, in other words, is trivial. A movement can survive Candace Owens. She was never really competing for your audience, and the average Candace watcher is not starting a Turning Point chapter and improving the conservative project. All we are watching is content, on both sides.