Traffic over Merit, and the Decline of the Conservative Infotainment Complex
Caring about the quality of arguments seems to be a thing of the past.
When I took a passing swipe in Wednesday’s column at Candace Owens reflecting poorly on the Daily Wire, little did I know how soon a perfect illustration of it would present itself.
During the October 16 edition of her podcast, in a segment helpfully clipped and brought to my attention by Twitter user Defiant Baptist, Owens chastises “both sides” for “using death as a reason to justify their stances. Death! Death! You have to agree with me or else you want death!”
As one would expect out of that not-exactly-original-but-nonetheless-valid observation, she cited several examples of leftists insisting that rejection of their favored policies will kill people, including Covid-19 lockdowns, gender-transitioning mentally ill children, and environmental regulations (she also took a swipe at defensive aid to Ukraine, because there’s no way someone as grifty as her wasn’t going to chase that trend). But she also threw in a jab at pro-lifers:
Abortion. That’s a conservative one, right? “You must like dead babies. If you are marching in the streets, and you are pro-choice, it is because you just like the concept of babies being ripped from their mother’s wombs and then being torn limb from limb. You love death.”
That’s where we’re at today. It is the doctrine of death, political arguments for people to make their points, always use the most extreme arguments. Let me tell you something: left or right, it’s disingenuous. Everybody is disingenuous. And their rhetoric is becoming more and more extreme with every political issue.
“Everybody is disingenuous.” If that isn’t an invitation to invoke one of my all-time favorite Burke quotes—“He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one”—I don’t know what is. Because, as should surprise no one, Candace is no stranger to playing the death card herself, against people she casually claims “demand war,” “want another war,” and so on.
As for the “substance” (using the term very loosely) of Owens’s argument, we could discuss all sorts of examples of leftists framing abortion as a positive good (even “beautiful”), such as the “Shout Your Abortion” movement. We could also recall that the Democrat Party fanatically and near-uniformly opposes any abortion restrictions of any kind.
But there’s a much more basic reason that talk of babykilling isn’t like leftist demagoguery for socialized medicine or against responsible gun ownership: because babykilling is literally what abortion does, and it strains credulity to imagine that Owens—who has spoken in the past about how an ultrasound of her own child drove preborn humanity home to her—doesn’t understand that perfectly well.
But for whatever reason—misplaced sense of fairness, stunt for outrage clicks, bid for objectivity points through both-sidesism, or maybe an attempt to align herself with Donald Trump’s hostility to pro-lifers—she is willing to play dumb. And no, the fact that a random pro-choicer on the street might not personally know an embryo is a living human being doesn’t cut it; pro-life outreach generally does not advise going fire-and-brimstone on strangers one is trying to persuade, whereas it is entirely appropriate to confront professional activists and officeholders who know better with the reality of what they support.
Owen’s warped thought processes (which in the past has led her to blow off a commitment to address college conservatives because an opportunity to hang out with Kanye West opened up, and more recently to play footsie with 9/11 Trutherism), ultimately, is not nearly as important as the fact that one of the Right’s largest media enterprises sees fit to inflict such fallacious phonies on the public discourse (and she’s not the only one)—an enterprise that, perhaps not coincidentally, is adamant about making its various moneymaking ventures into more than they are.
Would Ben Shapiro honestly say the above lecture on the “doctrine of death” constitutes intellectually-honest, logically-sound, productive, or even conservative content? Of course he wouldn’t; say what you want about his own positions (I certainly have), but nobody familiar with him can deny that he’s highly intelligent. Indeed, the prospect of hooking him up to a polygraph machine and having him review his own hosts’ output would be one of the few things that could tempt me into a premium membership.
So why inflict such tripe on an audience one is ostensibly trying to serve? Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing inadvertently hinted at an answer last year, in the course of a public beef with conservative writer and former Wire personality Josh Hammer, who rightly questioned Shapiro’s tolerance of Owens defending anti-Semitic lunatic Kanye West, but muddied the message with a crack about Ben and “shekels” in a private chat (for whatever it’s worth, Hammer is also Jewish; make of that dustup what you will).
After preposterously preening about Hammer being a “middling talent” by the Wire’s exceptionally-demanding standards (try not to laugh in light of what you just read above), Boreing said that Hammer “couldn't get the traffic. He couldn't take criticism. He was a general malcontent, and was deeply angry that we wouldn't (read: couldn't) make him famous - the only thing he seemed to care about. He just didn't have it.”
I of course have no idea (and don’t particularly care) about dueling claims regarding Boreing and Hammer’s behind-the-scenes history, but note well that “couldn’t get the traffic” is the first point Boreing mentions, and the only one pertaining to his actual output for the website.
That’s not quite an admission that the Daily Wire doesn’t care about substance as long as its personalities bring in the clicks, but it’s the only sensible explanation for tolerating the likes of Owens. If content is generating pageviews that translate to ad revenue and subscriptions, then who cares if it makes sense, accurately or fairly represents a subject, reflects and advances conservative principles, or leads audiences to better understand current events, make better political decisions, and pursue more productive courses of action?
Traffic over merit, clicks over conservatism. It may not be the only reason for the current state of the Right, but when the time comes for the autopsy, it will most definitely rate a mention as a contributing factor.