Don’t Read This If You Don’t Want To Be Sucked Into The Alt-Right Pipeline

As the right-wing culture shift has taken place and as high profile scandals like the Me Too allegations made against Justin Baldoni by Blake Lively and The New York Times, laymen of all political persuasions have found unlikely allies, or unlikely sources for reporting in people like Candace Owens, who have reportedly tired of politics in recent months and shifted gears into juicier pop culture takes. 

I have not been shy about my personal criticisms of Candace Owens, but despite my contention that she suffers from conspiracy-brain and contrarian-itis, engaging with her content on certain pop culture videos about celebrities does not put you on the alt-right pipeline. 

Likewise, women reading Evie Magazine for beauty and wellness tips, fashion rankings, or personal anecdotes about birth control is not a sinister plot to take you to the dark side. Conservatives engaging with culture doesn’t mean they’re going “stealth mode,” it just means you’re losing your vice grip over public consensus.

Can Conservatives Engage With Culture?

I first came across these TikToks denouncing Owens’ coverage of the Lively-Reyolds-Baldoni drama and Evie Magazine’s stealth plot to lure women in with insignificant apolitical content to capture unsuspecting lurkers on the alt-right pipeline from YouTuber Amala Ekpunobi. The content creators she features in a recent video have a common thread: they implicitly reject the notion that conservatives can earnestly engage in culture without some opportunistic agenda. 

They, along with journalists of The Cut like E.J. Dickson consider conservatives covering a high-profile celebrity case or making a video about veneers to be a trick and their unwitting consumers to be useless idiots getting the wool pulled over their eyes. Unsurprisingly, such critics hold no mirror against the left’s monopolistic stranglehold over Hollywood, education, and virtually all major institutions. They’re not interested in properly diagnosing the problem, just in enforcing ideological conformity (and segregation).

Ekpunobi confronts the double standard head on: “Here's what's happening: the left thinks that they own all mainstream culture because they have for quite some time and now that conservatives are participating, they're going, 'hold on a minute, you guys aren't normal people; you're not allowed to be here and if you are, it must be for nefarious purposes of leading people down an alt-right pipeline.' But guess what, guys? Conservatives are normal people. We engage with culture like everybody else.” 

She describes the problem as twofold: not only are conservatives normal people who have a right to participate in the culture they live in, but the culture is also actively de-wokening (I’d argue we’re not yet post-woke, but getting there). This means that the caricatures of conservative archetypes are no longer reflective of reality. What were strictly conservative talking points and archetypes ten years ago are starting to breach containment, hence liberals’ confusion at the confronting sight of the hipster barista that dresses like Anthony Fantano—a former liberal phenotype—openly taking the MAGA side in popular forums such as YouTube’s Jubilee debates. 

Does Pop Culture Need to Be Gatekept From “Bad Actors?”

Whitney Cummings took to TikTok to celebrate a cultural victory over polarization, “I did not think that Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds would be the people that united this country and it happened. The most liberal people I know are now obsessively following Candace Ownes for her take and journalism on the situation. Thank you Ryan and Blake for having such terrible personalities that we are now united as a country.” However, TikTokers like @crutches_and_spice argue it's just another funnel into the alt-right pipeline, even pointing to an absurdly over simplistic chart to demonstrate her point. 

Apparently, the Blake Lively v. Justin Baldoni court case falls under the "beauty, entertainment, dating, 20 v 1 (Jubilee debates)" funnel, which is a pipeline to right-wing perspectives on race and gender. Wow, what do you know? It’s almost like anything is a pipeline to everything. My water bottle is a pipeline to hydration. Being born is a pipeline to dying. Being born must be really sinister and bad! While I’m sure there are a few anti-natalists who would make that argument sincerely, most of us would reject that premise as absurdly reductive.

One viral TikTok cited by Epkunobi warned, “If you are on Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni-Tok enough so that the phrases ‘Candace Ownes had a point about this,’ ‘I never thought I'd agree with Candace Owens,’ ‘Candace Owens said this,’ ‘Not me looking for Candace Owens' TikTok to find out the new scoop,’ if that stuff has come out of your mouth I want you to know that you are currently on the alt-right pipeline. It’s not like the alt-right pipeline is looking for you, it’s not that it’s like you know two blocks down around the corner. No baby, you are on it. You are cruising.” 

The implication is that merely viewing Owens’ content or reading Evie Magazine, as others have suggested, is dangerous radicalizing territory. But if you’re so righteously opposed to this content, how can you meaningfully counter it if your only mode of political activism is disengagement? Criticisms of dangerous rhetoric ring hollow if they don’t meaningfully address or understand the rhetoric they disavow.

Lions, Tigers, and Bears and... Pipelines?

I’m here to tell you a little secret: there are no pipelines. The pipeline is just the circuitry in your brain and the way you process information. Yes, there are impressionable minds and rabbit holes of information. What anyone does with that information is entirely in their court. Some will be powerless to meaningfully challenge any of the content they watch by virtue of their intellectual limitations, but this ideological self segregation isn’t doing the libs any favors. It’s producing the exact kind of result they’re now lamenting—a shift rightward. When I think of the most successful leftist political content creators or influencers with liberal social views like feminist self-identification—the ones that counter-signal right-wing narratives—the people who come to mind are Destiny, Farha Khalidi, and RFH.

The specific reason they’ve been able to cut through the noise and bad optics of traditional left-wing mouthpieces is that they understand the utility of entering the arena rather than operating like a cult that excommunicates anyone for speaking to x person or entertaining y “right-wing” talking point. They’ve capitalized on the right’s tactics of communicating with whomever they please without giving into shaming tactics, and that’s allowed them to create meaningful opposition, and most importantly: respect.

Consuming content isn’t sufficient for radicalization, it requires a spirit that is receptive to the rhetoric they’re consuming and dare I argue that people have agency? In Dickson's own article, "Don't Fall for Candace Owens' Rebrand," she cites a paralegal obsessed with celebrity gossip who began watching Owens' content, who feels she can “easily separate Owens's Lively-Baldoni content from the rest of her brand.” Dom Bradley says, "I'm watching it to get what I want to get out of it... I will eat the meat, spit out the bones, take what I want, and throw away what I don't." Also known as: a normal disposition. When I listen to a song I like, do I first vet the ideological persuasions of the artist? 

The Serpent Eating Its Own Tail

Ironically, posing engagement with any content you personally find unsavory as an ultimatum one must take or leave wholesale is more likely to force the “reactionary” embrace of the very ideas they were warned against. Leftists always use guilt by association as evidence of disloyalty and force them out of the group (see: Bill Maher). But just because someone talks to a “problematic” person and debates a topic you consider “settled” or “not up for debate” doesn’t equal endorsement. I’ve never watched a debate between Destiny and Nick Fuentes and thought, “Yeah, this guy is endorsing everything Fuentes is saying.”

Conversation and debate with the opposite side is much more de-radicalizing than sequestration, let alone when the topic of conversation isn’t even political. Someone’s right not to associate with someone they perceive to be a bad actor is fair enough, but to police others’ consumption of benign pop culture topics because they’re five levels of separation from vaguely conservative politics is just liberal brain rot. Blind, unquestioning loyalty to a cause is a tactic employed by cults, not curious minded intellectuals. 

Blind, unquestioning loyalty to a cause is a tactic employed by cults, not curious minded intellectuals. 

When engagement with "unapproved" content is treated as a betrayal rather than a natural curiosity of the discourse, it creates an incentive to reject the rigidity of one side in favor of openness of the other. Grave warnings of covert alt-right pipelines may be trying to prevent ideological drift, but this absolutist mindset actually only accelerates it. Any system of thought that rests on a philosophy of repression is built on a house of cards. It cannot withstand itself. It may last for quite a while, as many authoritarian regimes have, but eventually the cracks will begin to form. Humans naturally crave autonomy, freedom, and individual expression. They cannot weather a stifling environment in the long-term—one that demands control of information, conformity, and censorship. This is why wokeness was never built to last. The left and right have essentially swapped positions regarding institutional trust. 

The current cultural rightward shift is entirely a result of the left’s own undoing—whose self-policing and ideological purity tests have weakened its influence as a result of insulation, and created a purity spiral that auto-cannibalizes itself. There’s only one logical result: forced excommunication of anyone vaguely straying from its orthodoxy (nevermind the fact that none of these people have any meaningful framework for what alt-right means, as evidenced by their references to Ben Shapiro as their company.) If such a pipeline is trusting people to engage with whatever aligns with their particular interests and drawing their own conclusions, then…boo!