The Tactics Candace and Tucker Use to Manipulate Viewers

Jeremy Boreing opens with a confession in his latest podcast episode. Watching the 9/11 conspiracy documentary Loose Change in the early 2000s, he felt that exhilarating, scales-falling-from-your-eyes sensation of finally seeing the truth. Then he hit mute. The narration in the film stopped. And he saw exactly what he’d always seen: buildings struck by jets, burning for hours, collapsing under their own weight. “The narrator hadn’t shown me anything new. They hadn’t revealed the hidden truth. They’d simply reframed the narrative so that I believed something different about the exact same footage.”

That feeling, he argues, isn’t the feeling of truth. It’s called the illusion of insight, and it can be manufactured. That’s the thesis of his latest podcast episode that focuses on Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and the wave of anti-Israel sentiment sweeping through young conservatives.

It has the same fingerprints as every social contagion in modern history: eugenics, the population bomb, COVID hysteria, BLM, transgenderism. “When every free thinker arrives at the same conclusion at the same time in the same words, their thinking isn’t as free as they believe it is.”

Boreing spends the bulk of the episode dissecting the specific rhetorical machinery behind this contagion, using Tucker and Candace as primary case studies. (RELATED: The Shadow War Against President Trump)

On Tucker, he identifies a technique called presupposition — stating a claim and then treating it as an already established fact within the same sentence. Tucker on Pearl Harbor: “When Roosevelt allowed Pearl Harbor to happen, which he did, that’s been proved, I think.” Boreing breaks it down: “He states the claim and then, inside the very same sentence, treats it as already established fact. He doesn’t argue it. He doesn’t source it. He assumes it into existence.” The hedge, “I think,” is legal fine print tacked on after the certainty has already landed. He also catalogs Tucker’s signature phrases: “obviously,” “clearly,” “universally recognized,” and “of course.” His team analyzed 23 episodes and found hundreds of examples. “Universally recognized and obviously aren’t actually making any arguments. They’re skipping the arguments entirely. They’re telling you the verdict is already in.”

On Candace, Boreing zeroes in on her trademark phrase: “We don’t know, but we know.” Her entire evidentiary basis for claiming something was suspicious about Charlie Kirk’s death was that she’s always been mic’ed backstage at Turning Point events. “From that singular data point, her personal experience at her own personal appearances, she concludes that anything different is therefore suspicious.” Then she converts admitted non-knowledge into collective certainty. “‘We don’t know, but we know’ is not a thing. It’s the sound of someone gesturing at a conclusion they just can’t reach and then hoping you’ll make the jump with them.” (RELATED: Operation Divide MAGA)

He also identifies what he calls authority transfer: “One true or compelling claim becomes a credential. And that credential is then used to smuggle in a dozen other claims you never independently verify.”

Tucker and Candace each earned trust by exposing something real, and then spent that trust on claims that don’t survive scrutiny. (RELATED: Bread, Circuses, and Outrage)

“The voices that profit from your cynicism want you to believe that trust is weakness,” says Boreing. “They want you to believe that doubt is strength.” The antidote isn’t better manipulation from a more trustworthy narrator. “It’s clarity. It’s evidence. It’s the humility to sit with uncertainty rather than reaching for the intoxicating snap of false certainty.”

Boreing zooms out from Tucker and Candace entirely and places the current anti-Israel wave inside a long and ugly lineage. Eugenics felt inevitable and scientific — nearly every doctor, professor, and policymaker agreed — until Adolf Hitler put a gun to his head in a Berlin bunker and the world was forced to see where “the science is clear” had led.

The population bomb theory felt urgent and obvious — until the famine didn’t come, the wars didn’t come, and the only lasting legacy was 300 million aborted Chinese babies and a demographic catastrophe still unfolding today. (RELATED: Death of a Charlatan)

COVID, BLM, climate change, transgenderism… each one had the same shape, the same feeling of urgent and arguable obvious truth, the same mechanism that made questioning it feel like proof that you were one of the compromised ones.

“Today, we face a new social contagion,” Boreing says. And the tell, he argues, is right there in plain sight: millions of young conservatives didn’t independently arrive at identical conclusions about Jews and Israel through their own organic research. They arrived at the same conclusions, at the same time, in the same words, citing the same influencers, experiencing the same feeling of waking up. That’s not independent thought. That’s infection. And the people spreading it, whether Tucker building an empire on American self-loathing or Candace trying to become a billionaire off your despair, need you demoralized, need you cynical, and need you clicking on the next episode.

“The first deception in human history didn’t feel like deception,” Boreing says. “It felt like enlightenment. But in reality, it was slavery.”

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Tyler Rowley is a Catholic author and founder of Right Mic, a newsletter that curates the most recent and relevant conservative podcasts.

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