Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and the like have, in recent months, emerged as essentially the preeminent faces of America's so-called "woke Right."
Yet as each of their respective profiles has risen almost meteorically, they appear to have gravitated toward a set of manipulative tactics and ideological tendencies that, while often framed as “novel” and new, are, in my view, anything but.
In September last year, Tucker Carlson had a Nazi apologist and podcaster, Deryl Cooper, on his show. The two talked about BLM, the Civil Rights movement, Russian President Putin, and much more.
Forty-five minutes into the talk, however, enveloped in dozens of other disputatious claims, Cooper made a particularly egregious one.
Winston Churchill, one of the greatest heroes of the 20th century who worked to take down Nazi Germany and rebuild Europe after WWII, was, according to Cooper, “responsible for [that] war becoming what it did,” he said to a largely passive Tucker Carlson. “Something other than an invasion of Poland.”
Hitler indicated real expansionist motives after invading Poland despite earlier promises to Churchill's predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, whose Munich ‘appeasement’ had tried to prevent war. So Cooper’s claim that England, not Hitler, bears central responsibility isn't just ahistorical; it's a deliberate lie meant to soften Nazi Germany's standing as the aggressor.
Cooper insisted he isn't calling Churchill the villain, but his own words, seconds later, undercut the disclaimer. He describes Germany as unprepared for the "millions and millions" of "local political prisoners" it suddenly had to handle after invading Poland, and says the camps where "millions of people ended up dead" simply reflected a lack of planning. As if their deaths just happened accidentally.
This is not a slip.
"Local political prisoners" is a euphemism that erases the fact that the victims were overwhelmingly Jews, Roma, and the disabled, targeted for who they were, not what they did.
And "no plan" implies an innocent mistake and directly contradicts the documented record that the Third Reich actually planned the extermination of Europe's Jews in explicit, bureaucratic detail.
Carlson's role here matters as much as Cooper's claims. He doesn't challenge a single one of them. He even interjects to help Cooper name Stalin as another “falsely” lambasted historical figure. Still, he never asks the obvious question: if Germany had "no plan," what explains all the evidence to the contrary?
If the only times Carlson speaks are to corroborate Cooper’s claims, and otherwise it is almost complete silence from the ex-Fox News anchor, it does effectively signal an endorsement.
Throughout, Carlson reacts with his now-infamous scrunched brow, squinting eyes, and a whimpering-like face, feigning fascination with what the guest is espousing.
It's both a general cadence and a set of literary devices that have since been brilliantly spoofed by Saturday Night Live’s Jeremy Culhane, along with comedian Ami Kozak, and others.
His "just asking questions" approach where he'll pose a question that's phrased to sound neutral, like asking whether Putin has ever threatened to get him fired for disagreeing, but the question is actually rigged. The "correct" answer is obviously "no," and that answer ends up making an authoritarian figure like Putin look reasonable by comparison to a domestic political opponent who actually did make that kind of threat.
By framing it as an innocent question rather than a direct claim, he plants the comparison in viewers' minds without ever having to defend it as a real argument.
He very clearly tries to express corrosive points while framing them as questions, so if pressed, he can easily walk it back as simply asking a question. And that if you call it out, it must indicate a hidden, sinister reason without ever naming what that reason supposedly is.
But it's not just hiding corrosive points in questions. Carlson, Owens, and others like them often use a manipulation tactic, I believe, that is particularly compelling to audiences that must be pointed out.
It's what the former CEO of the American right-wing media company, the Daily Wire, Jeremy Boreing, called “Pre-suasion.”
Carlson will often bring claims built on top of other claims that were never actually established.
Each one borrows legitimacy from the one before it, so that by the fifth or sixth time Carlson or Owens or whoever repeats the claim, you're arguing from a foundation that was never checked.
Carlson will use the words "obviously," "clearly," and "of course," while referencing the very foundation of his entire argument without ever going into it.
Candace Owens, in particular, utilizes this tactic extremely often. She'll say things like “I do think it's very weird that he [the late political commentator Charlie Kirk] was mic'd after he sat down… um, so yeah I thought that was strange. Something's not right.”
Or insinuating confidently that because there were many individuals in maroon shirts at the site of Kirk’s assassination, that must indicate some sort of coordinated military operation.
Language that announces something as self-evident is usually doing the opposite of self-evidence; it's skipping the part where the case gets made, because the case might not survive being made explicitly.
Candace Owens leans heavily on this tactic, asserting something as obvious and universally accepted when it would otherwise be challenged, then building seemingly logical claims outward from that unexamined premise.
The result is a structure that looks reasonable from the top layer, even though the foundation was never actually proved.
It all leads to what Boreing compared to the feeling of “scales falling from the eyes.” An instantaneous revelation. A shock moment, where, now you see the truth, when seconds earlier you didn't.
This move far predates Tucker Carlson and Candance Owens.
A biblical strategy
"Your eyes will be opened,” said the Serpent to an undecided Eve in the very first time this tactic was used.
The same tool that Carlson and Owens use today.
"Did God really say you shall not eat from any tree of the garden?"
The same build-up that the Serpent used before any claim is made, the same that Carlson and Owens use now. A redirect of attention. Not telling Eve what to conclude explicitly, but certainly implicitly.
Then comes suggesting something is being hidden from Eve.
And finally, the feeling that you see something others don't. It's framed by the Serpent, and now by the woke-right as joining an unseen tier, being a part of the people who see behind the curtain that everyone else is staring at.
The content of what's revealed almost doesn't even matter.
What's seductive is the exclusivity of the seeing. Once you believe you're one of the few who's noticed something hidden, the claim defends itself, because doubting it would mean giving up the very thing that made you feel exceptional in the first place. Owens, Fuentes, antisemites across Twitter/X even use that term to describe themselves. “Noticers.”
These lies are compelling for the same reason they always have been.
What makes this worth writing about, for me, isn't the tactics themselves, however. It's that I've fallen for them. Not in some abstract, theoretical "everyone's susceptible" way. Specifically.
There have been moments where a claim, made by conspiracy theorists, about 9/11, Kennedy’s assassination, or the moon landing, or even the claims made by Carlson, Owens, or Fuentes themselves, landed on me not because I'd examined it, but because it was framed in a way that made the examining feel unnecessary. Where "obviously" did the work that evidence should have done, where I felt the rush of waking up to something instead of the slower, less flattering work of actually verifying it.
Most of life, most of reality takes time to understand, and you actually shouldn't have it all easily comprehensible in an instant.
Maybe the Israel-Palestine conflict can't be fully understood from a 30-second TikTok clip; maybe it does actually take time.
That's the uncomfortable part of taking this seriously. It's easy to nod along to a breakdown of manipulation tactics when you're picturing the people who fell for them.
It is way harder to sit with the fact that skepticism isn't a personality trait you either have or don't; it's a discipline you fail at, repeatedly, usually in the exact moments you feel most certain you're finally seeing clearly.
Aristotle once said that “the mark of an educated mind” is the ability to “entertain a thought without accepting it.”
I quite like that. In an age where we're flooded with every idea imaginable, regardless of how shaky, I think it's more important than ever to be able to hear something, feel its pull, and still ask whether it's actually true.