I Thought We Were Having a Conversation
On watching a debate about an assassination while sanding a wall, and the particular argument that was never about who was right.
Our air conditioning had been out for several days, and on the hottest Sunday of the summer I decided to spend it sanding a bedroom wall and listening to Candace Owens argue with a man I’d never heard of.
I don’t know why I do this to myself.
Sweat kept sliding down my forehead into my eyes, mixing with the drywall dust until I could feel grit gathering along my hairline. Just a sanding block in my hand. No power tools. Nothing to blame the noise on later.
My laptop sat open on the bed behind me, and I had the door shut because the debate was about an assassination and my kids did not need three and a half hours of that leaking into the house.
They opened the door every four minutes anyway.
I sanded.
Candace talked.
Andrew Wilson talked over her.
And somewhere in the first ten minutes, before they’d gotten very far into the thing they were supposedly there to argue, my stomach did something I recognized before my brain caught up.
It got tight.
Low, and familiar.
The way it does at the beginning of a conversation you already know you’re going to lose — not because you’re wrong, but because of the shape of it.
I sanded harder.
“Are you fucking kidding me,” I said, to no one.
Dustin laughed somewhere behind me.
I should tell you I like Candace Owens.
Not all of her. Not all of her politics. I don’t know who killed Charlie Kirk, and I’m not going to use this space to pretend I do.
I watched because I genuinely wanted Andrew Wilson to convince me of something.
That’s the whole reason I like a good debate. I like hearing an argument I haven’t considered. I like the small, humbling rearrangement that happens when someone hands me a fact I have to make room for.
Changing my mind has never felt like losing to me.
I thought that was the point.
It took about five minutes for me to stop believing that was what I was going to get.
He reduced months of her reporting to “dreams, vibes, feelings.” He brought up a dream she’d spoken about after Charlie died — a man who wasn’t a headline to her, who had been her friend — and used it to make her sound unserious.
She looked at him and asked if he’d gotten it out of his system.
I laughed.
The tightness stayed.
It stayed for three hours, because it was never about who was right.
Candace wasn’t right about everything.
Andrew wasn’t wrong about everything.
It was the shape.
The interruptions.
The questions she’d start answering before a new one landed on top of the old one.
The way she was hurried toward an answer and blocked from finishing it at the same time.
At one point she told him:
“You don’t let me ever get to the end of the sentence.”
My hand stopped on the wall.
Because I know that sentence.
I know it in my body.
I have said versions of it in kitchens and cars and in the doorways of rooms I was trying to leave.
Can I finish.
That’s not what I said.
Just — let me finish.
You keep reaching for the end of the sentence because you still believe the end is where the understanding lives.
That if you can just get there — clearly enough, calmly enough, with the dates in order and the receipts in hand — the other person will finally go quiet and say:
Okay.
I see it now.
So you keep going.
Later she asked him which of the seven charges against Tyler Robinson he actually believed Robinson was guilty of.
He turned it around.
Name all seven.
She said she would, but asked him to name one first.
“Murder,” he said.
Wrong.
The murder charge was aggravated murder.
There was such an easy way through that moment.
I don’t remember.
Three words.
Nobody dies from three words.
Instead, within about thirty seconds, she was the one being tested.
He held up his fingers and started counting. She had to prove she knew enough, fast enough, while he narrated her failure to do it.
I stood there with dust in my throat and thought:
There it is.
You ask a question.
He can’t answer it.
And a breath later you’re the one on trial.
The ground moves so smoothly you miss the moment it happened, and then you’re doing the thing again — explaining, proving, pulling up the text message, clarifying what you meant and then clarifying the clarification.
Until you’re not talking about the thing anymore.
You’re talking about the way you talked about the thing.
And God help you if, after an hour of it, you finally raise your voice.
Because there it is.
Proof.
Look how emotional you’re being.
I have been in that argument more times than I can count, with more than one man.
For a long time I believed the problem was that I hadn’t found the right words yet.
I’d leave and keep having it alone — in the shower, on the highway — and I’d find the sentence, the perfect one, and feel this embarrassing little flush of relief.
As if there were going to be a rematch.
As if next time I’d say it exactly right and it would finally count.
It took me years to understand that some arguments have no right answer in them.
There wasn’t a goalpost in those arguments.
There was just a man deciding, again and again, that I hadn’t gotten there yet.
Toward the end, Candace confronted Andrew about an old post where he’d used a slur to describe Erika Kirk.
She asked him about it.
He didn’t walk it back.
He made it bigger, evenly, like it was the most reasonable thing in the world:
“I just think all women are retarded.”
No apology.
Just “tongue-in-cheek.”
Part of the bit.
And I felt that stomach thing one more time, except now it had heat in it.
Of men who’ve mistaken contempt for a personality.
Of cruelty getting called courage — he just says what everyone’s thinking — and it was a joke handed out like an eraser you can drag back over anything you said.
Mostly I’m tired of watching people admire it.
Disagree with Candace Owens.
Please.
Bring better evidence than she has.
Tell her she’s wrong to her face.
None of that is what got under my skin.
What got under my skin is that I still can’t find the thing to admire in making a person smaller while you do it.
By the closing statements I’d finally set the block down.
Dustin came in and sat next to me on the bed.
I was filthy — white dust on my arms, sweat drying and starting again — and we watched Andrew close with the exact same bullshit he’d opened with.
Dreams.
Feelings.
Vibes.
Dustin looked at me.
“That’s his whole argument,” he said. “She’s a woman. She’s emotional.”
And something in my chest let go.
Relief, first.
Plain and warm.
For three hours I’d been getting angrier at a stranger on a laptop, and here was the person next to me, seeing it too.
You hear it.
It’s not just me.
Then something moved underneath the relief.
Smaller.
Quieter.
I felt it and looked away from it almost in the same motion, the way you do with a thought you’re not ready to hold.
Because it was so easy for him.
From this side of the screen, with no adrenaline and no history and nothing of his own to defend, he could hear a woman being talked over and name it in one clean sentence.
I sat next to him and let both things be true.
I was so glad he could see her.
And I wished, just for a second, that seeing me had ever been that simple.
Then Andrew kept talking.
The debate ended.
I don’t know who killed Charlie Kirk.
I didn’t learn much I didn’t already know.
I have no idea who “won” the debate, and I find I don’t care.
I closed the laptop.
Then I looked at the wall.
Somewhere in three and a half hours of sweating and sanding and yelling at a man who could not hear me, I’d worn one whole section down too far.
“For fuck’s sake.”
Dustin looked over.
I’d made myself another job.
So I went and got the compound.
And fixed the wall.