Updated 11/26/2022 with info on Rebekah Mercer.

AOC was asleep at the wheel on the subject of Candice Owen and her husband George Farmer, who she married in 2019, being the power couple behind Parler. That’s the visible power couple.

Republican mega donor Rebekah Mercer would take issue with who is in charge of Parler, as she controls two of three board seats. To be honest, the Mercer heiress hasn’t gotten much of a return on her investment in uber-right-wing media investments: Parler, Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica.

The Parler app got banned in the aftermath of America’s January 6 insurrection because it was a haven for communication and calls to war among those who want to overthrow the US government. Apple, and other social media, banned Parler after the Jan. 6 riot.

In the case of Apple, the mega brand reinstated the Parler in the company’s app store on April 14. NBC News reported on April 19, 2021:

Timothy Powderly, Apple’s senior director of government affairs, wrote a letter to Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., and said that Parler had been allowed back into the company's app store as of April 14. Powderly noted that the app had been banned for “including posts that encouraged violence, denigrated various ethnic groups, races and religions, glorified Nazism, and called for violence against specific people.”
The letter, obtained by NBC News, also said Parler’s “moderation practices were clearly inadequate to protect users from this harmful and dangerous content.”
Despite the repeal of Parler’s ban, Apple’s letter stated that the company “stands by its decision” and that it was “an independent decision to remove Parler for non-compliance with the Guidelines, and it did not coordinate or otherwise consult with Google or Amazon with respect to that decision.“

The Washington Post broke down the whole story on Tuesday, with Candace Owens and Kanye West’s provocative friendship, explained. A subscriber to WaPo, I missed it because it was in the Style section. Although I’m sure the headline was a small one on the front page.

A far more relevant headline: Kanye [Ye], Candace Owens, Husband and Parler CEO George Farmer Explained would have been a public service, but hey. I’ve actually complained multiple times to WaPo about their pure clickbait headlines, but this one got the white glove treatment.

So — now we understand even better why right-wing Republicans ran Kanye West’s presidential campaign. That’s an undisputed fact. But now we must ask if Kanye West supported the January 6 insurrectionists.

I’ve always thought that the reason Gap was holding on to Ye was to market his clothes to young white men, not only Kanye’s original young black men crowd. In a post-Charlottesville world, branding is tightly woven into politics. So I saw the Yeezy Gap collab as always targeting disaffected young white men — like Charlottesville young white men. Good goddess, it’s a small world out there.