Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson know exactly what they are doing.
Over the past month, anti-Semites of all stripes, emboldened by Hamas’ barbaric attack on Israeli civilians, have made their presence among us known.
They have celebrated Hamas’s atrocities and committed their own, fantasizing about the destruction of Israel, tearing down posters of kidnapped children, and harassing their Jewish neighbors.
Much of the overtly anti-Semitic rhetoric and action across the West has been on the left, and conservatives have rightly pointed this out, attributing the deluge of hate and evil on display to a fallacious progressive theory.
But there is a right-wing cohort complicit in this great awakening of an ancient evil.
And that brings us back to Owens and Carlson.
In recent weeks, Owens has repeated a series of blood libels.
In one breath, he has implied that the Israeli government is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
In the following, he claims that Jerusalem’s historic Muslim Quarter (population: 22,000) is a ghetto where the city’s Muslims (population: 350,000) are forced to live.
After her Daily Wire colleague Ben Shapiro criticized her for her ignorant smears, Owens responded in X.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who suffer persecution for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you for my sake, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for my sake,” Owens wrote, quoting the fifth chapter of the Book of Matthew.
“No one can serve two masters. “Either you will hate one and love the other, or you will be devoted to one and despise the other,” he added.
“You cannot serve God and money at the same time. “Christ is King.”
And so, the mask that a thread held to his face fell off.
Shapiro, he argued without evidence and almost no plausible deniability, had abandoned justice for wealth; Is there a more classic example of an anti-Semitic accusation?
When Shapiro responded by reminding Owens that he could stop receiving a paycheck from his company if it threatened his soul, Owens hid behind his Bible verse.
“You are completely out of line to suggest that I cannot quote biblical scriptures,” he shouted, placing another “Christ is King” performance on his digital flop.
Then on Wednesday night, Carlson published a fawning interview with Owens in which both professed not knowing why Shapiro had criticized her in the first place.
Carlson brought up the dispute by playing the video of Shapiro “attacking” Owens stripped of all context.
When he asked Owens what might have inspired it, she insisted that “there’s not much background” for it.
Carlson later said that while he was “horrified” by the Hamas attack, he thought “the emotional response” from “some commentators” was “disproportionate.”
He then became enraged because some university donors threatened to boycott anti-Semitism on campus, protesting that they had not done the same for whites.
“If the biggest donors to, say, Harvard have decided, well, let’s close it now, where were you the last 10 years when you were calling for white genocide? You were allowing this. And then I found myself really hating those people,” she said.
His performance on Wednesday followed weeks of downplaying developments in Israel and arguing against the provision of aid.
Last month, for example, it brought retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor – a man who accused the pro-Israel lobby of enriching US officials – to claim that the Israelis are attempting to inflict collective punishment on Gaza civilians by perpetration of war crimes.
Both Owens and Carlson have a deep understanding of their audiences; That’s how they accumulated other such impressive ones.
They know that to keep anti-Semites on their side and attract more to them, they do not need to reference “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and alienate their best-intentioned followers.
They need only wink at the fanatics as they hide behind false curiosity (Carlson) or, even more embarrassingly, Christianity (Owens) when held accountable for their thinly veiled appeals to humanity’s worst nature.
Those of their ilk have people of good faith who make distinctions between anti-Semites and those who serve them.
It is time for the most lucid of us to stop allowing ourselves that luxury.
Isaac Schorr is an editor at Mediate.
