Seven years ago, a young woman burst into the spotlight of the conservative movement.
She was electric, combative, funny, and black.
Candace Owens quickly became a star on the right.
Republicans have long struggled to earn black support. Truthfully, it’s not like they’ve really tried.
But Candace could change that.
An intelligent, attractive, well-spoken black female ex-Democrat showing black Americans how 60 years of voting for Democratic Party policies harmed their communities.
“By the end of 2018,” she said, upon becoming Turning Point USA’s Director of Urban Engagement, “I’m going to be one of the most well-known people in this country because I am going to lead the black revolution for the conservative movement.”
She was right about one of those things.
It’s unclear if, six years later, Owens remains committed to championing the very issue that helped make her a right-wing star: leading a “black exit” from the Democratic Party.
Lately, Candace seems preoccupied with other issues—Jews and Israel—which she covered in depth on March 19 on The Candace Owens Show, her final episode with The Daily Wire. Three days later, Owens and the Daily Wire announced they had parted ways.
Owens began the show by rehashing a comment from 2018: “Whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. He was a National Socialist, but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine. The problem is that he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize; he wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German.”
The clip later went viral, and leftists smeared her as, essentially, an antisemite.
Her comments were not antisemitic, just ignorant. In the 6 years preceding Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, the German government excluded, ghettoized, terrorized, imprisoned, and murdered Jewish German citizens. Nationalism can be good. Nazi German nationalism was always bad.
In any case, on March 19, Owens shared for the first time a “very strange” meeting she attended at the Simon Wiesenthal Center during the controversy. She said the meeting was basically a prerequisite to continuing her career.
Owens said her understanding was that if she smoothed things over, “things would be clarified, and then I could just go on living, and my reputation would pretty much be restored. And by golly, that’s kind of what happened.”
“I didn’t understand the meeting because the individuals were speaking in Hebrew. I had to sit in a meeting and explain that I didn’t think Hitler was a great person, listen to two people speak Hebrew, and then my reputation was restored; or at least I was allowed to go on pursuing what I wanted to pursue,” Owens said. “It’s a very odd thing when I reflect on that.”
She said she “still always felt over me” the specter that “this could be over at any moment for you, don’t get out of line again…don’t make us have to threaten you again.”
“Odd,” indeed.
Does anyone really believe her account is full and accurate? Or that the Wiesenthal Center had the power to abort her career over her take on pre-1939 Nazi German nationalism?
Yes, many of her online admirers do. They can read between the lines of her sophistry.
For example, Owens said about the proposed TikTok “ban”: “If TikTok is in fact banned, there is no question that Israel will be blamed, AIPAC will be blamed, ADL will be blamed, Jews are going to be blamed.”
She’s right; her followers will blame the Jews.
One reply on X read, “It is forbidden to criticize the Chosen ones!”
Another: “Tiktok wasn’t owned by their masters so they wanted to close it down.”
And, “We all know why, it’s not a coincidence that we all noticed.”
If anyone knows anti-Semitism when he sees it, it’s Nick Fuentes, who is, like Candace, a skilled and charismatic sophist. And America, Fuentes says, is “controlled by a hostile minority” — Jews.
Fuentes is gaga for Candace Owens. On March 9, he praised Owens for being “outspoken about the Jewish power in the United States.”
“She basically said that there is a Jewish mafia or a Jewish gang, which she compared to the Bloods and the Crips, and she said that they wield immense influence in Hollywood and in Washington, D.C. and that they use allegations of anti-Semitism and the legacy of the Holocaust as a shield from criticism.”
“Sign me up for the next Candace Owens event,” Fuentes said. “Me saying this is probably bad for her. But I have to stan. I have to stan because she’s cooking.”
“She goes on Twitter and talks about, I mean, she implies, that the porn industry is run by Jews,” said Fuentes, hearing the dog whistle, a useful phrase the left has co-opted. “She starts talking on her show about how the Nazis, when they were burning books, were burning the books of Jewish degenerate sociologists.”
Fuentes was referring to an Owens episode in which she asked her followers, “Do you know which books the Nazis were burning?”
Let’s examine Owens’s style in this segment. It’s instructive:
“Definitely something we covered extensively, and you will cover extensively throughout the public education system, is the Holocaust,” Owens said. “That obsession with only referring to that historical aspect is partially because when you’re in the public school system, you really focus on World War 2 and the Nazis.”
Owens was “shocked” to learn the Nazis “were burning books that they deemed to be Marxist and that they deemed to be overtly sexual.”
But it’s widely known that the Nazis riled up Germans to burn books they deemed immoral or “un-German” — books authored by Jews, leftists, communists, and books the Nazis felt represented “the era of extreme Jewish intellectualism,” as Hitler’s propagandist Joseph Goebbels told 40,000 Germans at a ceremonial mass book burning outside the Berlin Opera House on May 10, 1933.
“One of the first and most notorious book burnings was the student-led destruction of the library at The Institute for Sexual Research,” Owens said, “Founded by a man named Magnus Hirschfeld. He was the guy who actually first coined the term transsexual.”
Hirschfeld was a Jew.
“He’s a pervert, doesn’t mean that his library or his institute should have been burned down; there’s no excuse for burning down an institute,” said Owens.
Then she shared “another fun and really bizarre fact” about gynecologist Ernst Grafenberg, who, she said, “was Jewish at the time of the Nazi Party.”
Grafenberg invented the Grafenberg ring, the first widely used IUD.
The Nazis arrested him in 1937 for smuggling out a valuable stamp and sentenced him to 3 years in prison. After less than 2 years, someone paid a ransom to get him out.
“Why on earth would the Nazi Party agree to allow a Jewish man to get out of prison early?” Owens asked. “Well, guess who bailed him out? Margaret Sanger. Margaret Sanger bailed him out, brought him to America to open her first birth control clinic; how on earth she pulled that out, I don’t know.”
“Fascinating part of history that you will never learn in a textbook,” she concluded. “I was actually aware of none of them, and I think that’s sort of the point. They want to control history.”
The purpose of this exposition is clear enough: to imply and suggest that “they” (Jews who determine what is taught in U.S. public schools) want students to focus on the Holocaust and never learn about the handful of Jewish German researchers and physicians who could make the Jews and left look bad.
“Obsession”; “shocked”; “bizarre”; “they.” Somehow Jews and Nick Fuentes hear the same dog whistle. Bizarre!
Owens is no dummy. She always leaves room for plausible deniability that she has a Jewish problem, even while fixating on Jew after Jew after Jew after Jewish State.
On November 3, less than one month after the Hamas massacre of October 7, she wrote on X, “No government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide, ever. There is no justification for a genocide. I can’t believe this even needs to be said or is even considered the least bit controversial to state.”
She was — everyone knows — not so cryptically referring to Israel’s operation against Hamas. When Dave Rubin called her out, Owens responded, “What’s amazing about this is that I did not name any country in this tweet. I simply stated that genocide is wrong— ALWAYS. This is not a controversial stance. Interesting how you interpreted it.”
She posted again: “In short— If the blanket statement that genocide is wrong upsets you in any way, then you need to check yourself. I said exactly what I meant and I won’t be backing down or apologizing or further clarifying this statement.”
“Back down” from what, exactly? The bold stance that genocide is wrong? And why wouldn’t Owens clarify her intent behind such an obvious, doesn’t-need-to-be-said statement?
Clearly, many of Owens’s nearly 5 million followers on X misunderstood her to be accusing Israel of genocide.
As someone paid to express her opinions, why wouldn’t she say what she really meant?
Because when it comes to her current obsession — Jews — Candace Owens is an obfuscator. And her obfuscation attracts anti-Semites while giving her cover to gaslight anti-anti-Semites.
It is, of course, implausible that Owens is surprised by objections like Dave Rubin’s or by gross replies to her other posts about Jews, replies like “Another pedo from the same tribe” or “What religion is Dan Schneider?” or “It’s hard not to notice a certain segment overrepresented in the psychology field.”
For being such a stellar communicator, it’s odd, or as Owens might say, “curious,” how both anti-Semites and anti-anti-Semites misinterpret her to be talking about the same people — Jews; even though she “did not name any country” and harbors “no hatred towards Jewish people” and “had many experiences with Jewish people growing up.”
And for having such a large audience, Owens is cavalier when she broadcasts ignorant takes about Israel — takes that would be excusable for a college freshman but not a political commentator.
Three days after her November 3 post, Owens shared an observation she made while touring Jerusalem, probably when she visited in 2018 to celebrate Donald Trump moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
“When I’m walking through Jerusalem and they say this is the Muslim Quarter, this is where the Muslims are allowed to live, that doesn’t feel like a bastion of freedom to me,” Owens said.
When her guest, Jewish musician Ami Kozak, said the Muslim Quarter is just the name of a neighborhood in the Old City, but Muslims are not restricted to it, Owens conceded that “maybe I’m misunderstanding it” before adding:
“My understanding from the rabbi was that this is where the Muslims have to live in Jerusalem, and it looked very different from where the Jewish people were living,” Owens said. “It was noticeably a lot dirtier, it was noticeably a lot darker, and it just made me feel, as a black American, knowing my own history, this isn’t freedom to me.”
Owens repeated that she may have misunderstood the significance of the name “Muslim Quarter.” Still, broadcasting it was irresponsible. Did she not think to first Google “Jerusalem Muslim Quarter” before comparing Israel to the Jim Crow South?
We’ll note that her misinterpretation of the rabbi’s words during her tour of Jerusalem calls into question her description and characterization of the 2018 Wiesenthal Center meeting she described in her March 19 episode.
In the March 19 episode, Owens all but disavowed her early pro-Israel commentary and activism. She said that when she joined TPUSA in 2018, she was “beside [TPUSA Founder Charlie Kirk] throughout most of his pro-Israel commentary.”
“I bet if people dug it up on the Internet, you would hear me saying pro-Israel talking points, and I say ‘talking points’ because when I got into it I didn’t really care, again, about Israel, because I was an American and I just wanted to talk about black America. But certainly, I was nodding my head no matter what Charlie Kirk said because I was just grateful to have a platform to talk about the things that were important to me.”
In that episode, Owens also covered her friend Kanye West’s infamous “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE” tweet.
Owens’s defense of Kanye was not bigoted. She was friends with and loyal to Kanye. She was wrong to say, “If you are an honest person, you did not think this tweet was anti-Semitic,” but many of the attacks against her during this period were unfair.
But Owens, on her March 19 episode, then defended an indefensible action for a public figure.
On X, she “liked” @christ_gnosis’s March 13 reply to Shmuley Boteach’s post about a threatening message Boteach received on February 20, which he attributed to Candace’s attacks. @christ_gnosis wrote to Boteach, “It says February 20th, Rabbi. Are you drunk on Christian blood again?”
People noticed. How did Candace defend liking a Blood Libel post? Because February 20 was before the most recent public blow-up between her and Boteach.
“I liked the tweet because it clarified the right date of the tweet, saying that ‘Rabbi Shmuley, this tweet is obviously from February 20th. What? Are you drunk on Christian blood?’” Owens said. “I didn’t even pay attention to the last part of the tweet. I just obviously liked that this person was calling out this BS smear tactic.”
Candace…pay attention.
Here is Owens’s defense of her public endorsement of a post that includes an accusation against a rabbi of drinking Christian blood: the first half of the post defends me. Which begs the question: do any guardrails remain? Or would Candace Owens publicly like and double down on her support of a post that denies the Holocaust or Israel’s right to exist as long as the post also includes a fair defense of Candace Owens?
When she was a guest on the March 8 episode of FreshandFit, each time Candace or the hosts mentioned a Jew or Israel, a “cha-ching” sound effect would play, including when Owens mentioned the wife of The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro. The “cha-ching” played maybe 7 times. Owens did not once object or appear uncomfortable.
We are sad to witness Candace’s devolution into adjacent antisemitism.
She is a potent force when directing her energies at the race-hustling left.
If she continues to fixate on Jews and Israel, she will be a potent and dangerous force for evil.
May that not come to pass.
