Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson know exactly what they’re 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’ve celebrated Hamas’ atrocities and committed their own, fantasizing about the destruction of Israel, tearing down posters of abducted children and harassing their Jewish neighbors.
Much of the overtly antisemitic rhetoric and action across the West has been situated on the left, and conservatives have rightly pointed out as much, chalking up the deluge of hatred and wickedness on display to fallacious progressive theory.
But there is a cohort on the right complicit in this great reawakening of an ancient evil.
And that brings us back to Owens and Carlson.
The past few weeks have seen Owens repeat a series of blood libels.
In one breath, she’s implied the Israeli government is committing a genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
In the next, she’s submitted 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 being called out on her ignorant smears by her Daily Wire colleague Ben Shapiro, Owens responded on X.
“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake,” wrote Owens, quoting the Book of Matthew’s fifth chapter.
“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other,” she added.
“You cannot serve both God and money. Christ is King.”
And just like that, the mask clinging to her face by a thread fell off.
Shapiro, she argued without evidence and hardly any plausible deniability, had forsaken righteousness for wealth; is there a more textbook example of an antisemitic charge?
When Shapiro responded by reminding Owens she’s welcome to stop taking a paycheck from their company if it’s threatening her soul, Owens hid behind her Bible verse.
“You are utterly out of line for suggesting that I cannot quote biblical scripture,” she cried, affixing another performative “Christ is King” to her digital flop.
Then on Wednesday night, Carlson released a fawning interview of Owens in which both professed not to know why Shapiro had criticized her in the first place.
Carlson brought up the feud 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 isn’t much of a background” to it.
Later, Carlson said that while he was “horrified” by Hamas’ attack, he thought that “the emotional response” to it from “some commentators” was “disproportionate.”
He went on to work himself up into a lather over some university donors threatening a boycott over antisemitism on campus, protesting they hadn’t done the same for white people.
“If the biggest donors at, say, Harvard have decided, well, we’re going to shut it down now, where were you the last 10 years when they were calling for white genocide? You were allowing this. And then I found myself really hating those people, actually,” he said.
His Wednesday performance followed weeks of downplaying the events in Israel and arguing against the provision of aid to it.
Last month, for example, he brought retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor — a man who’s accused the pro-Israel lobby of making American officials rich — to assert Israelis are attempting to inflict collective punishment on Gazan civilians through the perpetration of war crimes.
Both Owens and Carlson boast a deep understanding of their audiences; that’s how they amassed such impressive ones.
They know that to keep the antisemites in them on their side and attract more to them, they need not reference “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and alienate their more well-meaning followers.
They need only wink at the bigots while hiding behind either counterfeit curiosity (Carlson) or, even more shameful, Christianity (Owens) when they’re held accountable for their thinly veiled appeals to humanity’s worst nature.
Their ilk counts on people of good faith drawing distinctions between antisemites and those who cater to them.
It’s past time for the clear-eyed among us to cease affording them that luxury.
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediate.