We all know it: It was because of the Jewish stuff.
If you haven't been following the saga, I don't have time to clue you in on everything, but the rift started after Hamas' October 7th terror attack on Israeli civilians.
There are many younger conservatives (like myself) who grew up seeing the unfettered obsession with Israel that was particularly present among older American evangelicals, and have become frustrated with it as a matter of practical political policy.
Candace, from what I can surmise, is one of those millennial conservatives.
After the October 7th attack when the entire mainstream conservative establishment was calling for war and support of Israel, she decided to play devil's advocate. Candace invited Jewish-American professor and activist Norman Finkelstein onto her podcast in November to discuss problems with the state of Israel.
Her comments ignited a firestorm within conservative circles, with other Daily Wire hosts like Ben Shapiro even calling her out.
Candace, who rose to fame by not playing the identity-bloc game of the racist left in America (founding "BLEXIT" for black people), saw this as another identity-bloc game where she was expected to be an "ally" and toe the party line. As a reactionary who made a name by refusing to be controlled, Candace did what Candace was always going to do: She turned her sights on identity politics within the Jewish community like she had done many times to the BLM/CRT social justice warriors.
This has earned Candace no shortage of enemies. Everyone from the far-left ADL to right-wing pundits have condemned her.
The centrality of her message goes back to what I said in the beginning: A rising ire among younger generations who believe America no longer has the moral grounding or strength to be the world's policeman.
But Candace has gone down deeper rabbit holes than that, and that's what I want to spend a minute discussing with you, if you'll let me.
For context, here is The Washington Post's reporting today (take their bias with a grain of salt):
Let's talk about this growing obsession with the Jews and how a sane-minded person should navigate this (particularly Christians).
I'll talk first about one thing that Candace is right about, then two areas where she is wrong.
Where Candace is right:
Jewish supremacy is a real thing.
[Update: I feel it very important to note this does not apply to everyone. It is simply saying that there is a type of ethnic pride here that goes too far, just like every other people group on the face of the planet.]
I saw it firsthand in Israel. I saw the racism a Jewish-American couple leveled at our Arab driver on the way back to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. It was horrible. The taxi driver was one of many who had been paid to drive our tour group back to our hotels, but he hadn't counted on me. I had just spent the summer studying Arabic in Jordan and was staying in a Palestinian neighborhood on the Mount of Olives, far away from the typical western tourist hotels. He knew crossing the city late in the evening would take an extra hour and he wanted to find a different taxi for the couple.
They threatened him with arrest (these people were from Ohio!). The wife called her cousin in the Jerusalem PD and put him on the phone with her. The driver was terrified. After that, the wife spent the last 30 minutes of our drive talking about how the Arabs had ruined Israel and all the good things the Jews had done, like replant trees, since returning.
Much of what she said was true, but she felt the need to say it so smugly, so loudly, in front of a Palestinian driver who had just been threatened. It was the closest thing I've ever seen to the overblown, overhyped racism against blacks that Hollywood is always inserting into movies in their quest to prove that blacks are still oppressed.
That was prejudice. That was oppression.
When we dropped the couple off at their hotel, the frazzled driver turned to me and asked if he could smoke. I said yes and apologized for their behavior.
I'll never forget what he said next.
"Bah!" he scoffed. "The cHoSen pEoPle."
My heart sunk. The Bible teaches that the Jews were chosen by God. Not chosen because they were better or the strongest, but because they were weak (Deuteronomy 7:7), because they were stubborn, and because of God's promise to Abraham. In Deuteronomy 9, Moses told them this about kicking out the inhabitants of the land at the time:
After the Lord your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, "The Lord has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness." No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is going to drive them out before you. It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the Lord your God will drive them out before you, to accomplish what he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Understand, then, that it is not because of your righteousness that the Lord your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people.
The whole point of being chosen was to be the yeast of righteousness in the world, to let others know about God and worship Him. They were to be a light for the nations, so that all could be saved.
Instead, they became haughty and proud of their heritage, believing themselves special for specialness' sake. They then turned their back on God and received judgement for their sin, being dragged into exile. When Jesus Christ came - who fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament to a tee - they rejected Him. They killed him and asked for His blood to be on their children (Matthew 27:25).
Through the centuries, they have maintained their traditions and identity, something we here in the modern world can barely grasp. You might have a family tradition that dates back 50 years if you're lucky.
What about 5,000 years?
Wherever they go, they maintain this identity and form culture, homes, businesses, and schools that are separate from the host culture.
Everyone from Pharaoh to the Caesars to Martin Luther to Hitler to Candace Owens has observed this, and correctly.
(Hold your criticism there for one sec, I'm not going full-Hitler)
But that is where the correct observations end.
Candace Owens has gone down the rabbit trail that many, particularly those on the right (like Gab founder Andrew Torba) seem to be going down these days.
They take these observations:
- The Jews are a prejudiced people and many oppress others in the belief of their own supremacy
- The Jews refuse [Update: "Refuse" is too strong a word; I am speaking from an antisemite's view, not my own] to assimilate and instead create parallel economies that compete with mainstream ones
- The Jews in Israel are taking up a considerable amount of our limited resources that could be used for our own people
And they conclude:
- The Jews are the problem.
There are all sorts of wormholes you could be sucked down.
"Don't you know the Jews are behind [insert evil technology here] as well as [insert foreign policy decision here], not to mention the [insert academic curriculum here] or the choice to [insert new law here] and that a bunch of them [insert depraved crime here]."
Those wormholes are not new. Go and read Martin Luther's later writings.
Every time, and in every generation, the people who get sucked into those "Jewish cabal" wormholes end up doing the work of Satan.
Don't get me wrong: I don't doubt the devil is using many Jewish people within the establishment, who overwhelmingly vote for far-left policies, to do horrible things. But the idea that they as a people are uniquely and specially evil is a fallacy - a horrible tragic one, at that.
Now I want to dive into a theological thought experiment with you.
Did God's covenant with Abraham and Israel end because Christ paved the way for all people everywhere to be justified outside the Mosaic Law? Are the blessings He promised to that specific people group, to preserve them and defend them, void?
"I ask then: Did God reject his people? By no means! I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin." - Romans 11:1
Christ did not come to replace the Jewish people or the Law. No, He came to fulfill the Law so that people from the world over can "take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven."
The covenant with Israel and the Law were never failed parts of God's plan. He chose them - a weak, stubborn, rebellious people on the edges of the world - to shame the strong by saving the world through them. They thought that they themselves were the righteousness that God had promised, but they were merely the example of why no number of good deeds and no Law can save us. God worked through them despite their flaws. He gave them the Law, not to save them like they still believe, but to increase their transgression (Romans 5:20), for those who know a rule but break it are more guilty than those who did not know the rule.
Israel was an example of how particularly weak and helpless we are to save ourselves, which is why God must save us ("you are to give him the name Jesus [God saves], because he will save his people from their sins").
Only the willing sacrifice of a man who has committed no wrong can erase our own crimes and, as CS Lewis so aptly said, tap into the deeper magic that turns death itself backwards.
But despite the fact that neither Jewish heritage or following the Talmudic Law can save you, God's covenant with Abraham is not forgotten. He promised that He would protect them, a fact that Satan so fervently remembers. The dragon still wants to stamp out the seed of Abraham and the line of David. And so wherever the Jews go, because of the identity God Himself gave them, they receive covenantal blessings - simply for following the traditions handed down to them, in many cases. There is actually something special about being Jewish - even salvation is "first for the Jew, then for the Gentile" (and so is punishment, per Romans 2).
Satan hates that, and wants to destroy them.
The fact that he has failed from the time of the ancient Pharaohs to the October 7th, 2023 attack is such a testament to the fact that the God of the Bible is real. No other conquered people group has had this phoenix-like quality to rise from the ashes of certain defeat.
This is the first way in which Candace Owens and those on the right who see Jews as a threat are wrong.
Yes, there are many Jews who have been involved in horrendous things and used the blessings God has given them to work for Satan. They will be first in line in judgement.
But the frame of reference is wrong. You are looking at it upside down. They are not influential throughout history because of their inherent evil, but because God has continued to preserve them in spite of their own many, many failings.
This leads into the second great failing of those who drink deep from the wells of antisemitism:
The Jewish people stand condemned apart from Christ, and if you see them as the enemy, you condemn them to hell.
There should be separation between the Church and Jews who have rejected the Messiah (the evangelly boomercon obsession with Israel is unhealthy). I grew up in a church environment where supporting Israel was tantamount to supporting the return and reign of Christ. Why focus on the culture war when the end times are near, right? The godless wokies can have the schools and the arts and the sciences and the bureaucracies and the Oval Office because we'll get one up on them by fulfilling the Great Commission and restoring Israel, which will force Jesus to return and the good times to come!
This was horrifically wrong, but so is the rising pendulum - the opposite error of having nothing to do with the Jews.
The Apostle Paul's heart longed for the Jewish people. My favorite book of the Bible, Romans, dives deeply into so many of the issues that conservatives are grappling with today.
We should take to heart Paul's teachings in Romans 10-11 about how God seeks to save them even now.
"Did they stumble so as to fall beyond recovery? Not at all! Rather, because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious. But if their transgression means riches for the world, and their loss means riches for the Gentiles, how much greater riches will their full inclusion bring!" - Romans 11:11-12
A banquet table in heaven without the Jews is a sad table indeed!
So many of them are searching. So many are seeking. Yet they've fallen into ethnic pride and false gods that have trapped them.
"What the people of Israel sought so earnestly they did not obtain. The elect among them did, but the others were hardened, as it is written:
'God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that could not see and ears that could not hear, to this very day.'" - Romans 11:7-8
Even in Paul's day, there were those who saw Jews as the enemy. They were the ones who followed Paul from town to town trying to get him imprisoned and killed, after all.
No doubt there were many Candaces - intelligent, god-fearing, bold people - who fell into error there. And as you can easily see online with people who are becoming more racially charged, kinist, and elitist by the day as a backlash against all the anti-whiteness in our systems, there are people who go further still, not seeing the poisonous pride that's infecting them at the roots.
Paul had this to say about that:
"If some of the branches have been broken off, and you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root, do not consider yourself to be superior to those other branches. If you do, consider this: You do not support the root, but the root supports you. You will say then, 'Branches were broken off so that I could be grafted in.' Granted. But they were broken off because of unbelief, and you stand by faith. Do not be arrogant, but tremble. For if God did not spare the natural branches, he will not spare you either." - Romans 11:17-21
That last part should shake you to your core.
"For if God did not spare the natural branches, he will not spare you either."
I pray that Candace Owens remains bold and remains in Christ. I do not wish to slander her here or accuse her of being anywhere in the realm of Jew-haters like the Nazis.
But as she has become an avatar for those on the right who are disgruntled with the Jews, I pray that her observations about the blessings and sins of the Jewish people - and the foreign policy argument about whether the secular American government should support the secular Israeli government - do not continue down the wormhole that has claimed so many minds.
