"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth"
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The antisemitic US influencer's popularity has accelerated post-October 7, 2023
American conspiracist Candace Owens sees the pernicious influence of satanic Jewish pedophiles on international politics everywhere. Any rumor that casts Judaism, Israel or Zionism in a bad light is eagerly seized upon by her. She believes that the history of the Jewish people is wilfully distorted by the mainstream media and established institutions in the West. These, she says, are dominated by a ‘Marxist’ elite bent on abolishing Christianity and traditional family values.
Numerous claims of Owens’ call for critical discussion. These include her absurd and repeated declarations that Brigitte Macron is a man. Or that the moon landing was staged and vaccines are killing people. Or indeed her fervent support for Putin’s war in Ukraine and the so-called satanist origins of NASA. In this article, however, we will focus on her conspiratorial statements on Israel, the Holocaust, Judaism and Zionism. And even then it is impossible to go into everything because Owens makes so many crazed claims.
For a long time, Owens was considered a promising newcomer on the political front. She was young, articulate and, as an African-American woman, in an excellent position to counter progressive commentators who automatically linked gender, skin color and ethnicity to certain political positions. She was therefore reasonably popular among conservative Republicans. Things began to change when she became increasingly critical of Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza and started using some antisemitic tropes. That eventually led to a parting of ways with The Daily Wire, a show led by Jewish neoconservative Ben Shapiro.
The American influencer has not been idle since her resignation from the popular conservative show, and she has managed to gain a large following with more than 5.5 million followers on X and more than 3 million subscribers to her podcast on YouTube. It seems she is becoming increasingly extreme in her statements over time. Her emphasis is no longer just on the Israeli government, and her utterances are beginning to take the form of an antisemitic delusion. In doing so, she draws on the rich source of Christian antisemitism. By emphatically presenting herself as a devout Catholic, she believes she can counter any criticism with the counter-accusation that, as a Catholic, she is being persecuted by an anti-Christian conspiracy. She also makes it appear as if her life is in danger.
In Owens' world view, there is a spiritual war going on between Good and Evil, with no room for any nuance. The devil and his henchmen are engaged in an eternal battle against Christianity. The West, according to Owens, is dominated by a satanic elite of globalists. Her thinking is characterized by extreme enemy thinking in which intellectual depth is completely absent. Her argument is one long string of whole and half falsehoods. Against intellectual rigor, she puts her trust in God and her intuition.
In this eternal battle between Good and Evil, Jews are on the side of the devil. At least what are usually called Jews, because according to Owens, many of today's Jews are actually not Jews at all, but impostors. Indeed, they are almost all Khazars according to her. Owens is here employing an old antisemitic theory, which is especially popular among far right figures. Under this conspiratorial theory, not only are the Jews not actually real Jews, who would be allowed to appeal to the history of the Jewish people mentioned in the Bible, they are also all devil-worshippers who torture children in a horrible way with sexual rituals and sacrifice them to their idol.
She seizes on all kinds of speculative statements for this. For instance, she claims that the Magen David is an occult symbol for demonic rituals. Indeed, according to her, it is identical to the Star of Remphan, mentioned in the Bible book of Acts 7:43 as the god of the apostate Jews. Zionism (and thus Israel) is thus of satanic origin. This connection is completely made up and seems to originate with Texe Marrs, an American antisemitic conspiracist.
Owens' mythology gives a central role to the Jewish mystic Shabtai Tsvi (1626-1676), whose messianic teachings found many followers among Jews in Europe. There are a huge number of rumors and theories about this kabbalist, but with Owens he becomes the key figure in a conspiracy of “sabbatean” Jews against Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Indeed, Tsvi forcibly converted to Islam and since then there has been a distrust in Islamist circles against the Dönmeh, Tsvi's followers who followed him in his conversion. According to these Islamists, Mustafa Kemal Pasha Atatürk was a crypto-Jew, which Owens echoes with approval. There is no evidence for Mustafa Kemal's Jewish origin, but more important than whether or not he had a Jewish background is the question of what that means for Candace Owens.
Does having a Jewish ancestry (which must be hidden from the outside world) automatically imply being part of an international Jewish conspiracy? Instead of going into the concrete political views of the founder of the Turkish republic, Owens automatically links his genealogy to a certain politics, as if all Jews would agree among themselves. Anyone who has ever studied the actual political relations in the Jewish community and Israel knows that this is by no means the case. Remarkably, the persecution of the Conversos, the Spanish Jews who were forced to convert to catholicism, over a century earlier in Spain seems to be unknown to Owen.
The cult then presumably resurfaced around the figure of Jacob Frank (1726-1791), whom Owens said would have been a Sabbatean. He too converted to another faith, namely Catholicism. Frank was also rumored to be a Jewish spy in the service of an anti-Catholic conspiracy. Ideas that Owens revived with some eagerness. According to her, this “frankist cult” still exists, exerting a major influence on US politics, Israel, the mainstream media, education and the film industry in Hollywood. Moreover, they were even responsible for the creation of the state of Israel. Her comments on Frank are very superficial and make no sense whatsoever. That Frank played a malign role in accusations of ritual murder by Jews is probably unknown to her. As is the fact that the Kabbalah hardly played any role in his religious views. The Kabbalah is important because she thinks it is an occult and therefore satanic doctrine.
According to Owens, the Anti-Defamation League was founded by these occult “frankists” to cover up the ritual murder committed by Jewish entrepreneur Leo Frank (1884-1915). Indeed, Leo Frank, who was lynched by a mob, would have been guilty, contrary to what serious historians have written about it. The alleged ritual murder stands in a long tradition of accusations against Jews, the so-called Blood Libel. Without a hint of evidence, Owens declares the Jewish defendants guilty in all these cases. Candace Owens believes she is shedding an entirely new light on this old and largely forgotten court case. At least that is what she pretends because she does not actually bring any new element to the case, which caused a great furore in the US at the time, but which has thus since fallen almost completely into oblivion.
Leo Frank was accused of murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan and sentenced to death by a jury. The then-governor of Georgia commuted this sentence to life imprisonment because he believed Frank had not received a fair trial. When this became known, a crowd ignited in anger and marched to the hospital where Frank was recovering from an attempt on his life by a fellow inmate. He was taken to where Mary Phagan had lived and there brutally lynched by a group calling themselves The Knights of Mary Phagan. This group of perpetrators was never brought to justice and some of them founded the second Ku Klux Klan a few months later. Owens seems to condone the lynching.
There is little doubt among historians that Leo Frank did not receive a fair trial and that antisemitism has played a major role in it. For Owens, however, it suffices that Frank could have been a follower of Jacob Frank, an eccentric Jewish heretic of the 17th century, who converted to Catholicism but, according to some, remained secretly Jewish. Of course, for the claim that Leo Frank would have been a “frankist”, she provides no evidence whatsoever. In this affair, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith also played a major role, which was another reason for Owens to accuse them of being a front for “frankists”.
Regarding Israel, Owens seeks to delegitimize its existence by challenging the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Against the Jewish Holocaust, she contrasts the ‘Christian’ Holocaust of the Bolsheviks, making an explicit link with the Jewish ethnicity of some leading Bolsheviks. She does not even shy away from making Stalin an accomplice of the Jews. For instance, she claims that Stalin spoke Yiddish with the other leaders in the Kremlin and that all his wives were Jewish. Neither for the one nor the other does she provide any evidence and it seems to be simply copied from an anti-communist website.
But not only 80 million Russian ‘Christians’ were victims of these Jewish Bolsheviks, according to Owens. The German and Japanese victims in World War II also receive too little attention as far as she is concerned. As an echo of neo-Nazi propaganda, she does not tire of highlighting the suffering of these groups. Here, for her, the fate of Catholics is especially central. For instance, she falsely claims that the Catholic cathedral of Urakami was allegedly targeted in the atomic bomb attack on Nagasaki in August 1945. She constantly talks about 12 million Germans allegedly killed by the Allies. With this too, she wants to put the 6 million Jewish victims in the shade.
Owens believes that the seriousness of genocides lies mainly in the number of victims, thus showing a lack of understanding of the hallmark of a genocide, which is the intention to exterminate all or part of a population. We see this lack of understanding in her treatment of the war in Gaza.
Owens also links the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, to the assassination of John F. Kennedy (it seems no genuine American conspiracist can ignore this case) and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Again, she repeats the time-honored ‘evidence’ of “dancing Israelis” celebrating the attack. This lie has been spread by conspiracists for years and has been disproved many times. As for Kennedy, he was murdered because he opposed the nuclear ambitions of the Jewish state.
Things get really ingenious when Owens plays an interview by Tucker Carlson with country singer John Rich. In this clip, Rich proclaims that American theologian Cyrus Scofield's Bible commentary was a product of Zionist propaganda. By falsifying the true meaning of Bible verses, he improperly supported Zionism in Christian circles. Indeed, Scofield had been a pupil of John Nelson Darby, who in turn would have had contact with the Jewish Rothschild banking family around 1830. Here we see antisemitic conspiratorial ‘logic’ in its best possible form. Without a trace of evidence, all sorts of connections are made.
Owens seems to have a deep and special grudge against Sigmund Freud and psychology in general. Freud created psychology as a means to convince traumatized women that the sexual abuse they had experienced as a child wasn’t real. They were sexually abused by their fathers, but Freud invented psychoanalysis as a way to protect the abusers. She also claims Freud was gay and a kabbalist and “frankist”. Most of the ideas she mentions are based on an uncritical and biased reading of the highly speculative and controversial book The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory (1984) by American author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. There is a clear pattern in the way Owen reads books. She only uses the parts in the book that confirm her point of view and she ignores all the rest. She then uses these details to fit in her grand narrative of a global secret Jewish sect of satanic pedophiles and child murderers.
Owens' views are anchored in the tradition of pre-war far right Catholics. She is probably unaware of this, as she pretends to have discovered everything herself through meticulous research. Research that, however, relies on obscure websites and blogs rather than studies by reputable historians. It is notable that her remarkable and scandalous reintroduction of the Blood Libel has not met with much resistance in the circles of Catholic fundamentalists in which she likes to engage. For instance, she is on good terms with the American Bishop Joseph Strickland and the excommunicated Bishop Carlo Mario Viganò. It is not surprising then that she also seeks support from Carlo Maria Viganò and other arch-reactionary clerics. Conversely, these also seem to have found her, judging by her attendance as a speaker at the Catholic Identity Conference. Previously attended by Steve Bannon, Carlo Maria Viganò, Joseph Strickland and the Italian Roberto de Mattei. For a recent meeting with Donald Trump Jr., the ex-president's son, she was taken off the list of speakers at the very last minute after protests from Jewish organizations.
Owens’ crusade against “pedophilia” would be more convincing if she would agitate as forcefully against the sexual abuse of boys and girls in the Catholic church. But on this issue we don’t hear anything from her. In the only comment she ever made about this, she did not blame the Catholic church, but gay priests who shouldn’t be allowed to be priests at all. Thereby ignoring the many cover ups by the hierarchy and the abuse of girls and young women. And she occasionaly brutally attacks victims of sexual abuse if they happen to be victims of the Tate brothers, charged on many occassions with human trafficking, rape and abuse. She even publicly defends Andrew and Tristan Tate. Where there is little doubt, Owen uses every possible excuse to deny the evidence, but when there is no evidence at all, she is absolutely certain because she trusts her “gut”.
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