By Esti DeAngelis, Opinions Editor
Last summer, a professor contacted me about a potential summer research opportunity. He proposed a number of topics, one of which was investigating antisemitism on the right. When I initially responded to his email, I told him that if I was to research antisemitism, I would much prefer to focus on the left. That was where I felt the biggest problem lay and was most worth my time researching. With leftist students calling for intifada at our nation’s most elite universities and protesters and boycott groups targeting Jewish communities and businesses, it’s not hard to understand why I felt the right was the least of our problems.
My experiences and observations since then have led me to a different conclusion. Today, I regretfully have been convinced that the right, too, has an antisemitism problem.
In November 2023, conservative commentator Candace Owens hosted Jewish comedian Ami Kozak on her show to debate Zionism and antisemitism. At one point, Owens made the embarrassingly ignorant claim that Muslims in Israel are only allowed to live in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. “They say these are the Muslim Quarters, these are where the Muslims are allowed to live,” she said. “That doesn’t feel like a bastion of freedom to me.”
Owens’ claim is, of course, laughably false. But what concerned me more than her ignorance was the fact that she so confidently discussed things about which she had no understanding at all.
Owens parted ways with conservative media giant The Daily Wire four months later and started her own show. In the year since, I have witnessed an explosion of antisemitism on the right like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Owens’ debate with Ami Kozak foreshadowed perfectly what this explosion has looked like. It can be summarized in three words: “Just asking questions.”
Candace Owens is the poster child of the “just asking questions” crowd. Here are just a few claims made on her new and frighteningly popular show: 1) Stories of the horrific experiments of Josef Mengele are “bizarre propaganda,” and “even if you’re the most evil person in the world, that’s a tremendous waste of time and supplies.” 2) Israel was involved in 9/11, and Israelis who were working at the World Trade Center that day were “forewarned of the attack.” 3) Frankism, a defunct 18th and 19th century heretical Jewish movement, still exists today and is practiced by a cabal of elite pedophiles that “masquerades behind Jews.” This cult is responsible for the murder of Christian children “that kept going missing on holidays” as well as the founding of the State of Israel. I could go on for pages.
Owens has also insinuated that the earth may actually be flat.
All of these claims have something in common, something more than that they are all patently absurd. They all rely on one fact, usually untrue, that challenges an accepted idea. This “fact” is used to insinuate that we have been lied to, that we’ve been fed a false narrative. Throw out the piles of evidence of the horrors of the Holocaust because they just don’t make sense. Ignore the fact that all the 9/11 hijackers were affiliated with al-Qaeda because of “dancing Israelis” or something. No, it wasn’t, say, pogroms and persecution that inspired Theodor Herzl and the modern Zionist movement to found a Jewish state, but some long-defunct religious movement called Frankism because Frankists were, in her mind, pedophiles, and Israel (like every other country) has pedophiles. Ironclad logic.
Decades of historical literature and scholarly research are thrown out in favor of misconstrued lies. That is why Owens and figures like her who have also recently sunk into the world of right wing conspiracy theories, people like ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have told their audiences to question what we have been told about World War II. Last year Carlson hosted fake historian (but whom he called “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States”) Darryl Cooper on his podcast, a man who called not Hitler but Winston Churchill “the chief villain of the Second World War.”
Forget about, say, concentration camps. Instead, figures like Cooper, Carlson, Owens and others cherry-pick questionable sources to reinvent the narrative. They paint Churchill as an evil figure who picked a fight with Hitler, all because he believed that Nazism ought to be fought and not cozied up to, because as it turns out it is dangerous for the West.
In the past year, ideas like these, ones that call into question, well, everything, have been increasingly popularized. Ian Carroll, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist who gained a huge social media following in the past few months, was given a massive platform on Joe Rogan’s podcast in March, where he claimed that Jeffrey Epstein “very clearly was a Jewish organization of Jewish people working on behalf of Israel and other groups.” Rogan hosted Darryl Cooper, Carlson’s faux historian buddy, on his podcast a week later.
Here’s the truth: Sometimes the popular narrative is the right one. Sometimes what we’ve understood to be true for years, decades or even centuries is actually true. Hitler actually was the bad guy. Al-Qaeda actually did carry out 9/11. The conspiracy theorists who claim otherwise are popular because any subversive idea, anyone who “asks questions,” will find an audience. It’s exciting for some people to wonder, “What if everything I’ve known is a lie, and I can be one of the first to call out what’s really going on?” This is why figures like Carroll and Owens tell their audiences that they are talking about things no one else is talking about because everyone else is too afraid, why Owens says that if she is killed for speaking out about these things, “at least you’ll know who did it. It was the Frankists.” Their followers feel special, elite, part of a select group of the enlightened.
This feeling of enlightenment is key. It is why conservative thinker and author James Lindsay calls these antisemitic conspiratorial characters the “woke right.” Lindsay argues that in the same way woke ideology on the left believes that the United States was founded on racism and is still deeply racist, the woke right believes that the tolerant, liberal world that emerged after World War II, intentionally marginalized white Christian men. It is not Black people who are still systemically victimized, like the woke left believes; it is them, the Christians, being subverted and plotted against by a cabal of elites, who may just so happen to be Jewish.
The woke right, Lindsay says, have a “critical consciousness about the way the world is organized.” In other words, they are “just asking questions.” They seek to subvert all things true and replace them with some more enlightened ideology, the real story, one that only they have figured out.
Lindsay has been mocked not just by antisemites but also by conservatives who think that criticizing anyone on the right makes one a closeted leftist. But I urge them to listen to him. Because when I think of the state of the conservative movement today, I envision a fork in the road. On one side is a group of people who love the West, who love freedom and who believe in common sense policies that are attractive to millions of voters. This is the party that won the 2024 election, and this is the movement of which I am proud to be a part.
On the other side is a group of bitter, antisemitic conspiracy theorists who see Israel, not radical Islam, as the premier threat to all of civilization and who have what Lindsay pins as a “grievance identity” in which they are the perpetual victims: victims of Frankists, of Israel, of anyone who dares to say that the forces that threaten the West ought to be fought.
This antisemitic and conspiratorial drivel may get clicks, but if my optimistic view of the American people is correct, it will not win elections nor the culture war. It will only destroy the conservative movement. The “normal” right, if it wants to maintain the momentum and influence garnered since the election, must wake up to it, must call it out and purge it from its movement, before it’s too late.