Mark Tapson covers the Candace Owens/Ben Shapiro controversy. Candace is apparently bidding to expand her market while otherwise exposing herself as something of an ignoramus. A cat has her tongue on precisely whom she was talking about in the tweet below.
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.
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) November 3, 2023
It makes perfect sense to me that Tucker Carlson served as the medium for Owens’s explication of her message, such as it is. For some reason or other, Israel leaves Carlson cold. He prides himself on keeping cool about Israel’s ordeal.
Joel Pollak provides background in the Breitbart column on understanding the dispute. Pollak harks back to the roots of “America First” isolationism in the Second World War, when some Democrats and Republicans (Pollak says “conservatives”) opposed U.S. involvement — even to save the Jews of Europe. I would say some blamed the Jews for urging American support of Great Britain. Pollak rightly adds: “The debate ended when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.”
Lynne Olson’s Those Angry Days is illuminating popular history on this subject. Among many other things, it helps readers understand the dark places America First isolationism took Charles Lindbergh. Carlson leaves a lot unsaid — for example, he calls the Hamas massacre of Israelis and others “a foreign tragedy.” I think the case of Charles Lindbergh may help one to fill in the blanks.
Carlson does not acknowledge the fact that some 30 Americans were killed in the Hamas massacre of October 7 or that Hamas took nine more hostage. NRO’s Philip Klein reminded viewers who may have forgotten.
Owens isn’t intentionally funny. However, Tapson explores the Candace m.o. with an amusing example:
This is part of a pattern, by the way, of how Owens deflects criticism of her sometimes questionable positions: not by defending her stance in skillful debate (much less by confessing her ignorance), but by steering things in a different direction, turning the spotlight on her critics, and steamrolling over them with verbal diarrhea.
Case in point: in an appearance on a recent episode of comedian Bill Maher’s podcast Club Random, Owens acknowledged (not for the first time) her skepticism of America’s 1969 moon landing. Needless to say, Maher was taken aback, especially when she added, “I just want to know why we didn’t go back.”
“We DID go back,” he countered, “like, ten times.” To be precise, after the historic 1969 landing America went back to the moon a half dozen times, with five of those including landings. But Maher correctly added that a dozen different astronauts have walked on the moon. To cover her ignorance, Owens immediately began demanding the names of all those astronauts.
“Who [expletive deleted] remembers what the astronauts’ names were?” Maher began, and she pressed, “That’s a pretty big deal, to walk on the moon… Who else walked on it?” Maher got uncharacteristically flustered as Owens pounced to make him look like the ignorant one: “What were their names?” She went on to barrage him with her rapid-fire delivery about how and why he even dug up this “niche” topic, without ever admitting his valid point that her moon landing denial calls into question her judgment on other, more important topics.
I’d love to get her thoughts on who killed JFK while we’re at it.
The current war has flushed out the Nazis in our midst. It has also exposed the ignoramuses.
TPUSA’s Charlie Kirk provides an example of something other than ignorance. The term “kookery” might be apt. Jeffrey Scott Shapiro noted Kirk’s kookery in the October 18 Washington Times column “Defaming Israel: Charlie Kirk floats theory Netanyahu let Hamas slaughter Jews to consolidate power.” Owens, naturally, takes up the defense of Kirk with Carlson (he was just asking questions). Kirk’s kookery doesn’t warrant repetition here — see Shapiro’s column — but it should at least be noted.
UPDATE: Since writing what I have to say here I found Dan McLaughlin’s NRO column “Being Too Christian Isn’t Candace Owens’s Problem.” He goes over some of the same ground I do with wider scope and greater detail. I appreciate McLaughlin’s verdict: “It is possible — not likely, but possible — that Kirk is dense enough to believe all this. It is not plausible that Carlson is. He’s a smart guy, and he knows what he’s up to…Moreover, when Carlson downplays the October 7 murders as ‘foreign’ — and then heads to Spain to raise alarm about events in that country — he is playing a double game with plainly unequal rules.”
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.