Candace Owens was recently named the "Antisemite of the Year" by the @StopAntisemites group. I don't necessarily like the phrasing, but here is why I believe Candace Owens is among the most dangerous antisemites in the country: There are two underlying presumptions in that claim: 1) Owens is an antisemite, and 2) That she is a particularly dangerous one. On count 1: Six Degrees of Jews: A central tactic by conspiracy-driven antisemites, especially those in the neo-Nazi realm, is a game of "six degrees of Jews." An example of how this works: Let's say a small town is hit by a crime spree driven by a gang. The gang has six leaders: one is Jewish, three are Catholic, one is Protestant, and one is Muslim. The antisemite then declares, "Jews are driving crime in this town," and points to the one Jewish gang member as evidence. Now, if you're someone who doesn't know about the gang and just knows crime has gone up drastically, the connection is automatically drawn. You don't know that there are five other leaders or that it has nothing to do with that one gang leader's religion. So, all you have is a rise in crime which you now correlate to someone who is Jewish. This tactic heavily depends on the ignorance of the audience. However, because antisemites are obsessed with blaming all of the world's ills on Jews and there isn't always a Jewish gang leader since Jews make up a small portion of the population, their next step is just to claim there is a connection, regardless of whether it's true or baseless. Again, they rely on the audience not knowing any better. This has been the central tactic of neo-Nazis for years. Candace Owens has spent almost the entire year utilizing this tactic to create exactly the narrative described above. So, for example, she establishes that Stalin was bad (though, for neo-Nazis, he wasn't bad because he massacred millions of people, including many Jews, but because he helped defeat the Nazis). Then she claims Stalin had a Jewish name (he didn't), had three Jewish wives (he had two wives, neither of which were Jewish), and spoke Yiddish (he didn't). Similarly, she says Lenin was Jewish, but Lenin's quarter-Jewish heritage was only discovered after his death. But her entire point in drawing these connections is to blame Jews for Soviet Communism, relying on a game of six degrees of Jews. Again, she's counting on her audience not knowing any better. She hasn't done this once but repeatedly for almost a year. So she connects modern Jews to Frankism (an obscure cult with max of 50K followers) without telling people they were explicitly rejected by Jewish leaders (and that they explicitly rejected Jewish beliefs), and then most Frankists converted to Christianity. She then tried to connect them to the Leo Frank case in the US, which she also completely misrepresented, despite no real ties other than sharing the name "Frank." Owens did the same thing with an old antisemitic conspiracy about Jews creating and funding the popular Scofield Bible to ruin Christianity. Only that's just not true. It is based on Six Degrees of Jews where Owens points out Scofield was in the Lotus Club with someone who is Jewish (she suggests this was a Jewish connection), and then was in the same country where the Zionist Congress met. Of course, Owens and her fellow antisemites expect their audience not to check if the Lotus Club connection was the primary funder for the Bible (he wasn't—the top funder was Alwyn Ball Jr., a Christian real estate developer) or whether he was in the city the same year as the Zionist Congress (he wasn't). But you see how this game works; it's just about pointing the finger and trying to establish the connection. Again, this tactic of constantly trying to find Jews to blame for the world's bad events with selective or false information is exclusively played by antisemites. No regular person would do it, especially not repeatedly every day. You will notice that none of this relates to Israel, though Owens certainly extended her conspiracies to Israel, but I want to emphasize other examples to make the point that her target isn't Israel or Israel's government, but Jews. There are many other examples of conspiracies from Owens over this year, almost all using the tactic mentioned. On Count 2: The reason Owens is particularly dangerous is because she gained an audience of millions prior to going down this route and is smarter than your average antisemite. As I mentioned before, the tactic of tying Jews to every bad thing that happens occurs via six degrees of Jews but is very reliant on having an audience that trusts you and doesn't know that's what you are doing. Owens, unlike the typical antisemite who promotes these conspiracies, already had access to that audience. She developed it over years via relatively mainstream platforms on the right, pushing what are otherwise mainstream attacks on the left. She has access to millions who believe her and have no way of knowing that she is feeding them insane and bigoted conspiracies. They just know crime has gone up, and someone they have listened to identified a Jewish leader in the gang. In addition, Owens isn't as dumb as the typical neo-Nazis who promote these conspiracies. Someone like Jake Shields might attempt this game, but he eventually lacks the intellectual rigor to maintain them and resorts to just praising Hitler or attacking Jews openly. Owens is smart enough not to explicitly state she supports Hitler but instead minimizes the Holocaust and argues the Allies were just as bad. That allows her to maintain a degree of plausible deniability. Those denials are meaningless once you see what she is doing, but it adds to what makes her so dangerous and allows her message to be more mainstream. This is also what makes someone like @piersmorgan extremely poorly suited to confront her. He neither knows what she has said nor how it is wrong, so he ends up making general statements about antisemitism being bad, and she just denies that's what she is doing and engages in a massacre of strawman arguments. Anyways, people are certainly free to ignore these facts and associate with her. But that doesn’t change that they exist and those who actually oppose antisemitism need to be vocal about it so her audience at least is told they are being played and has the sense to check for the truth.
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