The ideological sewer known as social media was alight this week with the latest escalation in a feud that has been brewing for months, if not years: the Candace Owens versus Ben Shapiro showdown. This particular chapter began after Shapiro was recorded describing Owens’s weeks of “faux sophistication” regarding the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7 as “disgraceful.”
Owens apparently then cracked open Google and frantically copied and pasted a verse from Matthew that ends with, “You cannot serve both God and money,” to which Shapiro responded , “Candace, if you feel that taking money from The Daily Wire somehow comes between you and God, by all means quit.”
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Now, one of the primary criticisms of Candace Owens’s rhetoric since Oct. 7 is that it’s intentionally vague, with carefully worded pseudo-analyses designed to either enrage or delight its readers without having to stand by a specific viewpoint or principle.
And as her amazingly timed interview with Tucker Carlson showed, she learned from the best.
During her interview, which began with Carlson comparing the treatment of Candace Owens to Galileo, the pair touched on a number of controversial subjects, including Ben Shapiro’s comments, Nikki Haley’s attitude toward free speech and Israel, and predictions for the 2024 election.
But the glue that held each of these segments loosely together was Tucker Carlson’s own brand of vile, conspiratorial, and often antisemitic garbage, masked using his trademark strategy of fake cluelessness and supposedly good-natured questions.
“I’m an American. I was horrified by what happened on Oct. 7,” Tucker Carlson said at one point. So far, so good. “I think it was pretty strange, I don’t understand how it happened, but innocents died and that’s awful. And I hated watching that.”
Blink and you’d miss it: the sanity-conspiracy-sanity sandwich! By “strange,” what does Carlson mean? Could it be the conspiracy theory that Israel allowed this attack to take place? I guess we’ll never know.
“And I feel so sorry for the Israelis who were killed. However,” he continued, “there’s an emotional response that is disproportionate, I think, on the part of some commentators.”
Which commentators?
“I mean, our country is being invaded right now by millions of young men whose identities we don’t know, who probably don’t even like America, and they’re now living here,” he said. “Over a 100,000 Americans die every year of fentanyl, I’ve known a couple. These are real tragedies. I’ve never seen anything like the emotion from any commentator around those tragedies as I’m watching about a foreign tragedy. I think that’s odd.”
Veiled with Carlson’s recognizable questioning and relaxed tone, the argument he’s presenting is perhaps the worst example of whataboutism in recent years: the idea that it’s “odd” that “some commentators” are more emotional about a “foreign tragedy” than an American one.
Ignoring the fact that two things can be true at once — the vast majority of conservative commentators agree that the Hamas terrorist attacks and fentanyl crisis are both bad — notice another subtle “America first” framing of Oct. 7 as a “foreign tragedy.”
Are the 31 dead American citizens or nine kidnapped American citizens “foreign” because they’re Jewish? Hey, I’m just asking questions.
To her credit, Owens then argued that it’s perfectly reasonable for people to care more about certain issues, but that didn’t stop them from soon exploring accusations of white genocide.
“I get why donors are mad. By the way, I support donors giving money to things they agree with. You don’t like it? Don’t pay for it. Good for you,” Carlson said, referring to Jewish donors who have withdrawn hefty funding from colleges such as Harvard University following student support for Hamas. “However, then I thought, well, wait a second. If the biggest donors at, say, Harvard, have decided, well, we’re going to shut it down now, where were you the last 10 years when they were calling for white genocide?”
Carlson then launched into specific accusations of donor support for what he deems white genocide, saying, “You were paying for it. Because you were calling my children immoral for their skin color. You paid for that. And so why shouldn’t I be mad at you? I don’t understand.”
Tucker Carlson’s entire schtick is, frankly, a work of dark art. He’s the master of walking the hugely profitable tightrope between mainstream and conspiracy, using vague and unsubtle generalizations while hiding behind cluelessness and a yearning for truth.
If you seriously believe that Tucker Carlson doesn’t understand the difference between supposed support or apathy toward racist policies in academia — which, no, do not amount to white genocide — and the torture, rape, mutilation, burning alive, kidnapping, and murder of over a thousand Jews (at least 31 of whom were American citizens) in just eight hours on Oct. 7, then you must believe Tucker Carlson is stupid.
But Tucker Carlson is not stupid — far from it.
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Ian Haworth is a columnist, speaker, and host of “ Off Limits .” You can follow him on X at @ighaworth . You can also find him on Substack .
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