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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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Candace Owens out at the Daily Wire

This is less than 24-hours after the ADL publicly attacked Candace, and Mediaite reports:

Owens’s departure comes after months of tensions between her and Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro over her promotion of various anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Her promotion of so-called antisemitic conspiracy theories has definitely been noticed on DR Twitter, and she's been engaged in public spats with a certain Rabbi Schmuley. So this isn't really a surprise, but it's a significant development that DR critiques of Zionism are making their way into Right-wing mainstream, as other rhetoric has in the past 10 years.

Candace is breaking from the Zionist right at the same time Tucker Carlson has turned heel on US support for Israel, and even Alex Jones who is notorious for his "the Chicoms are behind everything I love Judeo-Christian values" schtick - his willingness to humor every conspiracy theory to his audience except ZOG - yesterday accused Israel of Genocide.

I have a lot of criticisms of Nick Fuentes and his movement, but there has to be credit where it's due. I remember the Bush years, support for Israel was simply axiomatic and it was unthinkable for anybody to believe any differently. That has changed, and Zionism now faces a pincer movement of critique from both the Left and the Right, with the Right-wing critique of Zionism growing in influence among younger audiences.

Obviously it’s not a surprise this story played out the way it did- conservative black woman pundits can get away with a lot because there’s so few of them, background antisemitism in the black community is fairly high to begin with, and she literally works for a Jew so there’s some limits to the antisemitism.

Is antisemitism going mainstream? Maybe. Red tribe normies seem a lot less tolerant of Israel than I remember them having been in the 2010s, but there was kind of nowhere to go but down, and the prevailing sentiment is still ‘they have a right to the land so I don’t care what they do to the Palestinians’. I still think there’s a long, long way to go before mainstream conservatives adopt antisemitism en masse, Candace Owens got fired for it after all.