On this episode of The Josh Hammer Show, senior editor at large for Newsweek, Josh talks with the author of Israel and Civility: A Guide to Modernity in the Age of Trump, Candace Owens, and why she's a monster.
00:04:24.800It's shaking everything America believes in down to America's soul, I fear.
00:04:31.040And you're right in the middle of that.
00:04:34.140And the Candace fallout of her being everything that the holiday of Sukkot is about, the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, which is so much about the power of evil speech.
00:04:54.100And I want to get into that with you, too.
00:05:11.280I first got to know him when I became the opinion editor at Newsweek.
00:05:16.140I still work at Newsweek, but do some slightly different things, including my show.
00:05:19.820But when I first joined the company, I joined as the opinion editor.
00:05:22.560When I joined there back in 2020, Charlie was one of the conservative columnists at Newsweek that I inherited.
00:05:30.020So, I first got to know him and his main kind of day-to-day manager, who is also the executive producer of the Charlie Kirk show, Andrew Colvitt.
00:05:39.500Andrew's been the main host of the Charlie Kirk show since Charlie was assassinated over a month ago.
00:05:44.260So, I first got to know Charlie and Andrew through my capacity as their editor, effectively, at Newsweek.
00:05:50.140But I started to get to know Charlie better.
00:05:53.080He first invited me to speak at a Turning Point USA conference, maybe about a year after that, about a year after I started as the opinion editor at Newsweek.
00:06:02.940And we kind of just got to know each other better and better over the four years that followed even that.
00:06:09.500And over the final year, year and a half or so of his life, we had gotten to the point where we were talking on a seemingly daily basis.
00:06:16.760I don't want to exaggerate where we weren't having hour-long phone calls every day, but we were in daily contact, right?
00:06:21.900Whether it was in individual messaging or this WhatsApp chat, this small WhatsApp chat that has now become the topic of international conspiracy, thanks to well-known conspiracists, Candace Owens.
00:06:35.800Charlie himself actually organized that chat, by the way.
00:06:38.340There have been a lot of people saying, oh, you know, the Jews were trying to control Charlie.
00:06:41.640No, Charlie literally started that chat.
00:06:43.700I mean, he was the one who personally added me, who personally added the other people there.
00:06:49.100So, yeah, we were basically in daily touch because we cared about a lot of the very same things.
00:06:55.740Charlie was a religious Christian, I'm a religious Jew, and we cared immensely about Jewish-Christian relations, about fighting off rising anti-Semitism, including within certain pockets of the American rights among Gen Z and millennial right-wingers in particular.
00:07:13.700He was passionate about trying to fight that off.
00:07:15.660He was passionate about trying to ensure that the United States and Israel had a viable relationship because he was a staunch, lifelike supporter of not just the Jewish people, but the Jewish state of Israel.
00:07:30.260The last few times I saw him in person, Roseanne, the first time would have been in July.
00:07:34.860So I did a debate on Israel against a not-particularly-funny libertarian quote-unquote comedian by the name of Dave Smith.
00:07:42.020So Dave Smith and I did a debate, which ends up actually being, tragically in hindsight, like genuinely tragically, ends up being the final event that Charlie Kirk ever hosted at a Turning Point USA conference because that ended the conference.
00:07:56.800Then I saw him again a few weeks later at this quote-unquote influencer retreat, 35, 40 people in the Hamptons.
00:08:03.840That, too, that retreat has also been the source of some controversy from the same provocateurs like Candace Owen.
00:08:09.160So that was the last time that I saw Charlie in person was in the Hamptons in early August.
00:08:13.320I actually took a copy of my book, and I signed up for him.
00:08:16.560He told me he would read it, and the rest, unfortunately, as they say, is history, and here we are.
00:08:24.800I was really interested in, it seems to me, Charlie's growing attraction to Judaism because, you know, he was talking all the time about keeping Shabbat.
00:08:37.100And I was just, I was really amazed at that because I have so many Christian friends who also are, you know, have come to keeping Shabbat, you know, Friday to Saturday night.
00:08:49.100And I just love that about Charlie because I feel that that's also a turning point for a lot of Christians to understand where Christianity, its roots.
00:09:00.180And, you know, and then I was talking to people saying, well, you know, the very definition of a Jew is one who keeps Shabbat.
00:09:08.960So I jokingly said, well, that makes Charlie a Jew and gives him the right to complain about Jews because that's what Jews do is complain about Jews and say, oh, they're not, the other Jews are not saying the right thing.
00:09:23.720So I'm out, which is how I interpreted his texting conversation about, well, if they're not going to, they're not going to control me because that's what all Jews say about other Jews, right?
00:09:35.120Yeah, look, you know, first of all, I'm not sure that a Jew is defined by keeping Shabbat.
00:09:41.680I myself started keeping Shabbat within the past couple of years or so, and I found it to be a positively life-changing experience.
00:11:04.900I mean, it's kind of an irony and perhaps a sad irony of our times, Roseanne, that the number one person who helped defend the Jewish people on college campuses, on these incredible hostile settings for the past two years, give or take, was this young evangelical Christian.
00:11:22.320I mean, Charlie really did more than anyone else in America when it comes to two things.
00:11:28.800One is keeping the Nick Fuentes, Gruyper, outright neo-Nazis decidedly at bay.
00:11:36.060Look, if you keep a handgun for self-defense, you probably deal with one or two headaches.
00:11:42.580It's either locked up somewhere where you can't reach when you need it, or it's just sitting there for anybody to grab.
00:40:47.580He goes, I read the Old Testament for the first time and I was struck by the violence and the murder and the genocide.
00:40:55.420Now, the pastor, the guest, to his great credit, did not take the bait at all.
00:41:00.020But I gave a speech, you know, Roseanne Jacob, a week or two after this episode at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C.
00:41:08.940My speech was actually on the Hebrew Bible.
00:41:10.800And I began my speech by talking about how what Tucker said is not just ignorant, which literally, by definition, it is grossly ignorant.
00:41:22.520It is heresy on Christianity's own terms for the following reason, which is that there was a second century Christian theologian called Marcion of Sinope, who in the very early days of the church said he argued that the God of the Old Testament, the Jewish God of the Hebrew Bible, is not Jesus, is not the God of the New Testament there.
00:41:41.540And he was universally condemned as being heretical.
00:41:44.160This is literally to this day recognized as a form of Christian heresy called Marcionism.
00:41:50.300He is literally a Christian heretic on Christianity's own terms.
00:41:54.760Candace Owens, who calls herself a Catholic there, you know, makes this very heavy handed argument.
00:42:00.780I mean, part of this whole conversation, which is particularly, I find, offensive, not as a Jew, but as a friend to many Catholics, is that Candace has also been saying, oh, Charlie Kirk was on the verge of converting to Catholicism.
00:42:13.200I mean, what are you implying exactly?
00:42:15.120She seems to be implying that Catholicism and the Catholic Church give you license to hate Jews, give you license to just bash Israel.
00:42:24.100I mean, maybe that would have been the case for part of the church's history.
00:42:26.940It definitely has not been the case since Vatican II in 1965.
00:42:29.620Well, she's not, she doesn't like Vatican II.
00:44:33.580And it's just a sad reality of the times that there are some people.
00:44:38.580You know, I mentioned this clown early in our conversation, this guy, Kurt Mills, who's like a Tucker acolyte.
00:44:43.800Again, this kid is the executive director of a publication calling himself the American Conservative.
00:44:48.920At the conference I just mentioned, the National Conservatism Conference, there was a bar in the middle.
00:44:54.940And I wasn't there with him, but I had numerous friends tell me that they overheard him getting a little sloppy with his drinks and he was getting a little loose-lipped.
00:45:04.460And he apparently told people they're listening in.
00:45:06.700I hear this from multiple people, so I think it's pretty corroborated.
00:45:08.740He said that his number one goal, his literally number one goal of the second Trump administration is to help to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Israel and a wedge between Jews and Christians, between evangelicals and Jews.
00:45:23.740Now, this guy edits a publication called The American Conservative.
00:45:27.880You might think that his top goal would be rising wages or bringing jobs back home or securing the southern border or deterring communist China or stopping the fentanyl crisis.
00:46:38.360Andrew Tate is someone who called Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of October 7th, a hero.
00:46:43.500Andrew Tate is someone who was called for London, England, to be conquered in the name of an Islamist caliphate, in the name of Sharia law.
00:46:51.060So if you really kind of scratch the surface and look deep in the bowels of some of these wings of the, you call the quote-unquote far right, whatever you want.
00:46:59.300Again, I don't actually like that label.
00:47:00.980A lot of them seem to be implying, Roseanne, that Christianity's true friend is not Judaism but Islam.
00:47:14.680It's historically ignorant, to put it mildly.
00:47:16.720I mean, there was that whole Crusades thing about a thousand years ago.
00:47:20.060There was the siege of Vienna from the Ottoman Turks in the middle of the 17th century.
00:47:24.920I mean, Christianity and Islam have a very complicated history.
00:47:27.560I mean, it was literally the first and second Barbary wars during the Jefferson and Madison presidencies that ultimately galvanized the U.S. really build up its navy in earnest.
00:47:41.420You know, these wars against literal Muslim pirates.
00:47:44.060But nonetheless, that is a very fringe argument that you see out there with increased frequency.
00:47:47.980Yeah, and you see the Catholic Church really participating in it, too, because, you know, UN Agenda 30 calls for a one-world religion, and it seems to be Chrislam.
00:48:00.500When you look at the way that they are coming together more and more, especially in the Arab world, you know, Chrislam is the destruction of Christianity and Judaism.
00:48:12.780And they're morphing into this kind of hybrid religion, which, you know, like Jake and I have discussed, that, you know, both of them are actually Zionists.
00:48:25.560They just want a Zion that's Judenrime.
00:48:30.280Well, look, I mean, I have a lot of, you know, religious Catholic friends there.
00:48:34.900I mean, I'm not a particularly huge fan of the—
00:48:46.060Well, Jeremiah Wright, I mean, yeah, a vowed enemy of America, a vowed enemy of the Jews, an anti-white bigot, frankly, Jeremiah Wright, right, you know, contemptible, contemptible stuff.
00:48:58.040Look, it seems to me that many of our contemporary conversations today, and, you know, you were just talking about globalism or universalism, a lot of it really does boil down to nationalism versus universalism.
00:49:11.320And this is one of the many—to me, Roseanne, this is literally the reason—if I were to tell you what is the number one reason that anti-Semitism, that hatred of Jewish people is—and hatred of Judaism, the number one reason this is the bigotry that simply will not die, the chameleon of all bigotries going back 4,000 to 5,000 years, I will tell you what that reason is.
00:49:34.440The reason is because the very concept of the Jew and the enduring nature of the Jew is a reminder of particularism, a refusal to be subsumed and to be homogenized into the universalist masses, going all the way back to the days of antiquity when it comes to the Roman Empire and various empires back then, whether it comes to contemporary, softer forms of tyranny, such as the United Nations and the World Economic Forum or even harsher forms of tyranny.
00:50:02.140The Jew always persists. The Jew always clings to his God, to his ways, the mitzvot, the commandments, and so forth there.
00:50:10.760And Israel, of course, is the Jew of the nations. They will not be subsumed into the globalist masses either.
00:50:17.040By the way, there's actually a biblical predicate for this. I would argue that the original model of the nation-state is actually found right there in the Bible.
00:50:25.400To me, it's actually where King David unites the tribes of Israel in Jerusalem, announcing a united kingdom there.
00:50:33.000He had no extraterritorial ambitions for the very simple reason that the borders were defined by God himself, who wasn't trying to invade anywhere else there.
00:50:39.800It was a nation-state. It had borders, and it was tribes united there. That's the nation-state.
00:50:43.340So if you hate particularism, if you hate nationalism, then you're more likely to be anti-Semitic than not.
00:50:52.100Certainly, Islam is very much a globalizing, hegemonic, universalist ideology.
00:50:58.260The Catholic Church, back in the day, a long time ago, very much had that as well.
00:51:02.040You definitely hear snippets of that as well from people like Pope Francis as well there.
00:51:07.920But globalism, unfortunately, is one of the enemies of the Jewish people.
00:52:36.440I believe in in in cultures and religions and that we are that that the world is typically best governed when people are able to govern themselves with people who generally speaking, think, act and believe like them there.
00:52:51.440Otherwise, you end up with a lot of the horrors, for instance, that contemporary Europe, the UK, Belgium, France are all experiencing when it comes to massive third world Islamic immigration.
00:52:58.980So that's that's my cards on the table there.
00:53:01.940The alternative, you know, if you want to go down the rabbit hole of of John Lennon's song, Imagine, right, kind of a globalism creed decor.
00:53:09.700I mean, again, you want to call it globalism, universalism.
00:53:12.380I don't really care, but that's a thing.
00:53:23.020Well, among other things, the borders are open there.
00:53:24.780So, again, we can quibble what to call it there, but it's very much a real thing and it should be criticized.
00:53:29.920Yeah, it's also like anti-tribal people, anti-tribal rights and just a big old corporatocracy where and corporations are the least, you know, they have the least liberty of anything in the world.
00:53:46.860You can be fired for you don't even have to know the reason you're fired.
00:53:53.700So, and serfs, you know, serfs, they have their serfs who are, you know, it's like this, hierarchical rule.
00:54:02.080Jewish people have always been for horizontal rule rather than vertical rule.
00:54:07.000And I think that all Candace and Tucker seem to really like vertical rule.
00:54:12.660I think it's that, it's that, it's really that ideology that we're fighting.
00:54:20.840And America's never, ever, although it has gone down that road, America is supposed to be of the people, by the people and for the people, which is horizontal rule.
00:54:30.720And, you know, I hope people will stay the course and not lose their faith, stay behind Trump and not let themselves be divided by old superstitious bigotry that is just bubbling under the surface all the time because we've been fed it our whole lives.
00:54:49.980And I hope they'll stay smart and on top of it and not be dragged down into a cesspool that's way too hard to get out of.
00:55:02.280And it's incumbent upon all of us to push back in our own capacities.
00:55:05.920You know, I get asked a lot, actually, you know, are they going to prevail?
00:55:09.600You know, are the, you know, are the stirs of the, of the, of the, of all this garbage, are the, are the folks who are starting to kind of stoke the flames of this Jewish Christian holy war?
00:55:22.740I mean, are they, are they going to actually prevail here?
00:55:25.540And the reason, the way that they do not prevail is if you have enough good people who speak up and say, stop right there.
00:55:32.560And, you know, that's what I'm trying to lend a voice to.
00:55:34.660That's what you're trying to lend a voice to.
00:55:35.800So we can only do what we can in our own individual capacities, but, you know, call me naive, call me stubborn, starry-eyed, but I continue to believe that for the majority of the American people, that facts and reality still prevail, that we are not in an entirely post-fact, post-truth, post-reality environment.
00:55:54.580There are definitely a lot of people who have, who have been so gaslit by the Candace Owens' of the world that they really are kind of down that rabbit hole.
00:56:01.280But for most people, again, call me naive, maybe I am, but for most people, I still think that the facts and reality really do still matter, and we'll fight it with everything we got, that's for sure.
00:56:12.020And we have to remember, thank you so much for saying that, but we remember that God's the one that wins.
00:56:19.960And God really likes that we love each other, not hate each other.