Russell Crowe’s new film is about trying to suss out hidden fans of Hitler, but what happens when the person being questioned makes no attempt to hide? Toward the end of Piers Morgan’s live interview with Nick Fuentes last night, Morgan, in what seemed like a pre-prepared line, accused his guest of trying to “come across as a moderate” — just ten minutes after Fuentes called the old Bohemian corporal “very fucking cool.”
To that line, Morgan told Fuentes that “I think [Hitler] is very fucking a monster.”
Yet Fuentes burst out laughing in reply: “And that’s a clip! ‘I think he’s very fucking a monster?’ Do you hear yourself? Can we all grow up?”
The interview, which Morgan kept insisting was “not an ambush,” was very much a case of an old world meeting the new; a liberal tabloid operator meeting the wild and uncontrollable brain of a very right-wing internet live-streamer. Because it was a live stream, Fuentes naturally had the upper hand. But since it’s already been viewed millions of times, they both win, according to the laws of digital media. What connects the tabloid universe and the internet age is a desperate need for attention.
The two-hour show consisted mostly of Morgan playing clips from Nick Fuentes’s daily podcast and then asking the 27-year old Chicagoan to own up to them. These included, among other things, calls to avoid black people in everyday life, jibes about the Final Solution and various ungallant remarks about women. Each time Fuentes would happily assent to these. This carried on for some time, yet Piers never really thought to shift from this prosecutorial mode. After nearly two hours, Piers claimed that “we’re getting somewhere” in that he had gotten Fuentes to admit his racialist, misogynistic and Judeo-skeptical views. This is a little like reading Mein Kampf and crowing that Hitler had inadvertently shown his “true colors.” “You are the embodiment of misogyny” said Piers at one point; Fuentes naturally took that as a compliment.
Piers Morgan’s panels on his show are often a madhouse of various Mao-enthusiasts, Islamists, obscurantist clerics, anti-Semites and Alan Dershowitz. Yet throughout this interview with Fuentes, he feigned bafflement that anyone could hold such views.
The encounter was intriguing in another way. As a tabloid hack and editor, Piers Morgan made his career on the fringes of acceptable conduct and opinion. In 2023 the UK High Court said that there was “no doubt” that Piers had known about his staff’s practice of hacking into the phones of prominent people. What we saw here was one demagogic medium passing the torch to another – with live streamers like Fuentes now becoming the go-to source for smut, gossip and provocation. Piers Morgan tried to use the old Fleet Street toolkit against this upstart, including that classic tabloid tactic of trying to out him as a homosexual.
Piers, in a sort of homage to analog television, also played a pre-recorded message from the old Rupert Murdoch colleague and Tory peer Lord Finkelstein, who asked, given that the Hitler had killed much of the Finkelstein family, whether Fuentes was “on team Hitler or team Mum,” partly in order to plug his book Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad. “I don’t care,” said Fuentes.
Morgan wondered aloud whether Fuentes was simply hamming up his views for money or as an elaborate joke. The real shock for him is that it’s neither.
In the year since his triumphant reelection, Donald Trump has racked up an enormous list of accomplishments, both foreign and domestic. His sweeping, “move fast and break things” approach to governance has generated a form of accepted normalcy which his first administration never experienced.
His White House staff and cabinet, once full of leaks and disloyalty, has turned out to be incredibly faithful. On the international scene, he has credibly been suggested as deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. And at home, according to polling averages from RealClearPolitics, Trump is more popular at this point in his second term than either George W. Bush or Barack Obama was.
Yet within the movement that made all this possible, it seems everyone is at each other’s throats. The long knives are out for people not on the left, but inside the big tent that Trump built. It’s not just a hierarchical fight between social and fiscal conservatives, insiders vs outsiders. It’s MAHA moms and tech giants; tariff lovers and haters; the Wall Street Journal vs the Heritage Foundation; Candace Owens vs Turning Point USA; Megyn Kelly vs based icon Sydney Sweeney; comic Dave Smith vs the Babylon Bee; Ben Shapiro vs Tucker Carlson; and Tucker vs, well, pretty much everyone on Fox News and most people who aren’t. It’s the most vicious, catty, well-coiffed and fully botoxed melee since Anchorman, and no one knows where Marjorie Taylor Greene found that hand grenade.
The question on the mind of every Republican in Washington: are we witnessing the great MAGA crack-up? And the answer is: almost certainly yes.
The insiders always knew it was too good to last. Trump’s remarkable political skill is in identifying the one issue that cuts across natural partisan tendencies to create a coalition that seemed incompatible. He won over the broad ethnic working-class coalition that supported him in 2024. He also scooped up the votes of those who wanted crackdowns on crime and those who want nonviolent offenders freed, of drug legalizers and vaccine skeptics, pro-natalists and crypto bros, supply siders and trade hawks, pastors and porn stars.
“Trump is so unique of a political figure, when he’s focused on governing, it’s actually time that daddy is spending away from the kids,” says one longtime GOP insider. “He brings back gifts whenever he comes back from one of his trips, but while he’s away at work or just not paying attention to us, we scrap like cats and dogs and start every day with bruises on our shins.”
The fights often take place on X – the site where everything is happening, which for many on the right these days seems to make everything about Israel, all the time. Ongoing squabbles can become so internecine as to be more difficult to follow than the plots of prestige TV shows. The strife is often colored by personal relationships: former employees feuding with past bosses or personnel fights with gripes held over from the first Trump term, or the different responses to January 6. This stretches all the way up to the President himself, who refused to endorse his former critic, Virginia Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, in the state’s recent gubernatorial race. It might not have made a difference, given her double-digit failure at the polls. But it was still a reminder that old wounds linger.
On the surface, the MAGA cohort should be enormously pleased with how things are going, even despite the Democratic success in the off-year elections. Yet rumbling underneath, multiple asymmetric fights are being waged, all of which can be viewed through the lens of who is up or down in controlling and directing the next generation of MAGA. Typically, conflicts of this nature are based on which ideological faction supports whom as the next presidential candidate. But in the case of the current fracas, such lines are often unclear. With even Marco Rubio reportedly acknowledging that J.D. Vance is the frontrunner for the 2028 Republican nomination, there isn’t really a competing candidate coalescing support for an uphill run… yet.
The Heritage Foundation’s struggles in this moment are a microcosm of the crackup’s tangled motivations. The story goes like this: in the aftermath of the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in September, a violent moment that both unified and depressed the coalition of the right, various figures began to position themselves to inherit all – or a portion – of Kirk’s role as the titular leader of the younger MAGA base.
It quickly became clear that this was about more than just reaching right-leaning college students and that it actually reflected competing visions about both Kirk’s and Turning Point’s attitudes toward Israel and anti-Semitism. Fights and arguments conducted via text messages and DMs spilled out into the open, with some conspiratorially minded figures claiming (without any evidence) that Kirk was actually assassinated over his shifting views on the subject. No personality exploited this moment more than Carlson, whose appearance as a speaker at Kirk’s memorial event included him comparing the young activist’s murder to the death of Jesus Christ. He invited the audience to “picture the scene in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus,” painting the hummus-eaters as the ones who engineered the crucifixion. As he typically does, Carlson pretended the suggestion of anything untoward about his anecdote was ridiculous. But afterwards he brought a longtime Kirk antagonist, the aggressively misogynist and racist troll Nick Fuentes, onto his show for what essentially amounted to a softball promotional interview.
The interview broke something open. Conservatives already uncomfortable with Carlson’s pro-Russia and Qatar-spinning tendencies turned on him. This turned explosive when the leadership of Heritage, the central think tank for American conservatism and the creator of the Project 2025 agenda that has guided much of Trump’s second term, decided to weigh in on Carlson’s side. Heritage president Kevin Roberts released a video defending the broadcaster, claiming that “we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” and that “conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.” He denounced Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition” and suggested that criticism of the Fuentes interview amounted to an attempt at cancellation.
The statement prompted widespread condemnation. Texas Senator Ted Cruz denounced it, conservative publications and op-ed pages decried it, long-tenured scholars resigned from the think tank, Heritage’s dedicated committee to tackle anti-Semitism considered assigning staffers to observe Shabbat. Ultimately, Roberts’s chief of staff took the fall and left his post. Roberts himself was compelled to hold a lengthy apology session. In the face of calls for his resignation, he held on to his position with the mantra: “I made the mess; let me clean it up.”
At that session, a young female staffer provided a view of why that “mess” happened in the first place, standing up to say: “I condemn Nick Fuentes’s hateful rhetoric. That being said, I would like to point out that some of the most vocal people against Tucker Carlson have been calling him an anti-Semite since he started to hold more anti-interventionalist views. A handful of young colleagues and I had no issue with the points you made in the original video… Gen Z has an increasingly unfavorable view of Israel – and it’s not because millions of Americans are anti-Semitic. It’s because we are Catholic and Orthodox and believe that Christian Zionism is a modern heresy… as a young person, many of us are generally tired of foreign entanglements, while our problems in this country worsen.”
While the old guard GOP might like it to be otherwise, the young staffer speaks for a growing number of solid MAGA voters who have become frustrated with the state of things. In a cycle when Democrats are embracing a political message emphasizing “affordability” and Trump seems to be spending outsized time on legacy-building projects instead of addressing the problems of inflation and growth, even some of his most loyal supporters are beginning to sound like critics. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Representative who became the first Republican to call Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide,” has become the recipient of a dramatic degree of strange new respect from everyone from Wolf Blitzer to Bill Maher to the harridans of The View. Her message is essentially that America’s leaders are spending too much time looking at other people’s problems and need to get back to focusing on their own. The critique is clearly aimed at Trump and those around him: the Donald’s focus has been decidedly more international in recent months.
It’s hard not to see this as sour grapes from supporters who expected a different Trump 2.0 than they are getting. As author James Kirchick summarized in the Washington Post: “Though Trump campaigned as an isolationist, he has certainly not governed as one. He has recently pulled a U-turn on Ukraine, imposing fresh sanctions on Moscow and calling off a proposed summit with Putin in Budapest. Trump is also ramping up action against Venezuela, citing dubious legal pretext to launch airstrikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and amassing military assets off the country’s coast for a possible attack on the mainland. And with Operation Midnight Hammer, he joined the Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear program. Even in symbolic ways, like changing the Defense Department’s name to the War Department, Trump has taken American foreign policy in a more interventionist, even bellicose direction.”
When Trump was making the decision to attack Iran in the summer and Carlson intoned, publicly, that such a strike would be likely to spark World War Three, the President responded by noting that he alone decides what “America First” means. The central question for the MAGA coalition is now who, once Trump is no longer behind the Resolute Desk, gets to decide what America First means?
For Vance, the man who seems likeliest to inherit that role, there seems to be recognition that things aren’t headed in the right direction. “We need to focus on the home front,” the Vice-President tweeted in response to the electoral drubbing the Republican party received earlier this month. “The infighting is stupid. I care about my fellow citizens – particularly young Americans – being able to afford a decent life, I care about immigration and our sovereignty and I care about establishing peace overseas so our resources can be focused at home. If you care about those things too, let’s work together.”
Whether Vance can hold things together through this moment of crack-up could determine whether this coalition, forged originally by Trump’s political ingenuity and force of will, can endure beyond the man himself.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.
It’s Thursday morning as I write. Has The Wall Street Journal weighed in with anotherattack on Kevin Roberts yet, the besieged president of the Heritage Foundation? No? Be patient. It’s early hours yet. Another fusillade is due any minute.
I have written about that tempest-in-a-teapot myself. I agree that Roberts’s brief video statement defending the Heritage Foundation’s friendship with Tucker Carlson was ill-advised. I say why in that column. I also think that his efforts at damage control have been ineffective. But given the incontinent fury of the response to that two-minute and thirty-nine-second video, I am not sure that anyone could have calmed the storm.
The more the mob rages, however, the more I suspect that – to adapt a famous saying of Saul Alinsky– the issue is not the issue. It’s not really Tucker Carlson and his curious ideas about chem trails, Area 51, the baddies in World II, or the state of Israel. It’s not even Nick Fuentes, the hectoring twenty-seven-year-old anti-Semite and political performance artist whom Carlson recently treated to a long and pillow-plump interview.
The key that unlocks the agenda in this controversy is contained in the phrase “proxy war.” The prime targets are not Kevin Roberts or Tucker Carlson. They are expendable cutouts for the real villain, the Make America Great Agenda of Donald Trump.
This is something that John Daniel Davidson touches on in a recent column in The Federalist. “Genuine concern about anti-Semitism on the right is being hijacked by neocons to attack J.D. Vance in hopes of retaking control of the GOP.”
Oh, for the days of George Bush and Mitt Romney! Can we get them back? Only a few days ago, it was reported that Mike Pence is tanned, rested, and ready for 2028.
We can draw a veil over that particular farce. Rest assured, Mike Pence will not be moralizing from the White House. But what entities like The Wall Street Journal long for is a return to a Pence-like “normality” and “Conservative, Inc.” The deep state missed taking down Trump when he ran in 2016. He was supposed to be toast, but somehow he prevailed. Then the Russia Collusion delusion was supposed to destroy him but failed. Then, when the 2024 election lumbered into sight, the establishment thought it had mounted a devastating first strike against Trump and his populist agenda. Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Fanny Willis, ninety-something indictments partisan judges and lawfare as far as the eye could see. Amazingly, it didn’t work.
Now those forces are piggy-backing on the campaign against anti-Semitism to take more shots against MAGA. The ironies abound. For one thing, when it comes to anti-Semitism, the Heritage Foundation under Kevin Roberts has been close to a model citizen. You haven’t heard that in the many attacks on Roberts, but it is true. The case was well put by Victoria Coates, a Heritage scholar and national security expert, in a letter the WSJ deigned to publish on November 6 under the title “Heritage Always Stands Against Anti-Semitism.”
The prime targets are not Kevin Roberts or Tucker Carlson. They are expendable cutouts for the real villain, the Make America Great Agenda of Donald Trump.
“In the days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel,” Coates notes, “Heritage hosted one of the first public events to condemn the terrorism and the blatant anti-Semitism it unleashed.”
“Shortly thereafter we created the National Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism to help coordinate the efforts of like-minded organizations.
In October 2024, we launched Project Esther, an initiative to combat anti-Semitism in the U.S. through legal and legislative remedies. This effort has found allies across the political spectrum and raised awareness among the general public and the Trump administration of the immediate threat that left-wing anti-Semitism poses to America’s Jews and the US… The Davis Institute for National Security, which I lead, focuses on defeating antisemitism, as do our colleagues in the domestic-policy and legal departments.”
There is a certain grubby pleasure in identifying a candidate for ostracism and then joining the crowd in shouting an approved list of imprecations. This is especially true when an adjacent issue provides moral cover, as the charge of antisemitism does here.
Hannah Arendt noted in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the growth of anti-Semitism in a society is always a bad sign, a canary in the mine of social and political comity. The oddity in this case is that Kevin Roberts, far from approving or abetting anti-Semitism, has been exemplary in attacking it.
Regardless of the ultimate outcome of the Gaza peace deal brokered by Donald Trump, the past two years have seen Israel achieve an unprecedented litany of military accomplishments in the Middle East. The level of damage done to Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis is difficult to comprehend. The end of the Assad regime and, with American support, the demolition of the Iranian nuclear program – setting it back years at the least – were steps that many once thought impossible. Israel has emerged from the post-October 7 period unquestionably stronger in every way except one: its support around the globe, particularly among the youngest voices in the West.
Polling is consistent, showing increased opposition to Israel and even support for Hamas among younger voters
The polling on this question has been consistent and widespread, finding a clear trendline toward increased opposition to Israel and even support for Hamas among younger voters. In America, the widely respected Harvard-Harris poll found last month that nearly half of Generation Z respondents supported Hamas over Israel, and more than a third of millennials shared their views.
Gallup’s July survey found support among those aged 18 to 34 for Israel’s military actions in Gaza and Iran to be just 9 and 15 percent respectively. A Quinnipiac survey which previously showed strong majorities believing it is in America’s interest to favor Israel found support had fallen from 69 percent in December 2023 to 47 percent today, driven by a significant increase in skepticism among younger voters.
And a major study released in October by the conservative Family Research Council that surveyed American Christians found just six in ten regular churchgoers believe it’s important to pray for Israel, and a majority did not believe it was important for the United States or for their churches to support Israel. Consistent with other polling, churchgoing Gen Z respondents ranked the lowest in favoring any kind of support – prayer, verbal, or financial. In the wake of the October 7 attacks, it would have seemed ludicrous to predict this level of dropoff. But for those who consistently conduct polling on this topic, the trend is both undeniable and the reasons too convoluted to explain with simple questions.
“For young people on the left, it’s a racial thing, a victimhood thing,” one pollster told me. “On the right, I think it’s more complicated. There’s a strong narrative that’s taken hold in a younger generation that claims American foreign policy is still overwhelmingly being dictated by the Jews, not ‘America First’ influences. So being an Israel skeptic has become a transgressive revolt against the establishment – and people need to understand that even for those who support him, Trump is the new establishment.”
What has helped this trend take hold in the minds of some young conservatives is that sometimes the actions of Israel’s most vociferous supporters trigger callbacks to the speech codes of the American left. A survey over the summer conducted by Turning Point USA of roughly 7,000 attendees who participated in their major student activist conference in Tampa, Florida, found that 73 percent self-identify as pro-Israel. But that doesn’t mean they don’t recoil at what they view as a tendency by some Israel supporters to frame criticism of the nation or its political leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu as anti-Semitism.
“One of the things that’s driving more people away from Israel is when you shut them down and don’t say they’re allowed to ask certain questions,” Andrew Kolvet, Charlie Kirk’s producer, said in a NewsNation interview outlining the results of the survey and a series of focus groups. “We have lived through an era where they were called racist if they felt like DEI was a problem. A lot of these kids have been steeped in a world where they were told they couldn’t say something, then the floodgates broke open and now they can say it, and now they feel like the anti-Semite word is being thrown out just like the racist word was a few years ago.”
The effort Kirk and his team placed on navigating the complicated feelings on campuses about Israel, even gathering multiple Jewish and non-Jewish influencers to discuss the questions he was getting from fans in the weeks prior to his death, indicates how much this area has become a minefield for the young right.
The Mike Huckabee generation of America’s baby boomer Christians who looked forward to their church’s annual trip to the Promised Land may still be in key positions within the Republican party, but they no longer dominate the conversation online or among younger voters. And for people raised on the idea that a core principle of “America First” foreign policy is avoiding entangling alliances which risk dragging the United States into needless wars, Israel is the number one example.
Yet for some avowed supporters of Israel, the real story here isn’t entirely or even mostly an organic one, but is driven by a number of intentional actors with their own agendas, backed and promoted by foreign or anti-American interests. Mark Levin, the radio host and Fox News anchor, has taken to labeling these forces “the enemy within,” a combination of media figures and politicians he believes have seen their rhetoric boosted and shared across social media in an attempt to break the America-Israel alliance.
The ongoing feud on this question between Levin and his former colleague Tucker Carlson (Levin calls him “Chatsworth Qatarlson”) has been just one of many to play out on social media and across a vast diaspora of podcasts, many of which have stronger consumption among politically engaged young people than the cable-news programs that once dictated the direction of foreign-policy debate.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a battle that is not going away so it cannot be considered lost
Just as the degradation of power held by the Democratic media establishment has furthered the fortunes of radical candidates like Zohran Mamdani, the fear among some pro-Israel activists is that diminishing strength of leadership on the right could lead to critics of the Israel alliance – like once-MAGA darling Marjorie Taylor Greene – taking on larger roles within the coalition. And behind it all is an abiding concern about the future of the Republican party after Donald Trump. As much as Trump has cemented his place in the minds of many as the most pro-Israel President in American history, his heir apparent is viewed with significantly more skepticism. The potential of a J.D. Vance contest against the likes of Marco Rubio for the GOP nomination in 2028 could become one where differences of opinion on Israel take center stage.
There is near-universal acknowledgment on the part of American Jewish activists that there is a problem here for their cause, but the question of what to do about it prompts little in the way of answers. AIPAC, the much criticized pro-Israel lobbying group, recently rolled out an ad campaign to rebrand their organization as “America First” to online derision. The elevation of Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News by David Ellison, who is very public about his pro-Israel views, has prompted hopes for more pro-Israel commentary from a network that has courted controversy with their coverage.
But there is a noticeable lack of vibrant leadership making the case for Israel to young audiences – a fact that becomes all the more noticeable with the loss of Kirk. “We know the kind of voices we need, we just don’t have them right now,” one Jewish activist told me. And in their absence, anti-Israel voices such as Nick Fuentes’s can fill the void.
When CBS News’s Tony Dokoupil put the question to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, citing a poll showing just 14 percent of Americans under 30 support Israel, his response was clear-eyed. “I think the first fix is to finish the war as speedily as possible, something that I have sought to do against all these contrarian propaganda… so, first, you want to end it, end the war speedily, because in the TikTok age and in the television age, letting wars go on too long is going to cost you precisely what it cost you. There’s a real battle on the social media. It’s a big battle. It’s a battle for truth, really.” Netanyahu’s answer implies that Israel is losing that battle.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a battle that is not going away, so it cannot yet be considered lost. The lack of bipartisan support for Israel has been an acknowledged problem for years, and now the danger of real opposition within both parties is a growing concern that can’t be ignored. For now, Israel backers can hold on to the reality that they continue to get the votes they need and the backing of many of the most prominent American politicians.
So long as Donald Trump is the leader of the GOP, he defines “America First” – as he reiterated when some of his MAGA supporters were invoking the prospect of World War Three during the debate over striking Iran. He has given no indication of handing over the reins to anyone else.
It is important to remember that there is a time for war and a time for peace. The debate over the Israeli alliance takes on a different nature in both contexts in American politics. The emergence of an emboldened anti-Israel faction of the American right has been driven not just by prominent voices but by the images from Gaza blasted across TikTok. With a ceasefire in place, a renewed conversation can be had. Israel’s focus remains survival above all else, even if the destruction of its enemies has come with a critical loss of western support. In the hierarchy of needs, staying alive matters most. The arguments can wait for another day.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.
Many conservatives will have long suspected that “woke” language – the cocktail of victimhood narratives and group identity – alienates most Americans. It is simply too grating, and it is simply too divisive. And no matter what your politics, it is almost impossible to imagine a healthy society that is built on an aggressive competition over who is the most historically aggrieved.
Up until now this has been mostly an intuition. But a new study by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) finally puts evidence on the table: that this “woke” language actively provokes real anger, defensiveness and bile in respondents. Woke language is often used as a way to browbeat ordinary people into submission, but we now have plausible grounds to conclude that it’s achieving the precise opposite.
Many leaders have tried solving (often very real) social problems by applying “woke” doctrines, but have usually ended up making things worse. Why? This kind of politics offers a very dubious picture of how society actually works, and an even weaker guide to what we should do about it. Peoples and nations are vast and complex, and it is incredibly difficult to make any high-level policy decisions based on simplistic evaluations of group victimhood or oppression. More than anything else, “woke” was just stupid.
But our research shows that there is more to this story. The survey tested the actual effect of “woke” language on Americans by drawing from public messaging put out by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The organization is one of America’s most influential liberal NGOs. It has been at the forefront of shaping how anti-Semitism is taught in schools across the US, developing a variety of educational resources like handbooks and curriculum programs.
In an effort – no doubt well-intentioned – to fight the scourge of increasing Jew hatred, the ADL embraced the language of “woke” in their campaigns. And, generally speaking, they have increasingly adopted language that presents Jews as victims: of physical violence, of prejudice, of “silence” from neutral bystanders. Jews are framed simply as one of many oppressed group identities in America and, so the logic goes, we can fight anti-Semitism by getting people to see them in such “woke” terms.
The problem is that this type of rhetoric only partly stimulates feelings of solidarity, care, concern, positivity or even respect. Most strikingly, the study demonstrates that exposure to this psychological framing actually increases participants’ reported anger, defensiveness, even hostility towards Jews. It also increases something called the “hostile attribution bias” – a jargonistic way of assessing whether you interpret people’s behavior in good faith or not.
Paradoxically, fighting anti-Semitism using the ADL’s language can measurably increase feelings of anti-Semitism. Talking about social issues like inequality or racism in “woke” language appears to upset people because it divides, accuses and relies on a message of competition rather than unity. Conservatives have long suspected this. Now, we have some more hard evidence.
This is not the first study indicating that “woke” messaging creates more hostility, not less. Back in November last year, the NCRI ran a similar research project after learning that an astonishing 52 percent of US professionals have to attend DEI meetings and training events at work, with the stated intention of increasing awareness of and opposition to “systemic oppression”.
Yet, surprisingly, nobody had bothered to run the numbers before and see if this corporate training works. If they had done so, they’d see that, more often than not, the cure is worse than the disease. (And even that’s only if you actually believed that DEI was about curing anything, as opposed to, say, subsidizing a class of HR professionals and conjuring an entire micro-economy – totaling $8bn according to McKinsey – out of thin air.)
We found that when Americans were exposed to messaging lifted directly from the work of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi, as these DEI programs entail, it significantly increased their perception of racism in the workplace – even without any evidence for it whatsoever – resulting in heightened racial prejudice, intergroup hostility, suspicion and division. (The same is true for Islamophobia.) These programs also led to increased support for actual punishment against those who committed “microaggressions”, something which has caused people to lose their jobs and livelihood.
The implications of these studies are enormous. Even anecdotally, it’s been obvious over the past few years that “woke” language alienates voters and drives social polarization away from the political center of shared values. Trump’s election was, inter alia, clearly a reaction to the increasing “wokification” of American politics and culture. And when public institutions adopt this kind of messaging, they find themselves unable to positively shape hearts and minds on social issues, no matter how noble.
Yet this doesn’t mean we should toss out the ambition of making society at least a little bit less crap – particularly for the long-suffering American middle classes. Most interestingly, what our study also showed is that you can reverse the negative effects of DEI training by simply adopting a language of shared humanity instead of “woke”. If you shift the framing from competition to cooperation, adopt a message of common dignity and responsibility towards each other, this new bad blood almost completely vanishes. Woke, in short, does not work. The language of shared humanity and common cause might be the secret to shoring up an increasingly faltering civilization.
The deliberate slaughter of Israeli Jews on October 7, 2023, was the most consequential event in the modern Middle East. It sent powerful reverberations across the region and well beyond it to the United States, the UK, Europe and Russia. Those tremors, like the war begun by the massacre, continue to this day.
On that fateful day, Hamas terrorists left Gaza, crossed into Israel in a carefully-planned attack, designed to kill as many Jews as possible and take others captive for negotiating leverage. The terrorists attacked young, unarmed concert-goers at an Israeli music festival and the residents of a nearby town. The attack killed 1,195 innocents. Approximately 250 more were taken hostage, dragged back to Gaza and held for ransom by their kidnappers. Some hostages remain there, living and dead, held for political ransom. Among those killed were 38 children, some of whom were beheaded. It was theatrical depravity.
The next day, October 8, Islamists in Lebanon launched a second attack, this one on Israel’s northern border. (Gaza is on Israel’s southern, Mediterranean border, next to Egypt.) The northern assault was conducted by Hezbollah, the heavily-armed terror organization in control of Southern Lebanon and a powerful actor in the rest of the country. The goal of this second attack, approved and funded by Hezbollah’s patron and financier, Iran, was to open a second front in the war, divide the resources of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), and inflict still more civilian casualties.
As Israel mourned its dead and grieved for its hostages, they also witnessed another shocking sequence of events: the most virulent anti-Semitic demonstrations in Europe since the Holocaust. The celebrations in some European capitals and a few American cities complemented those by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Significantly, all these celebrations began before the Israelis responded militarily to the attack. They were full-throated endorsements of the terrorist attack in New York, London and Paris, not a response to Israel’s counter-attack, which had not yet happened.
Israel was, of course, determined to respond to this unprovoked slaughter, just as America was after Pearl Harbor. And, just like America, the goal was not to engage in some minimal tit-for-tat rejoinder. Israel had more consequential, strategic goals, just as America did.
Israel’s primary goal was (and still is) to end its encirclement by Iran’s proxy forces (known as the “ring of fire”) and to end their constant attacks on Israel, which gave cover to Iran as it secretly finished developing nuclear weapons, which could exterminate Israel’s entire population and wipe the Jewish State off the map.
It is these larger, strategic goals – entirely “negative” ones of wiping out imminent threats – that Israel has implemented systematically in the two years since the October 7 attacks.
This comprehensive response has been led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with strong backing, at least initially, from his Cabinet and the public. Over time, however, that strong backing has eroded for four reasons. The first is war weariness, which always occurs in protracted conflicts. Second is the desire for the return of all hostages, living and dead, and the fear that continued military action in Gaza will lead Hamas to slaughter the remaining hostages and keep all of them as negotiating leverage. Third, some key IDF leaders are worried about rising casualties among their troops if door-to-door fighting continues in Gaza. Hamas has continued to fight because of its extreme ideology and continued to hold hostages because Hamas fighters fear they will be killed if they give up the hostages without clear commitments from Israel, backed by the US. Fourth, and most difficult of all, support within Israel for the war has decline because there is no clear, achievable goal for Gaza after the war ends.
The problem of post-war Gaza is not just the enormous cost of reconstruction, which will be borne, at least in part, by rich Western nations and Arab Gulf states. There are two even deeper problems.
· Who governs? There is no clear, benign successor to Hamas as Gaza’s governing authority; and
· Will the Jew-hatred in Gaza ever stop? Most Gazans endorse the same anti-Israel, anti-Semitic ideology as that terrorist organization. If that doesn’t change, then future Gazan governments will have public support for a staunch, anti-Israel stand.
True, Gazans are sick of the war and sick of Hamas, but that doesn’t mean that they have given up their hate for Israel and for Jews. It was their votes in an election demanded by the George W. Bush administration that gave Hamas the power to govern Gaza after Israel withdrew completely. Hamas could have used that new-found “democratic authority” to build a state that lived in peace with the Jewish state. Instead, they built a terror state in partnership with Iran and significant funding from Qatar. Hamas consolidated its control by killing all its local opponents, eliminating alternative governance possibilities, aside from tribal groupings. The absence of those alternatives is a major problem for the future of Gaza.
International support for Israel, which was strong in Western capitals in the months after October 7, has ebbed significantly as the destruction of Gaza has continued. The clearest indication of that erosion is the decision by France and the UK to recognize an imaginary Palestinian state that lacks clear borders or a unified government. The US has rejected that move, so far, but polls show declining support for Israel, especially among young people.
Despite these strains, the long war has not been all bad news for Israel. The good news is that Israel’s tough, consistent military strategy has extinguished the “ring of fire” and delayed Iran’s nuclear program by years. The Jewish State has clearly emerged as the strong horse in the region and done so without permanently ending the chances for renewing ties with Arab-Muslim states, embodied in the Abraham Accords. It has sustained its stunning economic growth, grounded in high technology, despite calling up huge numbers of reserves from the civilian workforce. This combination of economic and military power is why Persian Gulf states want closer ties with Israel.
But Gulf Arab states cannot take the next step until the Gaza War is finished. For Israel, that means Hamas must be crushed and the hostages returned.
Those are the continuing obstacles of a war that began on October 7, with the Hamas slaughter of innocents, and expanded the next day when Hezbollah, backed and funded by Iran, attacked northern Israel. The dark shadow of those acts lingers over Israel, the Middle East, and the western world on this, the anniversary of that unprovoked terror.
As so often, the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis hit the nail on the head over yesterday’s terror attack in Manchester. It was, he said, the result of “a tidal wave of Jew hated.”
Jews have spent the past two years highlighting the danger posed by the authorities’ refusal to take more than perfunctory action against the regular hate marches and gatherings. We have warned what was coming – and yesterday it came. It will, I dread to write, not be the last terror attack.
Palestinian statehood is a decent and worthy cause. It is no more intrinsically poisonous than the push for a Scottish, Welsh or Catalan state, or indeed Irish unification. But as with the latter, for all that there are those who are entirely decent in the way they advocate and campaign for their cause, the broader movement has indeed been infected with poison.
Look at what happened last night, hours after two Jews had been murdered and the deaths of many others prevented only by heroism. How did the so-called Free Palestine movement react? By staging an “emergency” pro-Palestine protest organized by the “Global Movement for Gaza UK” on Whitehall. Mobs gathered not just in Whitehall but also in London railway stations and in Leeds, Manchester, Bristol, Bournemouth and elsewhere. Is this how normal people react after a terrorist attack?
While the answer to that is clearly “no,” it is exactly how the Free Palestine mob react. It is, for example, how the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) reacted after the October 7, 2023 massacre of 1,200 Jews. On the day itself, while the massacre was still in progress, the PSC contacted the Metropolitan Police to signal their intention of staging a march the following week – on October 14, before Israel had even entered Gaza. It was the very definition of a hate march. And it was the first of the many that have followed, on which Jew hate is openly displayed, from banners with antisemitic caricatures that could have come straight out of Der Stürmer, the Nazis’ propaganda tabloid, to chants calling to the “globalize the intifada” – kill Jews – and “Khaybar, Khaybar, Ya Yahud! Jaish Mohammad sawf ya’ud!,’” which means “Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews! The Army of Muhammad Will Return!”.
Dismissing these examples as the work of “bad apples” on the marches doesn’t wash. For one thing, all too often the organizers have utterly failed to condemn those responsible. Of course they have – because such behavior is in the DNA of the movement. Look at the smaller mobs that gather regularly – such as one in London on Wednesday night, the day before the Manchester attack. It was not just physically threatening, launching fireworks and pushing its way through crowded streets. It was united in chanting for the destruction of Israel.
These mobs spring up across the country on streets, in malls, at railway stations – anywhere where they can be seen and intimidate. And, almost always, the police stand and watch (although yesterday’s mob in Whitehall turned so bad that 40 people were arrested, six of whom were for attacks on the police).
Back to October 7, and the idea of staging a march straight after a massacre of Jews. Guess what is now scheduled for this Saturday, two days after the murder of Jews? A rally for Palestine Action, the proscribed terrorist group. The police have asked the organizers to reschedule, given that they are on high alert for more terror attacks on Jews. Leave aside that pathetic phrase, “the police have asked,” and ponder why on earth a mob which harasses, frightens and intimidates Jews would respond to the murder of Jews by stepping back from its latest plan that will harass, frighten and intimidate Jews.
It is still early in the investigation, and key details remain unconfirmed. But what is already known about this morning’s attack in Manchester is horrifying. At least two people are dead, as well as the attacker. Three others are in a “serious condition.” The attack occurred outside Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue, shortly after 9.30 a.m., as members of the Jewish community gathered for prayers on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.
According to Greater Manchester Police, the attacker used a vehicle to ram into pedestrians before stabbing at least one individual. Armed officers responded within minutes. The suspect was shot but, according to witnesses, appeared to rise again, prompting a second round of fire. Bomb disposal units were later seen surrounding the body. Though authorities have not confirmed whether he was wearing an explosive device, the protocol and urgency of the response strongly suggest that possibility, as do some reports from the site.
A major incident was declared within minutes. Operation Plato, the UK’s emergency response to a suspected “marauding terror attack,” was activated. Counter-terror police and MI5 are now involved in the investigation.
At the time of writing, police have not released the name of the attacker or officially stated a motive. But it does not take a great leap of imagination to discern the likely nature of what occurred. This attack bears the hallmark of Islamic terrorism. The method – ramming, stabbing and potential bombing – is grimly familiar. And the choice of target – a synagogue, on Yom Kippur – suggests deliberate timing, designed to cause maximum fear, disruption and symbolic harm to British Jews.
To state what should be obvious: synagogues are not random venues. They are not theaters or shopping centers or commuter hubs, caught up in indiscriminate violence. They are specific, communal, identifiably Jewish. This was an attack on Jews because they were Jews, gathering to pray on our most sacred day.
That in 2025 this must still be said is its own indictment. British Jews, just 0.48 percent of the population, have lived under heightened threat for years. Our synagogues, schools and community centers require guards, cameras, fences and entry protocols. The Community Security Trust (CST), a communal charity, operates a national control centre and deploys trained security volunteers across the country. These lived necessities were born of painful experience.
Today is the brutal consequence of what so many Jews have been warning about, and living with, for years.
Since the Hamas attacks of October 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza, the UK has witnessed an unprecedented wave of anti-Jewish hatred. CST recorded over 4,000 anti-Semitic incidents in 2023, double the previous year, and the highest ever documented. Last year brought more of the same: verbal abuse, online threats, vandalism, assaults, intimidation of children in schools, harassment of Jewish students on campus, doctors spreading anti-Jewish rhetoric without sanction. In London, Manchester, Birmingham and beyond, Jews have felt exposed and abandoned, and have warned over and over again only to be ignored.
The atmosphere is toxic. Many Jews have stopped wearing visible signs of identity. Some no longer speak Hebrew in public. Conversations about emigration, once marginal, have become widespread. The mood is not just anxious; it is alienated. And this will only make it worse. Many of us feel our country has abandoned us and worse encourages those who hate us, giving them license to express their hatred more openly and brazenly every day.
All of this has happened against a backdrop of regular “anti-Israel” marches where chants spill into open hatred of Jews, sermons from mosques which have been exposed on national television spew invective, and media narratives frame Jewish safety as a political inconvenience. A climate like this does not stay rhetorical. It incubates violence.
Armed police seal off a road close to the scene of the fatal attack (Getty Images)
This is the real climate crisis of our era, and yet “net zero” for Jew-hatred is nowhere on our government’s agenda. Instead, our Prime Minister rushed to recognize a Palestinian state days before a serious plan was unveiled by America and Israel to end the war in Gaza and start a process to encourage the Palestinians to reject extremism and violence. The UK emboldened Hamas and those who have marched against Israel and Jews week after week on our streets. The global warming we ought to be most worried about is the rising temperature of debate and news coverage when it comes to Jews and Israel, for today’s attacks like today’s is where that leads.
Keir Starmer has said “additional police assets” will be deployed to synagogues nationwide and promised that the government “will do everything to keep our Jewish community safe.” He has expressed his horror that such an attack took place on Yom Kippur. This is hardly reassuring. Many blame him for his government’s absurd emboldening of Hamas, and constant vindictive, anti-Israel actions and statements. The fish rots from head.
Words of sympathy are necessary, but they cannot substitute for years of ignored warnings. Repeated failures to arrest hate preachers, to discipline antisemitic professionals, to prosecute violent demonstrators, or to confront institutional media bias have left the Jewish community exposed. It is not the fault of Jews that we must secure ourselves through voluntary communal organizations – it is the fault of a society that allows hatred to fester.
And now, on the Day of Atonement, in a city where Jews have lived for centuries, in a once great nation where Jews have contributed disproportionately in every field, we face the all too familiar spectacle of our sacred space turned into a crime scene. Jewish blood is cheap, it seems.
Let no one pretend this came from nowhere. Let no one feign surprise. The signs have been visible. The hate has been loud. And the consequences are now bleeding into the streets.
When Charles Kushner took up his appointment as American ambassador to France this summer, his first official visit was to the Shoah Memorial in Paris. As a child of Holocaust survivors, he tweeted, “fighting anti-Semitism will be at the heart of my mission.” So it has proved. Last month, Kushner published a letter in the Wall Street Journal in which he accused Emmanuel Macron of insufficient action in the face of soaring anti-Semitism in the Republic.
The ambassador was summoned for a dressing down. He didn’t attend as he was on vacation
Kushner also castigated the French President for his imminent recognition of Palestinian statehood. “Public statements haranguing Israel and gestures toward recognition of a Palestinian state embolden extremists, fuel violence and endanger Jewish life in France,” wrote Kushner. “In today’s world, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism – plain and simple.”
The American criticism of Macron mirrors that of Benjamin Netanyahu. Last month, the Israeli Prime Minister claimed the decision to recognize Palestine “pours fuel on this anti-Semitism fire.” Macron described Netanyahu’s remarks as “abject.”
Macron didn’t respond personally to Kushner’s criticism, but the ambassador was summoned to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a dressing down. Kushner didn’t attend, as he was on vacation. In his place he sent his chargé d’affaires. The magazine Paris Match described the move as “a deliberate diplomatic affront.”
Paris said it regarded Kushner’s remarks as not only inaccurate but also undiplomatic, not being “commensurate with the quality of the transatlantic link between France and the United States and the trust that must result from it, between allies.” The ambassador’s criticism, it said, also contravened the 1961 Vienna Convention, which stipulates that diplomats are duty bound “not to interfere in the internal affairs of the state.”
This convention was ignored in 2016 by France’s ambassador in Washington. In responding to Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, Gérard Araud tweeted: “After Brexit and this election, anything is now possible. A world is collapsing before our eyes. Dizziness.” He later deleted the post.
Araud returned to the attack in 2019 when he left Washington, declaring that Trump was a “whimsical, unpredictable, uninformed” President. The passage of time has not mellowed Araud. On learning last November that a re-elected Trump had nominated Kushner as ambassador to France, Araud tweeted: “I recommend reading his CV. ‘Juicy,’ as the Americans would say… Needless to say, he doesn’t know the first thing about our country… we console ourselves as best we can.”
Araud was not alone in objecting to the appointment of Kushner, whose son Jared is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka. The French media expressed surprise that a man who had spent a year in a federal prison for tax fraud (and was pardoned by Trump during his first term as President) was considered suitable for the post.
The left-wing newspaper Le Monde wondered what exactly qualified Kushner to the post of ambassador, noting his response to the Senate when asked a similar question: “I don’t know much about French art or wine, but I understand business.”
Democrats in America were also unimpressed by Kushner’s appointment. Severin Beliveau, a stalwart of the party in Maine and an honorary consul of France, penned a furious op-ed earlier this year explaining why Kushner should not be Uncle Sam’s man in Paris. “It is hard to find anything that qualifies Mr. Kushner for the appointment,” wrote Beliveau. “He is a convicted felon, has no diplomatic experience and can be expected to personalize the existing tensions between President Trump and the President of France.”
Kushner, 71, does indeed have little to recommend him for the role. But the same applied to some of his predecessors in Paris. George W. Bush appointed Howard H. Leach as ambassador to France in 2001, a man whose area of expertise was food-processing. And in 2009, Barack Obama gave the job to Charles Rivkin, who had made his name as a producer of The Muppet Show. The appointment raised eyebrows in France, although it was noted that he had been one of Obama’s principal financial supporters during his presidential campaign.
Despite his lack of diplomatic experience, Rivkin’s appointment was welcomed by the Paris elite, as mesmerized by Obama as the rest of Europe’s movers and shakers. “We couldn’t have dreamed of a better choice,” simpered Jean-David Levitte, the diplomatic advisor of president Nicolas Sarkozy. “Charlie Rivkin is the epitome of American professional success.”
In attacking Charles Kushner, France is shooting the messenger. His criticism is not unfounded
Once in Paris it became evident that Rivkin had one particular mission, which was to spread American-style identity politics into the suburbs. This soon came to the attention of the French press. Le Monde published an article in the summer of 2010 entitled “Washington conquers the 93” (93 is the administrative designation of the turbulent Seine-Saint-Denis département north of Paris).The paper described how Rivkin liked to visit these suburbs, sometimes with a famous face in tow, such as actor Samuel L. Jackson. According to Le Monde, “these symbolic and media junkets conceal the extent of the networking that has taken place in France in recent years to identify the elites of the neighborhoods and ethnic minorities.” Once they’d been identified, the American embassy invited these “elites” to Washington in order to “deepen their reflections on their subjects of interest.”
The extent to which Rivkin was importing identity politics into France was exposed by WikiLeaks in 2010. On January 19 of that year, Rivkin sent a confidential report to Washington entitled “Minority Engagement Strategy.” “French institutions have not proven themselves flexible enough to adjust to an increasingly heterodox demography,” wrote Rivkin. One initiative was to work “with French museums and educators to reform the history curriculum taught in French schools, so that it takes into account the role and perspectives of minorities in French history.”
This was clear interference, yet it raised barely a murmur in Paris. Not so the intervention of Kushner, which has caused outrage among the French elite. Jean-Noël Barrot, the minister of foreign affairs, described his criticism as “unjustifiable and unjustified… because it is not the place of a foreign representative to come and lecture France on how to govern its own country.”
Someone has to, because Kushner is right: France is taking insufficient action to protect its 500,000 Jews. Macron’s political adversaries accuse him of abandoning the country’s Jewish population in order to pacify the violent minority within France’s large “Algerian diaspora.”
In November 2023, Macron declined an invitation to attend a rally in solidarity with France’s Jews, who were already experiencing a surge in anti-Semitism. Allegedly he made his decision after he was warned from a Muslim advisor that his attendance might “give the neighborhoods cause to catch fire.”
The following year, Macron vowed that France would be relentless in combating anti-Semitism, which he admitted had increased “in an absolutely inexplicable, inexcusable, and unacceptable manner.”
In reality, the rise is eminently explicable. Once the preserve of the far right, French anti-Semitism is today most commonly found among the far left and their Islamist allies. Among the many recent anti-Semitic acts in France are the assault of a teenage boy as he left a synagogue in Lyon and the refusal of an adventure park to admit a party of Israeli children. There was also the chainsaw attack on an olive tree planted in memory of Ilan Halimi, a young Jewish man who was tortured to death in 2006 by an inner-city gang. Two Tunisian brothers have been charged with the desecration.
Halimi’s sister says “no lessons have been learned” from her brother’s death. Increasingly she fears for her children’s safety in France and says she is thinking of emigrating to Israel. Macron, she says, is “doing nothing” to protect France’s Jews.
In attacking Kushner, France is shooting the messenger. His criticism – supported by Washington – is not unfounded.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.
Freddy Gray: Candace is being sued or threatened with legal action by the Macrons, Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron, the President and First Lady of France. Because, Candace, you believe that Brigitte Macron is a man. Why do you think the Macrons are choosing to sue you?
Candace Owens: Because they were trying to stop the story. I think it was an effective PR strategy. They had been suing and harassing the journalists that had initially brought this story forth to the French public for years, and then they lost their defamation suit against the two journalists, Amandine Roy, Natasha Roy. And that was pretty explosive news. So I think that they then filed suit against me and knowing that it would drive potentially the most media traffic to kind of say, “Oh no, but it still isn’t true at all. I know we lost this defamation case in our home turf, but we’re now going to try it in America,” just to kind of signal to the press that they’re not lying.
FG: If you wanted the story to go away, this is not a very sensible strategy.
CO: Yeah, actually if you look at the history of them as a couple, they haven’t been very good at PR… I do think it was poor advice. I think their advisors made the wrong decision, and we saw this even recently, the disaster of their PR when Brigitte was caught assaulting Macron on the plane. I mean, they lied, they forcefully lied, and then they essentially disappeared. The story the very next day from the French press. So they’re used to having that kind of power.
FG: It’s that clip that makes me think you’re wrong, because I’m pretty sure she punches like a girl. I mean, men don’t hit like that.
How did the theory start?
CO: The Daily Mailran a headline, and Emmanuel Macron was on camera saying it’s not true, and freaking out about these rumors and saying how hurtful they were. And I thought that was odd. I said, “What could possibly be going on in France that the President is having to lower himself to respond to such a ridiculous rumor?” And when I was reading this article, I was sort of interested in the dog that wasn’t barking, which is that the Daily Mail didn’t do a good job of instantly debunking it. Obviously, tons of photos could debunk this… It wasn’t a deep internet web conspiracy. It was actually French journalists that were on the left who loved Brigitte Macron and wanted to celebrate her by doing their due diligence and telling the story of Brigitte Macron. These were feminists… They felt that they were being threatened by the Élysée Palace. They were asking basic questions, asking for pictures and feeling like they had done something wrong. And they were essentially being told that the only person that could get them what they were looking for was a woman named Mimi Marchand, who at that moment was running communications for the Macron couple. Mimi Marchand has since been charged with forging documents… So it was very organic how this story took off in France. People just trying to figure out like, hey, can we get some photos of you? There’s 30 years of your life that seem to be missing?
FG: It is definitely strange that nobody seems to be able to find a lot of evidence about Brigitte Macron’s upbringing. But what occurs to me – I’ve watched the series – I know the journalist you speak to, Xavier Poussard. He uses a facial recognition app to say that these images of Brigitte Macron’s brother must be her. There’s a sort of 80 percent likelihood. That strikes me as not necessarily reliable, and also the fact that, you know, siblings can look very, very alike. So the fact that Brigitte Macron’s brother looks a lot like her is not quite that surprising, is it?
CO: No, it’s not surprising at all. And you’re correct. This is not a 100 percent technology… What’s more compelling is that this brother of hers is missing. At this point you would have to have a terrible relationship with your brother if you wouldn’t just come out before you had to sue anyone and say, “Hi, it’s me, I’m Jean Trogneux. I love my sister very much. I’m a private person, but this is getting ridiculous.” Or even her children, right? Her children could release photos of them being raised by her growing up. But I don’t care how angry you are at your parents, at a certain level, you’d go, “Guys, this is getting ridiculous. Here’s me and my mom.” We’re just like, hey, 30 years of your life is missing. It’s getting a little uncomfortable with how many people in your orbit have been arrested for pedophilia. You’ve lied – objective lies – you told the press at the beginning of your relationship. Don’t forget, when he first ran for president, the public told the media he was 17. Now we’ve got them down to 15. And the truth is that he was actually 14 when he was in that play where she says she saw him perform. But it’s not helping the media story that they lie. From the very beginning they presented it as if Brigitte was this really irresistible, sexy teacher, when when they actually got evidence of what she looked like when she was teaching Macron. She looks homely. It’s definitely not a very attractive teacher that was wearing skirts. It looks like a male that’s in the middle of a transition, to be honest with you.
FG: I’ve listened to what Xavier and you said about that. And it does sound a bit like Xavier was sort of just angry at the media for the way that they manicured her image. But that’s what happens with powerful and important people. Their images are always being manicured, and often they manicure themselves.
CO: Which is totally fine. It’s every piece of the Brigitte Macron story that has required so many lies. And yeah, they they did that, perhaps because they didn’t want people to realize that something really strange happened at that school. And it doesn’t help that when Emmanuel Macron entered office, they got to work trying to lower the age of consent to 13. It doesn’t help that Emmanuel Macron’s mother worked in her career assisting transgendered people in getting identities. The person that’s dressing Brigitte Macron that works with LVMH and Louis Vuitton specializes in androgynous dressing, trans people and of getting models that are trans. There’s so many other elements that are just peculiar. I want people to also know that before we published the first episode, we were in touch with Brigitte’s team. We said, “Look, we’re not interested in spreading conspiracies. Answer these basic questions. Could you produce some photos of your living for 30 years? Did you live as Jean-Michel? Have you ever lived as a person named Veronique?” And they forcefully declined to answer any of those questions.
French pedophilia?
FG: I think you’re sort of insinuating that the real scandal behind this is a kind of pedophilic elite in France.
CO: I believe that’s been a problem that’s happened in Paris for a very long time.
Owens mentioned Sigmund Freud, Richard Duhamel, Richard Trumbull, Eric Moretti and André Gide as examples of French pedophilia.
FG: Well, like me, you’re a Catholic. You’re a recent convert to Catholicism. And I know from my French Catholic family that there is this obsessive hatred in France of the French government and the secular French government and the French left, and this assumption that they are satanic somehow or Satanic driven. Is that something you think you’ve latched on to?
CO: Well, no, I was not aware of French politics. I got into this quite organically. I don’t follow French politics. I don’t speak French… The idea that there are is an orbit of people who could commit crimes and then have the audacity to sue people for writing books or sue people that are talking about it. It offends me. It offends my senses as a Christian and as a mother. And I felt that it was very important for the world to kind of look and go, what’s going on in France? … It definitely wasn’t driven by some idea of a satanic panic happening in France.
Trump tells Candace to stop saying Brigitte is a man
FG: The Donald Trump story. He leant on you himself to stop talking about the Brigitte Macron story.
CO: Yeah. Back in February, Macron was in the White House ostensibly to discuss Russia and Ukraine. I was contacted by the White House and told that he took Trump to the side and wanted me to stop talking about Brigitte. And the person who relayed this to me before Trump called me the next day, said that it was a contingency on the Ukraine-Russia conversation, which is ridiculous. When Trump called me the next day. He basically said he was very surprised. But Macron took him aside and asked if he could get me to stop talking about Brigitte. I said to him that I would not speak about Brigitte for a few months while he was looking for a signature on some document pertaining to the EU. But then certainly, of course, I would speak about it months later, which is exactly what I did.
The Candace-Trump fallout
FG: You were a keen supporter. He was a fan of you. And then it seems you’ve completely fallen out and largely over Gaza. Am I correct in saying that?
CO: You are correct in saying that. What’s happening in Gaza, to me is just a moment of are you a human? Are you not a human? And also the Epstein fumble as well – the gaslighting of the Epstein case. To effectively gaslight your supporters and say, why? Why are we still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? What do you mean, why aren’t we still talking about Jeffrey Epstein if there’s been a blackmail ring, and politicians are supporting things because they have been blackmailed. I’ve been very disappointed in him.
FG: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that he’s in the files that he sent this card, this bawdy card, to Jeffrey at birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein.
CO: I don’t buy the birthday card because Trump immediately came out and said, this is not true and sued. In May when Pam Bondi sat down for a meeting and said, you’re actually in these files, he never debunked that. Do I believe that Donald Trump was on Epstein Island? No. Do we know that he parted with Epstein in his youth? Yes, we know that… The bigger point is that he he could have come to his supporters and said, “look, I’m very surprised to hear this. I have nothing to do with anything that happened on that island.” He could have gotten ahead of it. When you choose to gaslight the public, you have become exactly what you knew that we hated when we sent you into DC.
Do you ever think you’re a conspiracy theorist, Candace?
FG: Do you ever feel that you’ve maybe taken crazy pills and you’ve become a conspiracy theorist?
CO: Absolutely not. The Macron story is one of the most fascinating stories ever. And in a sane world, I would be given a Pulitzer.
Owens responds to accusations of being anti-Semitic
FG: There’s a lot of suspicion of you that you have gone from that criticism of Israel into full-on Jew-hatred. How do you respond to that allegation of anti-Semitism?
CO: It’s nonsense to say that I have hatred for Jews. I worked for Prager University. It is a literal Zionist enterprise that is run by an IDF intelligence. I then worked for the Daily Wire, which is run by Ben Shapiro. Prior to that, I worked in private equity for two Jews in New York for four years. And I almost married a Jew, actually, while I was in New York… I’m the same girl who stood up to Black Lives Matter. I don’t care about your identity. I know when people are calling people racist because they are trying to stop the conversation. They said, “You’re a self-hating black.” I know exactly what’s happening when you start using your identity as a shield, and it just doesn’t work with me. What’s happening in Gaza is atrocious.
FG: Well, you married a self-hating Brit instead. Not self-hating, sorry. I meant to say you married a Brit. Let me say that again. I don’t know whether your husband’s self-hating. I’m self-hating.
