Candace Owens tragically sees herself that way prematurely. It is tragic when a person of such potential simply basks in ignorance, rejecting peripheral information and knowledge to augment her smarts. Consumed with the narcissistic and even paranoiac sense that people of power are trying to silence her, she defiantly assures her following that she is a proud black woman who will not be silenced.  Poor thing.

Like so many others, while advancing up the ladder, she was blessed to encounter one or two sponsors or mentors to pave early roads for her. Many of us can remember those who believed in us and gave us that break. As such, Candace Owens found Dennis Prager, the well-known radio celebrity who brought her into his “Prager University.”

Then she got another break when Ben Shapiro brought her into the Daily Wire. They opened doors and mentored her, and she proved worthy. She brought them a new niche of viewers and listeners attracted by her unique brand.

Then along came Kanye West (who asks to be called “Ye”), the gifted conservative-leaning musical talent, fashion entrepreneur, and maniacal anti-Semite.

When Kanye West tweeted crazed anti-Semitic outbursts about going to “Def Con 3,” Jews obviously were disgusted. But Candace raced to defend him. This kind-of makes sense. There are so few prominent black entertainment conservatives, and Kanye West may have been her Cowboy Billy Watts.

With that, she began her descent into anti-Jewish hell. She proffered all sorts of defenses for Kanye West, while Prager and Shapiro, prominently Jewish, presumably sought to persuade her that Kanye West is not where she wants to build her brand. Alas, as a narcissistic proud black woman who will not be intimidated, she felt excited by the opportunity to defy her sponsors, finally to break her imagined chains — of guidance, opportunity, and mentorship. Don’t you tell me whom I can defend.

OK, that happens all the time. Simon and Garfunkel split. The Beatles broke up. But then it got sinister and pernicious. Her two foundational conservative mentors are Jews, proud and self-respecting Jews. So, instead of just targeting her two mentors personally with vitriol for seeking to dissuade her from defending West’s Jew hatred, she doubled-down on her delusional heroic pro-Kanye defiance and determined that the nastier way to hurt Prager and Shapiro personally would be by attacking Israel.

See the connection? A Jew annoys you, so you attack Israel? Got that? It is as reasonable as if her two early life mentors happened to be of Armenian heritage, so now she hits them by advocating politically for Turkey and Azerbaijan, while denying the Medz Yeghern (Armenian Genocide of 1915-1916) ever happened.

Suddenly, she starts telling her embarrassingly uninformed audience absurdly that she went to Israel and saw apartheid with her own eyes because there is an “Arab Quarter” in Jerusalem’s Old City and a separate “Jewish Quarter” there. Apartheid!

It never occurred to her why because she is so razor smart — she truly is — that facts need not align with her feelings. The four “quarters” of the Old City (which also has a “Christian Quarter” and an “Armenian Quarter”) were not designated by Israel or Jews but by a British cartographer mapping out the Old City in the 1840s, a century before Israel was established.

Apartheid? It is like designating a community in San Francisco as “Chinatown,” one in lower Manhattan as “Little Italy,” and another in upper Manhattan as “Spanish Harlem.” She sarcastically “endorsed” Nikki Haley for “president of Israel” because Haley agrees that Hamas-ISIS must be crushed. Went after “secret Jewish gangs” in Hollywood. Devoted a crazy episode of her show to attacking “Washington, D.C. Jews.”

She even “liked” a social media post that a rabbi was “drunk on Christian blood.”

(FWIW: By Torah law, Jews are forbidden to ingest even a speck of blood remaining in slaughtered beef or other animals. To extricate every trace of blood from meat, first it must be washed and scrubbed thoroughly to remove every discernible trace. Then it has to be immersed fully in room-temperature water for at least 30 minutes. Then the meat has to be washed off.

Then the meat must be coated on all sides with a layer of coarse “kosher[ing] salt,” and it is placed for at least one hour on a board with holes that allow any remaining blood, if any, to trickle out. Then the salt and anything else on the meat must be washed off in three separate washings. That is the deal with ingesting blood as per Leviticus 7:26-27. Absolutely forbidden to Jews, even if the meat otherwise is kosher slaughtered.)

She provided her YouTube platform to debunked Israel hater Norman Finkelstein. When Finkelstein speaks unchallenged, he sounds reasonable. By contrast, Piers Morgan invited Douglas Murray to debate him, and Murray mopped the floor with Finkelstein. Murray is educated and informed; by contrast, Owens has exposed that she is a blank without a script.

And her animus continues: Suggesting that Israel had advance knowledge of 9/11. Casting doubt on the Nazi medical torture experiments of Dr. Joseph Mengele, calling such accounts “bizarre propaganda.” Stating that the six-pointed Star of David originates from a pagan Canaanite god that was “fed” with child sacrifices.  Asserting that it was the Allies’ treatment of Germans during WWII that should be the humanitarian focus, not the claims of “the Zionists”:

The reason why this particular episode [of my podcast] is so detrimental to Zionism is because they [the Zionists] have polluted American minds to believe that we must defend Israel out of morality and the evils of the Holocaust. Learning about how many people who committed holocausts and mass murders were protected by Israel is disruptive to that narrative. Plain and simple. Learning about what the allies did to peaceful German civilians and their children is similarly disruptive to what we have learned in school.

Jews always are the canary in the coal mine. First, the conspiracy theorists go after the Jews; next, they are accusing America of perpetrating genocide against Germany during World War II. For Candace, it is exciting to be a brave, fearless black woman who will not be intimidated by anyone telling her what she may not say.

She can say anything she wants. (Ask Alex Jones about Sandy Hook.) So her present campaign against her presumed eternal enemies, Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager, hated for urging her to rethink her endorsement of Kanye West’s insanity, drives her to “reveal” all the secret evils of the Jews.

Ever heard or seen that playbook before?

In Judaism, we speak of three dimensions that comprise a person’s intelligence: (i) smartness (chokhmah), (ii) knowledge (da’at), and (iii) understanding/ insight (binah). Candace clearly is blessed with smarts. Alas, a smart person who lacks knowledge can sound smart, but only to those more ignorant than she — such as her social media following of ignorant teens, conspiracy theorists, and others of such ilk.

A random scan through a few hundred comments on her YouTube post the time she hosted Finkelstein reveals how ignorant, infantile, and sycophantic her commenting followers are. The pattern of comments can be summarized by this paraphrasing:

“Candace, you are so smart and so beautiful to look at. Thank you for having the courage to bring this wise professor to teach us about Israeli apartheid.”

“Candace, I never knew that about Israel’s genocide. Thanks. And I love looking at your face.”

“Candace, you are so brave to stand up to the Zionists. You are fearless — AND GORGEOUS!!”

“Candace, this Prof. Finkelstein is the first time I ever learned anything at all about Israel. No wonder the whole world hates them. He is so brave, and I couldn’t stop looking at you!”

That is her audience: not NASA scientists, brain surgeons, hard-working Americans on assembly lines, or homemakers rearing families. Rather, the blind leading the blind.

Candace: Smart but Ignorant

Candace is so smart but, as she unwittingly demonstrated when commenting on the 19^th century residential quarters of Old City Jerusalem, also is pathetically ignorant as to many complex matters. Without knowledge, there can be no useful understanding or insight, despite smartness, because it has no foundation.

It would be like having missed the news of Saturday, July 13, from Butler, Pennsylvania, then seeing Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention a few days later with his ear heavily bandaged, and applying one’s smartness and understanding, without knowledge and information, to conclude: “Trump must have gotten into one heck of a street fight.” Ignorance is not bliss, especially in a self-styled pundit.

Owens’s tragedy is that, determined to prove that she is a proud black woman, and that no one will tell her what she may say, she ends up painting herself into corners by spouting opinions and “exposing” conspiracies built on nonsense. Then, when her mendacity or fantasy is debunked, she is too proud to acknowledge her ignorance, so instead doubles down, retreating to her own “Def Com 3.”

I was among those who initially thought Candace Owens was a special new voice in America. Fifty years earlier, I had been eagerly enthusiastic about Cowboy Billy Watts. I did not want to accept that my Good Guy had gone bad. But he had, and he even turned out years later, in real life, to be a nasty racist. I conceded. Now I confront the reality that Candace Owens, too, has moved from potential greatness to scum.

Candace, we hardly knew ye. But now we know Ye and ye.

Originally published in The American Spectator

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore on Wikimedia Commons