What Joe Kent and Candace Owens Are Really Up to in Their Critiques of the Iran War
This story is part of TPM Café, TPM’s opinion and news analysis center.
At the Catholic Prayer For America gala in Washington on Thursday evening, the far-right group Catholics for Catholics (CFC) celebrated Joe Kent, the recently deceased director of the National Counterterrorism Center, who resigned over his opposition to the war in Iran. Kent has a long history of proximity to white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and his resignation letter linked his criticism of Trump’s war with anti-Semitic tropes. Although CFC announced that Kent would be interviewed on stage by Candace Owens, the far-right podcaster and influencer, her actual five-minute appearance at the black-tie affair — for which C-Span interrupted its regular programming to broadcast — turned out to be rather innocuous. Kent briefly repeated his views against the war in Iran. Under pressure from CFC President John Yep, Kent added a religious touch: “By having faith, I was able to hear the voice of God. I was able to hear that I was exactly where I was supposed to be and that it was time for me to take action, which made taking action incredibly easy actually and made me feel very liberated and like I was in the right place.”
Catholics for Catholics describes its mission as “to inspire a new wave of Catholicism and love of country. We are restoring what it means to say ‘I am Catholic’ in the public square. We are changing the nation and shaping a more holy and moral future for America!” As investigative journalist Kathryn Joyce has documented, the group regularly celebrates the conversion of new, usually very online, right-wing Catholics to the group. Two years ago, they celebrated Owens’ conversion, which coincided with his firing from the Daily Wire of right-wing podcaster Ben Shapiro due to his anti-Semitism. Along with Catholics for Catholics, many members of the online right rallied behind Owens after his departure from Shapiro’s organization, praising or sanitizing his anti-Semitism.
After Kent announced Tuesday that he was leaving the Trump administration, Owens immediately seized on it for his own purposes. Less than an hour after Kent posted his resignation letter to X, Owens quoted him on Twitter, calling him an “American hero, patriot and veteran.” She called Trump a “shameful president,” adding: “Let American troops take his lead and examine Bibi’s conscientious objection to the Red Heifer War. Goyim step down.” The MAGA right has appropriated the term “goyim” (non-Jews) to signal to each other their own victimization by nefarious and complicit Jews; Owens tries to convince his supporters that the Americans were manipulated into the “War of the Red Heifer of Bibi” to rebuild the Third Temple in Jerusalem. The next day, Catholics for Catholics announced that it would interview Kent at their gala.
Although she did not make an appearance in the C-Span video, Owens placed her support for Kent’s decision to resign above the war in Iran, in her bitter and relentless fight to elevate the anti-Semitic Catholic right as righteous opponents of the U.S. alliance with Israel, and now, the war in Iran. In doing so, Owens, who has a long history of anti-Semitic remarks, is attempting to provoke a confrontation, and perhaps even a reckoning, with one of the Republican Party’s most enduring constituencies: white evangelicals. Many of them, including Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee; his chief religious advisor, Paula White; and House Speaker Mike Johnson are Christian Zionists. Led largely by John Hagee, Christian Zionists support Israel’s right-wing government more than most American Jews and reject any criticism of it as anti-Semitic. They claim to “love” Israel and the Jews because that is what the Bible tells them to do, but their view of Bible prophecies is that when Jesus returns (an event that could be triggered by a conflagration in Iran), the Jews will convert to Christianity or perish. We are witnessing a standoff between anti-Semites and philosemites.
With their increasingly public fight against Christian Zionists, Owens and his very online allies are also trying to strike at the very heart of the alliance that made the modern Christian right possible: an army of “cobelligerents,” evangelicals and Catholics, united in a cultural war against secularism, abortion and LGBTQ rights. Owens and his supporters are trying to blow up this alliance, including trying to claim Charlie Kirk — seen by Trump, at least, as a potential young successor to evangelicalism’s old guard — as one of their own. Following Kirk’s assassination, Owens advanced a conspiracy theory that his murder was an inside job of the organization he co-founded, Turning Point USA, and even accused his widow, Erika, of participating in it. This week, Kent added fuel to the fire of Kirk’s conspiracy, telling Tucker Carlson on his podcast Wednesday that Kirk saw him at the White House last summer and begged him to stop Trump from going to war with Iran. “So when one of President Trump’s closest advisors urges us not to go to war with Iran and at least rethink our relationship with Israel, and he’s suddenly assassinated publicly and we’re not allowed to ask questions, that’s a data point,” Kent told Carlson. “A data point we need to look at.” (Kent is also reportedly under investigation by the FBI for leaks preceding his resignation.)
Owens’ embrace of Kent marked the second time in as many months that she came out loud in defense of an ally sidelined by the Trump administration. In February, an Owens protégé, former beauty queen Carrie Prejean Boller, who received a “Catholic Champion Award” at the CFC gala on Thursday, brought far-right Catholic anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism to a meeting of the Trump White House Religious Liberty Commission, which was supposed to address anti-Semitism. (The Trump administration has its own problematic definition of anti-Semitism, considering any anti-Israeli or pro-Palestinian speech anti-Semitic, a formulation that Owens and his allies have exploited to their own advantage.) Trump had appointed Prejean Boller, who converted to Catholicism last year, to the Commission alongside more conservative evangelicals and Catholics like Ryan Anderson, a former Heritage Foundation staffer who is now president of ethics and public policy. Center, and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, former archbishop of New York and former president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Prejean Boller made a spectacle of herself at the meeting, including engaging in confrontations with evangelical members of the Commission over their Christian Zionism, claiming that Zionism violated her religious freedom as a Catholic, and putting on a show of “just asking questions” about whether she would be deprived of her religious freedom, the right to quote sections of the New Testament about Jews killing Jesus. In her podcast applauding Prejean Boller, Owens said she herself once believed there should be a Jewish state “when I was under the demonic Zionist spell.” (She later complained that she had been subjected to a “brainwashing program” in a public school about “the Holocaust, the Holocaust, the Holocaust.”) Of Prejean Boller, Owens said, “a star is born.”
On cue, Prejean Boller did not stay silent when Commission Chairman Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick removed her from the body. In an interview with the AtlanticPrejean Boller blamed Patrick and televangelist Paula White, Trump’s longtime friend and head of his White House religious office, for his firing, calling White an “absolute evangelical demon.”
Catholicism scholar Matthew Cressler, speaking recently on my podcast, compared Owens to Father Charles Coughlin, who promoted anti-Semitism and Nazism on his radio show in the 1930s. Coughlin opposed the United States’ entry into World War II, claiming that the war was a plan by Jews for their own benefit and that they had conspired to involve the United States. Of Prejean Boller’s attempt to revive the anti-Semitic trope that Jews killed Jesus, Cressler said, “the Church has spent the last 60 years trying to dismantle” the idea that Jews were responsible for Christ’s death.
While online Catholic law is a relatively new phenomenon and unfamiliar to many Catholics raised in the Church, Hagee’s brand of evangelicalism is deeply ingrained in the lives of evangelicals whose religious communities and belief systems are deeply shaped by what they believe to be Israel’s role in fulfilling biblical prophecies about Christ’s ultimate return. White evangelicals are much more monolithicly Republican than white Catholics. What’s more, Republicans are much more broadly supportive of Trump’s war in Iran than Democrats or Independents; A YouGov poll this week found that more than 80 percent of Republicans approve of Trump’s handling of the issue, and he faces minimal resistance from congressional Republicans.
Owens, from his podcast booth and his X account, is attempting to upend decades of Republican views on the United States and its relations with Israel and the Middle East. She may be aiming for a horseshoe political theory, in which she draws inspiration from the anti-Israel left, but to get there they would have to adopt her militant, fringe Catholicism. In the meantime, it has been alarmingly successful in resurrecting the ugliest forms of anti-Semitism.
