What Joe Kent and Candace Owens Are Really Up to in Their Critiques of the Iran War

This story is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. 

At the Catholic Prayer For America Gala in Washington Thursday night, the far-right group Catholics for Catholics (CFC) celebrated Joe Kent, the recently-departed Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, who quit over opposition to the war in Iran. Kent has a long history of proximity to white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and his resignation letter paired his criticism of Trump’s war with antisemitic tropes. Although CFC had announced Kent would be interviewed on stage by Candace Owens, the far-right podcaster and influencer, his actual five-minute appearance at the black-tie affair — which C-Span interrupted its regular programming to broadcast — turned out to be rather anodyne. Kent briefly repeated his anti-Iran War views. When pressed by CFC president John Yep, Kent added a religious flourish: “Having faith, I was able to hear God’s voice. I was able to hear that I was exactly where I was supposed to be and it was my time to actually take action, which made taking the action incredibly easy actually and actually made me feel very liberated and like I’m in the right spot.”

Catholics for Catholics describes its mission as “inspiring a new wave of Catholicism and love of country. We are restoring what it means to say ‘I’m Catholic’ in the public square. We are changing the nation and shaping a more holy and moral future for America!” As the investigative journalist Kathryn Joyce has documented, the group regularly celebrates the conversion of new, typically very online right-wing Catholics into the fold. Two years ago, they celebrated Owens’ conversion, which coincided with her firing from right-wing podcaster Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire over her antisemitism. Along with Catholics for Catholics, many on the online right rallied behind Owens after her departure from Shapiro’s organization, praising or sanitizing her antisemitism.

After Kent announced he was leaving the Trump administration on Tuesday, Owens immediately seized on it for her own purposes. Within an hour of Kent posting his resignation letter on X, Owens quote-tweeted it, calling him “an American hero, patriot and veteran.” She disparaged Trump as “a shameful president,” adding: “May American troops take his lead and look into conscientious objection to Bibi’s Red Heifer War. Goyim stand down.” The MAGA right has appropriated the term “goyim” (non-Jews) to signal to each other their own claimed victimization by nefarious, conniving Jews; Owens is trying to convince her followers that Americans have been manipulated into “Bibi’s Red Heifer War” to rebuild the Third Temple in Jerusalem. The next day, Catholics for Catholics announced she would be interviewing Kent at their gala. 

Although she does not make an appearance in the C-Span video, Owens has placed her support for Kent’s decision to resign over the Iran War front and center in her ugly, relentless battle to elevate the antisemitic Catholic right as a righteous opponent of America’s alliance with Israel, and now, the war in Iran. In doing this, Owens, who has a long history of antisemitic remarks, is trying to instigate a confrontation, and maybe even a reckoning, with one of the Republican Party’s most durable constituencies: white evangelicals. Many of them, including Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee; his top religious advisor, Paula White; and House Speaker Mike Johnson, are Christian Zionists. Led most prominently by John Hagee, Christian Zionists support Israel’s rightwing government more than most American Jews do, and reject any criticism of it as antisemitic. They claim to “love” Israel and the Jews because that’s what the Bible tells them to do, but their view of Bible prophecy is that when Jesus comes back (an event that could be triggered by a conflagration in Iran), Jews will either convert to Christianity or perish. We are witnessing a showdown between antisemites and philosemites.

With their increasingly public battle against Christian Zionists, Owens and her very online allies are also trying to strike a dagger into the heart of the very alliance that made the modern Christian right possible: an army of “co-belligerents,” evangelicals and Catholics, united in a culture war against secularism, abortion, and LGBTQ rights. Owens and her followers are trying to blow up that alliance, including by trying to claim Charlie Kirk — seen by Trump, at least, as a young potential successor to evangelicalism’s old guard — as one of their own. In the wake of Kirk’s assassination, Owens has been pressing a conspiracy theory that his murder was an inside job by the organization he co-founded, Turning Point USA, and has even accused his widow, Erika, of being in on it. This week Kent added more fuel to the Kirk conspiracy fire, telling Tucker Carlson on his podcast Wednesday that Kirk had seen him in 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 who is vocally advocating for us to not go to war with Iran and at least rethink our relationship with Israel, and he’s suddenly publicly assassinated and we’re not allowed to ask questions, it’s a data point,” Kent told Carlson. “A data point we need to look into.” (Kent is also reportedly under FBI investigation for pre-resignation leaks.)

Owens’ embrace of Kent marked the second time in as many months that she loudly rose to the defense of an ally sidelined by the Trump administration. In February, an Owens protege, former beauty queen Carrie Prejean Boller, who received a “Catholic Champion Award” at Thursday’s CFC gala, brought the far-right Catholic anti-Zionism and antisemitism to a meeting of Trump’s White House Religious Liberty Commission, which was slated to address antisemitism. (The Trump administration has its own problematic definition of antisemitism, deeming any anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian speech to be antisemitic, a framing that Owens and her allies have exploited to their own advantage.) Trump had nominated Prejean Boller, who converted to Catholicism last year, to the Commission along with evangelicals and more conventionally conservative Catholics like Ryan Anderson, a former Heritage Foundation staffer who is now president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the former archbishop of New York and a past president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. 

Prejean Boller made a spectacle at the meeting, including engaging in confrontations with the Commission’s evangelical members over their Christian Zionism, claiming that Zionism violated her religious freedom as a Catholic, and putting on a “just asking questions” performance about whether she would be deprived of her religious freedom right to quote sections of the New Testament about the Jews killing Jesus. On her podcast applauding Prejean Boller, Owens said that she herself once believed there should be a Jewish state “when I was under the Zionist demonic spell.”  (She then went on to complain about being subjected to a “brainwashing program” in public school about “Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust.”) About Prejean Boller, Owens declared, “a star is born.” 

On cue, Prejean Boller didn’t go quietly when the Commission chair, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, removed her from the body. In an interview with the Atlantic, Prejean Boller blamed  Patrick and the televangelist Paula White, Trump’s longtime friend and head of his White House faith office, for her dismissal, calling White an “absolute evangelical demon.” 

The scholar of Catholicism Matthew Cressler, speaking recently on my podcast, likened Owens to Father Charles Coughlin, who promoted antisemitism and Nazism on his radio show in the 1930s. Coughlin opposed the US 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 antisemitic trope that the Jews killed Jesus, Cressler said, “the church has been spending the past 60 years trying to dismantle” the idea that Jews were responsible for Christ’s death.

While the online Catholic right is a relatively new phenomenon, and unfamiliar to many Catholics raised in the church, Hagee’s brand of evangelicalism is deeply embedded in the lives of evangelicals whose religious communities and belief systems are profoundly shaped by what they think is the role of Israel in fulfilling biblical prophecies about Christ’s ultimate return. White evangelicals are much more monolithically Republican than are white Catholics. What’s more, Republicans are much more broadly for Trump’s war in Iran than Democrats or Independents; a YouGov poll this week found more than 80% of Republicans approve of Trump’s handling of it, and he faces minimal pushback from congressional Republicans. 

Owens, from her podcast booth and X account, is trying to upend decades of how Republicans view the United States and its relationship to Israel and the Middle East. She may be aiming for a horseshoe theory of politics, where she draws in the anti-Israel left, but for her to succeed at that, they’d have to embrace her militant, fringe Catholicism. In the meantime, she is alarmingly succeeding at resuscitating the ugliest forms of antisemitism.