The Young Turks Find Common Cause With the Far Right’s Anti-Semites

(Willy Sanjuan/Seth Wenig/Louis Grasse/PxImages/Icon Sportswire/AP photos)

Last March, The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur saw it all so clearly.

After Candace Owens exited The Daily Wire amid her descent into the anti-Semitic rabbit hole, Uygur assessed the situation with a surplus of moral clarity.

“Between @benshapiro and Candace Owens, Ben is right,” he declared at the time. “If Owens just disagreed with him on Israel, I would be on her side. But that’s not all she does. She repeatedly said over the top anti-semitic tropes. She was trying to get fired from Daily Wire. Congrats, mission accomplished!”

His description of the situation wasn’t just accurate, it was admirable. Uygur is among the most outspoken critics of Israel in a media landscape full of them. It would have been easy for him to pocket and promote his new, prospective ally. But he resisted the convenient path for the righteous one.

Fast forward to the present, though, and Uygur has swerved over the median to take the other side of that fork in the road. Owens, Tucker Carlson, and their ilk are no longer unfortunate, bigoted stains on his cause, but design features worth bragging on.

“Israeli goons have been trying to cancel me, @AnaKasparian, @TuckerCarlson and @RealCandaceO for quite some time now. And we’re still here,” he wrote in one particularly eye-opening post. “The power to bully and intimidate is slipping. It’s no longer career suicide to criticize Israel. A Great Awakening has begun on both sides!”

“Pro-Israel forces are trying to force out @TuckerCarlson from MAGA. They’re also going after others, like @RepMTG and @RepThomasMassie. @benshapiro attacked Tucker today. So, it’s deciding time MAGA. America First or Israel First? The establishment is demanding you pick Israel,” he argued in another.

It’s a stunning, brazen turnabout from the progressive host. Was he himself acting as an “Israeli goon” when he called out Owens over her anti-Semitic rhetoric last year? Has she not, if anything, become more strident in her attacks on the Jewish people, even going so far as to implicate them in the murder of Charlie Kirk?

And what of Carlson? Are Shapiro’s differences with him based merely around their disagreement over Israel? Or are they about Carlson’s near-daily promotion of anti-Semitic smears, soldiers, and “dogwhistles” that better resemble a trumpet being played into a bullhorn?

The pair has left so little doubt as to their intentions as to shock Nick Fuentes, arguably the most influential open anti-Semite in the country, and Carlson’s new friend. And yet Uygur — who once saw through this strategic charade of laundering Jew hatred through criticism of Israel — is fooled by it? That’s a tough sell.

It’s not just him, either. Ana Kasparian, the other face of his company, has demonstrated a similar willingness to pal around with the far right. Carlson recently released a nearly two-hour denunciation of two Jewish-American commentators — Shapiro and Fox News’ Mark Levin — that also saw him villainize Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi, Christian evangelist who was executed by the Third Reich after helping 14 German Jews escape to Switzerland. Trumpet, meet bullhorn.

His guest for the episode? None other than Kasparian, who also recently came to the defense of virulent anti-Semite Lauren Witzke.

“Don’t allow these pieces of shit to get to you. They live off our resources and have the audacity to insult us,” mused Kasparian after StopAntisemitism — in an admittedly uncouth fashion — called out Witzke for claiming to have had a “Jewish best friend” who betrayed her.

“I ignored red flag after red flag,” recalled Witzke, who said she “learned a very valuable lesson.”

In other recent tweets, Witzke has relayed a heartwarming story about how she met up with a young mother who she spent an hour “talking about the Jews” with, and submitted that “for most US history, the vast majority of the population agreed with Nick Fuentes on,” among other topics, “race” and “the Jewish question.”

“This all started to end in the 1960s… Do you think America is safer, cleaner, higher trust, and better off than pre 1960?” she continued.

Charming, right?

Witzke has thanked Kasparian in what is actually a damning indictment of the latter’s behavior.

“Thank you for your kind words, Ana. It appears that this hit job majorly backfired,” she wrote. “Instead of isolating me, the smear merchants inadvertently brought together people from every political background against them.”

This is how anti-Semitism climbs back through the Overton Window, with unscrupulous opportunists like Uygur and Kasparian — knowingly in the former case — pulling its practitioners through it while decrying the Jewis-, excuse me, “Zionist” attacks on them.

Kasparian’s encouragement of Witzke was more revealing than she meant it to be. She sees the open anti-Semites among the “us” and the enemy as a “they” that Witzke is at least brave enough to put a name to.

If Uygur and Kasparian count Owens, Carlson, and Witzke among their allies, the rest of us would be foolish not to treat them as the proud hate-launderers that they are.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.