Israel, Me, Team Candace, and the Turning Point Aftermath

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Introduction

I just got back late Saturday night from AmeriFest 2025, Turning Point’s national conference. It was quite a wild ride down there, and I have never seen anything quite like it. To get anywhere, you had to navigate through what must have been 17 acres of vendors and podcasters—with all of the podcasters casting pod-content at one another. Reminds me of the time they threw two Scotsmen down into a pit, and they both got rich selling rocks to each other. There were just thousands of wall-to-wall people, the air just crackling with right wing hustle, and the tight security, and the loud furries protesting across the street . . . all in all, it was quite the spectacle. I consider myself personally enriched having been there.

What I want to do here is share my opening remarks from the discussion about Israel and the Jews that I had with Steve Deace, and then follow that up with some color commentary afterwards. There are a few things I touched on in my opening remarks that I really need to expand on. And by “expand on,” I mean soaking them with lighter fluid, setting them off, and then gesticulating at them in an animated fashion.

I am including my remarks in their entirety below because there were some pretty gaudy reactions online afterwards—meaning all thrust and no vector, like what happens when you are blowing up a child’s party balloon and it slips from your fingers before you can tie it off, and it visits every last corner of the living room.

This is not a discussion of the aftermath of the conference as a whole, but rather just the fallout from my little part in it. So here we go. I am doing to highlight in bold certain phrases that were missed by those who thought to characterize my comments as those of a Zionist pig who made off in the night with my Judas-shekels.

What I intend to do right after that, first, is explain the state of civil strife within the conservative movement. Then I am going to expand on a few of my points that were misconstrued by certain online maladroit mind-readers, sometimes deliberately, and other times because they just can’t help it. What I then want to do after that is tie all of this in with the gospel—the only answer to what currently ails the conservative movement, which would include, incidentally, Nicki Minaj being there.

So Get a Load of . . .

My Opening Remarks

The biblical expositor John Stott once observed that fuzzy thinking was one of the sins of our age. When you connect this to ignorance, malice and bad faith, you can find yourself with something that is truly rancid. This being the case, I wanted to use my opening statement to lay out some basic definitions. Please pardon my use of notes here because this topic and time are so important that I don’t want to leave any crucial thing out accidentally.

Zionism was a nineteenth century movement among Jews urging a return to their ancestral homeland of Israel. Atheist Jews could be Zionists, and observant Jews could be Zionists for religious reasons.

Christian Zionists are Christians, usually dispensationalists, who believe that the reestablishment of Israel in 1948 was a fulfillment of prophecy, and that Jews have a divine mandate to hold the land.

De facto Zionists are those who don’t believe that the promise to Abraham in Gen. 12 has anything to do with it, but who recognize that almost 8 million Jews are there now, with the same right to defend their territory that any other country would have. I illustrate this by noting that that I don’t believe in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny at all . . . but I still live in Idaho.

This brings us to replacement theology, which also has a fancier name . . . supercessionism. This is the view that the Church is Israel now, and is the lawful heir of all the covenant blessings promised in the Old Testament. This is the view that in Romans 11, the apostle Paul describes the one olive tree as straddling both eras, This is the view of most Reformed or covenantal theologians. It is the view I hold. But wait, there’s more.

There is hard supercessionism, which is the idea that today’s ethnic Jews are now entirely outside God’s covenantal dealings, and are just one more tribe, living alongside the Japanese, the Swedes, and the Navajo. I do not believe this.

The variant is soft supercessionism, which is the idea that although unbelieving Jews were cut out of the olive tree because of their unbelief, Paul prophesied that they would be grafted back in again, which would be a great spiritual blessing to the entire world. This is the mainstream view of Reformed theologians, from the Reformation down, and is the view I hold.

Ecumenical lies would be vain, humanistic attempts to keep peace by refusing to face the actual differences. Jesus was either the promised Messiah of Israel, or he wasn’t, and He either rose from the dead, or He didn’t. Honest Christians and honest Jews can be friends, but lying is not the way.

I don’t like using the term antisemitism when I can help it because, like the term racism, it has been greatly devalued through numerous misapplications. It is not antisemitism to disagree with Benjamin Netanyahu. It is not antisemitism for Christians to want Jews to believe in Christ. It is not antisemitism to differ with Israeli policies in the West Bank. The problems come in with the adverbs—the way such things are held and argued.

Actual antisemitism, or what I prefer to call Jew-hate, is what happens in my Twitter feed anytime I mention Israel. Jew-hate is October 7. Jew-hate is Bondi Beach. It is the belief that Jews are a uniquely malevolent force for evil in the world, and that this fact justifies a one-size-fits-all negative response to anything related to them.

Christian Zionists and Christian supercessionists do have pronounced theological differences, but one thing they can agree on is that Jew-hate is a serious sin.

What do I mean by a high-performance people? The Jews are a talented and hard-working people, and Jewish mothers are always pleased to introduce you to “my son, the doctor.” But they are also, like the rest of us, sons of Adam, making them dirty rotten sinners. So if they are overrepresented among the Bolsheviks and media moguls, just remember that they are also overrepresented among Nobel Prize winners and patent holders.

Professing Christians who are backsliding into Jew-hate—and it is backsliding—are angry because the Jews don’t believe Jesus. Jews are the enemy, it is thought. But Jesus commanded His followers to love their enemies, which you are manifestly not doing. So why should Jews listen to Jesus when you don’t?

Last thing, and you may consider this a little bonus round item. I mention it only because I believe it was brought up at this conference earlier. This bonus topic is the USS Liberty, attacked by Israeli planes in 1967, killing 34 Americans. I am making no assertions here. All I am doing is noticing. All I am doing is asking questions. You know, like Candace does, recklessly connecting dots. The Liberty was an intelligence-gathering ship, and LBJ was president. Israel was in the middle of the hot 1967 war. How confident are you personally that there was no American deep state in 67? How confident are you that we weren’t playing to both sides, and feeding intel to Egypt? How confident are you that America can only be double-crossed, and can never be the double-crosser? Your confidence in the essential goodness of the CIA is endearing.

I want to close by saying that I believe that debates about foreign policy, and America’s relationship to Israel, or what happened to the USS Liberty, or anything like that, are totally in bounds.

Debates about whether the organizers of this conference were complicit in the murder of Charlie are in another category entirely, a category best described as demented or unhinged. If passive aggressive gaslighting insolence had a basketball team, it is long since time to retire Candace’s jersey. Those assertions are not in the same universe at all, and so the latter one must never be allowed to hide under the former.

Various Excommunications

Vivek spent a good deal of time saying who “had no place in” the conservative movement. Ben Shapiro went after the Candace and Tucker types, and Steve Bannon denounced Ben Shapiro as an adversary. Megyn Kelly said that she was not going to denounce Candace for simply asking questions, which is not what Candace is doing, and the vice-president said that he was not going to play the denouncing game, thereby implicitly denouncing those who would like to see some more denouncing. It is entirely fair to say that there was a good deal of epistemic hostility between various speakers who appeared on stage and who spoke at this conference.

But I don’t think it is the same with the rank and file. Not at all. The attendees had a lot more commonality among themselves than the speakers did. The way I read the room—judging from audience reactions and applause lines—they are more than ready to accept various policy debates as “in-bounds,” as represented in the penultimate paragraph of my remarks, along with other related matters. They are also ready to be done with the Candace-drama, our right-wing theater kid, about which more in a few minutes.

When Isaiah pronounced a judgment upon the land of Egypt, civil war is the instrument in the Lord’s hand.

Notice that phrase, “I will set.” Civil strife, civil war, is the finger of God. It is His judgment. One of His instruments in bring this about is the perverse spirit that He pours into the bowl, in order to stir it up.

There is no way that this is going to stop unless the Lord stays His hand. And He is not going to stay His hand until we humble ourselves, and ask Him to.

The USS Liberty

Certain reckless souls said that my point in bringing up the attack on the USS Liberty was that the 34 sailors who died had it coming, and that I was taking up the side of Israel, arguing that they were entirely justified in attacking our ship. It was said, somewhat grimly, that this was a bold take indeed. Outrage ensued. Quite a bit of outrage ensued.

“All day they twist my words; All their thoughts are against me for evil” (Psalm 56:5, NKJV). One of the reasons why I don’t trust such people when it comes to things like Gaza is that I see what they do with things that I know about directly. You know, like the things I believe and say. When I see the hash they make of my words, twisting them into unrecognizable shapes, you will understand my reluctance to believe what they say about things on the other side of the world. When I see the demented lies they tell about my friends at TPUSA, I don’t trust them to identify who my global enemies should be. You know. Just one of the quirks I have.

But okay, the Liberty. Actually—back here in the real world—I was doing two things. The first is that I was running a reductio on Candace-style questions, showing how easy it is to just start connecting dots. I said that this is what I was doing, saying this in black and white. However the reactions illustrate how tribal everything has become. If someone “connects dots” in a way that casts some shade at what they think is their team, this is an outrage and not to be borne. But if they aim it at your team, all they are doing is “raising questions.” Why are you trying to prevent people from just asking questions?

When I said that I was making no assertions, I wasn’t kidding. I don’t know what was behind what happened to the Liberty, and don’t pretend to know. At the same time, the dots that I was connecting were not pulled out of thin air. The hypothesis that I put forward depended upon the following facts: the Liberty was an intelligence ship, Israel was in the middle of a hot war with her neighbors, and LBJ was our president. This was in no way casting shade on the men serving on the Liberty, who were simply doing their jobs—the same way that I was doing my job in the same Navy just four years later. But per hypothesis, say that the intelligence they gathered was sent back to Langley, and the smart johnnies there decided that it might be a good idea to play both sides. They shared some of that intel with Egypt. Israel put two and two together, over-reacted, and attacked the Liberty. The whole thing was then hushed up by both governments.

Now as presidents go, LBJ was quite an unscrupulous dirty bird, manifested in a number of different areas, and so this is not an outlandish possibility. It was not like I was attributing the attack to Klingons or something.

And then . . . it is quite striking that one of the few sensible responses online came from the USS Liberty Veterans Association. They did not believe that having issues with LBJ was outside the pale at all. Here is their response to my follow-up tweet.

It is frankly astonishing to me that so many on the dissident right today, who say they loathe and despise the intelligence community today, appear to believe that things were all bright and shiny back in the day. Are you kidding? When do they think the deep state got deep? During the last year of Obama’s presidency? Look. The coup they attempted with Trump they successfully did with Nixon. We don’t often get to use the word skulduggery, but there are occasions that call for it.

So, in my dot-connected hypothesis, the issue was not whether the sailors on the Liberty were wronged by Israel. Of course they were. The issue was whether they were wronged by Israel and also by America—whether they were also betrayed by their own president, their own government. So with that said, the hypothesis I set out might be true and it might not be true. I don’t know. But remember, I was just asking questions. No harm in asking questions, right?

The message here to everyone is to stop pretending that “asking questions” is some kind of neutral thing. It is not, and the pretense is wearing thin.

Which Two Things Are Not Like One Another?

During our session, someone from the audience asked us if it was “antisemitic” to oppose foreign aid to Israel. Both Steve Deace and I said “no, it was not.” That is a policy issue. Both of us wanted to see our foreign aid to all other countries to go down to zero, and that would include Israel. Within the conservative movement, it should be possible to come to a conference held by TPUSA, and to hear some speakers argue for zeroing out all foreign aid, and other speakers advocate for a judicious use of strategic foreign aid, with America’s best interests being the reason for the aid. Great. Have that debate. Make sure both sides are represented. Talk about policy. Is Israel our greatest ally? Let us debate the question! Let us knock ourselves out. Nobody is an antisemite for thinking that some other country is our greatest ally.

But there is another question, another kind of question, that does not belong at a conference like this at all. That is the question of whether or not the organizers of the conference you are going to were complicit in the grotesque murder of their founder and friend. That is an allegation that is gobsmackingly off-the-leash, with the holder of the leash being off her meds.

If someone thinks that is a reasonable question, and he gets an invitation to speak at TPUSA (for some reason), and he accepts that invitation, it really means that he doesn’t believe it is a reasonable question at all, and is just being a hypocritical opportunist. Going to the conference to chum around with the murderers?

Here is where the Great Smudge is happening. This is where the disingenuous juke move is being performed. A grotesque libel and slander is hurled at the leadership of TPUSA, with preparations being made to be insulted and affronted if they decided not to invite you next time. If they don’t invite you next time, it will be plain indication that they “don’t want to face the music.” They are trying to censor “questions”! No, it would actually be a plain indication that free speech has performed one of its central functions, which is to identify who the morons are. And in this case, who the impudent morons are.

Candace is not just “asking questions.” She is making very serious allegations. She is an accuser. She is an accuser of persons. She is the perverse spirit that the Lord has poured into the bowl. She is the great bringer of what might be called inviso-receipts. She has a vast army of people following her who are demanding the dopamine rush they get whenever she feeds them the next crazy line. That is why the moratorium that Erika and Candace agreed on couldn’t hold—it was like arranging a cease-fire with Hamas. Candace has a ravenous bear for an audience, and she has to feed it tainted meat, with that meat getting increasingly tainted. This is why we are moving into territory formerly occupied by those people who needed to read the tabloid headlines about Madonna and Sasquatch having a love child.

It is disingenuous, in extremis, to pretend that these questions are anything alike.

The Gospel for Team Candace

The gospel message has two parts. Those parts are repent and believe. Repent of what? We are called to repent of our sins and the sinful nature that produces them. Believe what? We must believe in the person and work of the Lord Jesus—who He was and what He did in His death and resurrection. He was the sin-bearer, and when we look to His crucifixion in faith, God forgives us for everything. God forgives all of our sins that were laid across this shoulders.

But in order for this to happen, the sins that characterize the person who is estranged from God are sins that need to be named. That is what repentance does—it names. When a preacher names such sins in his gospel offer, it is not personal invective, or name-calling, but rather a straightforward summons to new life . . . an invitation to leave behind the ways of death, and to come walk in newness of life. Adulterers must turn away from adultery. Thieves must turn away from stealing. Idolaters must repent of bowing down to statues. And coming to the point here, liars and slanderers must repent of their lies and slander.

And so as I name some sins here, it is not scurrilous abuse, but rather one of the things that has to be done the threshold of everlasting life. Repent and believe. You may certainly come in, but there is a mat on the doorstep for a reason. Wipe your feet, which begins with the recognition that your feet are filthy.

The tensions within the conservative movement today are not the result of mere differences of opinion. They are the result of wicked and unsubstantiated allegations—promised receipts that are followed up by no receipts. Lies that are covered up by being slathered in more lies.

This is a morass, a slough of ungodliness. What we are looking at is a toxic combination of people who were poorly educated, who have been shut out of economic opportunity and are bitterly resentful, who do not understand the biblical standards of evidence and justice, and who do not want to understand them, and who have had their grasp of the concept of objective truth rotted out by postmodern tribalism. In other words, to use shorter names for all such results, we have ignorance, envy and bitterness, injustice, and relativism. These are all things that call for repentance.

The world is full of sinners, but you can never get right with God by focusing on their sins. You can confess the sins of others all day long, and your layers of unhappiness will only get thicker. The bad attitudes that were tearing our country apart, and which have now been imported into conservative movement in order to tear it apart, are not things that can be patched over. The only thing for it is to name the sin, and turn away from the sin.

This is only possible because the death of Christ on the cross made a way for us to turn away from sin. Apart from His grace exhibited there, we are all dead in our sin, slaves to sin. We cannot extricate ourselves from what we are by nature, which is “objects of wrath.” In order for us to turn, we must be turned.

The only thing that has the power to do this is the death of Christ, gibbeted on a cross for the sake of His people. Because He was raised from the dead, it is possible for Him to invite you to join Him in that resurrection. Those who believe in Him are joined with Him in His death, and are justified by Him in His resurrection. But the humbling comes first. So repentance is the first thing we must do, and even that is a gift of God.

What is going on right now is not “politics,” but rather wickedness. Questions are not being circulated, but rather lies. These are not questions to be answered, but rather lies to be repented. Narcissism is not a psychological condition to be treated, or flattered by ignorant followers, but rather a radical selfishness that must be crucified.

Do I need to remind everyone again that it is either Christ or chaos? And keep in mind that this applies everywhere. Within the conservative movement . . . it is either Christ or chaos. And the way out of the chaos is to look straight at the ugliness of the sin, turn away from it with a shudder, and—in every sense of the phrase—come to Jesus.