Dinesh D’Souza and the Tucker/Candace Axis. With an Animadversion on Kevin Roberts

A year or so ago--perhaps more, I don't remember exactly; it may even go back as far as shortly after October 7, 2023--I got into something of a shemozzle with someone who is (at least for now) a "former" member here, when I observed that I worried a bit about the emerging anti-Semitic Right. He, and several others on this site, asserted that there wasn't much evidence of any such thing, that any fears that there might be were unfounded, and--well--probably incited by gullibility on my part and perhaps my overly emotional and/or affectionate view of Israel and the Jews.

I deeply resemble those sorts of remarks. Dad spent quite some time chasing Menachem Begin and the Irgun all over the Palestine Mandate in the years after WWII, and Dad was anything but a reflexive Zionist. He was, however, a clear thinker and had his head on straight, and he raised his daughter in much the same mold. So I'm not inclined to award any particular Middle Eastern group the benefit of the doubt, unless they can bring some receipts.

And here we are, almost at the end of 2025, and the obsession with "Israel," "Mossad," and "the Jews" as the fount of all evil, as expressed by extreme Islamists and--increasingly--by right-wing United States rabbit-hole dwellers with concerns all the way from Ukraine and AIPAC to Palestinian genocide to the space lasers and world control to big pharma to the murder of Charlie Kirk to Jeffrey Epstein and the continued existence of the man formerly known as "Prince" Andrew, and on and on, continues to strike me as rather over-the-top.

Last week, I listened to a Triggernometry podcast hosted by Konstantin Kisin, a Russian-by-birth millennial who went viral a few years ago with his "Woke Culture Has Gone Too Far" speech at the Oxford Union. You know. That Oxford Union. According to the Wikipedia retelling of his remarks, Kisin asserted that "woke culture" stifles free speech, and that "reducing climate change was incompatible with reducing poverty in poorer countries."

Gosh, sounds like he's totally in line with the latest update to the Bill Gates software. LOL.

But I digress. My point is that I'd like to direct you not to Kisin's remarks there, but to those of a guest in a particular Triggernometry podcast.

In it, the podcast guest, Dinesh D'Souza, makes two points as he attempts to explain the fascination, among some parts of the right, with Carlson and Owens. (Starts at about 11:18 of the linked video, although the whole eighteen-minute excerpt is worth listening to.)

First, D'Souza suggests that Carlson is using a "ventriloquism" strategy, which Tucker uses to promote his privately-held beliefs which he's not especially willing to defend in public. So D'Souza posits that Tucker goes out and finds others, even those with some reprehensible reputations, who are willing to be more upfront. Tucker then eggs them on with leading questions in which the responses Tucker is trying to provoke are embedded.

When Tucker's guests "blurt out" the inevitable response that Tucker is expecting, D'Souza suggests that Tucker pretends to be "thunderstruck" by the answer he was trying to elicit--one that actually agrees with Tucker's own opinion--and that it's at this point that Tucker doesn't challenge his guest's ideas, but starts to rail on about what a new revelation this is, and about how people have been "suppressing this kind of information" in order to keep us in the dark. (Even though it can often be shown in many cases that the same information has been known, spoken about, written about, and debated for decades. Such things don't matter much, though, when it comes to the youthful and the--sometimes willfully--ignorant, many of whom, it seems, comprise Carlson's audience. Everything old is new again, and we must bite.)

Second, when it comes to Owens, D'Souza says that her approach is different. He rather charmingly suggests that she's running something he calls the "Candace Intelligence Agency," in which she sees her role as the "World's Greatest Detective and the Pink Panther of my Time." She recruits and deputizes her followers to feed her information so that she can debunk one important story after another, in order to "crack the case" and prove that she's right about everything. I especially like his identification of her "intellectual striptease" in which she takes off one item of discovery, and then invites her followers to tune in on the next day for a subsequent small reveal.

I find it hard to argue with either of his assessments. I can't speak to Tucker's motive, or Candace's motive, but D'Souza sure seems to have nailed their way of going about things.

As D'Souza points out, it's a flawed methodology. One that elevates bigots, racists, and lunatics to a level of visibility they don't deserve, largely because of the lazy disapprobation among many on the right when it comes to insisting upon any sort of intellectual argument of principled consistency.

There aren't (as D'Souza says) all that many really smart and effective intellectual leaders left on the right these days. Most of them went full-blown TDS in bygone years and became irrelevant, and there are few remaining who can set out and defend a principled worldview, whether it agrees in all points with one's own or not. One of them is Victor Davis Hanson. Steve Hayward might be another. Melanie Phillips. Even Charles C.W. Cooke. ("Lucretia" is a personal favorite, although I understand she might not be everyone's cup of tea.) Ben Shapiro often speaks sense. Rod Dreher also. I find I like listening to people who might know more than I do, even if I disagree with them.

Sure, we can go back through history and look for others. And who do we find:

Let's start (and end) with Conservative and pedigreed stalwart Bill Kristol. He who recently announced that he'd vote for Zohran Mandami for New York mayor. Nuff said. (God. I liked him so much better in When Harry Met Sally.)

And in that absurd vein, I find Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts's recent remarks on Tucker's interview with Fuentes inexplicable. Or perhaps not. Perhaps the issue is just that--despite my original prejudice, when I look at our respective educational histories--he really is just that much more ignorant than I am.

From Roberts's Wikipedia page:

...a Ph.D. in American history from University of Texas at Austin in 2003. His dissertation examined the cultural construction of the Louisiana slave community from the 1790s to the 1830s, including the influence of the transatlantic, trans-Caribbean, and interstate slave trades, the role of the Catholic Church as an agent of colonial Spain, and the contrasting demographic structures of New Orleans, the coastal sugar parishes, and the Mississippi River-adjacent cotton lands.

And

In January 2024, Roberts said that he did not believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. He also said that he saw Heritage's role as "institutionalizing Trumpism", adding, "the Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start. And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated."

And so we come to Roberts' denunciation (on October 31, 2025) of the "venomous coalition" criticizing Carlson, and Roberts' assertion that Carlson "remains and always will be" a "close friend" of the conservative group.

Roberts seems to have bought into the lunacy that "criticism equals cancellation," which is why he's perfectly comfortable shouting on the one hand about the "slander of bad actors who serve someone else's agenda," (one assumes he's talking about the anti-Carlson Israel supporters on the Right) while at the same time saying that people like Tucker Carlson can call their political adversaries whatever they like, and threaten them with whatever they like, without opprobrium, debate, or consequence.

What a clown.