I followed the post up with screenshots of unrelenting Jew hatred from a variety of communities on the X app — taunts, desires to see my kid’s brain cancer return, suggestions that I’m a demon, a pedophile, a controller of banks and media and weather, etc. Typical Jewbaiting that, after a lifetime of hearing it, you get used to.

But when you see it coming from people who once believed in what you believed in, but who are now working tirelessly to convert conservatism into “Christian,” and then that into just another competing identity group in the victim Olympics, you begin to despair.

It’s easy enough to point out how surreal and absurd is this re-configuring of “conservatism” into a leftwing identity cult protected from criticism by an appropriation of Jesus; it is far more difficult to withstand the rising tide of hatreds that come with the promotion of such a project by people who hold such prominent platforms within your political tent.

To think that my family — and perhaps even US conservatism itself — is in danger because Candace Owens doesn’t know much about much, and yet considers herself a far more transcendent intellectual figure than history will ever judge her to be, has me so angry and so sad, simultaneously, that it’s hard to put things into words.