WhatsappHer assertion is absurd because it’s factually false, based on zero substantive or credible evidence and contradicting all legitimate historical records.
Far-right political commentator Candace Owens opened a new line of antisemitic attack on Jews a few weeks ago, when she absurdly accused Jews of running the transatlantic slave trade during the 15th and 16th centuries. She said, “Jewish people were in control of the slave trade. They’ve buried a lot of it, but it’s there, and you can find it,” implying a deliberate suppression of this “true history” in order to protect Jewish interests.
Her assertion is absurd, of course, because it’s factually false, based on zero substantive or credible evidence and contradicting all legitimate historical records. In fact, scholarly evidence proves that Jewish participation in the transatlantic slave trade was miniscule.
While it’s easy to defeat Owens’s “argument” with facts and logic, it’s useful to examine her propagandistic methodology since it exposes flimsy but deceptive strategies based on a series of argumentative “cheats,” including the a) use of discredited sources; b) representation of insignificant factoids as dispositive; c) hiding major contextual realities; and d) ignoring a preponderance of painstaking scholarship.
Her assertions are not meant to build factual cases for her biases, but rather to appeal to those already convinced that Jews are evil, those seeking a rickety illusion of “truth” to buttress their irrational hate. Psychologists call this “confirmation bias”—uncritically believing what you already “know” to be true. Basically, Owens tells her audience what they want to hear.
If you don’t care about hard evidence, these deficits won’t bother you, as they clearly don’t daunt Owens’s fabulism about the malevolence of Jews. But let’s be clear, she is like a circus sideshow—shiny and fascinating for the first 15 minutes, then threadbare and tawdry once her cheap rhetorical tricks wear thin. Those who “like” her because she’s “sincere” or “convincing” only betray their learning disorder—failure to think critically, failure to question and verify every source of information.
Jews played only a tiny role in slavery, dwarfed by whites, Arabs and black Africans. The transatlantic slave trade was orchestrated by European colonial powers—primarily, Portugal, Britain, Spain, France and the Netherlands—through state-chartered companies like the British Royal African Company and Dutch West India Company.
Financing came from national treasuries, joint-stock markets and taxes—sectors Jews were often excluded from due to antisemitic laws. Notably, Arab and African Muslims were also heavily involved in the slave trade, transacting 18 million African slaves along trans-Saharan routes. In contrast, mainstream scholars, including David Brion Davis of Yale University, have noted that Jews accounted for less than 2% of Atlantic trade actors. Mainstream scholars adamantly dismiss the utterly nonsensical claims that Jews controlled the slave trade, which is why the American Historical Association (AHA) issued a 1995 resolution condemning such claims.
Owens uses four argument “cheats” to deceive. First, Owens’s arguments on Jewish involvement in the slave trade are based on discredited sources, including The Talmudic Jew (Der Talmudjude), which claims Jewish law permits domination, coercion and exploitation of non-Jews. Consistent with this antisemitic vitriol, Owens said those who describe themselves as Talmudic Jews “think that we’re animals, that they have a right to own us, make us worship them, lie to us, sue us, take everything that we have and deceive us.”
The Talmudic Jew was written in 1871 by antisemitic German theologian August Rohling, who admitted to relying on antisemitic polemics, not verifying citations and lacking sufficient mastery of Jewish texts. While Rohling was still alive, the Catholic Church distanced itself from him, and Catholic scholars were warned against using his book, which later became a staple of Nazi and other antisemitic literature. Yet Owens encourages her audience to read it, presenting it as a “suppressed key” to understanding Jewish practices.
Owens’s views also echo the content in another discredited source, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One (1991), though she doesn’t cite the book by title. It is an anonymous publication by the Nation of Islam’s Historical Research Department, which alleges that Jews disproportionately owned slaves, financed the trade and dominated its operations, drawing on selective quotes from Jewish historians and encyclopedias, such as the Encyclopaedia Judaica. The book has been widely debunked by historians as “sophisticated hate literature.”
Second, Owens cherry-picks facts to justify her claim that Jews dominated the slave trade. For instance, she mentions that Jews were involved in specific slave-trading firms and plantations. While these facts may be true technically, they don’t remotely prove Jews controlled the slave trade.
Third, Owens hides major contextual realities. For example, she references the Jewish Encyclopedia to support claims of Jewish slave ownership, but omits context showing Jewish involvement in the slave trade was marginal.
Lastly, Owens fails to cite any credible scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade. Indeed, she utterly ignores perhaps the most definitive book on the subject, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade by Eli Faber (1998), which explicitly proves that Jews were a small minority of participants in the transatlantic slave trade.
Confirmation bias makes fools of Owens’ audience. Confirmation bias is flawed reasoning—the habit of interpreting evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs and subconsciously rejecting evidence that contradicts those beliefs. Most victims of this trap are unaware of their cognitive bias, and even when aware of it, they still slip easily into it. Thus, Owens’s audience of millions of fans is inclined to believe her antisemitic conspiracy theories, despite her failure to present any credible evidence.
Owens substitutes passion, supposition and imagination for hard evidence. She represents her “gut” feelings as facts, positions her opinions as morally superior judgments (“If you don’t feel the way I do, you’re insensitive or stupid”) and uses innuendo (“like Jews who worship money”) to imply generalizations. As such, Owens’s passionate claims soon wear thin and sound cheap, like a two-bit sideshow. Thus, as a social-media personality, she is second-rate. As a journalist, she’s a disgrace. The only difference between Owens and her audience is that she’s smart enough to know she’s lying.
