Candace Owens, apparently an expert on the infamous apostate Jacob Frank. Photo-illustration by Canva/Wikimedia Commons/Getty/Jason Davis/Contributor

By PJ Grisar July 30, 2024

Since her ouster from The Daily Wire for peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories, right-wing pundit Candace Owens has kept her hot streak going, dismissing Josef Mengele’s medical experiments as propaganda, suggesting AIPAC killed John F. Kennedy and now, in her latest, exhuming the obscure 18th century Jewish apostate and messiah claimant Jacob Frank. Frank and Frankism, Owens believes, are responsible for modern-day pedophile cabals.

Candace, girl, we have so much to talk about. I had no idea you were such a Jewish history buff!

In a live-streamed rant on her YouTube channel Monday night, Owens said Frank, who believed himself the reincarnation of false messiah Shabbatai Tzvi, founded “the preferred religion of the elites.” Frankists, she insisted, “worship the devil” and “believe that through deception they will inherit the earth.” She also alleged that the Frankists were behind the French and Russian Revolutions in an effort to “bring down Christian empires.” (A Putin apologist, Owens also made a big deal about Frank being from what is now Ukraine, even though he mostly grew up in the Ottoman Empire and preached to those in what was then Poland.)

Well a lot of those claims are new information to me! Owens, who attributed the origins of her discovery to a book on Sigmund Freud and mysticism, exploded a scandalous, deep-cut chapter of Jewish history into an event that reshaped the world and brought Christianity to its knees. What about the sect’s notorious mass conversion to Roman Catholicism? Owens said that’s typical shifty, Frankist stuff, an effort to “deceive” and “infiltrate.”

In picking her new bugbear, Owens has revealed a level of Jewish history nerdom unknown to even most Jews. all while, in her dog whistle-y way, indicating that the word “Frankists” could basically be bracketed with triple parentheses, though she acknowledged that Frank’s cult rejected rabbinical Judaism and were repudiated in turn by the Jewish mainstream.

For the uninitiated, some of what Owens is saying is true. Frank’s ministry developed from Sabbateanism, and his disciples did, as Owens said, have “sexual rituals.” The most infamous was the 1756 Lanckoronie affair, where Frankists were said to revel around a naked woman and maybe also had an orgy. Following that scandal, Frank was considered a heretic by most of the Polish Jewish authorities that had, until then, tolerated the Sabbateans.

But Owens is far less interested in Frank’s conception of the shekhinah being manifest in his daughter and heir, Eve, or his philosophy of liberating of the divine spark through transgression, than she is at leveling the same old tropes often applied to the Rothschilds to his short-lived movement. Don’t worry, she also said — though she couldn’t prove it yet — that the Frankists were rumored to be bankrolled by the Rothschilds.

Instead, Frank, who likely did not speak or consider himself to be Ukrainian, is an avatar for the evils of present-day Ukraine where, Owens says, in a none too subtle allusion to blood libel, “there were Christians who kept going missing on holidays.” Louis Brandeis was a Frankist, Owens claimed, adding that his family believed in incest and pedophilia “as a sacrament,” though she hastened to add none of what she was broadcasting was antisemitic, as these people are “no more Jews than they are Christians.” OK.

Frank is also, according to Owens, associated with Leo Frank, the lynched pencil factory superintendent accused of raping and murdering an employee, and through him the ADL (which she said was “established by Frankists” to cover up for Leo Frank, who Owens claimed was commanded to carry out the murder of a Christian child on Passover).  Owens didn’t mention Anne Frank, but one can only assume she thinks the diarist was somehow in on this too.

Owens encouraged her viewers to do their own research into Frankism — a task that, as late as 2011, when Pawel Maciejko released a major work on Frank, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755 – 1816, — was difficult for English readers.

Granted, Owens’ sources on contemporary Frankists, who may well not exist at all, likely don’t include actual scholarship like Forward columnist Jay Michaelson’s The Heresy of Jacob Frank, which challenges traditional claims of Frank as a degenerate, or even Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s popular novel The Books of Jacob. Hers, I imagine, are on sites that may give your computer malware and go on at length to say how Frankists infiltrated Wayfair to launch a massive child-trafficking ring, or some other lunacy.

The commentator is still to be commended for her passion for Jewish esoterica and, as she notes with no due modesty, her courage for exposing this long-neglected episode.

“If they wanna kill you they will,” Owens said, responding to a comment about how Joan Rivers was murdered for saying Michelle Obama was trans. “At least you’ll know who did it. It was the Frankists.”

Frankists may top the suspect list, but close behind will surely be the formidable rival sect of Lisa Frankists, who preach the divinity of rainbow-colored leopards on pencil cases.

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