Drama Alert: Ben Shapiro Calls Out Daily Wire Employee Candace Owens for Her "Ridiculous" Opinions on Israel

Is she still a Daily Wire employee? A source I have codenamed "Commenter" says she removed the Daily Wire tags from her Twitter bio. Another source, also codenamed "Commenter," said that she was near the end of her contract.

Owens has been caught repeating false claims from the left before:

I don't think that one incident is disqualifying. Little secret about being a public bloviator, which I'm sure none of you ever realized before, because I do exhaustive research before writing every post: We don't know what the f*** we're talking about at least 70% of the time and we basically learn by saying stupid things and then being corrected by people who know more than we do.

She's also getting knocked for deploying a line favored by Ilhan Omar, that people only support Israel because they're being paid to do so:

I disagree with her on that, but let's face it, she's just going down a path that conservative favorite Tucker Carlson has been trailblazing for a while.

I've been complaining for a while that conservatives are acting like drunks who just discovered that alcohol was something they can't handle -- completely repudiating all prior positions on foreign policy. Were we too credulous of the Deep State and various militarists? Well then, we'll now hypercorrect and disavow the support of any foreign country and likewise denounce the idea of America having any opinions on foreign nations' behavior.

That's a bit extreme, isn't? Couldn't we first just try recognizing that we tend to get drunk when we open a bottle of Militarism so we should sip from it carefully and with full awareness that we have a problem with the stuff?

Do we really have to rush from one fatally-flawed extreme -- blind allegiance to anyone promising foreign adventures -- to the other fatally-flawed extreme, justifying the repulsive behavior of foreign behaviors?

And the people pushing the idea that we shouldn't support Israel because, by doing so, we "involve ourselves in a foreign dispute," need to explain to me how arguing against Israel's war on Hamas does not similarly "involve us in a foreign dispute," just on the other side.

I do find it a little weird that Candace Owens keeps pushing anti-Israel propaganda favored by the left -- and of course the alt-right, too -- but no one is required to be in 100% lockstep with "conservative consensus," which no longer even exists.

At any rate:

Ben Shapiro was asked about Owens' various statements. He pronounced them "ridiculous" and stupidity posing as "faux sophistication."

Note that in the below video, he does not call Candace Owens an anti-semite. That's the gloss added by the person linking the video.

My basic take is that I don't really agree with Owens and I find myself thinking she's a callow alt-rght hustler half the time and a decent commentator the other half. I do not approve of attacks on her for merely "platforming" Andrew Tate, or for not rushing to #Cancel Kanye West. I thought that we on the right had generally come to the realization that Snap Cancellations, and playing six degrees of cancellation (where you cancel people just for giving a "platform" to someone who's been cancelled), were bad things, generally.

And no, that doesn't mean we have to "accept everyone" nor does it mean we've abandoned the right to exclude people who are plainly bad actors. Just that we should be a lot more cautious about cancelling people, and only do so when the person in question is legitimately heinous and deserves the punishment we are urging. And cancellation is a social death penalty, which causes many of the people suffering the penalty to strongly consider suicide as an alternative, and some to actually take their own lives.

I'm not saying it's not sometimes the right and proper tactic. I'm just saying: I thought we'd all been through this enough ourselves to be extremely hesitant to push for this penalty.

I'm not even knocking L'il Ben Shapiro, who also retains all of his right to express himself and knock Owens for her, um, shaky and dubious thoughts on Israel.

Owens seems to be leaving the Daily Wire. That's fine. And it's fine that Shapiro doesn't want to renew her contract. He doesn't owe her a job and besides, she's an independent contractor. She'll just start her own Owens Wire and be just fine.

I'm only counseling against hastily-made decision to cancel Owens -- or cancel Ben Shapiro, for that matter -- given what we've all learned about cancelling people. To wit, it feels too damn good to rush out to destroy a stranger's life, and so we ought to be very suspicious about cruelty that comes in the guise of sanctimony.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 05:32 PM

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