Influencers are taking sides in the Ben Shapiro/Candace Owens war.
Owens got the heave-ho from The Daily Wire last month, a site co-founded by Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing. Many assumed her harsh rhetoric regarding the current Israel/Hamas war may be to blame, but neither side has shared specifics on the termination.
Now, the war of words between the two has gone nuclear.
Candace, I can see why you'd want to hide behind a moderator — particularly one who said we should rename our company the "Daily Jewish Wire" just yesterday.
No.
One on one. Monday at 5 PM.
We can sit down and have a healthy debate like adults, and we'll live-stream it on X… https://t.co/l2UFEB7a0f
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) April 5, 2024
Note: This reporter is a contributor to The Daily Wire.
The feud has drawn major attention on Twitter and elsewhere. Right-leaning Americans are particularly engrossed in the saga, given the conservative gravitas on both sides.
One particular voice is worth noting.
Comedian Andrew Schulz, who ended a deal with a major streaming platform to preserve his comedic voice, weighed in on the matter. Schulz isn’t a conservative. He’s still open-minded on most issues and understands why the woke’s war on free speech hurts us all.
And, of course, he’s a very funny fellow.
That’s why it’s a shame Schulz’s hot take on Shapiro v. Owens came up short. Very short.
Schulz addressed the matter on his “Flagrant” podcast, coming down hard on Team Shapiro.
“Before you have a media platform, it’s very easy to critique media,” the comic began, referencing notoriously liberal outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post. “You’re censoring free speech. You’re for censorship.”
He recalled Shapiro’s recent defense of Owens’ dismissal and dubbed it disingenuous.
“In this argument, he makes the case for censorship, but he calls it something else,” Schulz said, noting how Shapiro described The Daily Wire as accepting a window of ideas.
“Anything outside of that window is fireable. That’s censorship,” Schulz said.
Part of that is accurate.
The Daily Wire is a transparently conservative media outlet. The site offers a variety of views on multiple topics, but they generally fall under a right-of-center perspective.
Site contributors like Andrew Klavan routinely debate Shapiro on mic and behind the scenes, for example, and the two remain both friendly and professional.
A news publisher has no duty to keep an opinion columnist on staff if her or she shares views that are dramatically opposed to the site’s mission statement. If a Nation columnist suddenly began penning pro-Trump articles, he or she may not be employed for long.
That’s not an attack on free speech.
If a mainstream news reporter uncovers a story that doesn’t fit the editor’s preferred narrative and it gets spiked, that’s troubling.
Owens isn’t a traditional reporter. She’s not regularly filing investigative news pieces. And, more importantly, her commentary has become increasingly unhinged.
Last year, she told Bill Maher she doesn’t believe man landed on the moon. When Maher called her out on the matter on his “Club Random” podcast, she spun before playing the victim.
More recently, she insisted that French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife Brigitte is a man.
“After looking into this, I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man,” she wrote on X, although she hasn’t produced credible evidence to support her theory.
The Washington Examiner called her out for the suggestion.
Owens went from a sophisticated political pundit to a baseless conspiracy gossiper, usually reserved for the newspapers people read in grocery store checkout lines.
Owens retweeted a post from Max Blumenthal that said: “White American Jews are living through a golden age of power, affluence and safety. Acceptance of this welcome reality threatens the entire Zionist enterprise, from lobby fronts like the ADL to Israel, because Zionism relies on Jewish insecurity to justify itself.”
She famously stood by her friend, Kanye West, after he dissolved into a Jew-hating frenzy.
…she defended Ye after he tweeted he was going to “go death con 3 on Jewish people.”
“If you are an honest person, you did not find this tweet antisemitic,” Owens wrote about Ye’s comment at the time.
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More recently, she dubbed Israel’s war against Hamas “genocide” and publicly attacked Shapiro after he condemned her Israel commentary. As part of their running feud, she suggested an antisemitic trope while blasting Shapiro.
“You cannot serve both God and money.”
How many employees can do that without risking their job status?
There’s even more.
Her brand of “just asking questions” rhetoric is often flat-out ugly.
In all communities there are gangs. In the black community we’ve got the Bloods, we’ve got the Crips. Well, imagine if the Bloods and the Crips were doing horrific things, murdering people, controlling people with blackmail, and then every time a person spoke out about it, the Bloods and the Crips would call those people racist, would get the media to say those people were racist. . . . What if that is what is happening right now in Hollywood if there is just a very small ring of specific people who are using the fact that they are Jewish to shield themselves from any criticism. It’s food for thought, right? . . . There are enough people that are speaking out about a ring in Hollywood, also a ring potentially in D.C., that we should start to ask those questions. . . . All Americans should want answers because this appears to be something that is quite sinister.
Columnist Christine Rosen had more to say on Owens’ recent opinions.
When Dennis Prager (for whom Owens once briefly worked) gently chastised her for defending West’s anti-Semitic statements, Owens used her podcast as a venue to attack Prager, who is Jewish. As she told the New Yorker, she called and yelled at him, saying, “I’m not playing this game with the Jewish community again.”
Here’s guessing Schulz doesn’t know the full story behind the Shapiro/Owens feud. He’s a comedian, not a scholar. He’s still spitting out hot takes, left and right. That’s what many people do on social media and podcasts.
It’s often better to stick to subjects you know well, although many are guilty of pushing past those reasonable limits in our digital age.
The bigger question remains:
Would Schulz still feel Shapiro betrayed his free speech beliefs if he knew all of the above?
The post Andrew Schulz Needs Free Speech Primer appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.