The decision of Daily Wire “god-king” Jeremy Boreing to abruptly fire popular black hostess Candace Owens has thrown the conservative metaverse into turmoil, for two reasons.

First, Owens is herself popular among conservatives, especially among those who support Donald Trump. She’s funny, smart, has guts, and is willing to stand up to lying members of Congress – to their faces – and take on issues members of so-called Conservative, Inc., won’t touch.

Boreing himself said, just a few months ago, that Owen’s job was “secure” and that the Daily Wire, unlike the propaganda outlets that pass as news organizations these days, will “never” engage in cancel culture and the mass Soviet-style censorship of liberal viewpoints.

The Daily Wire “would not fire Candace” because she “is paid to give her opinion,” Boreing said. “Unless those opinions run afoul of the law or she violates the terms of her contract in some way, her job is secure and she is welcome at Daily Wire.”

To many, this now sounds like a crock.

Et Tu, Boreing?

Boreing is being denounced as a coward and a liar by some, such as YouTube influencer Mark Dice.

For weeks, speculation has mounted that Daily Wire cofounder Ben Shapiro was trying to get Owens fired for comments critical of Israel’s attacks on Gaza and the high casualty rate among Muslim women and children. Shapiro is Jewish, married to an Israeli, and naturally supports Israel’s right to defend itself against the barbaric terrorism that Hamas unleashed on October 7, 2023 (as do The Stream and most evangelical Christians nationwide).

More troubling, however, is that many are now claiming that the Daily Wire and its allies manufactured a smear campaign against Owens that painted her not just as critical of Israel but as actually antisemitic. This would seem absurd on its face. However, in recent years conservatives have watched as some far-left Jewish groups, most notoriously the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), have attacked conservatives as “antisemitic” simply for their stands on political issues, such as mass immigration.

Ideological Pogroms

The most obvious recent example is Tucker Carlson. The head of the ADL, a far-left partisan named Jonathan Greenblatt, openly and proudly campaigned to have Carlson fired from Fox News because he engaged in “dog whistling” and antisemitic “tropes” – such as saying that mass immigration is undermining American democracy.

Many conservative Jewish leaders were aghast, seeing this as the worst example of crying wolf. They are angry that Greenblatt seemingly wants to turn the ADL into something like the Southern Poverty Law Center, a liberal activist group that operates primarily by smearing its political opponents (which include pro-family parachurch ministries and think tanks) and calling them racists.

Plus, some 83% of Orthodox Jews voted for Donald Trump and agree with him on mass immigration. The “czar” of Trump’s immigration policy, Stephen Miller, is Jewish. And Israel, of course, famously erected its own massive 30-foot concrete border wall to keep illegal immigrants, including potential Palestinian terrorists, out of the country. To call someone antisemitic for supporting strong borders, therefore, seems a bit of a stretch.

Yet here was the Daily Wire apparently calling another America First conservative with whom it disagrees politically an antisemite – at least according to its hosts and supporters.

Context Is King

The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan took to the airwaves to explain that the phrase “Christ is King,” common among Christians and frequently used by Candace Owens, can be antisemitic – or at least in certain contexts. A Jew who converted to Christianity, Klavan made a fair point: “Christ is King” is not itself antisemitic, he said, but when yelled at Jews during political arguments it could be taken as such.

The question is: Did Candace Owens do such yelling?

The case against her for antisemitism is three-fold.

First, she supposedly said that Hitler is “okay.” This was the first sign for some conservatives that the Daily Wire was out to smear Owens by taken something she said out of context — the way the political Left used the “very fine people” hoax and, most recently, the “bloodbath” hoax to smear Donald Trump.

Anyone who watches the clip in full – from a speech Owens gave in Canada in 2019 — will see that she was not saying Hitler is “okay.” Instead, what she clumsily said is that she supports “nationalism” and that, had Hitler (who was democratically elected) stuck to a simple nationalist program – putting Germany back to work and building the autobahn and all that – that would have been okay. “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine,” Owens said. (Naturally, leftist media outlets like the Daily Beast pounced with deliberately deceptive headlines like, “Owens: Hitler Was ‘OK’ Until He Tried to Go Global.”)

Guilt by Association

Owens herself has repeatedly clarified that she was defending nationalism, not Hitler. She told USA Today that “Hitler was a homicidal, psychotic maniac’ and there is ‘no excuse or defense ever for … everything that he did.’” (So, she’s apparently not as big a card-carrying Nazi as the Daily Wire is trying to imply.)

The second piece of evidence against Owens was that she “liked” a tweet in which someone made a sarcastic crack about a rabbi being “drunk on Christian blood again” – a classic and ridiculous “trope” of Jew hatred. (Her defenders, such as Mark Dice, pointed out that the offending line was actually in an exchange with Australian-Israeli activist Avi Yemini and one of his critics, so Owens may not have even seen the actual line, but “liking” something like that is clearly dumb.)

The third piece of evidence is that Owens associates with and defends real antisemites, not just people whose politics the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt doesn’t like — such as Kanye West (who is critical of Jews in Hollywood and the music industry) and a YouTuber and political activist named Nick Fuentes, who is literally and openly a white supremacist.

Both of these characters have their defenders, but frankly strike this writer, at least, as lunatics. The so-called “far right” does have its fair share of Jew haters – as does, we now know, the far left. Ethnic hatred of any kind should always be unequivocally condemned, whether it’s uttered by Nick Fuentes or by college professors teaching critical race theory.

Avoidable Issues

So, the bottom line is this: This entire sordid episode of Owens’ abrupt departure from the Daily Wire was stupid and could have been avoided.

It weakens conservatives during a critical election year, and gives aid and comfort to those who already want to paint Republicans as Nazis and racists.

The whole egomaniacal lot of them – Ben Shapiro, the “god-king” Jeremy Boreing, and, yes, Candace Owens – should have talked all this out before it escalated into the type of cancel culture insanity we’ve all observed on the far left.

Now Democrats will say, “See? Republicans are the real Nazis — and cancel culture is not a pathetic assault on free speech, as they claim, but entirely legitimate.

“Even the Daily Wire does it.”

 

Robert Hutchinson writes on the intersection of politics and ideas. He is the author of The Death of Hitler: What Really Happened (Regnery Publishing, 2020).