CNN’s Jake Tapper Slams Candace Owens Fans For Supporting Her ‘Bigoted Bullsh*t’

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CNN’s Jake Tapper took to social media on Sunday to denounce anyone who supports conspiracy theorist and “rabid antisemite” Candace Owens’s “bigoted bullshit.”

Both Tapper and The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro have condemned Owens for pushing what journalist Yashar Ali called “Neo-Nazi propaganda, including dangerous Talmudic conspiracies.”

On last week’s podcast, Owens held up a copy of antisemitic tome, The Talmudic Jew, and told her listeners that Shapiro and other Jewish people believe they are “contract lords.”

At a Turning Point USA event last week, Shapiro told a large audience of conservatives, “The people who refuse to condemn Candace’s truly vicious attacks, and some of them are speaking here, are guilty of cowardice. Yes, cowardice,” Shapiro said in his speech. “The fact that they have said nothing while Candace has been vomiting all sorts of hideous and conspiratorial nonsense into the public square for years is just as cowardly.”

Tapper on Sunday posted on X, “It’s insane that this rabid antisemite who relies on lies and long-discredited bigoted bullshit is a popular conservative voice. It’s also profoundly disappointing that powerful conservative voices whom I once thought knew better stand by her — or are silent.”

In his own post, Ali pointed out Owens’s influential reach, writing, “Keep in mind that every episode of Candace’s show is viewed or downloaded millions of times, and she has a top-five news podcast in the country (Apple/Spotify) and is in the top ten podcasts overall.”

In a weekend New York Times opinion piece titled, “Candace Owens Is the Conservative Movement’s Frankenstein Monster,” Michelle Goldberg wrote about the Republicans who have embraced Owens as one of their own.

“This is partly a story about conservatives creating a monster they can’t control. Owens, after all, has been saying nutty things for a long time,” Goldberg wrote, continuing:

In 2019, she left her job as communications director of Turning Point not long after arguing that Hitler’s real sin was globalism, not nationalism. (“If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great,” she said, it would have been fine.) Rather than ostracize her, however, powerful conservative organizations cultivated her. Republicans invited her to testify before Congress about why white nationalism wasn’t a problem.

In 2020 Shapiro hired her at the Daily Wire, his media company, which is where she began her podcast. (They split in 2024 over her increasingly antisemitic rhetoric.) Having elevated her in large part for her willingness to say outrageous things about her opponents, people on the right are now surprised by her willingness to say outrageous things about them.