Ben Shapiro Publicly Scolds Candace Owens For ‘Garbage’ Tweets, Owens Fires Back ‘You Have My Number’
Ben Shapiro publicly scolded Candace Owens for retweeting Max Blumenthal Sunday, the latest awkward spat between the Daily Wire colleagues.
The kerfuffle connects back to controversial antisemitic comments and social media posts made by Kanye West, who legally changed his name to Ye, including threatening to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE” in a tweet.
Owens has vehemently and repeatedly defended West, even going so far as to argue his “death con 3” tweet wasn’t antisemitic. The two drew sharp criticism when they wore shirts that said “WHITE LIVES MATTER” to Paris Fashion Week, and West is reportedly in the process of buying Parler, the struggling right-wing social media platform run by Owens’ husband.
Shapiro, to put it lightly, does not appear to be on board with Owens’ embrace of West, and has been amping up his rhetoric towards her over the past few weeks.
On Oct. 12, Shapiro posted a tweet calling West’s “death con 3” tweet and other recent comments “clearly anti-Semitic and disturbing.” He did not mention Owens by name, but the tweet was just a few days after she had defended that exact tweet from West, and Shapiro had been offline for the Jewish holiday.
Earlier this month at a speech at Texas A&M University for the Young America’s Foundation, Shapiro went so far as to say that Owens’ defense of West was “morally” wrong, and that she would have been fired from The Daily Wire if she had said what West had said. He did draw a distinction, however, between what Owens had actually said and West’s comments, framing her words as having “defended her friend.”
The latest digital brawl was sparked when Owens retweeted Blumenthal on Saturday to agree with his comments that “We White American Jews are living through a golden age of power, affluence and safety,” which he said was a “welcome reality” that “threatens the entire Zionist enterprise, from lobby fronts like the ADL to the State of Israel, because Zionism relies on Jewish insecurity to justify itself.”
“You are about to get into a lot of trouble for stating this,” wrote Owens about Blumenthal’s tweet, comparing his comments to her own about the NAACP and Black Lives Matter. “When you disrupt the trauma economy and call out not-for-profits that benefit from it, you become their next target.”
On Sunday, Shapiro took a screenshot of Owens’ retweet of Blumenthal to publicly call her out.
“I think the ADL is a partisan hack organization, too,” he wrote. “But RTing Max Blumenthal, who spends his life covering for Jew-haters and stumping for Israel’s destruction, makes the conversation significantly worse. It’s garbage.”
Owens replied back to Shapiro a few hours later.
“I don’t know who Max Blumenthal is, but I do know that you have my number and could have informed me in earnest,” she wrote. “Real relationships should trump Twitter theatre. Let’s set a better example going forward.”
Neither Shapiro nor Owens have tweeted again directly addressing each other, although Owens has posted several other tweets defending NBA star Kyrie Irving, who was suspended from the Brooklyn Nets for his own antisemitic comments, claiming he was being “publicly hang[ed],” because “he would not bend the knee to the corporate Covid vaccine lies.”
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