David Horowitz center cuts ties with Candace Owens

(JNS) — The David Horowitz Freedom Center, which invited the “then little-known Candace Owens” to a conference six years ago where she said “everything started for me,” has bid adieu to the conservative commentator.

The center “went on promoting Candace, honored her with an Annie Taylor Award for Courage in 2018, and hosted her at multiple events,” it said in a statement, published in Frontpage magazine, which Horowitz edits. “That’s why we are so disappointed in what she has become.”

“The atrocities of Oct. 7, the appearance of ignorant mobs in the U.S. chanting ‘Hitler was right’ and supporting the Hamas terrorists, and Candace’s moral equivalence about these neo-Nazis have changed the stakes,” per the center. “We have decided to issue the present statement because of her recent promotion of Hamas’s genocidal lies.”

It detailed some of Owens’s statements, including comparing Israel to the “segregated South,” implying Israel committed “genocide” and saying antisemitism on campus would increase with the removal of the group Students for Justice in Palestine.

On Nov. 15, Owens wrote on X that Ben Shapiro, the Jewish co-founder of The Daily Wire and its editor emeritus, was “emotionally unhinged.” She responded to a post by Shapiro that said, “Candace, if you feel that taking money from The Daily Wire somehow comes between you and God, by all means quit.” Owens hosts a show on The Daily Wire.

In recent remarks that apparently leaked on social media, Shapiro confirmed that Owens “still works for my company, and I think she’s been absolutely disgraceful. I think that her faux sophistication on these particular issues has been ridiculous.”

Owens joined Daily Wire three years ago following stints at Prager University and the conservative youth group Turning Point USA.

On Nov. 6, Owens wrote in support of Queen Rania of Jordan, who is of Palestinian descent, and who cast doubt on Hamas’s atrocities and accused the world of a “double standard” on Palestinian deaths in Gaza.

“I agree with Queen Rania’s assertion that antisemitism is being weaponized in order to silence critics and bully people into compliance,” Owens wrote.

In the past, Owens has also faced criticism for defending Ye (Kanye West), who has frequently been accused of antisemitism.