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'Real relationships trump Twitter theatre': Candace Owens hits back at Ben Shapiro in antisemitism spat

The commotion stemmed from the comments and social media posts made by Kanye West, who threatened to go 'death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE'

Candace Owens attacked her Daily Wire colleague Ben Shapiro after the latter called her out for retweeting Max Blumenthal on Sunday, November 6.

The commotion stemmed from the antisemitic comments and social media posts made by Kanye West, who threatened to go "death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE" in a now-deleted tweet. Owens has notably defended West throughout, even arguing that his post wasn't antisemitic. The duo sparked outrage when they wore shirts emblazoned with the words 'WHITE LIVES MATTER' to Paris Fashion Week. Meanwhile, West is reportedly in the process of buying Parler, a right-wing social media platform run by Owens' husband.

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Mediaite reported how Shapiro has appeared to distance himself from Owens' embrace of West in the past few weeks. On October 12, the conservative pundit posted a tweet calling the rapper's "death con 3" tweet and other recent comments "clearly anti-Semitic and disturbing.” While he didn't explicitly mention Owens by name, the tweet came just a couple of days after she had defended the same tweet by West while Shapiro was offline for the Jewish holiday.

Shapiro also criticized his colleague in a speech earlier this month at Texas A&M University for Young America’s Foundation. He said Owens' defense of West was "morally" wrong and that she would have been fired from The Daily Wire if she had used West's words. However, he drew a distinction between what Owens had actually said and West's comments, saying she had simply "defended her friend."

The latest spat took place after Owens retweeted Blumenthal on Saturday and appeared to agree with his comments that "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.” Owens responded, “You are about to get into a lot of trouble for stating this. Reminds me of when I said something similar about the NAACP and BLM way back when. When you disrupt the trauma economy and call out the not-for-profits that benefit from it, you become their next target.”

Shapiro took a screenshot of Owens' retweet of Blumenthal to publicly call her out on Sunday. “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 clapped back a couple of 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 tweeted. “Real relationships should trump Twitter theatre. Let’s set a better example going forward.”

While neither Shapiro nor Owens has tweeted again at each other at the time of publication, the latter has posted a number of tweets defending NBA star Kyrie Irving, who was recently suspended from the Brooklyn Nets for his own controversial comments. Owens said Irving was being “publicly hang[ed],” because “he would not bend the knee to the corporate Covid vaccine lies.”