David Kaufman: Candace Owens' attack on Ben Shapiro undeniably racist

Right wing provocateur Candace Owens has managed to achieve the impossible. Along with reaching a new low in antisemitic incitement, Owens has upended decades of racial orthodoxy with just

That video, posted this weekend, was a takedown of podcaster Ben Shapiro — founder of the conservative media site The Wire who is publicly (and proudly) Jewish. Like most of the right’s top leadership, Shapiro — who formerly employed Owens at The Wire — appeared last week at the annual conference for Turning Points USA, the political action group established by the late Charlie Kirk.

This was the first major Turning Points gathering since Kirk was murdered in September. But rather than focus on honouring Kirk’s legacy, the event turned into an internecine war field with Israel and antisemitism as its most potent flashpoints.

No speaker was more provocative or confrontational than Shapiro, who took deep swipes at former Fox News host Tucker Carlson for providing the self-described white nationalist Nick Fuentes with air time on his massively popular podcast in late October.

Not only did Shapiro describe Carlson’s interview with Fuentes as “an act of moral imbecility,” he went on to frame Fuentes as a man that Kirk had “despised. … he knew that Nick Fuentes was an evil troll.” And this is where Candace Owens stepped in, and things became far nastier, antisemitic and unanticipatedly racist.

Owens’ attack on Shapiro’s Jewishness should come as little surprise. The past 18 months have seen Owens increasingly turn her on-air attention to both Israel — which she has derided as a “cult nation” and “demonic enterprise” — as well as Jews in general. And on her podcast this week, her disdain for both reached new and potentially violent levels.

Indeed, after blaming Jews for controlling the transatlantic slave trade and suggesting Israel was responsible for Kirk’s death, Owens (who is Black) then declared that Shapiro hates “white men” and “all Black people” before imploring African-Americans to “wake up” to whom she believes are their truest foes — Jews. Owens’ language is measured and intentional, at once nuanced and plain-spoken — there can be no doubt to what she is advocating and it is hatred, retribution and violence.

“They think that we are animals, that they have a right to own us…and have us worship them,” Owens said of some unnamed cabal of Jews. “I challenge Black Americans to wake up to your true history; Jewish people were the ones who were trading us,” she continued. “They’ve buried a lot of it, but it is there.”

Owens’ language is also undeniably racist — a word I never thought possible to ascribe to an African-American, but racist Owens has become. Like most Black people — my father is African-American, my mother Jewish-American — I was raised in the belief that Blacks cannot be racist. Discriminatory and prejudiced, without doubt — but never racist.

The power dynamics inherent to both race and racism have typically denied African-Americans the institutional authority (both public or private) racism demands. According to this thinking — which is central to progressive identity politics — Black people lack the ability to turn discriminatory actions into ways that “affect someone’s life physically, economically, educationally, politically or otherwise,” as author Clyde W. Ford put it in the Los Angeles Times last year. This is what is required to define such acts as “racist.”

A recent viral essay on alleged anti-white male discrimination across the American workforce, for instance, perfectly illustrates this phenomenon. Although author Jacob Savage does his best to insist these men have been victims of racism, as Savage himself makes clear, the industries and companies he details are still almost entirely led by whites. They are the ones who ultimately decide whether DEI-driven, anti-white, pro-minority hiring policies are enforced.

In other words, the folks preventing white men like Savage from being hired across America are other white men — not the women and minorities landing those jobs instead. This is discrimination, for sure. But racism — not so much.

Owens, however, is an entirely different matter. Although the platforms that her show relies upon — YouTube, Apple, Spotify — are led by Caucasians, Owens’ ability to bypass traditional media distribution channels has scrambled conventional power dynamics and their long-standing relationships to race.

Backed by the autonomy of podcasting and its limited checks-and-balances, Owens possesses levels of ideological and institutional control historically unavailable to minorities, particularly African-Americans. Armed with similar authoritative power as whites, a black woman like Candace Owens can in fact engage in racism. And this past weekend — as she stoked the flames of a race war — Owens went at it with full force.

There will be many on the left who will disagree here; so invested are they in the identity and diversity industries that they refuse to concede that a platform such as YouTube has become such an improbable ethno-equalizer. But this power realignment has been a long time coming.

The failure of DEI programs across American corporations and academia following Hamas’ October 7 massacre and subsequent global antisemitic tide suggested how Jews — historically considered “white” in the U.S. — could endure the same type of systematic discrimination traditionally experienced by blacks. And this discrimination — often state-sanctioned with little oversight or consequence — is now undeniable.

Owens’ (not so) coded call for a race war ratchets this racialized antisemitism to odious new levels. And the indifference to Owens’ incitement by mainstream media only provides her with ample cover to deliver more. Amid this moment of ongoing White House attacks on DEI and affirmative action, many will be loath to affirm Owens’ actions as racist.

But they are — and she is.

National Post

David Christopher Kaufman is a New York-based journalist and former New York Post editor and columnist. Sign up for his Substack newsletter, Counterintuitive.