Goodbye Candace
Goodbye Candace
A statement by the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The Editors - NOV 20, 2023
Six years ago, the David Horowitz Freedom Center invited the then little-known Candace Owens to its annual Restoration Weekend gathering of conservative movers and shakers.
“This really is the conference where everything started for me,” Candace later said. “I started my career, my political career on YouTube making just funny, satirical videos, and I got an email from David Horowitz inviting me to this conference, and let me just tell you what a big deal it was for me. I had no connections whatsoever.”
At this conference she met Charlie Kirk, and connected with his nationwide student organization Turning Point USA, and became a national figure.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center went on promoting Candace, honored her with an Annie Taylor Award for Courage in 2018, and hosted her at multiple events.
That’s why we are so disappointed in what she has become.
Back then she laid out an ambitious plan to “move the black vote 20 points by 2020”. It’s not clear what happened to that. Instead of liberating the black community, Candace began giving platforms to anti-Israel voices like Andrew Tate, a Muslim convert who said that “ISIS are the real Muslims because ISIS do exactly what the book says.”
The David Horowitz Freedom Center has previously criticized Candace’s promotion of Tate. But because of our history with Candace and our hope that she would pull out of this spiral, we did not make an issue of it.
The atrocities of October 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. We have decided to issue the present statement because of her recent promotion of Hamas’ genocidal lies.
For example, she has falsely compared Israel to the “segregated South.” This is the sort of ignorant ‘Apartheid State” slander that we expect from Black Lives Matter – and the Jew-killers of the Middle East.
When Candace implied that Israel was engaged in “genocide” for defending itself against the atrocities committed by Hamas, that’s the kind of genocidal lie we expect to hear from Hamas.
And when she suggested that to remove the Hamas auxiliary — Students for Justice in Palestine — from campuses would increase antisemitism, that’s what we expect to hear from the New York Times.
It’s not what we at the Freedom Center stand for and it’s not what the patriotic movement we have been helping to build over the last 35 years represents.
Instead of focusing on the meaningful activism and defense of American values that brought her to our attention, Candace Owens has become obsessed with her own fame, stirring up drama to compensate for a lack of real achievement. Her comments about Israel and her promotion of people like Andrew Tate are part of a pattern. Candace tackles a subject she knows nothing about, never bothers to learn anything about it, and then rides the backlash by playing the victim to generate more fame and money.
What a tragic misuse of talents.
In 2018, Candace tweeted that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was clueless. She’s “programmed to hate Israel and she has no idea why.” Now she has become AOC. Candace hates Israel for the same reason that AOC does. Fame. She proved that she knows as little about Israel as AOC does when she falsely claimed that the Muslim Quarter in Jerusalem is the only place that Muslims are allowed to live, thus “proving” the Hamas canard that Israel practices apartheid. It does not.
But this is not just about Israel. It’s about the survival of western civilization which the Islamic jihadis have been working to destroy. And it’s about the sad caricature that Candace has become, and the end of the promise we saw in her.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center wishes to express its deep disappointment with Candace’s ignorant, hateful and morally obtuse remarks about Israel and the Jews. But, of course, it’s not just about the Jews. The Jews are the canaries in the mine. The West is next and America above all.
It’s one thing to have been alive in the Thirties and not realize where the Nazis were heading. It is quite another to be alive during a 75-year campaign by Islamic jihadis to “finish the job that Hitler started,” and fail to stand against their open campaign to create a second Holocaust.
Here is the irony that the so-called pro-Palestinian left and Candace fail to grasp. For nearly two decades Israel and the West sent millions in humanitarian aid to Gaza, which was used instead by the Hamas government to build 300 miles of terrorist tunnels and turn Gaza into a military base, sending thousands of rockets into civilian areas in Israel – war crimes. Where were the protests in Gaza and on college campuses then? They were demonstrating in behalf of the war criminals.
We are in a civilizational war and Candace is either on the sidelines or actively supporting the crusade against the West.
We at the Freedom Center remain committed to finding and supporting the activists who will do the work, rather than chase the clicks, who will stand up for freedom and the sanctity of human life, who will refuse to compromise with evil and retreat into a delusional isolationism that says if the evil doesn’t affect me immediately, I don’t really care about its victims or the future that it intends.
Goodbye Candace, we will continue to support those who truly strive to raise up the movement for liberty and life, not selfishly tear it apart.