Ben Shapiro Addresses Daily Wire-Candace Owens Split: Not a ‘Free Speech Problem’

Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro addressed Candace Owens’s recent departure from The Daily Wire, the outlet he helped found, in an interview released by Dave Rubin on Thursday.

Owens was let go by The Daily Wire last Friday after months of sparring with Shapiro and in the wake of a string of anti-Semitic comments made by Owens.

“It’s interesting because we all sort of came up together to different extents, and we’ve all done a million things together and public events and networks and all those things. It seems to me that at this moment, she’s [Owens] now a free agent,” mused Rubin. “She happened to end up on Locals, which I created, and we were a platform, not a publisher that you guys are. Can you at least talk to just sort of just sort of where it’s at now? She’s not with you. She’s free.”

“She’s free to do whatever she wants to do, to be wherever she wants to be. And the difference between a publisher like The Daily Wire and a platform like Locals is obviously that a platform should have a very broad range of speech that it allows, including speech that maybe even the creators don’t believe is inside what they would consider to be the Overton Window,” affirmed Shapiro. “That’s a very different thing than direct subsidization of particular opinions. The Daily Wire would not have a host, would not pay a host, who was staunchly pro-abortion. They would have no obligation to buy a host who is staunchly pro-abortion.”

He continued :

And so when it comes to the hosts on The Daily Wire, obviously everyone is able to say what they want. Nobody ever comes to me and says, “You can’t say X,” nobody ever says that to Walsh, and no one ever said that to Candace. But the reality is that there is an Overton Window at The Daily Wire. Obviously there was a non-meeting of the minds, that’s pretty much all I can say on this. And, you know, a lot of this has happened publicly, but to the extent that that The Daily Wire is in fact not a publisher — it is, in fact, not a platform, it is a publisher. That means that there is no moral obligation for and there’s no free speech problem with The Daily Wire saying, we don’t wish to pay a particular host or that host saying, I don’t wish to work here anymore, because again, there’s a parting of the ways that I’m that, you know, is not really open for discussion at this point.

Rubin went on to ask if Shapiro was surprised by the controversy around the split, to which Shapiro answered that he was not because of the right’s understandable reaction to the “excesses of the left.”

Shapiro also insisted that Owens’s firing was “not about disagreements over Israel,” citing his colleague Matt Walsh’s opposition to the U.S. providing aid to Israel.

“There are a lot of other factors, obviously, at play,” he noted.