CANDACE Owens has delivered a brutal summation of the recent history of prominent Jewish conservative US political activist and publisher Ben Shapiro – a briefing that would probably land her with a defamation suit in Australia.
Owens, who has attracted widespread ridicule and condemnation for airing her questions around the assassination of Charlie Kirk, believes Shapiro “knows things about the assassination that most people don’t”.
She also describes Shapiro as a serial underminer of organisations and user of young recruits, echoing Steve Bannon’s stinging attack on him at TPUSA’s recent AmericaFest where he publicly condemned Shapiro as being “like a cancer” and a “metastasizing cancer”.
Bannon said Shapiro tried to take over Breitbart News and his mentor David Horowitz’s organisation, and predicted that, at some point, he will “make a move” on Turning Point USA as well, “because he’s always been envious of Charlie Kirk.”
Shapiro is a hard-core pro-Netanyahu Zionist, whose recent mission appears to be singling out the Christians who reject the pro-Zionist narrative and making examples of them through ridicule.
Shapiro, who paid for a top time slot at the conference just after Erika Kirk’s opening, took to the stage to call out targeted speakers at AmericaFest (Tucker Carlson and Bannon primarily), declaring them “guilty of cowardice” for refusing “to condemn Candace’s truly vicious attacks” against Erika Kirk and Turning Point USA.
But Owens, in the recent podcast, turned the blowtorch back on Shapiro, accusing him of recruiting young Christians and offering them “big opportunities” via his Daily Wire platform, then paying them to attack other Christians. She gave the example of a young whistleblower who he recruited and was then told to audition in a video attacking herself and Carlson.
Owens also accused Shapiro and his team of running a series of attacks on conservative broadcaster Megyn Kelly, after he appeared with on her on stage last year, and attempted unsuccessfully to get her to take a stand with him against Owens and Carlson.
In 2012 the young Shapiro became a prominent voice in the US conservative-populist movement by joining the staff of Breitbart News, founded by Andrew Breitbart who is said to have mentored Shapiro.
That same year, on February 29th, Breitbart suffered a mysterious heart attack and collapsed on a street near his home in Brentwood, LA. He was rushed to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead the next day. He was 43 years old.
A coroner blamed hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (enlarged heart) with focal coronary atherosclerosis, which had been diagnosed the year before. However questions have been raised about the timing of his death, a day before he was to release “damning video” about President Barack Obama, threatening his 2012 re-election campaign.
Also suspicious was Los Angeles coroner Michael Cormier dying of arsenic poisoning on the day the L.A Coroner’s Office released Breitbart’s autopsy report.
Owens points out that Shapiro had a strained relationship with Charlie Kirk and “was not his friend”, despite trying to give the opposite impression in public. “Ben Shapiro’s behaviour since Charlie Kirk’s assassination leads me to believe that he may know more than the public knows,” said Owens.
“He’s behaving as if Charlie’s company (TPUSA) was promised to him 3000 years ago. Like he assumed he would somehow benefit off his death and I’m getting in the way of that somehow.
“And if he did benefit, it would not be the first time … that Ben Shapiro sought to pervert the legacy of a dead man to his own benefit.”
She also said Shapiro, after firing her from her previous role at Daily Wire, attempted to bankrupt the company she set up by launching legal actions.
Shapiro was an academic high achiever at a young age, and after getting a degree in political science at UCLA, went on to Harvard to get a law degree. He became the youngest syndicated columnist in the US at age 17.
But several years on at Breitbart, Shapiro ran afoul of Bannon, who was the company’s executive chairman. Breitbart decided to back Donald Trump’s 2016 run for the presidency, but Shapiro at the time was part of the Never-Trumper faction of the Republicans.
Why such a brutal attack? Because Shapiro and a friend ran an “operation” against Trump-staffer and attorney Cory Lewandowski, using a Breitbart female reporter who accused Lewandowski of assaulting her. It was all faked and the allegations were used by media to attack Breitbart.
Shapiro meanwhile, while working as Breitbart’s editor at large, was also developing his own media platform, The Daily Wire, which now hosts top-level profiles such as Jordan Peterson and Matt Walsh.
But Shapiro’s “Israel first” stance is losing him and increasing number of supporters as America-first sentiment grows, and may eventually lead to his fall from grace.