Candace Owens speaks at CPAC on March 2, 2023. Photo: Lev Radin via Reuters Connect
YouTube suspended far-right political commentator Candace Owens from its platform for one week and demonetized her account after she shared a previously-unreleased 2022 interview with Kanye West in which the rapper, who now legally goes by the name Ye, made a series of antisemitic remarks.
YouTube also said it removed three episodes from the Candace Owens YouTube channel, including the Owens-West interview because the episode violates the platform’s “hate speech policies.”
Owens shared the news Monday afternoon on her X account and blamed the move on “Zionists.” She shared screenshots of the YouTube messages she received about her account, and wrote in one post on X: “There will be no show today, or at all this week. That’s because @YouTube has issued me a strike and a one week suspension for my sit down with Kanye. They also removed the interview as ‘hate speech’, as it was mass reported by Zionists. Their tactics never change.”
She said in another post, “We all know exactly who is behind this and why,” and claimed in a video message shared on X that Zionists launched “financial terrorism” and “harassment campaigns” against her. The media personality said she’s not upset about the YouTube suspension because “I don’t belong to Zionists, I don’t belong to YouTube, I don’t belong to any of these [Jewish] groups, whether it’s the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] who are making these calls behind the scenes. My platform belongs to God and it’s the people around the world that are supporting me.”
“I’m not going to be compelled to support evil,” she added in her video.
Photo: Screenshot
In a separate post on X, Owens defended comments made by West in their 2022 interview. She claimed that during her discussion with the “Flashing Lights” singer, “Ye was calm, and filled with love—speaking about the world coming together to defeat evil.”
On Aug. 7, Owens published on her YouTube channel an interview she did with West on Oct. 17, 2022, for her podcast “Candace.” During their conversation, the controversial rapper made a number of claims about his “Jewish doctor” and “Jewish trainer,” as well as the “Jewish media” allegedly conspiring against him. He repeatedly talked about the Jewish community, compared high abortion rates among Blacks to the Holocaust, and said, “Jewish businessmen are the ones who have done the things to me to hurt me and my friends.” West also discussed during their 2022 interview the notoriously antisemitic tweet he published that year about wanting to physically harm Jews.
YouTube’s decision to suspend Owens and demonetize her account came after she made offensive remarks last week about Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late spiritual leader of the Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch movement who was also known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
On Sept. 4, Owens appeared in an episode of the YouTube channel “Piers Morgan Uncensored” with fellow guest Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a former Chabad emissary. While debating Boteach on Piers Morgan’s show, Owens falsely claimed Schneerson, who died in 1994, “preached Jewish supremacism, the hatred of all non-Jews.” She added, “You can go through his speeches and you will see that he continually talks about how non-Jews should be treated and that, again, we are a different species.”
Yaacov Behrman, a spokesperson for the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, responded to Owens’ accusations by accusing her of displaying “utter ignorance” for labeling Schneerson as a Jewish supremacist. Chabad’s official X account shared a long thread about the spiritual leader’s life and wrote in part: “The Rebbe saw the importance of each individual, no matter how ordinary they might seem. His door was open to all. The Rebbe dedicated hours daily to personally responding to letters from people worldwide.”
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