In this episode, Mike and James discuss the firing of Candace Owens by The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro's appearance on Dave Rubin's podcast, and the new definition of anti-Semitism and why it serves the state of Israel.
00:00:00.000Zionism as a concept was fairly new, and there were many Orthodox Jews who did not even hear about the concept or didn't agree or had nothing to do with that.
00:00:13.300So the fact that anti-Semitism is now a concept that's defined, partially it's tied to the state of Israel, seems strange because that doesn't even represent all of Jewish people.
00:00:32.140So it feels like it's this new definition serving the state more than it's serving the people living all around the world, because it's not just Jewish people living in the state.
00:00:43.300Hello and welcome to this week's Critical Compass. My name is Mike and this is James.
00:01:04.260This week we've got a couple topics to discuss from events during the week that have happened in the general podcastosphere that we live in.
00:01:15.600The first one being the firing of Candace Owens by the Daily Wire. That was kind of, I don't know, you can let me know what you think here, James, but kind of sounds like they tried to make it sound like it wasn't a firing and that it was maybe a mutually agreed upon departure.
00:01:34.760But as the week kind of went on and more information came out, it started to look more and more like a firing.
00:01:41.720Yeah, it's hard to know if she kind of wanted out or if she was forced out or you never know the little conversations that happen behind the scenes.
00:01:53.320But I think that was a shock to a lot of people considering that the Daily Wire is a platform of free speech, or so it was.
00:02:07.360Kind of been inching towards this with Candace Owens come October 7th. She didn't seem to have the same kind of views that you'd expect from, well, Ben Shapiro being very adamant and very vocal about his support of Israel.
00:02:26.520So that's already creating an issue. And I guess, is the Daily Wire, they're not editorizing the content like a news station would, but I do feel like there are certain views that are more acceptable than others.
00:02:44.300Mm-hmm. Well, at least that's the argument that, actually, maybe I'll pull this up from Twitter here.
00:02:51.160This is the, that's at least the argument that Ben Shapiro made on Dave Rubin's podcast.
00:02:58.360They talked about this a little bit. I'm just going to share the screen here. Let's see what I've got.
00:03:04.500Yeah, so this is Alexandros Marinos on Twitter saying that here's a beautiful teaching moment.
00:03:10.840And the Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin clip is one of the most important recorded interactions for people who care about hypocrisy in the public sphere.
00:03:18.840Four-minute video here. I won't play at all, but we'll obviously link this in the, in the description.
00:03:24.260But generally speaking, Shapiro makes the argument that Daily Wire is a publisher, like a magazine or a newspaper, and not a platform, like Locals.
00:03:33.360Interestingly, he implies that the Daily Wire was subsidizing Candace Owens.
00:03:37.420This would imply they were taking a financial loss to have her there.
00:03:40.060Doesn't she have 3.5 million subscribers? I don't think, she's like, she was one of the top hosts, other than like Jordan Peterson.
00:03:50.320Yeah, she was, if not the best, if not the first, if not the, like the most popular, then at least the second.
00:03:57.380I think, I don't know, would you say that, would Shapiro still be number one, or do you think JVP would be number one now?
00:04:05.100I think Jordan Peterson's probably up there.
00:04:10.060Yeah, yeah. Well, and he says, you know, he goes through a few, few different points here, but one of the things that Shapiro said was that,
00:04:18.060no one ever says to me, you can't say this. No one ever said that to Walsh. No one ever said that to Candace.
00:04:23.760But the reality is, there's an Overton window at the Daily Wire. Obviously, there is a non-meeting of the minds. That's all I can say on this.
00:04:30.580So, what do you think about that, James?
00:04:35.380I, I think there was a wider Overton window when nobody talked about certain issues, and now that there is disagreements on that,
00:04:46.200I feel like he can't advocate for it being a free speech platform.
00:04:53.360I feel like when you have people advocating to like, you can't touch that subject, like, well, why can't you touch it?
00:05:05.780Or it'd be different if there's malice behind the exploration of a topic, but I think Candace Owens has, especially with her exploration of BLM,
00:05:15.740when Black Lives Matters first came out, she spoke up about it and got lambasted by, basically, she's called a traitor to,
00:05:31.420like, she's a self-hating Black at that point.
00:05:37.720She's pointing out that, like, oh, maybe there's some corruption in BLM as an organization.
00:05:42.600They said, well, it's hurting the movement, it's the message behind the movement, but even with making distinctions between the organization and a movement and people,
00:05:53.020she's still got a lot of hate for that and proved to be right.
00:05:58.080So, her instincts have been decent on other issues, and she seems to, she's not careless with her words by any means.
00:06:07.500And she seems to, I don't think she's said anything too reckless that would even fall into, like, with claims of anti-Semitism.
00:08:47.740So, and that's where we have Rabbi Barclay writing an article, uh, being very critical of Candace and accusing her for some things.
00:08:57.660So she, this was before she got fired.
00:09:00.060She decided to sit down and she's like, well, let's have an honest discussion.
00:09:03.280Let's fully just go over, here's what you claim.
00:09:07.140Let's watch the clip that that's based off of and go through.
00:09:09.720And the, and it all starts out with her asking what antisemitism is.
00:09:16.480And the first part of that is a, it is a discussion about, he spends the first five minutes talking about more of the history of like blood libels.
00:09:26.480And the kind of the myths behind Jewish people that were perpetrated in kind of the more medieval times and how some of those things fueled hatred towards Jewish people as a group.
00:09:41.460But he also specifically says that antisemitism is a hate that mutates.
00:09:50.260And he's kind of, can't really pinpoint a definition.
00:09:54.540So let's just, uh, I want to show this little part here.
00:09:58.860Quazit, you said it's a hate that mutates.
00:47:02.920Yeah, well, this, like, this literally could have popped off at any second, you know, and there's, there's, from what, from what at least we can see from this video.
00:47:08.400What if another, another group comes in and they have a disagreement and they're holding daggers, like.
00:47:17.320You can, you can carry, like, you can carry daggers.
00:47:20.120I mean, you can carry pocket knives and stuff in, in Canada.
00:47:23.500Depending on the province, they have to be certain, you know, under a certain number of inches.
00:47:27.380But, like, that type of action, like, you know, the guy, like, stabbing that flag and cutting it.
00:47:32.140Like, I mean, that's, right in front of the cop, too, who was, he wasn't even really paying attention.
00:47:36.820He was just sort of, like, in the area.
00:47:40.220I, I would have, I guess, just to say it a different way.
00:47:43.380I would have a hard time believing that if anyone at that acts of tax protest pulled out a knife to do anything with it, to cut up an apple.
00:47:52.260So, I have a hard time believing the response would be as nonchalant as it was in the Kalistani protests that we just saw.
00:48:00.020Yeah, the, it's not, it's not an equal, equal treatment between these different protests.
00:48:07.360You have, you can point to other examples of pro-Hamas and people who are literally, like, supporting the terrorist entity of Hamas and saying what they're doing is justified.
00:48:22.540And them getting preferential treatment from the cops and not the same as, this is where it gets tricky, is, like, wire, like, are there optics associated?
00:48:37.300Like, well, we can't be too hard on this group because we'll be called racists and look at the history of cops.
00:48:42.720And, um, they, like, they don't want to be, they don't want to stain on their reputation.
00:48:51.880But in this case, it feels like full riot gear is maybe just trying to motivate people to stay home and not come out to, like, to protest these kind of things.
00:49:07.500Especially, especially when we have two people still in coots, um, or two people from the coots protest still in jail.
00:49:16.160Um, they're still working out some procedural stuff.
00:49:18.640So it's been maybe 750 days, um, pre, like, pre-trial.
00:49:24.860They're not convicted and they've been jailed.
00:49:28.840So I think between that and then this massive police presence, I feel like there's almost, it's that intimidation of, like, well, you wouldn't want another coot, so don't come out.
00:49:42.040Like, we're here, we're, like, we'll, we'll do the same thing.
00:50:45.520You know, it's just a very, very, very different response.
00:50:50.060And I don't, you know, maybe I missed it, but certainly don't remember that being discussed in the media or being, or being talked about in the way, in any sort of way as being, uh, um, being talked about as a disruption or a blockade or any of the usual suspect terms, you know?
00:51:11.040And considering if we take the convoy, the convoy is an example, like you still had access to all major streets in Ottawa.
00:51:22.060Like it was not a, it did not choke, did not set up choke points and prevent like by design from the beginning by, by design.
00:51:32.040And they worked with the police to make sure, and this is something that like, is still kind of one of these myths that's still said casually by people of like, oh, they, they gridlocked, they gridlocked Ottawa and they shut down all these streets.
00:51:46.220And it's like, well, there was complete ambulance access.
00:51:49.820There was a lane open on all these major streets.
00:51:53.540And the way that media talks about that protest versus cases where the entire road is blocked, or you have just stop oil.
00:52:04.160And these are just protests that conveniently aligned with the stories that government and, and the media are, are promoting and championing.
00:52:15.820So it feels like it's a, it's a double standard.
00:52:32.880I'm all, I'm all hopping mad now, but thinking about unjustify, unjustifiable, unjustifiable cops.
00:52:40.660But I, uh, that's, that's a good place as any to end.
00:52:44.560So, um, of course, as always, we'll put links to all this, uh, uh, links to the videos, links to the articles that we, uh, that we talked about timestamped, all that, uh, in the description, in our sub stack.
00:52:56.740Thank you again, everyone who watches, uh, and who reads our sub stack and who is subscribed to it.
00:53:01.160We, um, we, um, I love to see the, the, uh, view counts and the, the open, uh, statistics on the email.