Facebook, The Daily Wire / Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, Cropped by Resist the Mainstream

The Daily Wire announced that it was severing ties with Candace Owens on Friday—but while the writing has been on the wall for quite some time, the moment is nonetheless meaningful, exposing the moral hypocrisy of a mainstream which anathematizes the telling of politically incorrect truths while demonstrating startling callousness in the face of injustice.

At first, the partnership between Owens and The Daily Wire was an ideal match. Owens was able to boost her profile significantly from the affiliation, transforming her into one of the most influential pundits on the right. Meanwhile, Owens served a valuable purpose for The Daily Wire: Halfway insulated from the standard allegations of racism by her own melanated complexion, Owens could speak about racial issues with unique freedom, providing unsparing racial commentary forbidden or frightening to her white colleagues.

Yet this once-symbiotic relationship was strained by the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas on October 7th. To the surprise of many, Owens emerged as a leading right-wing critic of Israel’s wartime conduct—a position which earned the ire of Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro as early as last November, when the Daily Wire colleagues brought their disagreements over the ethics of the war to the public forum of social media. The disapprobation of her employer, along with the unsparing attacks of the progressive mainstream media, only seemed to embolden Candace Owens, who responded to allegations of antisemitism with righteous indignation, where most pundits would have chosen to display whimpering contrition.

Given these irreconcilable differences, Friday's latest development was predictable: For those paying attention to the internal politics of conservative media, the only remarkable thing about the divorce between Owens and The Daily Wire was that it did not occur sooner.

The announcement of Owens’ departure was preceded the day prior by an attempted smear by the Anti-Defamation League and Media Matters, consisting of a hitpiece which attempted to associate Owens with the controversial pundit Nick Fuentes—a right-wing live streamer whose exclusion from every mainstream social media platform and surplus of negative press coverage may qualify him as the single most “cancelled” man in America. The article supports this tenuous connection by citing Fuentes' excitement about Owens' criticisms of Israel and of Jewish civil rights organizations, even claiming that Owens is “going full 88″—an numeric abbreviation understood to mean “Heil Hitler.”

It does not matter that the affinity between Owens and Fuentes is by all appearances one-sided, with Owens asserting that she does not know Fuentes. The mere fact that such a purportedly odious man has seen reason to praise Owens is deemed sufficient to condemn her as the black female equivalent of Julius Streicher. While this line of attack is self-evidently unfair to Owens, I contend that the premise itself is morally corrupt—Indeed, I will argue that Fuentes, whatever his faults may be, is by far the moral superior of the mainstream which maligns him; and the tiny thread connecting Owens to Fuentes is, if anything, a credit to the former.

Admittedly, Fuentes is far from the perfect victim, the spotless political pundit. Despite his insistence circa 2020 on the importance of “optics,” Fuentes has often followed a mischievous compulsion to shock progressive sensibilities on issues as trivial as they are dangerous: Trafficking in flippant Holocaust denial, Fuentes effectively sabotages his own reach and exposes those who associate with him to institutional sanctions—all over a point of historical revisionism which is largely irrelevant to the politics of the 21st century. At times, it appears that Fuentes' resilience in the face of controversy is surpassed only by his willingness to walk into the traps laid in front of him by the progressive mainstream. This lack of tact, along with his sneering and disagreeable personality, qualify Nicholas J. Fuentes as an easily despised figure.

However, despite his personal and political flaws, Fuentes is undeserving of this designation of odiousness. As Israel’s assault on Gaza continues unabated in its brutality, Fuentes has arrived at a fundamentally humane and reasonable position, calling for a ceasefire in the brutal, asymmetrical conflict and opposing the double standard which allows the IDF to wage war with brazen unconcern for civilian casualties in a manner rightly forbidden to the rest of the developed world. While the carnage at present is still far from qualifying as a “genocide,” as Palestine's more polemical defenders often claim, it is an undeniably brutal conflict which stands to become much worse in the event of a full-blown famine or invasion of Rafah. The irony of the situation is that the respectable, polite and politically correct establishment are the enablers and even proponents of the violence: The same establishment which ostracizes Fuentes, casting him as a little Hitler with cartoonishly evil ambitions, has by and large supported the excesses of the IDF, often with unhinged zealotry.

To a lesser degree, Candace Owens has fallen victim to the same phenomenon: A woman who has been slandered as an evil, abhorrent bigot by the progressive mainstream has taken a measured humanitarian stance in opposition to the Gaza crisis, while the same mainstream which censures Owens continues to support the violence. By holding this stance, neither Owens nor Fuentes stands to gain any goodwill from progressive anti-Zionists, and the left at large will continue to condemn them as hateful demagogues. Yet in burning their bridges with the right-wing establishment, both have demonstrated far greater character and gumption than their critics. Owens' exit from The Daily Wire is not only damning indictment of the outlet, which despite its pretense of promoting free speech has aligned with the censorious mainstream by purging its most incisive pundit: It is an indictment of our society's established Overton window, which rewards the perpetrators of actual violence while levying the harshest calumnies against those who question its wretchedly disordered moral priorities.