Candace Owens No Longer Headlining Trump Campaign Fundraiser After Backlash Over Holocaust Comments

Political commentator Candace Owens is no longer headlining an upcoming fundraiser for former US President Donald Trump’s campaign after her inclusion generated backlash due to her recent controversial comments on Israel and the Holocaust, which many observers say crossed the line into antisemitism.

Owens, a prominent right-wing provocateur and media personality, was originally listed as one of four headliners for the event later this week sponsored by the Trump campaign and a cryptocurrency firm. Donald Trump Jr., the son of the former president and current 2024 Republican presidential nominee, was also planning on attending.

“Donald Trump Jr. is making an appearance with Candace Owens, who recently suggested that the real victims of WWII were not the Jews but the Germans and the real villains not the Axis but the Allies,” US Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) wrote on X/Twitter after the initial announcement.

Dov Hikind, a former New York State Assemblyman and founder of Americans Against Antisemitism, argued on social media that the Trump campaign “being so closely associated with her [Owens] and the disgusting behavior we’ve witnessed from her almost daily, makes it near impossible to make the case to the Jewish people that the Republican Party is where we can trust that antisemitism in any form will not be tolerated.”

However, soon after the backlash, Jewish Insider reported that Owens was removed from the poster and no longer attending the event in Nashville, Tennessee on Friday following fierce backlash from conservative critics and Jewish allies of Trump.

“It was never announced Candace was hosting an event with” the Trump campaign, a spokesperson for Owens told Jewish Insider.

Meanwhile, Owens got into a spat with a reporter on X/Twitter who claimed she was booted from the event due to her recent comments, which included suggesting on her podcast last month that AIPAC, the foremost pro-Israel lobbying organization in the US, was behind the assassination of former US President John F. Kennedy. During the same episode, Owens claimed that the US is being “held hostage by Israel.”

Weeks later, Owens promoted a series of talking points downplaying the atrocities of the Holocaust and said experiments by Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele performed on Jews during World War II sounded “like bizarre propaganda.”

The reporter, Stella Escobedo, posted that she could confirm that Owens was off the panel for this week. “I’m told it was a group of Bitcoin guys, not politicians who organized the event and didn’t know about her Jew hatred,” she tweeted. “I’m told Don Jr. was invited to the event prior to Candace being added to panel. Zero tolerance for antisemitism.”

Owens responded, “I was definitively not cancelled from any event over ‘Jew hatred,’ least of all because of anything to do with Trump’s campaign. This is just entirely made up out of thin air.”

She went on to claim that any friction with the organizers of the event was due to being “bombarded with requests late last evening for me to — as a condition of my speaking , I would be willing to promote a bitcoin ticker here on Twitter.”

Owens added, “Given the fact that many people (myself included) were wrongly drafted into various crypto lawsuits last year, I declined to do so. This morning we were again asked by organizers of the event to promote and we again said that it was not something I was willing to do.”

The event in Nashville was billed as a “VIP Meet & Greet” and reportedly costs as much as $5,000 to attend.

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