In typical leftist fashion, Representative Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) attempted to ambush conservative activist Candace Owens (shown) during a congressional hearing on Tuesday, playing selected audio of part of some recent remarks by Owens. Lieu’s ploy was intended to leave the false impression that Owens was defending Adolf Hitler.
Owens did not sit idly by and let Lieu’s unjustified accusation go unanswered, responding, “I think it’s pretty apparent that Mr. Lieu believes that black people are stupid and will not pursue the full clip in its entirety.” Owens is a noted black conservative who has compared the slavish devotion of most African-Americans to the Democratic Party to “the Democratic plantation.”
The House Judiciary Committee hearing was ostensibly about online hate speech, concentrating on “white nationalism,” “white supremacy,” and racism. During the hearing Lieu shared the clip, in which Owens responded to a question at a conservative event in London on December 11. Lieu then asked Eileen Hershenov, the senior vice-president for policy at the Anti-Defamation League (an organization that focuses on allegations of anti-Semitism), if Owens’ effort to “legitimize” Hitler, history’s most notorious anti-Semite, fed into “white nationalist ideology.”
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Lieu launched a vicious personal attack against Owens, attempting to leave the impression that she supported the “nationalism” of Hitler, because Owens had been invited by the Republican minority to be one of its eight witnesses during the hearing.
While Democrats posture themselves as champions of minorities like blacks, Democrat attacks on blacks are nothing new. The truth is that Democrats are prepared to unleash vitriolic attacks on any black person who dares to deviate from the strict liberal line — witness the treatment of notable black political figures such as Clarence Thomas, Herman Cain, and Dr. Ben Carson.
It is an obvious political tactic of the Left to tar the desire to maintain American national sovereignty as “nationalism,” then add adjectives such as “white” to that word, and implying that any person who describes himself as a “nationalist” (as opposed to a “globalist”) like President Donald Trump, is just like Hitler, who was supposedly another “nationalist.”
In fact, the idea that nationalism is bad was the basis of the question that Owens was asked in London late last year — that the growing movement toward nationalism and away from globalism was somehow something to be concerned about.
Owens responded, “I think that the definition [of nationalism] gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don’t want. Whenever we say ‘nationalism,’ the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. You know, he was a national socialist, but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine.”
“The problem is that he wanted — he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German. Everybody to look a different way. That’s not, to me, that’s not nationalism.” She concluded that she really did not have an issue with nationalism, as she defined it.
Clearly, only a person who is desirous of wanting to smear Owens can read her remarks and conclude that she supported what Hitler did inside of Germany. She explicitly said that if Hitler “just wanted to make Germany great,” she was OK with that. Of course, as history records, Hitler wanted to do more than that — he wanted to have a totalitarian dictatorship inside of Germany. As Owens later added, Hitler was “a homicidal, psychotic maniac,” and that there was “no excuse or defense ever for … everything that he did.”
After Lieu’s attempt to leave the impression that Owens would have been fine with Hitler had he just not invaded other nations like Poland, Owens was visibly angry. “I think it’s pretty apparent that Mr. Liue believes that black people are stupid and will not pursue the full clip in its entirety.… He is assuming that black people will not go and pursue the full two-hour clip. He purposefully cut off — and you didn’t hear the question that was asked of me. He’s trying to present as if I was launching a defense of Hitler in Germany, when in fact the question that was presented to me was pertaining to whether I believed in nationalism, and that nationalism was bad.”
Owens continued, “And what I responded is that I do not believe we should be characterizing Hitler as a nationalist.… A nationalist would not kill their own people.… That was unbelievably dishonest, and he did not allow me to respond to it.”
But Owens was not finished in her blistering response to Lieu. She addressed the insinuation that she was pro-Hitler. “By the way, I would like to also add that I work for Prager University, which is run by an Orthodox Jew. Not a single Democrat showed up to the embassy opening in Jerusalem. I sat on a plane for 18 hours to make sure I was there. I am deeply offended by the insinuation of revealing that clip without the question that was asked of me.”
The response of Owens is a textbook example of how conservatives should challenge the dishonesty of the Left. The manner in which Hitler is usually characterized as some kind of a “right-winger” should also be challenged. His political party is almost always called the “Nazi” Party. That is like calling the Communist Party the “Commie” Party — Nazi is just a shorthand for National Socialist. In other words, Hitler and his henchmen were not right-wingers, but rather socialists, men of the Left.
The hearing had little to do with protecting minorities from “hate crimes,” and more to do with partisan politics, as Owens put it well, noting that words such as white supremacy and white nationalism are little more than “election strategies.… The hearing today is not about white nationalism or hate crimes — its about fear-mongering, power, and control,” adding, “The goal here is to scare blacks, Hispanics, gays, and Muslims into helping [Democrats] censor dissenting opinions, ultimately into helping them regain control.”
Photo of Candace Owens: Gage Skidmore
