A vocal Trump supporter exploded at a Democratic congressman during a public hearing on Tuesday, suggesting that he had unfairly suggested she was a Nazi sympathizer.
California Rep. Ted Lieu played a short excerpt from comments made by Candace Owens, a conservative activist who speaks for the Turning Point Project youth group.
Speaking last year to a British audience, she sought to distinguish between Trump-style nationalism and Nazi ‘National’ socialism. Owens’ choice of words at the time was panned by some as clumsy, and by others as friendly to Adolf Hitler.
By the end of the House Judiciary Committee hearing, which focused on hate crimes and white nationalism, Owens was berating Lieu for taking her out of context and not offering her a chance to defend herself.
And Donald Trump Jr., one of Twitter’s hottest conservative flamethrowers, wrote that it was ‘[g]reat to see someone call out the Dems on their purposeful manipulation of facts for their narrative. Since the media runs with anything they say and is the marketing wing of the DNC they aren’t used to getting called out for the repeated BS.’
Conservative commentator Candace Owens blasted a Democratic congressman on Tuesday for insinuating during a Capitol Hill hearing that she is a Nazi sympathizer
California Rep. Ted Lieu played a 30-second snippet from a longer answer Owens gave to a question about ‘nationalism,’ painting her as a defender of Adolf Hitler
Donald Trump Jr. turned Owens into an instant political celebrity by rocketing video of the exchange through the conservative Twittersphere
Lieu began his five minutes during the hearing: ‘I don’t know Ms. Owens. I’m not going to characterize her,’ Lieu had said. ‘I’m going to let her own words do the talking.’
‘I’m going to play for you the first 30 seconds of a statement she made about Adolf Hitler,’ he said, holding up his phone to a hearing room microphone.
‘I actually don’t have any problems at all with the word “nationalism.” I think that it gets – the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is actually what I don’t want,’ Owens was heard saying.
‘So when you think about, whenever we use the word “nationalism” the first think people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. You know, he was a national socialist, but if Hitler had just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine,’ she continued in the recording.
‘The problem is, 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.’
Owens works with the conservative Turning Point Project youth organization and is a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump
Committee chair Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat, banged his gavel when he thought Owens called Lieu ‘stupid’
Lieu posed his question to Eileen Hershenov, senior vice president of policy at the Anti-Defamation League, referring to Owens.
‘When people try to legitimize Adolf Hitler, does that feed into white nationalist ideology?’ he asked. Hershenov said it does.
A Republican Judiciary Committee member gave Owens, an African-American, the floor minutes later.
‘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. He purposefully presented an extracted clip,’ she scolded.
Hearing the word ‘stupid,’ chairman Jerry Nadler leapt in.
‘It is not proper to refer disparagingly to a member of the committee. … the witness may not refer to a member of the committee as “stupid”,’ he ordered.
‘I didn’t refer to him as stupid,’ she shot back. ‘That’s not what I said. That’s not what I said at all. You didn’t listen to what I said.’
A stone-faced Lieu sat wordlessly, staring at Owens as she fired her rhetorical cannon.
Don Jr. is an ally of the Turning Point project and rushed to Owens’ defense as he praised her for calling out ‘BS’ from Democrats
Lier sat stone-faced and listened to Owens tear him apart and accuse him of maligning her as a Nazi supporter
‘He purposefully extracted, he cut off, and you didn’t hear the question that was asked of me. He’s trying to present as though I was mounting a defense of Hitler in Germany,’ she boomed, ‘when in fact the question that was asked of me was pertaining to whether or not … I believed in nationalism, and that nationalism was bad.’
‘And I responded that I do not believe that we should be characterizing Hitler as a nationalist. He was a homicidal, psychopathic maniac that killed his own people. A nationalist would not kill their own people.’
Owens also said she works with Prager University, an online extension learning program, ‘which is run by an Orthodox Jew.’
She told the hearing room that she had ‘sat on a plane for 18 hours’ to attend the May 2018 opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem.
‘Not a single Democrat showed up,’ Owens said.
Tuesday’s Lieu-Owens clash was a collision of strident voices on opposite ends of Washington’s political spectrum.
Lieu is known for using his sizable Twitter following to troll right-wingers.
Owens is known for firing up conservative millennials, and for her association with the Turning Point project.
The organization, founded in 2012 by an 18-year-old, has attracted controversy since the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency – which it rallied for.
Last October the Miami New Times reported a Turning Point chapter at Florida International University included members who shared jokes ‘about watching underage cartoon pornography and deporting Latina women’ and shared ‘racist’ memes ‘showing Syrian men raping a white Swedish woman at gunpoint.’
The organization drew scorn in February for hiring a ‘chief creative officer’ who had been fired from two news outlets for plagiarism.
Buzzfeed axed Benny Johnson in 2014 for copying writing from dozens of other publications. The same problem surfaced later at the Independent Journal Review.
A Fox News Channel correspondent abruptly cut off the group’s director of Spanish engagement in November, for comparing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to a sexually transmitted disease.
‘She won’t go away. She’s like herpes,’ said Anna Paulina.