Rep. Ted Lieu plays clip of Candace Owens' Hitler comments at hearing on white nationalism
During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on hate crimes and the rise of white nationalism, Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., played a 30-second audio clip of conservative commentator Candace Owens speaking about white nationalism and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler on Tuesday.
“In congressional hearings, the minority party gets to select its own witnesses, and of all the people the Republicans could have selected, they picked Candace Owens,” said Lieu.
“I’m going to let her own words do the talking", he said.
The audio was derived from a video taken at a conference in London in December, where Owens said that she doesn't "have any problems at all with the word 'nationalism.'"
"I think that the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don't want," she added, then using Hitler as an example.
“If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well — OK, fine,” she said. “The problem is he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German.”
On Tuesday, Owens said that Lieu was making assumptions about black people.
"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," she said.
The conservative commentator also asserted that Lieu purposefully extracted parts of what she said and that he purposefully cut it up "similar to what they do to Donald Trump to create a different narrative."
Eileen Hershenov, who is the senior vice president of policy at the Anti-Defamation League, was also a witness at the hearing, and Lieu asked her if Owen’s comments “feed into white nationalist ideology.”
“It does,” she responded. “I know that Ms. Owens distanced herself from those comments later, but we expressed great concern over the original comments.”
Owens said that playing the clip was “unbelievably dishonest.”
