In court earlier yesterday, a feud between Ted Lieu, a Representative for California’s 33rd congressional district, and Candace Owens, an American conservative commentator, was ignited when Lieu played a clip of Owens seemingly supporting Hitler’s nationalism. Before Lieu played the clip, he said, “I don’t know Ms. Owens; I’m not going to characterize her. Instead, I’ll let her words do the talking.”
In the tape, Candace Owens said that she believed Hitler’s nationalism was okay. “… if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great, okay, fine,” she said as she answered a question about Hitler’s nationalistic political identity. She then insinuated that the real problem with Hitler’s actions was that “he had dreams outside of Germany.”
“I actually don’t have any problems at all with the word nationalism,” she continued. Instead, she had a problem with Hitler’s desire to globalize.
After the tape finished playing, Lieu asked the other members, “If people try to legitimize Hitler, does that feed into white nationalist ideology?”
Eileen Hershenov answered: “It does, Mr. Lieu. I know that Ms. Owens distanced herself from those comments later, but we expressed great concern over the original comments.”
Owens, however, had a defensive rebuttal: “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,” to which Chairman Jerry Nadler said, “the witness may not refer to a member of the committee as ‘stupid.’”
He had misinterpreted what Owen had said — instead, Owens had said Lieu must believed black people are stupid, not that Lieu was stupid. Owens replied, “I didn’t refer to him as ‘stupid.’ That’s not what I said. That’s not what I said at all. You didn’t listen to what I said.”
