Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) played a clip of conservative commentator Candace Owens speaking about Nazi leader Adolf Hitler on Tuesday during a congressional hearing where she was testifying about white nationalism.
“Of all the people Republicans could have selected, they picked Candace Owens,” Lieu said, blasting Republicans who invited Owens to the hearing, before playing the audio.
“I’m going to let her own words do the talking,” he continued.
In the audio, which comes from a December video clip Lieu also shared on Twitter, Owens says she doesn’t have a problem with the word “nationalism” but that “it’s globalism that I try to avoid,” using Hitler as an example.
“If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well — OK, fine,” she says. “The problem is … he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German.”
{mosads}Lieu then asked Eileen Hershenov, senior vice president of policy at the Anti-Defamation League, whether Owens’s comments “feed into white nationalist ideology.”
“It does, Mr. Lieu,” Hershenov responded. “I know that Ms. Owens distanced herself from those comments later, but we expressed great concern over the original comments.”
After Lieu’s questioning period, Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) asked Owens to respond to the clip.
“I think it’s pretty apparent that Mr. Lieu thinks that black people are stupid and will not pursue the full clip in its entirety,” Owens said before being cut off by Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who said she should not “refer disparagingly” to a committee member.
“He purposefully extracted clip, he cut off, and you didn’t hear the question that was asked of me,” Owens added.
“[Hitler] was a homicidal, psychopathic maniac that killed his own people,” Owens continued. “A nationalist would not kill their own people.”
Playing the clip was “unbelievably dishonest, and he did not allow me to respond to it,” she added.
Owens, responding to controversy over the resurfaced clip earlier this year, said she was answering a question at the event about the terms “globalism” and “nationalism.”
In February, she stood by her defense of the difference between nationalism and globalism, saying Hitler was “not a nationalist,” according to USA Today.