Charlie Kirk’s group will host Donald Trump in Arizona, even as his organization promotes Candace Owens, an unapologetic antisemite.
Candace Owens fires back over Hitler comments
Candace Owens says Rep. Ted Lieu misrepresented her comments on Adolf Hitler, that he must think “black people are stupid” and won’t watch the clip.
USA TODAY
Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative youth movement Turning Point USA, isn’t stupid.
He knows he’s got a Candace Owens problem. He has to know.
Candace Owens cut her teeth at Turning Point USA as a fiery critic of left-wing identity politics and the Democratic Party.
Her voice carried because she is articulate and telegenic and gifted in the arts of digital media. But what gave it particular resonance is the fact that she is conservative and African American.
That all began to turn sinister as she drank deeply from a well of antisemitism and became, herself, a gusher of conspiracy theories and blood libels against the Jews.
Candace Owens is a big part of Turning Point
On Friday, Turning Point Action and Turning Point PAC, spinoffs of its namesake organization, will platform Donald Trump in the old-fashioned way — on stage at Glendale’s Desert Diamond Arena.
Meanwhile, Turning Point USA continues to platform Candace Owens on its web pages.
You can go to Turning Point’s official web page and see Candace Owens listed under staff as “Chair of BLEXIT.”
BLEXIT is a movement Owens created to usher in the Black person’s exit from “victimhood culture.”
Go to the BLEXIT web page “powered by Turning Point USA,” and you’ll find Owens prominently displayed.
Elsewhere on the Turning Point web page, Owens’ picture rotates onto the page with her quote, “Turning Point USA is one of the greatest student youth movements that we have in America that is fighting for American ideas.”
Owens keeps spewing hate for Jews
The problem for Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump is that Candace Owens has begun to construct a persona as one of the most unabashed purveyors of anti-Jewish conspiracies and prejudice.
Conservatives first began to notice something was off on this score in 2019 when at a conference in Great Britain she was asked about her support for nationalism.
Her response was daft and ill-informed.
“If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well — OK, fine,” she said, as reported by BuzzFeed News. “The problem is he had dreams outside of Germany. … He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German.”
More hints came in 2022 after she defended this tweet by her rapper pal, Kanye West.
“I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE. The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti-Semitic because black people are actually Jew also You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.”
Owens responded on the Daily Wire podcast, “Now, if you are an honest person, you did not think this tweet was antisemitic.”
Any honest person would say she’s full of it.
Her rhetoric has escalated since Oct. 7
After Oct. 7, Owens began to accuse Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinian people. That was too much for Daily Caller co-founder Ben Shapiro, who had hired Owens to develop content for his conservative news outlet.
The two parted ways.
Since then, Owens has begun to put a vile twist on the 1913 lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish man falsely accused in Atlanta of raping and murdering a 14-year-old girl.
As reported by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Frank’s case was credited as the impetus for the Anti-Defamation League or ADL, which won Frank a posthumous pardon.
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Last Sunday, Owens called Frank “a convicted pedophile.” She followed up, Haaretz reported, with accusations that ADL has ties to the Ku Klux Klan and was founded by “racist, deranged defenders of pedophilia.”
Owens has also warned that criticizing Israel can get you killed. And she implied Jews were to blame for the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963.
“They shot JFK in an open car, he was a sitting president, so my security doesn’t matter, if they want me, they’re gonna get me,” she said, according to Haaretz and other news outlets.
Conservatives are starting to condemn her
On social platform X, formerly Twitter, conservative and Fox News contributor Sara Carter expressed her contempt:
“I’ve known Candace for some time and admired her work on BLEXIT & as a valued voice in the conservative movement. Sadly, something seems to have gone wrong with Candace, so that she is now engaging in and spreading the most vile & vicious Jew-hating conspiracy theories, some of them dating back to the depths of ignorance from the Middle Ages! Her false ideology spreads like a deadly cancer.
“I condemn Candace Owens, I condemn her disgraceful fall to espousing pure antisemitism, and I know there is no room in the conservative movement for an antisemite like Owens. I call upon any conservative individual or organization who still holds any ties to Owens to similarly condemn and cut off Owens.”
On July 26, Donald Trump was scheduled to appear at fundraiser in Nashville that included Candace Owens in the guest lineup.
That created a firestorm, and Owens’ name was eventually removed from the lineup, The Jerusalem Post reported.
Owens said she voluntarily withdrew because she would have been asked to promote a cryptocurrency as a condition of attending.
Charlie Kirk has a problem and knows it
On Friday Donald Trump will take the stage in Arizona that will no doubt be festooned with the logos of its sponsor — Turning Point.
Turning Point’s website remains an unabashed megaphone for Candace Owens.
Something has to give.
And Charlie Kirk knows it.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at [email protected].
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Publish date : 2024-08-22 05:06:00
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