Turning Point USA spokesperson Candace Owens. Image by Gage Skidmore/Wikipedia Commons

By Ari Feldman February 12, 2019

Conservative activist Candace Owens half-heartedly walked back her controversial statements on Adolf Hitler, posted online last week, in an interview on Fox Business Monday.

BuzzFeed News reported last Friday that Owens had invoked Hitler in responding to a question about nationalism, disputing that Hitler, who envisioned the Third Reich lasting for 1,000 years, could be described as a nationalist.

“He was a national socialist,” Owens said. “But if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine. The problem is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize.”

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Owens then suggested that Hitler was a globalist because he wanted “everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German.”

In a friendly interview on Fox Business Monday, Lou Dobbs asked Owens to clarify her comments, prefacing his question by saying that she was only facing backlash because she was under attack by leftist media outlets. Dobbs also agreed with Owens that “the word nationalism is wrongly attributed to Hitler.” (The Encyclopedia Brittanica refers to fascism, the form of Nazi government, as “extreme nationalism.”)

Owens falsely suggested that her original comments were actually about Hitler’s genocidal crimes against Jews.

“He was not focused on trying to bring the Germans to a better state, because he was actively killing German Jews,” she said. “He was also trying to expand, and he was an imperialist.”

Dobbs responded by saying that Hitler and Joseph Stalin were “two of the evilest” people in history, and gave Owens some Hitler-related rhetorical advice.

“In this business, it’s a very simple thing –– the news business –– anybody who brings up Hitler loses. Every single time so if you’re looking for a metaphor, taken from the old guy. Find another metaphor.”

“I will totally, totally take that advice,” Owens responded. “I’ve learned my lesson.”

Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aefeldman

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