A vocal Trump supporter exploded at a Democratic congressman during a public hearing on Tuesday, suggesting that he had unfairly suggested she was a Nazi sympathizer.
California Rep. Ted Lieu played a short excerpt from comments made by Candace Owens, a conservative activist who speaks for the Turning Point Project youth group.
Speaking last year to a British audience, she sought to distinguish between Trump-style nationalism and Nazi 'National' socialism. Owens' choice of words at the time was panned by some as clumsy, and by others as friendly to Adolf Hitler.
By the end of the House Judiciary Committee hearing, which focused on hate crimes and white nationalism, Owens was berating Lieu for taking her out of context and not offering her a chance to defend herself.
And Donald Trump Jr., one of Twitter's hottest conservative flamethrowers, wrote that it was '[g]reat to see someone call out the Dems on their purposeful manipulation of facts for their narrative. Since the media runs with anything they say and is the marketing wing of the DNC they aren't used to getting called out for the repeated BS.'
Lieu began his five minutes during the hearing: 'I don't know Ms. Owens. I'm not going to characterize her,' Lieu had said. 'I'm going to let her own words do the talking.'
'I'm going to play for you the first 30 seconds of a statement she made about Adolf Hitler,' he said, holding up his phone to a hearing room microphone.
'I actually don't have any problems at all with the word "nationalism." I think that it gets – the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is actually what I don't want,' Owens was heard saying.
'So when you think about, whenever we use the word "nationalism" the first think people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. You know, he was a national socialist, but if Hitler had just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine,' she continued in the recording.
'The problem is, is that he wanted – he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize, he wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German.'
Lieu posed his question to Eileen Hershenov, senior vice president of policy at the Anti-Defamation League, referring to Owens.
'When people try to legitimize Adolf Hitler, does that feed into white nationalist ideology?' he asked. Hershenov said it does.
A Republican Judiciary Committee member gave Owens, an African-American, the floor minutes later.
'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. He purposefully presented an extracted clip,' she scolded.
Hearing the word 'stupid,' chairman Jerry Nadler leapt in.
'It is not proper to refer disparagingly to a member of the committee. ... the witness may not refer to a member of the committee as "stupid",' he ordered.
'I didn't refer to him as stupid,' she shot back. 'That's not what I said. That's not what I said at all. You didn't listen to what I said.'
A stone-faced Lieu sat
