Donald Trump Jr. Praises Candace Owens for Defending Her Hitler Comments After Ted Lieu Airs Clip in Congress

Donald Trump Jr. has praised right-wing activist Candace Owens for her appearance on Capitol Hill, during which she defended her comments about nationalism and Adolf Hitler.

Owens, 29, director of communications at the conservative group Turning Point USA, appeared as a witness in front of the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday during a hearing on hate crimes and white nationalism.

Representative Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, played a clip of the comments made by Owens regarding Hitler in December while she was promoting her organization in London. Owens, who supports President Donald Trump, claimed Lieu took her remarks out of context and said she was offended by his use of them.

"Wow. Well done @RealCandaceO!!! Great to see someone call out the Dems on their purposeful manipulation of facts for their narrative," tweeted Trump Jr., the president's eldest son, about a clip of Owens' response to Lieu. "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."

During the hearing, Lieu said he did not know Owens and would not try to characterize her. "I'm going to let her own words do the talking. So I'm going to play for you the first 30 seconds of a statement she made about Adolf Hitler," he said, before holding his phone up to the mic.

Owens can be heard saying, "I actually don't have any problems at all with the word nationalism. I think that the definition gets poisoned by leaders that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don't want. So when you think about whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. You know, he was a National Socialist. 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. He wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German."

Owens responded angrily. "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 purposely presented an extracted clip," she said, before Chairman Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat, intervened.

Nadler said it is not proper for a witness to disparage a committee member and incorrectly suggested she had called Lieu stupid. Owens was allowed to continue.

"As I said, he is assuming that black people will not go pursue the full two-hour clip, and he purposefully extracted—he cut off, and you didn't hear the question that was asked of me," Owens said.

According to a BuzzFeed News report of the London event, Owens was asked about nationalism in Western society, and it was she who brought up Hitler in response to the question.

"He's trying to present as if I was launching a defense of Hitler in Germany, when in fact the question that was asked of me was pertaining to whether or not I believed...in nationalism and that nationalism was bad," Owens told the judiciary committee hearing. "What I responded...was I do not believe that we should be characterizing Hitler as a nationalist. He was a homicidal, psychopathic maniac that killed his own people. A nationalist would not kill their own people."

She then said Lieu, like the critics of Trump, was deliberately taking remarks out of context "to create a different narrative."

"That was unbelievably dishonest, and he did not allow me to respond to it, which is worrisome and [tells] you a lot about where people are today in terms of trying to drum up narratives," Owens said. "By the way, I would like to also add that I work for Prager University, which is run by an Orthodox Jew. Not a single Democrat showed up to the embassy opening in Jerusalem. I sat on a plane for 18 hours to make sure that I was there."

She added, "I'm deeply offended by the insinuation of revealing that clip without the question that was asked of me."

Lieu did not respond immediately to a request for comment.