Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) played a video of Candace Owens defending Adolf Hitler‘s nationalism in a hearing on hate that was attended by the controversial right-wing provocateur.

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee invited Owens, a former Infowars personality, to testify at a hearing on white nationalism and hate crimes. She used the opportunity to plug Blexit, her campaign to have black people leave the Democratic party, and claim Antifa is the real extremist threat.

When it was Lieu’s time to speak, the progressive lawmaker reminded his colleagues of some controversial comments Owen made about a certain German dictator.

“Of all the people that Republicans could have selected, they picked Candace Owens,” Lieu said. “I’m going to let her do the talking. I’m going to play for you the first 30 seconds of a statement she made about Adolf Hitler.”

“I actually don’t have any problems at all with the word ‘nationalism’,” Owens said in February at an event alongside TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk in February. “Whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler.”

Owens explained that Hitler’s problem wasn’t his nationalism, it was his globalism: “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, 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. Everybody to look a different way. To me, that’s not nationalism. In thinking about how we could go bad down the line, I don’t really have an issue with nationalism. I really don’t.”

After playing the clip, Lieu asked one of Owens’ co-panelists, Anti-Defamation League executive Eileen Hershenov: “When people try to legitimize Adolf Hitler, does that feed into white nationalist ideology?”

“It does Mr. Lieu,” Hershenov replied. “I know that Mrs. Owens distanced herself from those comments later, but we expressed great concern over the original comments.”

After a backlash back in February, Owens clarified that she did not mean to defend Hitler, who she described as a “homicidal, psychotic maniac who was bent on world domination.”

Watch above, via PBS.

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