Candace Owens , the comms director for conservative youth organization Turning Points USA, is getting attention for curious statements she made about Adolf Hitler during a Q&A in London.

The pundit and political activist was asked by an audience member about the rise of nationalism in Western politics, and according to BuzzFeed News reporters Mark Di Stefano and Alex Spence, Owens herself brought up Hitler in response.

“I actually don’t have any problems at all with the word ‘nationalism’,” Owens said. “I think that the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don’t want… Whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler.”

Owens went on to explain that Hitler was a”national socialist,” before adding “but 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.”

Owens was joined onstage by TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, who appeared to be totally okay with Owens’ curious defense of the leader of the Third Reich who oversaw the genocide of over six million Jews during World War II.

UPDATE! Candace Owens has addressed this article (and many others) that have reported her comment in a recent Periscope interview. In it she says that what she meant was “that people wrongly conflate the word nationalism to mean Hitler,” before adding that in her purview, Hitler was not a nationalist but rather a “homicidal, psychotic maniac who was bent on world domination.”

It is worth pointing out, again, that the initial question posed to Owens was solely about the rise of nationalism, and it was she who brought up Adolf Hitler.

(H/T John Whitehouse)

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