The House Judiciary Committee’s hearing about white nationalism on social media got off to a poor start Tuesday when the YouTube livestream fell victim to the very problem Congress hoped to investigate. Hundreds of anti-Semitic comments, racist missives, and declarations of white supremacy flooded the YouTube page for the hearing—“Anti-hate is a code word for anti-white,” wrote one user. By the time Google’s representative began speaking, commenting on the livestream had been disabled altogether.

In what turned out to be a perfect metaphor for the hearing, even this news proved divisive. “This just illustrates part of the problem we’re dealing with,” said Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, after The Washington Post reported that the YouTube comments had been taken down. Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert shot back in Trumpian fashion and in the most conspiratorial terms. “Could that be another hate hoax?” he asked. “Just keep an open mind.”

Indeed, a hearing meant to address a deadly serious topic—data show a surge in fatal attacks by far-right extremists in recent years—was instead derailed by Republicans veering off topic to rage about their own perceived ideological persecution at the hands of Facebook and Google. As proof, they summoned Turning Point USA communications director Candace Owens, a young black conservative who says Democrats represent a “plantation” mindset, to air her grievances about the hearing’s very existence. “The hearing today is not about white nationalism or hate crimes, it’s about fear-mongering, power, and control,” Owens said, suggesting at one point that Democrats “blame Facebook, they blame Google, they blame Twitter, really [Democrats] blame the birth of social media, which has disrupted their monopoly on minds.”

Owens went on to argue that white nationalism is a Democratic trope invented to “scare black people,” and that “the myth of things like the Southern switch, the Southern strategy . . . never happened.” (The Southern strategy, infamously articulated by Reagan adviser Lee Atwater, was a Republican electoral strategy to capitalize on racial animus to siphon white votes from the Democratic Party. It is not only well-documented, but was so pervasive that then-R.N.C. chairman Ken Mehlman apologized for it in 2005.) At one point, apropos of nothing, she promoted her own Blexit campaign, an attempt to get African-Americans to leave the Democratic Party.

Already a controversial figure in her own right, Owens grew even more radioactive after a New Zealand white nationalist gunman named her as an influence in a manifesto he published before attacking two mosques last month, killing 49 people. (“Each time she spoke I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness,” he wrote, though he added that some of her “extreme” positions were “too much, even for my tastes.”) The Republicans on the committee, however, showered Owens with praise. “I think you’ve caused my friends on the left to go to their safe spaces,” Rep. Ken Buck glowed, asking if she “triggers the left.”

Democrats, for their part, had little patience for Owens’s presence among more credible experts from the Anti-Defamation League, the major tech companies, and victims of white nationalism. “Of all the people that Republicans could have selected, they picked Candace Owens,” Rep. Ted Lieu said. He then played an infamous clip of Owens at a TPUSA event, seemingly defending Adolf Hitler’s nationalism: “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. 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.”

The video of the exchange between Lieu and Owens, of course, quickly went viral, complete with Owens’s face contorting with rage. “I think it’s pretty apparent that Mr. Lieu thinks black people are stupid,” she shot back, attempting in classic Trump-era form, to cast her Democratic critics as the real racists.

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