Black conservative commentator Candace Owens says congressional “hate hearings” are really about “fear-mongering, power, and control.”
By John Friend
On April 9, the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), a fierce critic of President Trump, held a rather Orwellian hearing focusing on hate crimes and the rise of white nationalism in America. Once again, the mainstream political establishment made perfectly clear its utter disdain and contempt for white Americans who hold positive, pro-white perspectives by deriding and slandering such ideas as “bigoted” and “hateful.”
Unsurprisingly, not a single pro-white advocate was invited to speak to the committee. Instead, a variety of social justice advocates, including a representative from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the president of the Equal Justice Society, made appearances before the committee in order to denounce the alleged “threat” of white nationalist ideology and the spread of “hate” on social media platforms and other sectors of the Internet, which many witnesses before the committee insisted has been facilitated and even encouraged by President Donald Trump.
“White supremacists in the United States have experienced a resurgence in the past three years, driven in large part by the rise of the alt-right,” Eileen Hershenov, the senior vice president of policy for the ADL, proffered in her prepared remarks before the committee. “There is also a clear corollary, as our research shows, to the rise in polarizing and hateful rhetoric on the part of candidates and elected leaders,” Hershenov noted, referring to Trump.
Hershenov went on to hype the alleged threat of rightwing violence, dubiously arguing that so-called white supremacists have been responsible for “more than half of all domestic extremist-related murders in the past 10 years.”
“So, there is a crucial need for this hearing, focusing on white nationalism—not because other types of extremism aren’t dangerous, but because we as a society, our laws, and our elected leaders have not focused sufficiently on the rising threat of white supremacy,” Hershenov declared before moving on to discuss the role social media has played in allowing “hate to spread.”
Facebook and Google, two of the largest Internet companies, which own other large social media platforms including Instagram and YouTube, also had representatives at the hearing and insisted they are doing everything in their power to prevent the spread of “hate” and “white supremacist” ideology on their platforms.
“There is no place for terrorism or hate on Facebook,” Neil Potts, public policy director for Facebook, stated in his testimony before the committee. “We remove any content that incites violence.”
Facebook recently announced a new policy to ban any sort of “praise, support, and representation of white nationalism and white separatism” on its platform, which this newspaper reported on at the time.
Perhaps the most interesting and reality-based testimony came from Candace Owens, a young black conservative who serves as communications director for Turning Points USA, which seeks to advance conservative causes on college campuses across America. In her explosive testimony, which went viral on social media in the aftermath of the hearings, Owens blasted Democrats and their fear-based political strategies, which she powerfully argued have been used so effectively to keep blacks and other minorities down.
“We’re hearing [terms like ‘white nationalism’] sent around today because what they want to say is that brown people want to be scared, which seems to be the narrative that we hear every four years ahead of a presidential election,” Owens stated in her testimony.
She went on to note some of the real problems facing the black community in America today, including poor education and test scores, rampant criminality and violence, abortion, and single-parent families, problems that, according to Owens, have been fostered by policies promoted by Democrats—not white nationalists.
“The hearing today is not about white nationalism or hate crimes; it’s about fear-mongering, power, and control,” Owens insisted. “The goal here is to scare blacks, Hispanics, gays, and Muslims, helping [Democrats] censor dissenting opinions … helping them regain control.”
Owens went on to argue that the statistics being used to allege an increase in white nationalist violence are being manipulated for political gain by Democrats, while actual instances and threats of violence coming from the radical left and antifa groups are being downplayed and ignored.
“If they actually were concerned about white nationalism they would be holding hearings on antifa, a far-left violent white gang who determined, one day in Philadelphia, that I, a black woman, was not fit to sit in a restaurant,” Owens said. “They threw water at me, they threw eggs at me, and the leftist media were silent on it.”
In a sane world, hearings would be held on the groups and organizations engaging and promoting political violence, which largely emanates from the radical left. Leftwing political violence and hate speech has largely been ignored by the political and media establishment, which constantly focuses on alleged rightwing extremism and violence that is often mischaracterized, distorted, or outright fabricated.
John Friend is a freelance author based in California.
