Stephen A. Smith Gushes Over Candace Owens: ‘She Knows What She’s Talking About’
Stephen A. Smith continued his never-ending quest for attention by saying remarkably ill-informed and outrageous things during a new episode of his titular YouTube show.
Smith addressed the recent controversy over his interview with right-wing smear merchant Candace Owens, on his show, insisting that she “knows what she’s talking about.”
Owens has been a vocal critic of Israel, going so far as to suggest in a not-so-veiled anti-Semitic trope that the Jewish state is controlling U.S. foreign policy. She recently posted on X:
Like Smith, Owens often makes outrageous comments with the ostensible goal of getting attention, like the time she discussed Adolf Hitler’s nationalism during a Turning Point USA event in London. Here’s how I reported this when it happened in February of 2019:
“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.
This is but one of dozens of examples where Owens said some absolutely crazy shit. Like the time she promoted a U.S. invasion of Australia (though she later said she was joking.) She has also insisted that the French First Lady is actually a man, and claimed that President Donald Trump “made a deal” with the deep state.
But it’s her flirtation with anti-Semitism that has led to her exile from Trump events, like her dubious effort to cast doubt on the events of the Holocaust in some sort of weird revisionism.
Smith has had Owens on before and defended her comments lustily. And he doubled down after his most recent conversation with the provocateur, saying:
I know that some of you out there may not have wanted to hear a damn thing that Candace Owens had to say, but four plus million people subscribe to listen to her every chance they get. And not everybody in America, or this world for that matter, can say that. What she says matters, and a lot more often than not. She seems to know what the hell she’s talking about. It’s very rare you hear somebody says, she’s clueless, she don’t know what she’s saying. You don’t hear that about her. You wanna refute what she has to say and defy her positions? You better know what you’re talking about because she certainly does usually, if not always. That’s why I had on the show.
Now, there is a decent chance that Smith is unaware of Owens nakedly playing footsie with anti-Semites. But there is also a chance that Smith likes that and is opting to amplify her because he cares less about editorial standards and more about broadening his audience, even if it means he’s reaching people relish Owens’s bigotry.
Maybe Stephen A. Smith should spend less time playing solitaire and more time researching the guests on his show.
Watch above via YouTube.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
