Candace Owens is a bigot, but banning her will only backfire

Lately Candace Owens even dabbled in Holocaust denialism when she queried whether Josef Mengele really carried out gross experiments on kids at Auschwitz.

I cannot stand Candace Owens. I find her the most grating of all the bigoted irritants on the internet. And that’s saying something.

The web is awash with noisy purveyors of prejudice. They set up their webcams, apply their concealer, and then proceed to bash whatever minority they have decided is responsible for the rot of the Western world.

Yet even in this sea of wordy invective, Owens stands out.

It’s the combination of her motormouth delivery and her historically illiterate conjecture that marks her out as especially exasperating. Her latest grift is Jew-bashing. She bemoans those “DC Jews” who throw around accusations of anti-Semitism to “silence people”. Oh, those sneaky Jews.

She asked a rabbi if he was “drunk on Christian blood again”, in a sick nod to the medieval hysteria that depicted Jews as the sacrificers of Christian children and drainers of their innocent blood.

She wrings her hands over the “rich and powerful forces” at “anti-American organisations like the Anti-Defamation League”, the NGO founded to combat anti-Semitism. Just say it, Candace: you think Jews are the power behind the throne, the all-powerful puppeteers of public life. You know who else thought that? I’m not even going to say.

Lately, she’s even dabbled in Holocaust denialism. She queried whether Josef Mengele really carried out gross experiments on kids at Auschwitz. It sounds like “bizarre propaganda”, she said. How long before – like other online grifters with an outsized obsession with the Jews – she starts wondering if the reports of six million dead are “bizarre propaganda” too.

Given she gets my goat, you might think I would welcome her banishment from Australia. You might think I would cheer the Immigration Minister’s rejection of her visa application to do a speaking tour in November. After all, why should the good folk of Australia, especially the Jews of Australia, have to watch as this queen of grift waltzes round the country planting seeds of bigotry? Keep her out – right?

Not so fast. A dangerous precedent is being set. The Australian state is assuming for itself the staggering power to determine which ideas its citizens may hear, and which ideas their dainty ears must be protected from.

It is behaving in loco parentis. Where mums and dads babyproof their homes to protect their little ones from bumps and grazes, the Australian government is Candace-proofing the nation to protect people from her barbs and nonsense.

Candace Owens in 2019.

I object to everything Owens says, but I object even more to the right of the state to protect people from what she says. If it’s a choice between being offended and being protected from offence by a bureaucracy that thinks it knows better than the rest of us, give me the former every time.

The thing is, Immigration Minister Tony Burke is right in what he says about Owens. He’s right that she’s been “downplaying the impact of the Holocaust”. He’s right that decent folk will find such drivel vexing and hurtful.

But he’s wrong – catastrophically wrong – when he says “Australia’s national interest is best served when Candace Owens is somewhere else”. Shorter version: Australia will be a better, healthier country if this wicked woman is kept out. Really? The edict against Owens’s speaking tour actually suggests Australia is a fragile country, one so jittery that it can’t even intellectually face down a bloviating muppet such as her. It also gives the impression Australians are a childlike people. When Burke says Owens could “incite discord in almost every direction”, he’s slighting his own citizens more than her.

He’s depicting Aussies as a mob-in-waiting. Apparently all it will take to tip them over the edge of civility is a lame speech or two by a visiting irritant.

This is always the impulse behind censorship – not only to silence problematic people but also to tame the unpredictable plebs.

Censorship is a double calumny: it shushes those who have something to say and patronises everyone else. The entire engine of censorship is the patrician urge to protect the masses from their own worst instincts. It is the government’s dread of its own populace and their alleged latent hatreds that convinced it Owens must be kept “somewhere else”.

Tony Burke

It will backfire. Bans always do. The only person who will benefit from Burke’s edict is Owens herself. She will pose as such a brave teller of truths that states feel the need to crush her. Burke is aiding and abetting her grift. See, she’ll say, I told you the establishment is out to get me. More people will now look her up, to see what Australia is so scared of. How much better it would have been to give her the liberty to speak, and everyone else the liberty to laugh in the face of her lies.

That’s how bad ideas are best tackled – not by forbidding them but by mocking them, by subjecting them to the unforgiving spotlight of free discussion and frank ridicule.

I want to speak up for an under-represented minority – the one that hates what Owens says but thinks she should be free to say it.

For the price of the “safety” the government is offering you is your own autonomy. In protecting you from insulting words, the government is insulting you in a far worse way. It is taking away your liberty to hear and your liberty to decide for yourself.

That’s far more annoying than Owens’s shtick.

Brendan O’Neill is a journalist and editor of Spiked.