The problem with denying Candace Owens an Australian visa for her upcoming tour

If she is banned, Candace Owens will, like others previously denied entry to Australia, go on about free speech. And we will be denied a seat to her unhinged drivel.

OPINION: Candace Owens, to use the AFL vernacular, sounds like a bit of a dropkick.

She’s a far right black American firebrand who thinks that Donald Trump is too moderate. Her wider views are both insulting and weird.

Unbothered by facts, or logic, or decency, she says that trans people could be responsible for a rise in mass shootings.

She believes that Israel was founded by a cult. She rejects the evidence for Moon landings and dinosaurs.

She even buys into the flat Earth theory, which may be news to the astronauts who have seen the planet from space. Unless, they, too, are fake?

Owens is planning to come to Australia to share her ideas. The Coalition is among those groups which argue that she should be banned.

“There is no place in Australia for Candace Owens and her vile, divisive, and dangerous conspiracy theories …” wrote Zionist Federation of Australia leaders Jeremy Leibler and Alon Cassuto.

Candace Owens could be coming to Australia. Picture: AFP

“Extremism, racism, bigotry, and anti-Semitism are unacceptable in any form, regardless of whether they originate from the far left or right.”

Immigration Minister Tony Burke will assess Owens’ visa suitability. In responding to the cancel calls against Owens, he has spoken of his intolerance for hate speech.

The Zionist Federation of Australia is right, at least to the extent that Owens is extreme, racist, and anti-Semitic.

But is banning her, which would inevitably feed into her marketing machine, the wisest approach?

Must we be shielded from such wholesale nonsense? Do we need protecting from such nutty ideas, lest they catch on?

You’d have thought not, at least until October 7 last year, when a massacre of Jews triggered the unchecked expression of ancient vendettas and crackpot ideologies.

No one has done much to check the fringes of the Pro-Palestinian lobby which bow to Hamas and advocate the obliteration of a country and its people. (If only these Australians could be banned from their own country.)

A Sydney MP has said the controversial US far-right speaker and Holocaust denier Candace Owens should not be allowed in Australia for a speaking tour slated for November. Picture: Instagram

Instead, we have a long tradition of banning visitors who spout similarly hateful ideas.

David Icke, a Holocaust denier and 22-carat dropkick, was banned in 2019 in what would have been his 11th visit to Australia.

It seems that Owens has borrowed some of Icke’s pet theories; that the Jewish people, who bankrolled Hitler, were behind the 9/11 attacks.

Milo Yiannopoulos was banned, too. He seeks to offend everyone to his Left, which is pretty much everyone.

We also cancelled Gavin McInnes, perhaps the soundest target for rejection.

He founded the Proud Boys, the all-male band of nutjobs who stormed the US Capitol after Trump lost a legitimate 2020 election.

We did allow Nigel Farage, that peculiarly British politician who appears to have been fully imported from the estate veranda of a colonial plantation.

And Lauren Southern, a shock merchant from Canada. She generates attention, in part, by questioning the sexual proclivities of religious figureheads.

Canadian far-right activist Lauren Southern. Picture: AAP

Somehow, the nation survived its encounters with Farage and Southern. Most of us probably cannot remember that they have been here.

They may have appealed to malcontents who buy into conspiracy theories which validate their resentments.

But chances are that the likes of Farage and Southern convince no one who wasn’t already convinced.

By that thinking, Owens should be allowed to visit Australia. She’d have no natural constituency in this country, given her calling card is as a Black woman who is anti-Black.

Just this month, she announced that Stalin was Jewish, and that the wife of French president Emmanuel Macron is a man.

She does not heed history or evidence or opposing views. Candace Owens bows to Candace Owens. She does not think or investigate. She performs – on a worldwide circuit in which the most outrageous speakers are united by narcissism.

You’d hope that a local visit would expose such oddness. That seeing such xenophobic fantasies up close would dispel any lingering faith in their messages.

It seems that this won’t happen with Owens. She appears set to be cancelled.

Perhaps, to be fair, she should be, given Australian Jews no longer feel safe in their own country.

Yet it also seems like a missed opportunity.

If she is banned, Owens will, like others denied Australia, probably bang on about free speech and the Antipodean backwardness.

And we will be denied a front seat to her unhinged drivel.

Debunking such rot, by being subjected to it, seems like a more robust response. It would certainly affirm that we know who we are, and who we are not.

Originally published as The problem with denying Candace Owens an Australian visa for her upcoming tour