Candace Owens calls Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' a 'textbook' while excusing Kyrie Irving's antisemitism

09 November 2022

On Wednesday's edition of The Daily Wire's The Candace Owens Show, the namesake right-wing host encouraged her audience to read Adolf Hitler's 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf while complaining about the backlash over Brooklyn Nets point guard Kyrie Irving's embrace of antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Irving's open endorsements of fringe ideas that include antivaccine misinformation, flat Earth, and the New World Order have thrown his career with the National Basketball Association into significant jeopardy. NBA reporter Marc Stein noted on Monday that "there is growing pessimism in various corners of the league that Kyrie Irving will ever play for the Nets again," Yahoo! Newspointed out on Tuesday.

But Owens – who defended rapper Kanye West after he repeatedly disparaged Jews last month – believes that Irving is a victim of overly zealous coordinated retaliation by the Anti-Defamation League and the NBA. To make her case, Owens alluded to a controversial documentary called Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America that rocketed to the top spot on Amazon after Irving promoted it – an action that contributed to his suspension. Numerous organizations have demanded that Amazon remove the film, which the Washington Free Beacon explained on Tuesday "not only denies the Holocaust but also claims Jewish people falsified the historical record about it in order to 'conceal their nature and protect their status and power.' It also claims that white people cannot be authentic Jews, a belief that inspired the deadly 2019 shooting at a kosher supermarket in New Jersey."

Owens maintained that the movie's popularity should absolve Irving for tacitly endorsing its hateful subject matter:

I was right. Last night, #HeroestoNegroes was trending on Twitter. It was a top trend on election night, no less, and everybody under the trend was saying 'I'm watching it right now, I'm watching it, why would they try to take this from us?' Why would they try to keep this information from us?' And that is what happens when you over-censor information.

It was never necessary to attack Kyrie Irving, even if you felt that the information in this documentary was bad. And there are plenty of people that have spoken out and said that. The extreme efforts that the ADL went through in coalition with the NBA to punish him and their efforts to then demand that Amazon take this documentary down, of course, was going to pique people's interest.

Not only is the documentary the top documentary on Amazon, but it's also the book – which I didn't know they had a book – is now a bestseller on Amazon's list. If you go to Amazon bestsellers, you will see 'Heroes to Negroes.' It is one of the bestselling books.

Continuing on, Owens suggested that Amazon would be violating its subscribers' rights to free speech if it withdraws Heroes to Negroes from its library:

And, what I like about this story is because – you know how I feel about free speech. I think people have a right to be wrong. I think people have a right to take in information. I think people have a right to read whatever they want.

That transitioned into Owens mentioning Hitler's Mein Kampf – a collection of his insidious ramblings that he authored while in prison for trying to overthrow the Weimar Republic in 1923 – as an invaluable educational document. Owens then concluded that it is unfair to punish Irving while Amazon continues to make money off of the motion picture that ultimately led to his fall from grace:

A little reminder, if you actually go on Amazon right now, you can order and read 'Mein Kampf.' It is not an endorsement of Adolf Hitler to read a historical textbook. It just is not, right? And the idea that we should be censoring all this information and no one should see it because it hurts some group of people, to me, just does not gel well with our First Amendment rights.

Amazon, still not in trouble, don't know how Kyrie Irving's entire life is on the line, but nobody is talking about Amazon, but they are making a ton of money. So Kyrie Irving is losing money and Amazon is making tons of money. Think about that for a second.

Watch below via Media Matters for America or at this link.

From Your Site Articles