‘The capacity to incite discord in almost every direction’: LOL, a right-wing shill has been banned from Australia

Right-wing commentator Candace Owens is, to put it bluntly, a nightmare of a person. She does not deserve to visit Australia, and now she will not.

After concerned groups rightly campaigned against allowing Owens into the country, immigration minister Tony Burke announced she would not get a visa. “From downplaying the impact of the Holocaust with comments about [Josef] Mengele through to claims that Muslims started slavery, Candace Owens has the capacity to incite discord in almost every direction,” he said. “Australia’s national interest is best served when Candace Owens is somewhere else.” And that sums it up nicely. Owens is an extremely dangerous person.

Owens has a 3 million-strong following on social media, and she fills the heads of her followers with hatred and lies. She is particularly noted for being extremely antisemitic, one of the things that got her banned from Australia. She once liked a post on X about Jews drinking the blood of Christians, but even that wasn’t enough for her. On a July episode of The Candace Show she labelled the documented crimes of Mengele as “propaganda” and “absurd.” This insidious Holocaust denial was too much even for MAGA, and Owens was dropped from a Donald Trump fundraiser, although at the time she denied that her cancellation was anything to do with antisemitism.

In addition to the antisemitism, which is obviously bad enough on its own, Owens is anti-Muslim, anti-transgender, and even anti-Black despite being Black herself. She claimed that the Black Lives Matter movement was about “black anarchy” and that “White supremacy and white nationalism is not a problem that is harming Black America.” And, surely to the surprise of no-one by this point, she also spread conspiracy theories during COVID.

Owens’ tour of Australia was advertised as for people “seeking alternative viewpoints”. It would be, the promo material said, “provocative” and “controversial”—but those are just buzzwords hiding the real truth: Owens, like Donald Trump (who she of course wholeheartedly supports) seeks only to divide.

Her tour would have covered Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane, and now thankfully those places don’t have to deal with her. It’s somewhat of a mystery why she would have sold any tickets at all, considering that during the pandemic she suggested on her show that America should invade Australia and “free an oppressed people” because of the strict public health measures put in place—measures that the vast majority of Australians in actual fact supported.

The Anti-Defamation Commission, a Jewish-Australian organization, welcomed the news that Owens wouldn’t be allowed to set foot on Australian soil. Its chairman Dvir Abramovich told ABC News that the refusal was, “a victory for truth,” and continued, “Australia has no place for those who mock the suffering of genocide survivors and insult the memories of the 6 million Jews who perished. This is a line in the sand.”

Owens hasn’t commented yet on being banned from an entire country, but considering her viewership, she’s sure to start ranting about freedom of speech and cancel culture before too long.