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Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Sun-Times
National
S. E. Cupp

Candace Owens is infected with viral MAGA fever

Candace Owens. (Jason Kempin/Getty Images)

Despite all her tough talk on social media and podcasts, her hackneyed attacks on liberal snowflakes and cancel culture, and her daddy-issues affection for dictatorial strong men like Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Candace Owens is seemingly afraid of lots of odd things no one should really be afraid of.

Not that that keeps her from trying. She’s apparently very worried that Bill Gates, computer geek and philanthropist, is attempting to make people allergic to meat with manipulated mosquitoes. And she wants you to be worried, too.

These are just some of the irrational and paranoid fixations that make Candace Candace — an avowed conspiracy theorist (a term she says was invented by the CIA, itself a conspiracy theory), an accomplished attention-seeker, an occasional defender of antisemitism and an alleged grifter.

So, it should come as no surprise that her latest irrational fear that she’d like to foist upon the rest of us is of “men that paint their nails and wear dresses.”

Her recent tantrum against the trans community on her Daily Wire podcast is so cartoonish that it reads almost like a parody of bigotry — as if she looked it up in a textbook and decided, “I’m going to give this a try.”

“I definitely discriminate against men that paint their nails and wear dresses,” Owens huffed. “I don’t really care how you feel about that. Wear your dress and you can paint your nails. But I’d prefer you keeping 100 feet away from a playground and all of the feet away from my children and me. If I see you, I’m going to cross the street if I’m with my kids.”

Now, this sounded better, perhaps, in the original German, when Nazis used the same kind of language to describe their fear of and disdain for Jews.

Or when American Southerners discriminated against Italian immigrants, in some cases even trying to segregate them. As Louisiana Gov. John M. Parker described Italians, “just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in [their] habits, lawless, and treacherous.”

Or when whites used it in favor of Jim Crow laws.

And nobody tell Owens, the self-proclaimed Christian, what people said about lepers in the Bible.

Nevertheless, “We want to survive,” Owens continues. “And so, when we get that feeling…my mother used to refer to it as the heebie-jeebies. When someone just gives you the heebie-jeebies, even if you can’t quite put your finger on why, I think you need to lean into that and I actually think that society would be safer if we discriminated more.”

Ah…eugenics. You thought history had voted it out, but here’s Candace to give it some CPR.

In one of the darkest chapters in American history, eugenics was responsible for the involuntary sterilization of people who were thought to be “feebleminded” or unfit — what today we’d call disabled. Latinos, indigenous, Black and poor people were also targeted.

Would she bring back forced sterilization, too, in the interest of our “survival,” to make society “safer”?

S.E. Cupp is the host of “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered” on CNN.

The Sun-Times welcomes letters to the editor and op-eds. See our guidelines.

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