Candace Owens condemned after alleging ‘Black Americans are the most murderous group in America’

Critics of right-wing commentator outraged after dismissal of George Floyd’s death, and comments about murder rate

Candace Owens has been condemned online and accused of “verbal gymnastics” after she alleged that Black Americans were the country’s “most murderous group”.

The far-right commentator was speaking on Tucker Carlson Tonight when she said Democrats had downplayed the arrest of a Black man, 39-year-old Darrell Brooks, for the deadly attack on a Wisconsin Christmas parade last week.

Ms Owens, also downplaying the deaths of George Floyd and the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse as issues of racial injustice, alleged that “Black Americans are the most murderous group in America by rate”.

Her remarks were widely condemned by Twitter users on Tuesday, with sports journalist Andreas Hale writing: “Watch in awe the gerbil gymnastics of Owens saying George Floyd wasn’t about race”.

“[And] because the cop didn’t use a racial slur while murdering him to the pivot of ‘Black Americans are the most murderous group in America.’ She better hope God is in Blackface”.

“Dumerica,” Rick Rosner, a man who has the world’s second highest IQ, added, before describing Ms Owens as “sleazy” and one of many “evil grifters preaching at couchbrains and gullibles”.

“What we’re seeing here is just evil. Pure evil,” Charles Johnson, an American blogger and former jazz guitarist added in a tweet. “I honestly don’t know how people like this sleep at night.”

The admonishment of the 32-year-old came after she told Mr Carlson that “the left can pull a racist narrative from thin air where it doesn’t exist. When it is actually in their face they try to avoid it”.

“Especially when a perpetrator is a Black person against another white person which obviously happens more often in this country because Black people are the most murderous group in America by rate,” Ms Owens said.

That has been disputed by FBI figures from 2017 showing how most homicides in the US are interracial. Nor does the claim consider the fact that Black Americans are incarcerated at higher rates than their white counterparts.

Ms Owens, in comments that angered her critics, told Tucker Carlson Tonight viewers that “the two biggest race cases of the last years are really George Floyd and Kyle Rittenhouse, never actually produced a single piece of evidence pointing to race, right?”

She said that Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin did not use “racial language” before kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for almost mine minutes in May 2020 – apparently ignoring the fact that Chauvin was convicted of murder for acting disproportionately during an arrest.

The Black man’s death was meanwhile seen as another injustice for Black Americans in the face of the US’ criminal justice system, and led to a summer of protests across the US and around the world.

Ms Owens went on to allege that a “racial narrative” was “extracted” from the trial of Mr Rittenhouse by the left, and that the issue of race “didn’t matter” because his victims were white.

The comments appeared to ignore the fact that the teenager had travelled from Illinois to Wisconsin, where he was forced to defend himself from anti-racism protesters, as alleged in court last week when he was acquitted.

Ms Owens is well known for making controversial statements.

This article was amended on 17 December 2021. It originally said that Mr Rittenhouse had travelled from Illinois to Wisconsin with a rifle. This was not the case.