Candace Owens told she should 'be ashamed' after comments about Obama's new book and racism in America

As the right wing continues to grapple with President Donald Trump’s recent election loss, it’s no surprise pundits are now turning to criticise former President Barack Obama.

In back-to-back appearances on Fox News last week – on Sean Hannity’s show on Thursday night, then on Fox & Friends Friday morning – conservative commentator Candace Owens, known for her criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement, disparaged Obama’s upcoming memoir, A Promised Land.

(Owens is also spreading the false claim that Joe Biden is not the president-elect.)

In the new book, Obama describes that he believes Trump’s presidency was part of a racist backlash against his own time in office.

In the interview with Hannity, Owens called Obama “despicable”, “unfathomable”, “backwards,” and said he was “making history in the wrong kind of way.”

She then accused the two-term president of “hating America".

“He is the first president that has ever come out of the White House hating America, and that is what I believe about Barack Obama today,” she said.

Owens also claimed that Obama wouldn’t have been elected if racism was still present in the US.

“If people were feeling spooked, if people were feeling racist, or feeling like white supremacists, he would never have stepped foot into the White House,” she said.

“This is a majority white country, okay? Barack Obama won because white Americans voted for him, because white Americans believed in him,” she said, “and by the end of his term, those same Americans no longer believed in him, and that includes me.”

While many Trump supporters praised her, others said she should "be ashamed" of her comments as racism in the US is still clearly rampant:

“It is November 2020 and this great shame is saying that America is not racist because some white people voted for Obama in 2008. lord grant me the strength,” one Twitter user wrote.

Despite Owens' tirade, it seems clear that Obama does not, in fact, hate America.

In an expert from his book, Obama instead wrote about the country with clear-eyed nuance:

“What I can say for certain is that I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America – not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind.”

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