Subscribe
NewsOne Featured Video
CLOSE

Candace Owens disgusted the world with how she handled being cited by at least one of the alleged gunmen who launched deadly shooting attacks on two mosques in New Zealand on Friday. The woman who once ran an anti-Trump site by laughing on social in the wake of the horrific attacks.

MORE: New Zealand Mosque Terrorist Reportedly Was Listening to Civil War Music

Robert Owens, her grandfather, told The Daily Mail, “This is the first time I’m hearing about this but this is not my granddaughter’s behavior. Why would she be laughing at it? That doesn’t seem proper. She is a religious person and we taught her. She has family all over the world. Members of our family and her grandmother’s family are all over the world in many nations. We just don’t do that. We’re not that type of people.”

He added, “I know how she was raised and the things we taught her. And no, that’s not our character. We had a lot of influence on her life as a child and we try to be close to our grandchildren.”

Mr. Owens also said he wasn’t aware of Candace’s politics, “I don’t know too much about it because I don’t follow the news as closely. From time to time when I find that that she’s on, I try to listen. But if people know her way of living, it tells you that she is very flexible in her views. Sometimes you can say things and be taken the wrong way. I was a very good follower of Martin Luther King. I listened to him and some of the things he said, I disagree with and then some things he said, it brought tears to my eyes because I knew it was so true.”

He continued, “Sometimes she might come over to some people one way in some of the things she’s saying. I’ve listened to Donald Trump and some people hate what he says and I listen, and dig out the history of America, and say, you know what? Donald Trump was right. But I loved JFK and Bobby K, I loved those Kennedy boys. It brings tears to my eyes that they’re dead… I want to emphasize to you, Candace is not that type of an individual. She was brought up with all kinds of people and they were all in my yard playing with her.”

He also revealed her background, “Candace herself is international. Candace is in the middle and she can accept everybody, that’s the way she was brought up from a child. She was brought up in a predominantly white neighborhood and people told us not to move up there because we weren’t going to be accepted. I’m from the South and I was born and mostly raised in North Carolina and I know how it was. My father was attacked by the Ku Klux Klan back in the day and he put me under the bed because of all the bullets that were coming into the house. When I peeped out, I saw was people in black clothes and riding horses. Naturally, I grew up wondering who those people were that were riding those horses and shooting at us.”

Mr. Owens now lives North Carolina. He sold his home in Connecticut “where he ran a dry-cleaning business for 35 years with his wife, Nola, who passed away in 2013,” The Daily Mail reports.

In case you missed it, Owens, 29, was cited as “the person that has influenced me above all,” according to an apparent partial transcript posted to Twitter by journalist Ian Miles Cheong.

Owens responded to the reports by threatening legal action against the media if it “attempts this ‘Candace inspired a mosque shooting in New Zealand’ bit.”

She tweeted “HAHA” and LOL!” in part of her earlier responses to those same reports, prompting some folks on Twitter to wonder if Owens was laughing at a terror attack that reportedly killed 40 people.

Owens’ views on Muslims have been documented in her own tweets, both directly and indirectly.

She has called President Donald Trump “the savior” of the free world. Trump, of course, has fought for the U.S. to ban Muslims.

Beyond that, Owens has also used Twitter to quote Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in the negative context of Muslim immigration.

Most recently, Owens had some glowing remarks about Adolf Hitler last month. Hitler, of course, wanted to exterminate people of Jewish faith much like Islamophobes want to do to Muslims.

“When we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. He was a national socialist. If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine,” Owens told the group of young attendees.

Those fateful words reportedly resulted in a number of members of her organization, Turning Point USA, wanting her fired.

SEE ALSO:

Candace Owens Lets Roseanne Bash Kamala Harris

Candace Owens Trying To Save Her Career

Sunken Place Summit: Twitter Destroys Candace Owens’ Young Black Conservatives Event
Black Republicans
12 photos