Trump activist Candace Owens says George Floyd is 'not a hero' and was the 'bottom of society' in 17-minute rant

Candace Owens, an outspoken Trump supporter and activist, has posted a 17-minute video on Twitter in which she shares her thoughts on George Floyd.

Owens, who is African American, has made controversial statements in the past, but the latest has sparked a new level of outrage.

In the video, she paraphrases black conservative Shelby Steele, saying:

Something unique about black Americans, which you cannot find in any other culture in America... and it is the fact that we cater to the bottom denominator of our society ... we are the only community that will get outraged and get up and organise and picket in protest to defend the bottom denominator of our community, meaning criminals, err, burglars, robbers... anything that you commit a crime, only black Americans will be out picketing to defend the criminals. It is not something that white Americans do, that Jewish Americans do.

She goes on to say that white people will "dispose" of people who are "at the bottom of their society".

The rant goes on in this vein for a while. For what it's worth, this is neither logical nor accurate.

There is not a "scale" of society, and people with criminal records should not be "disposed of" – they should be supported and rehabilitated, especially when systematic oppression due to race or socioeconomic status has led them to commit (or, in many cases, be wrongly convicted of) criminal offences.

Further, white people have a long history of rallying in support of people who have made questionable choices. See: Trump supporters.

Anyway, she eventually gets to her point: that George Floyd – whose brutal murder at the hands of police officers has sparked protests around the world – is neither a "martyr or a hero".

She bases this on her belief that Floyd "had drugs on him, was using counterfeit bills, and was high".

While she does condemn the actions of Derek Chauven, the police officer who caused Floyd's death by kneeling on his neck for almost eight minutes, she seems to want to make the point that Floyd should not be used as the face of protest.

In order to illustrate this, she reads out Floyd's criminal record for about five minutes.

Eleven minutes in, Owen says that it's "easy" as a black person to "take the victim narrative, to believe that we are being brutalised by police officers". Her logic seems to be that black Americans are sometimes killed by other black Americans, so the crimes of the police are irrelevant.

She also espouses the Trump narrative that protesters are "antifa thugs" and that racism "doesn't exist as a problem in this country", implying the whole thing is a Democratic conspiracy to win the election.

Needless to say, this hasn't gone down well. Here are just a handful of people's comments.

We can surely all agree that taking 20 minutes to post a video in which you smear the name of a dead man and minimising the fight of oppressed communities is... not the one.