Right-wing pundit Candace Owens now barred from New Zealand as well as Australia
Candace Owens has been barred from New Zealand weeks after a ban from Australia. (Jason Davis/Getty Images)
Right-wing influencer Candace Owens has been barred from New Zealand just weeks after being prevented from entering Australia.
Owens, who has called LGBTQ+ people a “sexual plague on society”, has been refused an entertainer’s visa to enter New Zealand, immigration officials said on Thursday (28 November).
Jock Gilray, a spokesperson for the immigration agency, said the work permit was refused because visas cannot be granted to those who have been excluded from another country, the Associated Press reported.
Owens’ visa request for Australia was rejected in October because of remarks in which she denied Nazi medical experimentation on Jewish inmates of concentration camps during World War II.
Owens was booked to speak at events in several Australian cities, as well as in Auckland, New Zealand, next February and March. Tickets remain on sale on the promoters’ website, where there is no mention of her being refused visas by either country.
The former Daily Wire host left her role at the conservative news site after clashing with its founders over her remarks about Jewish people and her opposition to the US military’s support for Israel.
Owens has also become well-known for her offensive claims about LGBTQ+ people. In September, she said TikTok was “socially engineering” men to be gay, and was reportedly suspended from YouTube for violating the platform’s hate policies.
She has also claimed that JoJo Siwa was “lying” about being gay, labelled anyone shopping at Target “gay” and a “pervert”, called “transgenderism” was a “cancer”, and praised Donald Trump as a “feminist icon” because of his opposition to trans rights.
In March 2022, she also referred to the Walt Disney company as “child groomers and pedophiles” after the company objected to Florida’s passage of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Then in May 2022, after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Owens promoted the untrue conspiracy theory that the shooter “was a trans individual.”
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