Conservative pundit and speaker Candace Owens has responded to criticism of recently unearthed remarks she made late last year commenting on Hitler while defending the term nationalism.

A clip of her answer posted to Twitter has been viewed more than two million times. Many on social media have criticized a portion of her answer in which Owens comments, "if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay fine."

On Friday, Owens dismissed the controversy and blamed "Leftist journalists" for mischaracterizing her comments.

Hitler was "a homicidal, psychotic maniac" and there is "no excuse or defense ever for ... everything that he did," she clarified.

Her comments were meant to show that Hitler was not a nationalist, she said. Hitler did not put Germans first; he "was putting German Jews into concentration camps and murdering — he was a mass murderer," she said.

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In the comments, Owens answered an audience member who asked for a "longterm prognosis" about the terms "globalism" and "nationalism."

Owens embraced the term nationalism; claiming the definition gets "poisoned" by proponents of globalism.

She said:

I actually don't have any problems at all with the word 'nationalism.' I think that it gets, the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don't want. So when you think about, whenever we say 'nationalism,' the first thing people thing about, at least in America, is Hitler. You know, he was a national socialist, but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay fine. The problem is ... he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German. Everybody to be speaking German. Everybody to look a different way. ... To me that's not nationalism.