Chapman professor quits Congressional race following KKK tweet, home invasions
Chapman history professor Liam O’Mara tweeted an image of a KKK hood to far-right, Black political commentator Candace Owens, a move that led to O’Mara’s resignation from the 42nd Congressional District race in 2022 and politics altogether. Photo courtesy of O’Mara
Chapman University history professor Liam O’Mara began considering an early end to his two-year political career after repeated home invasions forced him to move out. The series of break-ins began last November, shortly after the initial release of the 2020 final vote tallies for the 42nd Congressional District race — an election O’Mara ended up losing with 42.9% of the vote.
Now, he’s homeless — residing in his mother’s house with most of his belongings in storage.
“Instead of going for the valuables, they went into closets for papers and started digging around things,” said O’Mara, a 2006 Chapman alumnus. “They took my Ph.D. off the wall, smashed the frame and threw it in the mud outside. They dug out boxes that had my old wedding photos and threw them out into the mud … There were constant attacks, and they just kept coming.”
However, the flagrant trespassing and destruction of property weren’t enough for O’Mara to quit politics and drop out of the running for the 42nd Congressional District race in 2022. The breaking point, he said, was a mistake made March 23: tweeting an image of a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) hood in response to far-right political commentator Candace Owens, a Black woman, in an attempt to call out comments he perceived as racist.
The interaction caused O’Mara, who teaches about nationalist, populist and neo-fascist movements, to officially drop out of the Congressional race and politics entirely after only two years in the field.
Owens tweeted a statement March 22 attributing Black people as the largest source of violent offenders against both the Black and Asian American communities. The right-wing commentator also used the term “clown world” when referring to the anti-white supremacy movements.
O’Mara responded to Owens’ tweet at approximately 2 a.m. PST, tweeting an image of a KKK hood with a caption that read: “Yikes. You may’ve dropped this.”
O’Mara received widespread criticism for the tweet and attributed his lapse in judgement to stress and lack of sleep — partially caused by emotional distress after the multiple break-ins — and social blindness, which he said was a byproduct of having Autism Spectrum Disorder. O’Mara explained he was caught up in responding to the argument itself and not the person, a possibility resulting from social media culture.
However, O’Mara also emphasized in a Twitter apology video that he takes full responsibility for his actions and does not want to make excuses.
“I’m the first to admit it was an insensitive way to approach the topic,” O’Mara told The Panther. “It does reflect a bit of white privilege that it just didn’t occur to me that this could be seen that way … I did mess up. I acknowledge the screw-up there and the racial insensitivity of it.”
Owens, angered by the tweet, wrote March 23 that she filed a police report because of the incident. O’Mara initially defended his message, but later resorted to apologizing for his actions.
O’Mara explained that Owens’ original tweet contained white supremacist, neo-Nazi rhetoric when she used the phrase “clown world,” which has strong ties to racist meme usage. Although O’Mara said some people went as far as to call him a white supremacist, he emphasized that his intention behind the tweet was, conversely, to call out Owens’ racist language.
“That kind of reference from somebody with that big a platform really gets to me,” O’Mara said. “When it followed an attempt to — on the day of a national shooting — suggest that Black men are inherently violent, and then tying that to a neo-Nazi reference, that’s what I was trying to point out ... It’s straight-up white supremacist rhetoric.”
If he could go back, O’Mara said that he would have used his words to explain his intent instead of posting or justifying the KKK hood image.
Owens did not respond to The Panther’s request for comment.
Debra Bratton, a Chapman almuna, commented dismissively on O’Mara’s apology and explanation.
“Dude, your (sic) done,” Bratton wrote in her tweet. “Your (sic) in my district and this won’t be disappearing anytime soon. Spreading the word far and wide in the valley.”
In a response to The Panther’s inquiry for further comment, Bratton wrote that she doesn’t want to contribute any misinformation, but claimed O’Mara knows what he did was “stupid and dangerous,” rendering him “not suitable for office.” Bratton declined to speak to The Panther on the matter further.
O’Mara, who ran for the 42nd Congressional District in 2020 — garnering 42.9% of the vote — lost to Ken Calvert, a 28-year incumbent. Many of O’Mara’s own staffers have condemned his actions in the form of a letter signed by 16 current and former campaign staff members.
Both O’Mara and Owens have received criticism and sympathy for their actions. Tom Zoellner, a Chapman English professor, believes O’Mara released his original tweet with intentions to condemn racist and anti-Black Lives Matter (BLM) rhetoric.
”He seems to have been reacting to Owens' caustic derision of BLM, not her identity, which was temporarily forgotten in the disaggregated space of social media,” Zoellner said. “(O’Mara) recognizes his mistake and has offered an unequivocal apology, but the conservative outrage machine is still eager to twist this into something that it isn't and destroy his career in the process."
Marisa Ozbat, an activist from Prince George, Virginia, worked on O’Mara’s 2020 campaign through social media fundraising groups. Ozbat, contrary to the staffers mentioned in the letter, stood up for O’Mara’s character.
“It was obvious his intent was to point out that Candace Owens says some extremely foul and racist garbage,” Ozbat told The Panther. “We worked with his campaign in 2020 and he’s got not one racist bone in his body. I think he just didn’t see how it could be perceived, and he apologized.”
“It was obvious his intent was to point out that Candace Owens says some extremely foul and racist garbage. We worked with his campaign in 2020 and he’s got not one racist bone in his body. I think he just didn’t see how it could be perceived, and he apologized.”
Kayla Asato, a 2018 Chapman alumna who works with political and nonprofit organizations in Orange County, condemned O’Mara’s actions, but explained that it was clear he had no malicious intent.
“Regardless of how much of a grifter and white supremacist Candace Owens is, she is still Black and he is not,” Asato told The Panther. “While it is super bad optics for people to do harm to an African American woman with a single piece of white supremacist iconography, so many politicians have done far worse and not gotten any repercussions.”
Moving forward, O’Mara is unsure whether or not he will return to the political scene. Instead, he said he intends to look for a place to live and focus on a new career, possibly involving political commentating.
“I really don’t like this sense that I would make any excuse for what I did,” O’Mara said. “I’ve always been pretty direct about who I am, and I wish people could take into account that I occasionally lack a little tact, but it’s not because I’m a terrible person. It’s because sometimes I fail to recognize how other people would see something — that’s where the autistic social blindness comes in … I just wish more people had given (me) the benefit of the doubt.”