Fox contributor Mollie Hemingway lectured the media for not reporting that the guy yelling “white power” in a video Trump retweeted was sarcasm and thus not doing enough to counter prejudice against white people.
In case you missed it, Donald Trump retweeted a video today of a white man in the Florida retirement community, The Villages, driving a golf cart and shouting “white power.” CNN has more:
The President retweeted the video that showed the community's Trump supporters and anti-Trump protesters arguing with one another. The President thanked the "great people" shown in the video.
"Thank you to the great people of The Villages. The Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats will Fall in the Fall. Corrupt Joe is shot. See you soon!!" he wrote in the tweet. Roughly three hours later, the tweet no longer appeared in Trump's timeline.
"President Trump is a big fan of the Villages. He did not hear the one statement made on the video. What he did see was tremendous enthusiasm from his many supporters," White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere said in a statement.
Hemingway was at her usual perch on Fox’s MediaBuzz show today, scolding the media for not being pro-Trump enough and, in this case, accusing the media of promoting racial conflict instead of harmony – while ignoring the racial conflict and divisiveness deliberately incited by both Trump and her own network.
HEMINGWAY: Well, this is a great example of media being factual without being accurate. Not that it's a tweet that he should have tweeted or put up. It appeared to show someone sarcastically responding to someone accusing him of holding these — this individual of holding these views — by sarcastically saying he did. And this is something where this is a very big issue right now. And we need the media to really do a good job, rather than provoke racial conflict. You have a lot of people advocating hatred toward white people, or you have responses like this, and it needs to be very careful. I think the media seem to want to promote conflict, rather than to remind people that this is a wonderful country where people get along very well, and where we are, -- you know, we are the best country in the world on some of these things.
Really, Mollie?
This is the video Trump retweeted. Yes, the guy yelling “white power” was responding to an anti-Trump protester but there’s no indication that he was sarcastic and didn’t mean it.
Seniors from The Villages in Florida protesting against each other: pic.twitter.com/Q3GRJCTjEW
— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) June 27, 2020
But Mollie, have you checked out anything Tucker Carlson says lately? Just this week, he called for Black Lives Matter protesters to be labeled as “terrorists” and “rounded up” before they destroy the country. Last month, he suggested that the protests against George Floyd’s murder by police were worse than his death. He also grossly distorted comments by anti-racist activist Tim Wise to claim he believes “parents must hurt their own children” because “happy childhoods are a sign of racism.”
And then there’s Trump. If Hemingway really cares about people getting along well, she really needs to pay closer attention to him.
Not surprisingly, host Howard Kurtz said nothing to challenge that stream of hypocritical BS from Hemingway. But the other guest, Jessica Tarlov, let her have it pretty good:
TARLOV: [Trump] is his worst enemy when it comes to social media, and we've seen that time and time again. He also doesn't seem to pay a lot of attention to the things that he is tweeting. We've seen this when anti-Semitic tropes end up on his Twitter account — Don Jr.'s, as well, his son. And then they play dumb about it. “Oh, what are you talking about? I didn't know that that was anti-Semitic.” The president needs to be the adult in the room. It's clear that he can't handle that, and someone needs to take his phone away. We've been discussing that for years at this point. But for—
[…]
TARLOV: -- Mollie to say, “Oh, you know, they didn't get the depth of this, it was sarcasm.” White power is never a joke, and for Mollie to say, “Oh, this is a country where we all get along.” I don't know what country Mollie's living in at this moment.
You can watch it below, from the June 28, 2020 MediaBuzz, via Media Matters.