Chris Hayes Issues Disclaimer After MSNBC Guest Calls Trump Nominee Pete Hegseth a ‘White Supremacist’
MSNBC host Chris Hayes issued a disclaimer on Thursday after one of his guests claimed Fox News host-turned-Trump nominee Pete Hegseth was “known to be a white supremacist.”
Former NAACP Legal Defense Fund president Sherrilyn Ifill cornered Hayes into providing viewers with “the full side of the story” after she called President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense a “white supremacist,” citing his opposition to diversity and inclusion initiatives in the military.
After Hayes criticized President-elect Donald Trump for nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary and Matt Gaetz as attorney general, Ifill said, “I’m gonna add the secretary of defense nominee, Peter Hegseth, the Fox News commentator as well.”
She claimed:
This is someone who, you know, is known to be a white supremacist, known to be an extremist. Whose platform, whose book is basically about his opposition to the advancement of black officers to the top brass, and the military is actually a very important area for black advancement. And so him selecting that particular person– And by the way, the Department of Defense has 3 million employees. There’s no evidence that this man has ever run anything. The fact that he is a veteran is simply insufficient.
Ifill then described Hegseth’s nomination as “eminently dangerous.”
“I would just say that Hegseth would say that he would deny strenuously he’s a white supremacist,” declared Hayes. “I just wanna put that on the record.”
“So did Trump,” Ifill interrupted.
Hayes continued, “He has tattoos that garnered the attention of essentially National Guard commanders when he was going to be sent on the mission to guard the 2020 inauguration of Joe Biden. He was pulled from that, he says, because he was identified as an extremist, in part because of those tattoos. He thinks it’s crazy. I just want to, like, give the full side of the story here.”
Ifill argued, “But if you’ve read what he’s written about the people in the military, about gay people in the military, about women in the military, about black people in the military, especially in supervisory positions, he is an extremist. That is absolutely true.”
Watch above via MSNBC.
