She’s back.
Newly minted Hearst television host Soledad O’Brien blasted Donald Trump for “normalizing” white supremacy and lashed out at cable news for trying to be fair to the Republican nominee.
Appearing on CNN Sunday, the failed CNN host and social justice warrior gave her stamp of approval to Hillary Clinton’s efforts to tie Trump to the white supremacy movement.
“If you look at Hillary Clinton’s speech where she basically pointed out that what Donald Trump has done — actually quite well — has normalized white supremacy,” O’Brien explained. “I think she made a very good argument, almost like a lawyer. Here is ways in which he has actually worked to normalize conversations that many people find hateful.”
“I’ve seen on-air, white supremacists being interviewed because they are Trump delegates,” she said. “And they do a five minute segment, the first minute or so talking about what they believe as white supremacists. So you have normalized that.”
Clinton, she said, has “a lot of really good factual evidence [of Trump’s ties to white supremacy] that we would all agree that are things that have happened and do exist.”
O’Brien demanded that journalists ask if Trump is “softening the ground for people — who are white supremacists, who are white nationalists, who would self-identify that way — to feel comfortable with their views being brought into the national discourse to the point where they can do a five minute interview happily on national television?”
“And the answer is yes, clearly,” she said. “And there is lots of evidence of that.”
On September 10, O’Brien will debut as host of “Matter of Fact”, which is Hearst Television’s weekly, half-hour political program. The show airs on local broadcast stations and is cleared in 75 percent of the country, including Fox-owned KTTV Los Angeles. Other groups that have cleared the show include CBS, Meredith, Nexstar, E.W. Scripps, Tegna and Tribune.
It’s not clear if the numerous local stations planning to broadcast O’Brien’s program are aware of her strident liberal views – though she made no secret of them during her time hosting the failed morning program “Starting Point” on CNN, where she was known for aggressively badgering conservative guests. John Sununu, a frequent guest on that show, once told Politico he counted O’Brien as one of the “triumvirate” of Obama spokeswomen: “There’s Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Stephanie Cutter, and Soledad O’Brien.”
“Starting Point”, one of CNN’s lowest rated shows, was canceled in 2013. Following her ouster from CNN, O’Brien joined the short-lived cable network Al Jazeera America before joining Hearst.
