Black conservatives are lashing out at ESPN host Jemele Hill. The journalist came under fire from White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders after she called President Trump a “white supremacist.” Sanders said ESPN needs to can her.
[RELATED: ESPN Host Not Backing Down On Trump Comments]
Fellow journalists came to her defense, believing Sanders using the White House bully pulpit as a way to smear her was beyond inappropriate. Meanwhile, some black conservatives are going after her with a vengeance.
Hill used her personal Twitter account (which, let’s be honest, isn’t personal) to say that Trump was “ignorant,” “offensive,” “a bigot,” “unqualified” and “a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself [with] other white supremacists.”
In a statement from The National Center for Public Policy Research, an independent conservative think-tank, a number of black conservatives with the Project 21 leadership network came down hard on Hill’s mean tweets.
“Jemele Hill is not only hurting her own credibility by feeding the hate machine disrupting our nation, but she is causing more harm in a divided America. Her outbursts seem nothing more than the epitome of the racism she so ardently seeks to call out,” said Project 21 member Richard Holt, a political consultant.
“Ms. Hill’s comments harm the cases of Americans who have been victims of actual racism and keep us from moving into a post-racial society. Has the fight for civil rights and full emancipation for blacks in America been so successful that we have nothing left to do but malign white conservatives for their political views? Ms. Hill isn’t wrong to dissent, but she picked the wrong method to do it.”
Project 21 member Christopher Arps said he’s tired of ESPN’s rampant political bias. He said she’s lucky to be black, female and liberal.
“It’s fortunate for Ms. Hill that she is in a triple-protected group in this country,” he said. “She is African-American, she is female and she is liberal. Anyone else making similar inflammatory comments would have been immediately suspended and – of course – later terminated.”
Project 21 member Nadra Enzi, a community activist in New Orleans, said “Jemele Hill’s dog whistle blew a deafening twitter crescendo that unsurprisingly echoes Hillary Clinton’s denunciation of her loss as proof of lurking white nationalism.”
Hill issued an apology on Twitter.
ESPN readily accepted it.