Republican strategist Mary Matalin Sunday morning demanded CNN political correspondent Van Jones retract his comments about Donald Trump's election win being a "whitelash" against President Barack Obama,leading to a fierce argument between the two political experts.
During a panel discussion on ABC's "This Week," Matalin made her demand while discussing, with another panelist, the takeaways from several Democrats concerning Hillary Clinton's loss.
Jones, jumping in, told her he stands by his comments and believes that race was a factor in the election, leading Matalin to call Jones a "racial polemicist" when instead he should be a "racial reconciler."
"You should be ashamed of yourself to say that to my face," he told her. "I have spent more time in this country…"
"[To] say it behind your back would be better?" Matalin said.
"Hold on a second," the CNN pundit told her. "I spent more time than you have trying to be a racial reconciler."
"Really?" Matalin shot back. "How do you know that? Do you anything about me? Do you know anything about me?"
Jones also accused Matalin of not listening to his whole quote, and she responded that she did, and that he'd asked what he should tell his kids.
"What I would tell your kids?" Matalin said. "I'm a black man in America who went to Yale, who has written books, who served a president."
"And ninth generation American, ma'am," he responded. "I'm the first one in my family born with all my rights. I'm a ninth generation American. And so we have not escaped because I went to Yale all the problems of this country."
"I do know your daddy," she told him. "Your grandparents were teachers. Your grandfather was a bishop."
"George, this is a problem that we have right now," Jones said, turning to show anchor George Stephanopoulos. "If someone like myself, who is married to a white woman, who has spent my entire life building bridges, can't point out the alt-right whitelash reaction without being accused of being a racial polemecist, we're going to have a big problem."
Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, asked Matalin if she has "no sense of decency" but to say such words to Jones, and the GOP strategist offered her "deepest apologies."
"You don't know anything about me," she still argued. "You don't know anything about my healing and I would say there are ways to get to reconciliation different from calling — focusing on the toxic elements as you did."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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