Bill Kristol blasted the direction of the Breitbart website after the death of Andrew Breitbart, calling it a "disservice" to the founder's memory.
"I knew Andrew well. He was a troublemaker, but he was a good-hearted person," Kristol said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program. "I hate the fact that it's called Breitbart News. If they changed the name and called it right-wing intolerant, mean-spirited news, that would be fine."
Kristol was among a panel discussing Donald Trump pulling in Stephen Bannon, chairman of the Breitbart News site, to become the CEO of his campaign, apropos given that Robert Costa of The Washington Post said, "the beating heart of Trumpism started at Breitbart."
"This is where Trumpism really starts to marinate," Costa said on "Morning Joe" program. "This anti-illegal immigration strain of the right wing Republican populism starts at Breitbart in 2010, 2011 as part of the tea party movement."
However, Kristol defended the tea party wing, saying Trump took conservatism down a crooked path.
"It's one thing to be against illegal immigration … It's one thing to say you should have less legal immigration. That is a serious public policy issue," Kristol said. "It's another thing to start castigating people and dividing people by ethnicity, race, religion and so forth …
"Trump in that respect is very different from the tea party types. You can criticize them all you want. But most of them were not Trumpites in that respect. Trump is a new low."
And Kristol wasn't done with the de-evolution of Breitbart after the passing of Andrew Breitbart.
Three months ago the site called Kristol "a renegade Jew."
"I'm not a big, 'Oh, it's terrible anti-Semitism' kind of guy, but that's a little creepy," Kristol said. "And why was I a renegade Jew? Because I didn't support Donald Trump?"
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