Fox News personality Harris Faulkner took time on Friday to bring up Hillary Clinton in a discussion about a highly controversial New York Times editorial written by conservative Bret Stephens, titled, “I Was Wrong About Trump Voters.”
“First of all I want to go back to Hillary Clinton for just a second and I normally don’t blame one person for an entire movement nor do I give them total credit either but she was a specific case of bringing hate to a new level in this country,” Faulkner told her Fox News colleagues on “Outnumbered.”
Faulkner partially praised President Bill Clinton, while not mentioning him by name or title, but said he did bring the country together during a time of economic hardship. (By the time he left office Bill Clinton balanced the federal budget and erased the federal deficit.)
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“Her husband was the one in dynamically similar straits that we are today economically who said ‘I feel your pain’ to every single American. He was able to do something that really we haven’t seen anybody do since and that’s bring the entire country together, maybe for just that moment,” Faulkner said, adding, “and Lord knows he had his issues right?”
“But with her it particularly was damaging for her to express her hate for half the country after having been in a White House for eight years when it wasn’t specifically like that,” she added, presumably referring to Clinton’s remark suggesting half of Trump voters – not half the country – are “deplorables.”
Faulkner mischaracterized and misstated Clinton’s remarks from the highly contentious 2016 campaign, so for the sake of fact-based reporting here is what the former U.S. Senator and U.S. Secretary of State said, via NPR:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? [Laughter/applause]. The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
Clinton, like Stephens in his New York Times essay, went on to talk about “that other basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change.”
Neither Faulkner nor most of the media ever reported on that part, arguably the more important part of Clinton’s comments, where she essentially suggested she too felt their pain:
“But the other basket, the other basket, and I know because I see friends from all over America here. I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as you know New York and California. But that other basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”
Faulkner went on to say:
“When people were really down and you didn’t kick them when they were down. You tried to help them with a better economy with saying that you understood them. So now you fast forward and we get the Clinton crowd, the Hillary Clinton version of that crowd, as you say, and we’re only growing more of them. Because it’s easier sometimes to profligate hate than it is to shed your grace and love.”
Watch Faulkner’s remarks below or at this link: