ABC legal analyst Sunny Hostin said on Monday’s broadcast of “The View” that people like Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, and first lady Melania Trump have no right to quote Martin Luther King Jr. because they “enabled a racist president.”
Hostin said, “I remember the time when someone like Jemele Hill came forward and called Donald Trump a racist and lost her job because of that, received death threats because of that. I remember Collin Kaepernick getting canceled because he stood up for people and stood up for the police brutality that Black men were experiencing. And remember that Dr. King was called an enemy of the state, was trailed by the FBI, was called a troublemaker because he was talking about race, talking about the evils, the three evils, which in 1967 for him were racism, poverty and the war in Vietnam.”
She continued, “We still are suffering from those three evils, maybe in a different way because we still are suffering from the scourge of racism and police brutality. We are suffering from economic disparity and poverty, and we are certainly suffering from this evil pandemic. And Dr. King, in 1967 again said, you know, there has been some progress, but we must not allow this progress to cause us to engage in a superficial, dangerous optimism. I think that is what happened to us. I think we saw that we are going to have the first female vice president who is African American and Southeast Asian, and we saw such promise with Georgia, you know, turning blue. We saw such promise, and then on January 6, we see that white supremacy is very much so alive and well.”
Hostin added, “We saw an insurrection on our nation’s Capitol. We saw that there are people just like Dr. King said that would much rather have white supremacy rather than this multiracial democracy that he wished for. So, I would say that in order for us to really live out his legacy, his dream, is that we must demand truth before unity. I saw today, unbelievably, in my view, Ted Cruz, Kayleigh McEnany, Ronna McDaniel, Melania Trump, quoting Dr. King, tweeting Dr. King. Those are the same people, like Melania Trump with this birther lie, Ted Cruz challenging the Electoral College. Kayleigh McEnany over and over again with her propaganda. How dare they. How dare they try to quote Dr. King on the celebration of his birthday when they enabled, enabled a racist president causing this insurrection and attack on our democracy. So while we have some progress, we just have such a long way to go.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN