Comedian Chelsea Handler shared a video on Instagram Sunday by Nation of Islam Louis Farrakhan — widely considered a racist, antisemite, and homophobe — and declared: “I learned a lot from watching this powerful video.”
The video shows a snippet of Phil Donahue’s television program in 1990, in which he interviewed Farrakhan over two days. Handler’s comment accompanied the clip:
The video begins with a white woman asking Farrakhan why Americans cannot “come together” regardless of race.
Farrakhan attempts to tell her the she, and others, look at black people “as second-class, inferior citizens.”
To an older woman who confessed her fear of racial violence, he declared: “We do not have a history of killing white people. White people have a history of killing us.” Some audience members, from the Nation of Islam applauded.
It is not clear exactly what Handler “learned” from the video. In the comments, she acknowledged that he is antisemitic but appeared to defend him.
Farrakhan has a long history of incendiary rhetoric, calling Jews “termites” in 2018.
Handler, whose politics are left-wing, tweeted over the weekend: “Junteenth [sic] should be a national holiday but with gravity – a day of reflection and mourning.
Juneteenth is observed in some black communities as a celebration of emancipation.
Handler also referred to next weekend’s rally for President Donald Trump in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as a “white supremacist rally” because of violent race riots that took place 99 years ago in Tulsa on a different date (May 31-June 1, 1921).
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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