Conservative pundit Bill Kristol got into a minute-long shout match with Bloomberg Politics editor John Heilemann on Wednesday’s “Morning Joe” after he warned of a campaign to disrespect the memory of Confederate soldiers in the wake of the South Carolina church massacre.
On the MSNBC show, as well as in several tweets the day before, the consistently wrong Kristol accused “the left” of trying to tear down Confederate statues and ban the teaching of speeches by Abraham Lincoln after retailers like Amazon and eBay announced they were pulling Confederate memorabilia.
“Nobody is talking about any of those things,” Heilemann shot back. “Literally, I know of no one. This is the classic exercise of straw man building and knocking down.”
“And I know it’s fun for you. You are trolling by doing these things, because no one on the left is suggesting what you’re suggesting,” Heilemann said.
The flag debate Kristol had weighed in on was itself a reaction to the killing of nine worshipers at a historic black church on June 17 in Charleston, South Carolina. The suspect, who appears to have white supremacist leanings, has been charged with murder.
The exchange culminated in Kristol yelling, “I am not a free market fanatic!”
Before the Heilemann showdown, he had been more or less shut down by the entire panel.
“Oh, good God,” Mika Brzezinski said under her breath before quoting Kristol’s tweets at length, as their author sat a few feet away.
Here’s one of them:
The Left’s 21st century agenda: expunging every trace of respect, recognition or acknowledgment of Americans who fought for the Confederacy.
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) June 23, 2015
Echoing his tweets, Kristol told the panel that he disliked the “cheap self righteousness” of “the left” and asked whether it was now inappropriate to honor Robert E. Lee or Confederate monuments at Gettysburg or Arlington.
When the panel threw it over to Washington Post writer and MSNBC contributor Jonathan Capehart, at first all he could muster was a laugh.
“I’m sort of dumbfounded here. We’re talking about the reaction of the slaughter of nine people in a church, historic African-American church,” Capehart said.
Caphart said Kristol was “belittling the pain and anguish” of the families of the victims whose loved ones were murdered by someone who embraced that flag, as well as blacks living in cities where it flies over their heads, by descending into teasing the left about history.
Kristol scrunched his face up in the studio as Capehart spoke.
Watch the clip of Heilemann and Kristol’s argument below:
