Fox News’s Andrea Tantaros suggested yesterday on television that I had called for her resignation because she is a supporter of Donald Trump. This is — how shall I put it? — not true. Not in the slightest. In fact, I responded to her claim that conservatism had achieved nothing important in 15 years by asking why, if that were true, she was not including herself among the activists, consultants, journalists, and movement representatives whom she believes have been so ineffective. Our initial exchange, from a few days ago, is publicly accessible:
Bizarrely, Tantaros responded to this by claiming that I — someone who shamefully, just like her father, is of foreign birth — had instructed her to vote for Ted Cruz (who, apparently, is a “Canadian”):
You can tell that this isn’t true by looking at the words I used.
A little later on, Tantaros submitted that, by disagreeing with her in public, I was revealing my sexism. In order to advance this theory, she pretended that, having been upset by our exchange, I called for her dismissal. In fact, the tweet she is quoting — out of context, natch — was the one that set her off in the first place, not a response to anything she subsequently said. Is it time to fire up the Delorean?
For some reason that will forever be inexplicable to me, Tantaros yesterday elected to rekindle the episode, this time with the charge that I had asked her to resign because she was favorable toward Trump, and, a little later, with a repetition of the charge that it is misogynistic to question her.
In order to understand how entirely wrong both of these secondary claims are, you might start at the beginning of this post once again. What a tangled web . . .