A parade of progressive pundits quickly joined Don Lemon in attacking Haley’s 2024 announcement in racist and sexist terms.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we recap the litany of racist and sexist reactions to Nikki Haley’s 2024 campaign announcement, caution against a call to shame conservative Supreme Court justices, and hit more media misses.
Nikki Haley Met with Sexism, Racism after 2024 Campaign Kickoff
“I have always made the liberals’ heads explode. They can’t stand the fact that a minority, conservative, female would not be on the Democratic side,” former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said last week.
Haley’s comments were a response to CNN’s Don Lemon saying Thursday that she “isn’t in her prime,” at only 51 years old — but she just as easily could have been responding to any number of the awful takes that pundits unleashed after she formally announced her presidential bid last week.
Lemon and his co-anchors on CNN This Morning were discussing Haley’s suggestion that politicians over 75 years old should be required to pass mental-competency tests when he suggested that Haley herself isn’t in her prime: “A woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.”
Co-anchor Poppy Harlow immediately pushed back on the comments saying, “What are you talking . . . wait . . . are you talking about ‘prime’ for child bearing? Or are you talking about ‘prime’ for being president?”
Lemon spoke over Harlow to say, “Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just saying what the facts are. Google it.”
He offered a half-hearted apology on Twitter later on Thursday: “The reference I made to a woman’s ‘prime’ this morning was inartful and irrelevant, as colleagues and loved ones have pointed out, and I regret it. A woman’s age doesn’t define her either personally or professionally. I have countless women in my life who prove that every day.”
Haley, for her part, responded to the apology in a tweet of her own. “To be clear, I am NOT calling for competency tests for sexist middle-aged CNN anchors; only for people who make our laws and are 75+,” she quipped.
CNN chairman Chris Licht reportedly said Friday that he was “disappointed” by Lemon’s comments, calling the remarks “upsetting, unacceptable and unfair to his co-hosts, and ultimately a huge distraction to the great work of this organization.”
On Friday and Monday, Lemon was notably absent from the CNN morning show he co-anchors.
Not to be outdone, The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg on Monday dismissed Haley’s call for a “new generation” of leadership saying, “You’re not a new generation, you’re 51.” Meanwhile, co-host Sunny Hostin blasted Haley’s call for mental-competency tests for politicians older than 75: “How dare she say that someone over 75 needs some sort of mental acuity test. I think she needs a mental-acuity test.”
Daily Beast contributor Wajahat Ali appeared on MSNBC on Sunday and accused Haley of using her brown skin “as a weapon against poor black folks and poor brown-black folks.”
“She uses her brown skin to launder white supremacist talking points,” he said.
Ali also called Haley “the Dinesh D’Souza of Candace Owens.” He added: “She’s the alpha-Karen with brown skin. And for white supremacists and racists, she is a perfect Manchurian candidate.”
Several other figures unearthed false claims that Haley goes by the name “Nikki Haley” rather than her given name, “Nimrata Nikki Randhawa,” as a way to hide her Indian heritage. However, Haley has been called “Nikki” since she was born. Her parents immigrated to the U.S. from India.
USA Today previously debunked claims that Haley had changed her name to “get ahead” in politics. “Nikki” is a common nickname that means “little one” in Punjabi. Haley is the former South Carolina governor’s married name that she adopted after she wed husband Michael Haley in 1996 — six years before she entered politics, according to USA Today.
Mary Trump, the niece of former president Trump, played into the name-shame game: “First of all, f*** you Nimrata Haley. Second, you are a racist, anti-American sell-out.”
The Recount shared a video of Haley saying, “Take it from me, the first minority female governor in history: America is not a racist country.” Jemele Hill, a contributing writer for the Atlantic, replied to the video: “So why did she change her name then?”
So why did she change her name then? https://t.co/ZcTwADRgwz
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) February 16, 2023
Meanwhile, Politico posted a three-part thread on Twitter about Haley’s “complicated racial dance.”
“There’s no doubt Nikki Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, is a trailblazer. But she’s had a fraught relationship with race,” Politico wrote.
In 2001, for example, Nikki Haley reportedly listed her race as “white” on her voter registration card, and never publicly explained why.
She’s also shown a willingness to embrace some of the dog whistles deployed by the current Republican Party.
More: https://t.co/Iq9OqmPlVv
— POLITICO (@politico) February 14, 2023
“Haley led SC’s effort to remove the Confederate flag from statehouse grounds. She elevated Tim Scott to the Senate. Over the past two years, she publicly leaned more into her heritage,” the outlet tweeted. “But there are other parts of her record that are harder to reconcile.”
The “harder to reconcile” detail is that Haley reportedly listed her race as “white” on her voter-registration card in 2001 and she has allegedly “shown a willingness to embrace some of the dog whistles deployed by the current Republican Party.”
The latter tweet led Twitter to affix an added context tag to the post, which read: “Due to a lack of options in the ‘race’ section in American voter registration forms, South Asian Americans often choose ‘white’ because none of the options fit their identity For example, in 1990, 25% of South Asian Americans checked ‘white,’ while 5% checked ‘black.’ For example, in 1990, 25% of South Asian Americans checked ‘white,’ while 5% checked ‘black.’”
And it was a tale of two headlines over at NBC, where the framing of an article about vice president Kamala Harris’s race contrasted sharply with a piece on Haley’s race:
Then and now, @NBCNews:https://t.co/YuGCJq4Y4qhttps://t.co/ZRNrUljdWr pic.twitter.com/sNXzPoT4JJ
— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) February 20, 2023
The offensive takes were not limited to the Left and the mainstream media, however. Conservative pundit Ann Coulter appeared on The Mark Simone Show podcast this week and asked during a conversation about Haley: “Why don’t you go back to your own country?”
“Her candidacy did remind me that I need to immigrate to India so I can demand they start taking down parts of their history,” she said. “What’s with the worshiping of the cows? They’re all starving over there. Did you know they have a rat temple, where they worship rats?”
Coulter called Haley a “bimbo” and a “preposterous creature,” for her support for removing the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Statehouse after the 2015 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.
“This is my country, lady,” Coulter said. “I’m not an American Indian, and I don’t like them taking down all the monuments.”
NR’s Jim Geraghty pointed out just how preposterous it is to suggest that Haley go back to her country:
Apparently it doesn’t matter if you’re born in Bamberg, go to Clemson, live in South Carolina almost your entire life, build a business, sit on the board of your church, donate $130,000 to charity in one year, and have a husband in the Army National Guard who serves in Afghanistan for a year . . . You will still face “You’re not one of us” crap.
Headline Fail of the Week
“There is only one way to rein in Republican judges: Shaming them,” A Washington Post opinion piece claimed over the weekend.
“America’s judiciary is dominated by conservatives issuing an endless stream of rulings that help corporations, the rich and the bigoted while hurting working-class people, women and minorities in particular,” writes columnist Perry Bacon Jr.
Bacon goes on to say: “Democratic politicians, left-leaning activist groups, newspaper editorial boards and other influential people and institutions need to start relentlessly blasting Republican-appointed judges. A sustained campaign of condemnation isn’t going to push these judges to write liberal opinions, but it could chasten them toward more moderate ones.”
Bacon acknowledges that his suggestion could fuel violence: “There will be arguments that such high-profile criticism would put judges in physical danger. I obviously oppose violence. But judges are powerful figures setting policy — they should get as much scrutiny as elected officials.”
The Washington Post chose to publish this call to action just eight months after police foiled an assassination plot against conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Police detained 26-year-old Nicholas John Roske, wearing black clothes, in front of Kavanaugh’s home in Maryland, according to a criminal complaint. The man told authorities he called 911 because he was having suicidal thoughts. He told a dispatcher he had come “from California to kill a specific” Supreme Court justice, the affidavit said. Authorities found a Glock 17 handgun with two magazines and ammunition, a tactical knife, pepper spray, zip ties, a hammer, a screwdriver, and other gear in Roske’s backpack.
What could possibly go wrong?
Media Misses
— More than 1,000 contributors to the New York Times signed a letter to the paper this week criticizing its “coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children,” which “has in recent years treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources.” Times executive editor Joe Kahn, for his part, pushed back against the claims in a letter to the paper’s staff: “Our coverage of transgender issues, including the specific pieces singled out for the attack, is important, deeply reported, and sensitively written.” He concluded: “We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation of Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.”
— The New York Times confusingly chose to report that the shooting at Michigan State University that left four people dead and five others wounded had “put the school back in the national spotlight, years after a sex abuse scandal involving a prominent sports medicine doctor on its faculty became public.” The Times distastefully linked the recent tragedy at the university with the school administration’s handling of sexual-assault accusations against Larry Nassar, a university physician who served as the team doctor of the U.S. women’s national gymnastics team for 18 years. He has been accused of sexual misconduct by hundreds of young women.
— MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell claimed that Florida governor Ron DeSantis “says that slavery and the aftermath of slavery should not be taught to Florida schoolchildren,” during an interview with vice president Kamala Harris on Friday. DeSantis press secretary Bryan Griffin refuted the claims in a tweet: “@GovRonDeSantis never said this, and FL has extensive black history requirements.”