https://youtu.be/JSoLPm6a2yo
ESPN personality Jemele Hill stopped by The View on Wednesday morning to discuss the controversies she’s found herself embroiled in over the past year — specifically, her remarks directed at Donald Trump in the wake of Charlottesville, and her tweets about Jerry Jones and the Cowboys that led to her suspension. In September of 2017, Hill delivered a scathing tweetstorm criticizing the president, who she called a “white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself with other white supremacists,” as well as a “bigot” and “unqualified and unfit to be president.”
While Hill now admits that her words came from a place of emotion in the heat of the moment — which she has since conceded was a “lesson learned” — she says that she still stands by what she said in those tweets. “I don’t think that his supporters are white supremacists,” she told Meghan McCain. “What I would say though, is that they have the privilege, the benefit of the privilege to be able to disassociate themselves from certain issues.”
When further grilled my McCain about whether or not she would say, lump Ben Carson in with white supremacists surrounding Trump, Hill clarified her remarks.
“I didn’t say he was surrounded by all — by everybody who surrounded him was a white supremacist,” she continued. “Obviously Steve Bannon. I could go down the list of people who have at very least played footsie with white supremacists.”
As far as the Jerry Jones controversy however, Hill continues to admit a misstep on her part, due to her employer’s relationship with its advertisers. “I very much understood why I was suspended,” she told the panel, echoing her previous remarks. “You asked me, would I do it again, and I would just do it a different way, I wouldn’t take it to Twitter.”
“What I should have done, especially because we were having all these national conversations, is gone to ESPN and asked if I could write a column about it instead … with more breadth and depth explain my position.”