Ah, the perils of live punditry.
The hosts of Fox & Friends Weekend learned the hard way this Sunday why it’s best to know what you’re talking about before you go on air.
In an early morning segment, they defended Kanye West — whose unlikely support for Donald Trump has made him a bonafide celebrity on Fox News — after he was suspended from Instagram for posts that were anti-Semitic.
In the posts, West suggested rapper Diddy was controlled by Jewish people.
While two co-hosts — Will Cain and Pete Hegseth — said they did not see the posts, they defended West anyway. Co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy, however, did see the Instagram post. Even after describing it, she said it was “totalitarian” for Instagram to suspend him over it.
“There is no question that Kanye or Ye was going to have to be taken down after what happened in the Tucker Carlson interview,” Campos-Duffy said. “They had to cut him down.”
“We’re in this weird era where people can’t just say what they want to say,” she continued. “This idea you have to just shut down his account is just, it’s totally totalitarian, totally anti-American. It’s just wrong.”
Hegseth said West would likely not have been suspended from Instagram had he not appeared for an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier in the week. In that interview, West claimed Jared Kushner, the Jewish son-in-law of Trump, made peace deals between Israel and Arab nations for personal profit.
When the hosts defended West earlier Sunday morning, they apparently had not yet seen the tweets that followed Instagram’s suspension.
After West was suspended from Instagram, he went to Twitter where he dropped a shocking threat against Jewish people on Saturday night.
The Fox & Friends Weekend hosts apparently found out about those tweets in the 9 a.m. hour of their show Sunday morning, because they returned to the topic with a much different take.
“Ye West threatening to go to war with Jewish people on Twitter,” Hegseth said.
(Excerpt) Read more in: Mediaite