Jeanine Pirro went on C-SPAN. It didn't go well.
Written by Madeline Peltz
Published
A September 8 appearance Fox News host Jeanine Pirro made on C-SPAN’s Washington Week to promote her new book backfired after callers confronted her over various controversies she’s generated.
The session began with host Steve Scully asking Pirro about her March 2019 suspension from Fox and the future of her position at the network. Things got worse for Pirro during the cringeworthy question-and-answer session. One caller asked about Democrats “attacking only white people’s guns,” to which Pirro responded by raising concerns about “Black-on-Black crime.” Two other callers confronted Pirro about racist remarks by her and others at Fox News. One man from Texas said he’s “tired of this anti-immigrant, anti-people-with-brown-skin rhetoric that’s coming out of Fox News, coming out of people like you” and linked xenophobia from the president, Pirro, and others at Fox to the orphaned baby President Donald and first lady Melania Trump posed with after the El Paso, Texas, massacre. Pirro responded by getting extremely defensive.
The interview began with Scully asking her whether she’s going to lose her show on Fox and why she was disallowed from appearing on Bill O’Reilly’s Newsmax show.
A caller named Kevin from Denver, Colorado, mocked Pirro for getting herself suspended from Fox News after she said Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) couldn’t faithfully serve the Constitution because she wears a hijab; the caller also blasted Pirro for championing the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory that she’s been pushing while promoting her book.
Later, caller Teresa from Tennessee spoke to Pirro about Teresa’s belief that “our white community” is being attacked by Democrats trying to take “only white people’s guns” while “gang members in Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia” go unpunished. Pirro responded by expressing concern about “Black-on-Black crime.”
Perhaps the most sobering of all the calls was from Carol of Elgin, Texas. He connected Fox News and Pirro’s rhetoric to the hate-motivated mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, and told Pirro that “the president’s rhetoric, Fox News’ rhetoric, your rhetoric had helped to orphan” the baby who lost his parents in El Paso. He also demanded that Pirro's “anti-immigrant, anti-people-with-brown-skin” commentary stop. Pirro responded by getting mad and denying that she is racist.
Pirro opened her last book by calling herself an idiot. She carried this title forward with pride in her C-SPAN appearance, in which she refused to listen to a “recitation of the facts.” It's not like her bosses in the Fox News c-suite have any standards to hold her to anyway.