Appearing as a guest on Monday's New Day, liberal CNN political commentator Symone Sanders not only repeatedly smeared White House advisors Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka as "white supremacist sympathizers," but she even deceptively claimed that Gorka had characterized "brown people" as a problem.
At 7:53 a.m. ET, as she debated former Virginia Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli over the issue of why President Donald Trump had not more explicitly condemned white supremacy ideology, Sanders took aim at Bannon for associating himself and Breitbart News in the past with the "Alt-right" movement:
My disagreement because Steve Bannon when he was over at Breitbart just a year ago, he said that he was proud that Breitbart was the platform for the Alt-Right. The Alt-Right is nothing but white supremacy in khakis. Steve Bannon has been a curator of the Alt-Right.
But, as Breitbart editor Joel Pollak clarified on ABC's The View last February, when Bannon referred to the "Alt-right," the relatively obscure term had not yet come to be defined as "white supremacy" in the way that it has over the past year, so her claim about Bannon embracing the "Alt-right" is misleading.
The CNN commentator then went after Gorka as she continued:
You played audio from Sebastian Gorka just moments ago on your show where he basically said, "It's not the white supremacists -- look at these brown people in the Middle East." And so it's not aspersions that have been cast onto these individuals -- these are words that these folks have used.
But the audio of Gorka from an interview with Breitbart last week did not refer to anyone as "brown people." Sanders's comments might not have intended to be claiming an exact quote, but her choice of words certainly could have been construed that way. Gorka's exact words were, as played earlier on CNN:
It's this constant, "Oh, it's the white man. It's the white supremacists. That's the problem." No, it isn't, Maggie Haberman. Go to Sinjar, go to the Middle East, and tell me what the real problem is today. Go to Manchester.
In context, Gorka was discussing a recent interview on MSNBC in which he had argued that terrorist attacks in the U.S. by radical Muslims should not be considered "lone wolf," leading liberals to cite Timothy McVeigh and terrorism involving white radicals, even though the topic of conversation was specifically terrorism from radical Muslims.
Sanders added:
White supremacist sympathizers are seemingly advising the President of the United States. And that is jarring and concerning to me. This is the people's house -- white supremacy has no place in our administration.
A bit later, the liberal commentator went after Bannon and Gorka again as she claimed they were sympathetic to white supremacists and neo-Nazis:
When President Trump took the podium on Saturday, a woman was dead -- she was murdered by white supremacist neo-Nazis. He did not use those words -- that terminology. You have white supremacist neo-Nazi sympathizers apparently in the White House in Sebastian Gorka and Steve Bannon. This is not just rhetoric. This is very real for people all over America.
Toward the end of the segment, she beat on the point again:
We need to hear from the President of the United States today. We need to hear him say the words "white supremacy, KKK, neo-Nazis," and then we need actions to follow up with those words. We need him to reverse the policy change that the United States of America is looking at white supremacists in terms of in our counterterrorism program. He needs to remove the white supremacists around him -- white supremacist sympathizers. That is Steve Bannon and Gorka.
