Hey, it’s just an alternative fact.
Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer got his world-historical figures momentarily confused on Tuesday, when he claimed that Karl Marx wrote “Mein Kampf” during a segment on “America’s Newsroom.”
“I remember 20 years old going to Trier, Germany, and trying to find the home of Karl Marx, cause, you know, 1848 ― he wrote ’Mein Kampf,’” Hemmer said. “I want to know what it was all about.”
The quote, which has been cut from Fox News’ website, was roundly mocked on Twitter. People also really enjoyed co-anchor Dana Perino’s response to Hemmer’s remark.
Hemmer did acknowledge his mistake later in the show, saying: “I misspoke. 1848. Karl Marx. ‘The Communist Manifesto.’”
“Mein Kampf,” or “My Struggle,” is a 1925 autobiographical and anti-Semitic manifesto by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler. Marx was a German political philosopher and economist who is one of the most influential socialist thinkers in history, best known for his 1848 pamphlet “The Communist Manifesto” and the three-volume “Das Kapital.”
Hemmer’s comments came near the end of a discussion among three white people about whether critical race theory should be taught in elementary schools.
Hemmer, along with Perino and Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen, discussed an op-ed published by the Los Angeles Times Sunday that argued that CRT, an academic framework that examines how policies and the law perpetuate systemic racism, should be introduced to American students at a younger age. The subject is typically taught in law and graduate schools.
Unsurprisingly, Hemmer, Perino and Thiessen were of the view that the subject should be kept out of grade-school classrooms and be reserved for college students.
“In college you should be studying everything,” Thiessen said on “America’s Newsroom” Tuesday. “We should be studying Karl Marx, we should be studying ’Mein Kampf,’ we should be studying all sorts of bad ideologies, and students should be opening their minds. When you’re teaching grade-school kids, you’re forming young citizens, you’re teaching them patriotism, you’re teaching them how to understand their country, and that’s very different from what you’re teaching in a college class.”
That’s when Hemmer said that critical race theory taught at a college level is “fair game,” and committed his slip of the tongue while attempting to boast about his intellectual curiosity.