Fox News host Brian Kilmeade left many people slack-jawed when he claimed on “Fox & Friends” Monday that he read Adolf Hitler’s notorious manifesto “Mein Kampf” as part of his high school curriculum.
He was apparently trying to keep up with Gen. Mark Milley, who said during congressional testimony last week that he believed members of the armed forces should be “open minded,” “widely read” and educated about issues, including critical race theory.
“I’ve read Mao Tse-tung. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist,” explained Milley, who chairs the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “What is wrong with understanding?”
Kilmeade said he thought Miley “totally missed the point.”
“He said, ‘Oh, I read Mao, I read Stalin.’ That has nothing to do with it,” Kilmeade insisted.
“We read ‘Mein Kampf’ in school. No one thought we were Nazis,” said Kilmeade. “That is part of the curriculum. You find out about other things and other insurgencies. We get it. That has nothing to do with critical race theory.”
Critics on Twitter weren’t buying Kilmeade’s story about reading Hitler’s notorious anti-Semitic, world-domination screed as part of any public high school curriculum in America. Even guest Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) seemed to suppress a smile when Kilmeade made the outlandish claim.
They also had no idea what point Kilmeade was reaching for.
Kilmeade attended Massapequa High School in Long Island, New York, in the 1980s. The school could not immediately be reached for comment.