Kathy Barnette Questioned on Her Islamophobic Tweets on Fox News, Gives Rambling Explanation

Republican Senate candidate Kathy Barnette was questioned on her Islamophobic tweets on Fox News Sunday and provided a rambling explanation that she was not expressing “full thoughts” or “even full sentences.”

Barnette is surging in the Pennsylvania Senate primary, despite little name recognition and a war chest dwarfed by her rivals, former Bridgewater CEO David McCormick and TV doctor Mehmet Oz. Despite her fierce support for Donald Trump, the former president has endorsed Oz.

She has faced criticism from other prominent conservatives, including Fox News host Sean Hannity, who said her old tweets “likely render her unelectable in Pennsylvania.”

In an appearance on Fox News Sunday, anchor Shannon Bream questioned Barnette on those tweets. They including one declaring “Obama is aMuslim. Doing Muslim like THINGS!”

“Any context then for those particular tweets?” Bream asked.

Barnette initially blamed her bigoted commentary on the Syrian refugee crisis.

“In almost all of those tweets, when you look at the time frame we were living in at that particular time, we had the Obama administration bringing in a lot of Syrian refugees at that time,” she said.

“At that time, I was hosting a show called ‘Truth Exchange’ and I would have all kinds of ideas and was leaning in to helping the public begin to have those conversations, and so those were some of the — that’s the context around a lot of those tweets,” Barnette added. “The overwhelming majority of the tweets that are now being presented are not even full thoughts. They’re not even full sentences and yet people take it and they begin to build their own narrative around it.”

As the New York Times points out, the United States had accepted fewer than 2,000 Syrian refugees — despite pledging to take in 10,000 — by the time of her tweets.

Barnette’s comments in 2016 came shortly after Trump, then a presidential candidate, called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States.

In a Friday interview on NBC News, Barnette was also confronted on her past tweets — including one declaring pedophilia “a cornerstone of Islam.” She flat out denied sending that tweet in the interview.

The tweet remains posted on her account.

Pedophilia is a Cornerstone of Islam ⋆ UFP NEWS http://t.co/PmuXZE7h80

— Kathy Barnette (@Kathy4Truth) April 10, 2015

Watch above, via Fox News.