Democratic strategist Donna Brazile responded calmly to an animated Sarah Isgur, a former Trump administration official, after she accused liberals of not caring about free speech.
The confrontation came during a Sunday panel on ABC's This Week program. Isgur criticized President Joe Biden, who has said he decided to run in reaction to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
"Look, I am upset!" Isgur began. "I'm horrified that Joe Biden, who said he ran because of the Unite the Right rally, won't say the same things about what's going on now that he did then."
"Because what we're seeing is the right and the left, a large minority of both of those political movements, rejecting liberal values like free speech, like persuasion," the panelist continued.
After several minutes of ranting against pro-Palestinian protesters, Isgur concluded with a challenge to Brazile: "And where are the people on the political left saying the same things that us on the political right were saying about the Unite the Right rally, about the anti-liberal values on the right?"
"Where are they now, Donna?" she demanded.
"On campus, trying to lead the dialog," Brazile responded calmly.
"A dialog!" Isgur exclaimed. "Can you imagine dialoguing with the Unite the Right rally, folks?"
"Let me just tell you something," Brazile pressed on. "I'm on those campuses every week. "I'll be on another one tomorrow. And it is important that we engage in civil dialogue."
Brazile agreed that some of the students "crossed the line."
"And there's no place for the kind of rhetoric that threatens students and threatens an entire Jewish faith and Jewish community," she added. "There's no place for this on campus. But yes, we have to have dialogue. We have to talk to students."
Following the 2017 white supremacist rally, not all Republicans condemned demonstrators.
Then-President Donald Trump described demonstrators who joined the mob of white supremacists and neo-Nazis as "very fine people."
