On Saturday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted about being denied service at a restaurant in Lexington, VA, over her complicity in anti-transgender and anti-immigrant Trump administration policies. Sanders’ tweet helped set off a wave of media opinions that opponents of bigotry should “let the Trump team eat in peace,” and that vocally opposing bigoted policy “violates the spirit of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” 

• Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt: ”The lady who owns this restaurant, is she allowed to do that? Is that discrimination? Are you allowed to just kick someone out because you don't agree with their policies or beliefs?”

• Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations claimed on an all-white MSNBC panel that denying Sanders service at a restaurant “violates the spirit of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

• Fox correspondent called protests against Trump officials a “quiet civil war.”

• The Washington Post editorial board compared peaceful protests against members of the administration to anti-abortion violence, which has included multiple bombings and murders. 

• New York Post’s Karol Markowicz invoked Anthony Bourdain, claiming that his fans said last week that Bourdain “was amazing because he taught us about breaking bread with different kinds of people.” (Bourdain also famously said that Henry Kissinger “should not be able to eat at a restaurant in New York.”)

• Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan: “The history in our country of denying people access to restaurants, to water fountains and even bathrooms is too raw, too real.”

• ABC’s Matthew Dowd: “If a vulgar person makes you vulgar, they win. Let us meet hate with love. Let us meet bullying with an embrace. Let us meet vulgarity with civility.”

• CNN’s David Axelrod said, “Kind of amazed and appalled by the number of folks on Left who applauded the expulsion of @PressSec and her family from a restaurant.”

• Fox & Friends Weekend host Pete Hegseth said on the show, “It’s so ironic … you’ve got this tolerant leftist running this restaurant” but she refused to serve a Trump official.

• The Washington Post’s David Ignatius tweeted, “Hard to imagine an incident that would be more helpful to Trump White House and more harmful to its critics than this refusal to serve a senior government official, however troubling her views.”