With a doctorate in racial and political gaslighting, MSNBC’s ReidOut host Joy Reid tag-teamed on Tuesday with progressive charlatans Joan Walsh of The Nation and Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark to lambaste the American right as braindead racists who’ve shunned the coronavirus vaccine, live to be perpetually angry, oppose Obama-era policies because they’re racists, and oppose aid for African-Americans.
(Article by Curtis Houck republished from NewsBusters.org)
And like in a previous segment about Fox News, Reid reveled in recent corrections from News Corp-owned outlets despite multiple recent ethical and factual failures from MSNBC and fellow Comcast-owned network NBC (see here, here, here, here, here, and here). The Fox hysteria was so mind-numbing that Walsh attacked Peter Doocy as a show-boater.
Reid contrasted the supposed tens of millions of racists with her side, which has found success in “[t]he radical normalcy of the Biden administration” with “winning” thanks to “competence” on the part of President Biden.
Despite her history of false claims and “hacked” blog saga, Reid set the table with the retracted Fox News stories about meat consumption and Vice President Harris’s children’s book at a detention center (and the fact that Tucker Carlson has a show) to argue FNC is a bastion of fake news filled with people who think the coronavirus was never real and the election was stolen.
Walsh said while it should be “hilarious,” it isn’t because “Biden has driven them absolutely nuts.” Sounding as if she was still employed by CNN, Walsh said there’s no difference between FNC’s daytime and primetime lineups with Doocy being an example of their awfulness:
They have a White House reporter, correspondent, Peter Doocy, he couldn’t go and he likes to bug Jen Psaki all the time and, you know, get attention for himself — he couldn’t go there and say, hey, what’s this about, Biden being the hamburglar, and what’s this about Kamala Harris's book being given to every poor, migrant child. That’s what you do. You report out a story. They don’t even bother doing that anymore. It's insane, frankly.
If Doocy is pompous prick and people like Jim Acosta and Brian Karem aren’t, then we have some beachfront property to sell you in Manitoba, Joan.
Moving to construct another strawman, Reid and Sykes took a piece from a far-right columnist saying he won’t become vaccinated to own the libs and argued it represents the entire American right as disinterested in constructive ideas or even a rational thought (click “expand”):
REID: Charlie Sykes, you tweeted a thing, I mean, that a right-wing, you know, 29-year-old wrote about how I'm not going to get vaccinated just because me not being vaccinated owns the libs and it makes them mad. It’s like, baby, if you end up in the ER, I’m not the one who’s going to be mad. You the one who’s going to be in the ER. You’re going to be a ventilator and not me. Like, they actually think that I will risk death just to own the libs. That is crazy. What is happening?
SYKES: Well, it's a pretty good encapsulation of American conservatism in 2021. You know, it's not about these ideas. It’s about owning the libs, as you mentioned a little bit earlier, it’s about constantly feeding the outrage machine. It is a little like watching an addict, you know, figuring how we can stoke it up. We need to come up with something more outrageous but, you know, what is interesting? You talked about Joe Biden's normalcy. But, you know, I will look at it in a slightly different way. Look, where is the tea party resistance right now? Joe Biden is — is proposing $1 trillion proposal after another, this is the largest expansion of the federal government since the New Deal, Great Society, and yet, there is no tea party out there. There’s no energy. They’re not talking about the deficit after four years of Donald Trump. They’re not even talking about health care anymore. What is the real passion? Well, the thing they’re passionate about is continuing the big lie about stopping the steal[.]
Yes, Brian Stelter made hay with this claim about Fox personalities, but if Bret Baier, Harris Faulkner, Greg Gutfeld, Bill Hemmer, Dana Perino, and Republican members of Congress who are also doctors have all gotten the vaccine and/or encouraged others to do so (or at least consider it), then why make such a broad claim about the right?
Worse yet, Reid even pointed out the video of congressional Republicans in the previous segment. Talk about a short memory.
At any rate, their third strawman came in the form of a Louisiana state lawmaker talking about the “good” of slavery being a stand-in for Republicans being racists. Reacting to the clip Reid said it was a reminder that the tea party opposition to Barack Obama’s policies were exclusively due to his skin color.
Walsh agreed, adding that because “Biden is white,” the GOP can no longer play the race card in opposing the White House and be “out there in their funny hats, and their American Founder costumes with, you know, hideous, racist pictures of Obama.”
Praising Walsh’s 2013 book about white people, Reid put the racism into overdrive by saying poor white people have stopped recognizing what’s good for them in the form of welfare because of the racist hate deep in their hearts at seeing people of color receive access to many of the same programs that help them.
Oh, and according to Joy, Fox News hates anyone who isn’t a white Christian. Of course, Sykes was glad to go along (click “expand”):
REID: I do recommend people read this book What’s the Matter with White People because it goes through the fact that the New Deal and the things that a lot of white, working class people used to cherish, they now hate because they just associate it with black people and they say that the things that saves their own families throughout the 1940s and '50s are all now welfare and they’re all bad because diverse people get access to them. Isn't basically that — that’s all there is? That’s why Fox News is in the outrage business because they’re just, like, mad at people who aren’t white Christians.
SYKES: Well, well, they’re clearly mad and they want to keep people mad. They want to keep people outraged and convinced they’re victims. You can almost sense this palpable disappointment that there were not racial riots, urban riots after the Chauvin verdicts. I mean, they — they had all the talking points about that — that was, you know, that were, you know, cued up but you will say, it is really extraordinary looking at some of the polls like the Monmouth poll yesterday showed two-thirds of Americans are all in on these big spending plans, the infrastructure plans, the social infrastructure plan, raising taxes. It would suggest that while Fox and the right are playing these — these culture war games, they are fundamentally losing the fight. They’re not even participants.
REID: Yeah.
SYKES: And so, after four years with Donald Trump, you know, they wake up and find the country is not with them anymore.
Reid’s poisonous gaslighting of viewers to hate anyone to the right of Charlie Sykes was made possible thanks to the endorsement of supportive advertisers such as Atlantis, Dove, Fidelity, and Tractor Supply Co. Follow the links to see their contact information at the MRC’s Conservatives Fight Back page.
To see the relevant MSNBC transcript from April 27, click here.
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