Relentlessly determined to blame President Donald Trump for every single bad thing that happens in America, MSNBC’s liberals decided Saturday that Trump, the NRA, and racist police are at fault in the tragic shooting of Georgia’s Ahmaud Arbery. Host Joy Reid, who isn’t happy unless she’s pointing out how racist and awful white Americans are, kicked off the segment with a long-winded rant describing those who participate in anti-lockdown protests as “angry, spittle-flecked, mostly men, mostly white, spewing respiratory droplets and indignation.”
Not, as you may have previously thought, hard-working Americans who are worried about liberty and their own paychecks.
Reid went from this ugly rant into a larger discussion of the “necropolitics” of the coronavirus pandemic. If that word is unfamiliar to you, it is Reid’s term for describing the “freedom to decide who gets to live and who has to die for me to get mine.” See, Reid (and she’s sadly not alone) has come to the conclusion that once Trump and his supporters realized that the coronavirus was disproportionately affecting minorities, they no longer cared about the death tally.
And here we thought the line against Trump was that he NEVER cared about the coronavirus. Well, arguments change as political contrivances shift.
After winding down this stunningly-racist monologue, Reid was primed and ready to bring on her guests to talk about the Ahmaud Arbery shooting.
“Police are quite casual about white protesters literally screaming in the faces of officers,” Reid mused. “They’re not afraid of them, but they’re afraid of any black motorist.”
That’s a stretch.
But it was enough of an opening for Vanderbilt University professor Jonathan Metzl, who concluded that “all the rhetoric coming out of the NRA” is responsible for Arbery’s death. “What I write about in my book, these ideas that basically the white body, the white home is a particular castle. All of that rhetoric has been kind of deployed to give the idea that basically white Americans can use their weapons to defend themselves.”
Ah. Anyone care to break down gun violence by race and see if this statement holds up to scrutiny?
But the previous remarks were nothing compared to those of NBC’s Kurt Bardella, who joined the conversation to say that “white people feel like it’s okay to hop in the back of your pickup truck and hunt another human being down and execute him and film it for reasons that are beyond understanding.”
Well, these particular two white people apparently thought that, but we certainly haven’t seen too many white people defend it. Again, do you really want to get into statistics and start arguing about what black people “feel like it’s okay” to do?
The shooters, Bardella continued, were “fueled by the rise of Trumpism and fueled by the fact that the most powerful person in the world views minorities and people of color as second-class citizens and every policy that he has supported and imposed on the American people is designed to elevate white people and keep people of color down, you know, somewhere else.”
We’re not sure how to stop killings like the one in Georgia or to prevent the miscarriage of justice that seemed to follow. But if we had to guess, doubling down on “whites are evil,” racially-divisive rhetoric is probably the exact worst way to do it.
