Tear down Statue of Liberty? MSNBC says freedom = ‘selfishness’

MSNBC’s Morning Joe

7-17-20

EDDIE GLAUDE: He’s talking about black and brown people as kind of like infestations, people who threaten to undermine the very fabric of America, that us and them kind of language, and Willie, you know as you said in the last hour, this is explicit, as you just said now, this is explicit. And, you know,  Americans have to face it. We have to make a choice. The rhetoric is not unusual. I mean, it’s just a caricature of what we’ve been hearing for 40 years of how racial dog whistles have in some ways informed our body politic. He’s just really bad at it, he’s just really crude about it, we have to make a choice to finally leave this stuff behind. I hope in November, I think I agree more with Mika than I do with Donny. It’s gonna get worse — We need to understand that we have to make a choice. There’s no middle ground here.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: How many lessons do we have to learn about Donald Trump? How many times do we have to be shocked? How many times do we have to be appalled? How many times do we have to be humiliated as Americans around the world to see he will do anything, doesn’t care about the law, doesn’t care about norms, doesn’t care about traditions, and he doesn’t care about people and he will do whatever it takes to somehow make his mark and to make it seem that he has been in had some way discriminated against, that he is the victim, that perhaps the election was illegitimate or the votes weren’t counted right, he won’t leave. I got a bet on this. He will try to hold on somehow and he will surprise us. I cannot tell you what he’ll do, but I will say putting the mic down and walking away is just not in his wheelhouse. It’s not. So you would think it can’t get worse, the sound bite we just showed you, but also in those White House remarks, this campaign event that he held at the White House, President Trump compared the National Guard response to Minneapolis protesters as a, quote, knife cutting through butter.

GLAUDE: You know, Mika, and he’s not committed to democracy. At least not for some people. You know, he’s talking about freedom of speech for some people. When we talk about lawful, nonviolent protests he’s talking about knives cutting through butter. Or, you know, we have reporting out of Portland saying that there are unidentified police officers or whomever, picking up protesters, right. Public radio in Oregon reporting what’s happening out there. There’s a sense in which Donald Trump doesn’t give a damn about American democracy, he only cares about Donald Trump. Therein lies the threat, therein lies the danger, that we have this narcissist, this selfish person, who’s greedy, who’s running the country and he’s the avatar for a kind of selfishness that we’re seeing across the country with regard to masks Mika. Liberty is now a word, a synonym, for selfishness and self interest. Liberty trumps national sacrifice. Liberty is in this moment, in Donald Trump’s hands, a bludgeon, a tool to really beat the hell out of democracy. I’m, I’m just overwhelmed by this this morning to hear it, to see it and in some ways to worry about the state of the country.

BRZEZINSKI: Yeah. Katty Kay, for me what comes to mind, you think about American politics, you’ve been covering it from many different perspectives for years, but I — I know it sounds very naive, but I don’t understand the Republicans in Washington who can’t simply stand up and say, that was wrong, you can’t say that. We are not a racist country. We cannot accept racism in our president. Maybe I’m naive but I’m just — I’m heart broken, actually, that  they are so weak and pitiful and, quite frankly, racist themselves.

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