Saturday's AM Joy on MSNBC displayed how the Left can interpret racism or racial insensitivity into anything as host Joy Reid not only mocked President Donald Trump's words of praise for iconic anti-slavery activist Frederick Douglass, but even treated it as somehow inappropriate for Vice President Mike Pence to send out a tweet on February 1 commemorating President Abraham Lincoln signing onto the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery.
A bit later, MSNBC contributor Toure Neblett comically lauded Chicago's high murder rate as a "massive success story" because the crime problem in the city used to be worse.
At 11:37 a.m. ET, returning from a commercial break, there was a clip of President Trump: "Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who has done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice."
Reid then moved to mock the President for how he worded his remarks: "Now, for the record, Frederick Douglass died in 1895, and was so widely recognized before his death that, according to one historian, he was actually the most photographed man of his time."
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After displaying on screen a tweet from Vice President Pence commemorating the day Lincoln signed onto the Thirteenth Amendment, Reid took aim at him as she snarked: "And no, no, no, no, no, no, Mike Pence. Abraham Lincoln has Presidents Day. You can try again next year."
Her comments mirror some on the left who have shown offense that Pence honored Lincoln on the first day of Black History Month, even though February 1 is, in fact, National Freedom Day, which commemorates the day Lincoln signed onto the Thirteenth Amendment, therefore making the commemoration historically timed.
A bit later, during a discussion of Trump highlighting the unusually high murder rate in Chicago, Neblett jumped in to whine about the meaning of "America First." Neblett:
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, you know, talk about "America First," I'm American. I've never lived anywhere else, right? My family is fully American. I don't feel embraced by this. I don't feel anyone saying, you know, we're looking out for my interests, you know, when the President is out tweeting about Milo's right to speak at Berkeley, but then he's attacking John Lewis's right to speak and Hamilton's right to speak. I don't feel "America First." I feel "a certain America first."
The liberal contributor and former co-host of MSNBC's The Cycle then pushed a list of left-wing agenda items as being more important than stopping black Americans from being murdered as he continued:
This attack on black-on-black crime in Chicago, this is not the prime thing that black America needs to deal with. We need the war on drugs dealt with, we need wealth inequality dealt with, we need public schooling better, we need policing violence dealt with better. He's dealing with some black people -- and 40 percent of the murders are committed by one half of one percent -- but some black people are killing others in Chicago.
He ended up putting the most positive possible spin on a high murder rate as he added:
No recognition that the murder rate in Chicago is about half of what it was 20 years ago, so that is actually a massive success story in terms of the long-term history of Chicago. But all we hear about -- as Alicia (Garza) referenced -- our criminality, our problematic nature for the nation. Does "America First" include me?
