On Friday's MSNBC Live with Stephanie Ruhle, MSNBC contributor Zerlina Maxwell was the latest liberal commentator to show herself to still be in denial of the fact that the Barack Obama administration also kept some illegal immigrant children in cage-like structures as she claimed that it is a sign of President Donald Trump's "racism" that his administration also does so.
She also claimed that there is "terrorism" committed by white nationalists in the U.S. "on an ongoing basis," and repeated the double myth that the Central Park Five were proven innocent and that Trump lobbied for their execution.
During a discussion of the aftermath of Trump's attacks on Ilhan Omar and several other Democratic members of Congress who are minorities, host Ruhle then posed: "So can the President plausibly deny that he is behind this when you look at his history?... He's been awash in it for decades."
Maxwell began her response:
It really doesn't matter what's in his heart because we can look at his actions, and we can look at his words and his policies and see who they negatively impact. Somebody who doesn't have those feelings in his heart is probably not going to cage brown children and then defend that policy as a good thing.
She continued:
It doesn't really matter to me whether or not this is a political strategy to energize his base. The Southern Strategy was also a political strategy, and it was racist. This is racist, and so we need to be calling it out because it's actually a threat to our national security. White nationalists have been murdering people. That's something that's happening in this country on an ongoing basis. Month after month, we're seeing terrorist attacks fueled by this kind of rhetoric.
A bit later, she added: "You mentioned the Central Park Five. That was in 1989 -- Donald Trump put out a full-page ad calling for their execution -- they were later exonerated. He's never apologized."
In fact, the Central Park Five were not proven innocent, and Trump did not lobby for their execution, but rather called for a new law to make the death penalty a sentencing option for the future that would only apply to adults who commit murder.
