Minutes after polls closed in Virginia on Tuesday, MSNBC’s election night co-hosts made it clear that they were pessimistic about their chances as they instead continued to lie about gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, his voters, and Republicans writ large by calling them “dangerous” human beings “to our national security” and racists “in fleece” peddling “lies” about critical race theory (CRT).
ReidOut host Joy Reid was, not surprisingly, the worst. Five minutes after polls closed, Reid peddled the lie that Youngkin ran a racist campaign to ban Toni Morrison from schools and held out hope for Democrat Terry McAuliffe on the basis of Black voters who were scared that Youngkin “would purge” books about W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King Jr. from schools.
Deadline: White House host Nicolle Wallace complained that, without evidence, Youngkin “put” Donald Trump’s “disgusting, flagrant out racism” “in a disguise,” and “wrapped” his campaign “in two Big Lies” that he opposed the January 6 Capitol riot and that he would ban critical race theory.
According to Wallace, Youngkin supported January 6 because “[Youngkin] flew an insurrection flag at [his] rally” (which wasn’t true and he condemned it), and banning CRT would be “like us banning ghosts” seeing as how “there are no ghosts.”
“There isn't critical race theory taught...[H]e’s given it a lie as a label and he said he's going to ban it. There isn’t any critical race theory. It's a legal theory not taught in public schools in Virginia,” she added.
Of course, CRT is absolutely being taught in schools. And on the race front, Youngkin’s running mates are Black (Winsome Sears for lieutenant governor) and Latino (Jason Miyares for Attorney General).
Reid came back and claimed that, in a Youngkin Republican Party, schools will be banned from “teach[ing] the truth about Thomas Jefferson” or talking about slavery because they’re things that make “white parent[s] uncomfortable,” and are thus deemed critical race theory.
The racist MSNBC host continued: “He's found a way to launder a pretty racist trope, this idea that we cannot talk about America's history, because it hurts my feelings.”
Lacking any sense of irony, fellow MSNBCer Rachel Maddow complained that Youngkin and his allies have had Fox News Channel to help create a narrative about CRT “even though it's not actually taught anywhere” or even “a real thing.”
A few minutes later, Reid and Wallace argued for the left to be even more dehumanizing in their descriptions of any and all political adversaries on the right (click “expand”):
WALLACE: The question for Democrats is going to almost Rumsefeldian, do you go on the campaign trail with the Republican Party you know you’ve got, that they lie, that they launder the Trump racism in — in — in fleece, that they have a propaganda network that reaches more candidate’s ads —
REID: That’s right.
WALLACE: — in any state election. Do you adjust with this new propaganda, disinformation, barely veiled dog whistle, race stuff or keep trying to fight on, you know, policy.
REID: This is the problem with Democrats, that they want to do the latter. They seem to —
WALLACE: I know.
REID: — believe if they just do goo-goo good-government policy, that somehow people will understand that they are better for them. It's better for you to be with us because we’re going to give you this policy, this policy, this policy while Republicans are fighting with a sledgehammer. They're using a blow torch and Democrats are coming out with, like, a fork. They don’t understand.
Just prior to MSNBC viewers being rescued in the form of Steve Kornacki providing actual electoral returns, Reid unleashed a truly dangerous line of attack about how Democrats should respond to the “toxicity” of American politics that, as per MSNBC, is the fault of Republicans (click “expand”):
You know what? For Democrats to really fight that, they would have to be willing to say what you have said on your show, I think we've all said a version of it, you have to be willing to vocalize that these Republicans are dangerous. That this isn't a party that's just another political party that disagrees with us on tax policy. That, at this point, they're dangerous.
They're dangerous to our national security, because stoking that kind of soft, white nationalism eventually leads to the hard-core stuff. It leads to the January 6th stuff, because if people are tolerant of it in your party, they're tolerant of the soft racism, it's a really short trip to get to the January 6th insurrectionist play.
This declaration that non-Democrats are “dangerous” and a “national security” threat was made possible thanks to the endorsement of advertisers such as Fidelity and Liberty Mutual. Follow the links to see their contact information at the MRC’s Conservatives Fight Back page.
To see the relevant MSNBC transcript from November 2, click here.
