Talk about dehumanizing your political opponents . . .
On Joy Reid's MSNBC show today, guest Elie Mystal called supporters of President Trump "idiots" and "zombies," saying "we have to stop them from infecting everybody else." He elaborated on his ugly message at the end of his rant, saying: "we have to cauterize the wound that is Donald Trump and his supporters, and worry about the people who aren't infected yet."
Mystal's solution was to ban live coverage of President Trump. Instead, exhorted Mystal, Trump should be put on a 30-second delay, with someone in an on-screen box "to explain to people that he is lying in real time." Wonder whom Mystal has in mind to serve as that objective arbiter of truth?
The highly-animated Mystal [view the video] was apparently enraged by the fact that Trump supporters are counting on the President to fulfill his promise to build the wall.
When liberals like Mystal cast conservatives as less-than-human, as people who represent a threat of "infecting" others, we are heading down a potentially very dangerous path.
Note: Mystal employs a particularly violent metaphor in speaking of the need to "cauterize the wound that is Donald Trump and his supporters." Cauterize: "burn the skin or flesh of (a wound) with a heated instrument or caustic substance,"
Here's the transcript.
MSNBC
The Joy Reid Show
2/16/10
11:05 am ET
JOY REID: Donald Trump has taken a fictional thing, a thing that was just a campaign slogan [build the wall], that now his base is like, oh no, we actually want you to do it. You said it in your campaign and yes it was a slogan but we actually want it to be real. And now he's about to go to court on it.
ELIE MYSTAL: We're fighting over a metaphor. And I don't understand why we're so obsessed with the idiots who believe in the metaphor. The 37 to 40% of people who believe whatever Donald Trump is going to say, they're gone. They're lost. They're zombies now. And every day, we try to figure out: what's the cure for zombies, right? There is no cure. They're gone. We have to just stop them from infecting everybody else.
And the way that we stop them -- we stop this zombie disease from infecting everybody else, is that we have to stop amplifying the lies that are told by Donald Trump. He should never be put on live. He should only put on, on a 30-second delay, and there's got to be somebody in like a box-in-box under him, just like if there were interpreting sign language, to explain to people that he is lying in real time. Every time he lies. We have to -- that's the only way to kind of -- we have to cauterize the wound that is Donald Trump and his supporters, and worry about the people who aren't infected yet.
