On Monday’s explosive episode of Morning Joe, the historically illiterate Reverend Al Sharpton alongside grumpy host Joe Scarborough set out to make one of the most bizarre and laughable arguments against Donald Trump to date: that Trump’s entire movement was to make him king of the Unites States, and that he and his followers were “on the side of King George or the Confederates.”
Proving his weak grasp on American history, Sharpton suggested the Confederates and British also said their causes were about fighting for free speech.
Scarborough ranted: “Tell me, why should we try to understand them when it's just, it’s one bad-faith excuse after another for letting Donald Trump act like an authoritarian? Please tell me why do I need to try to understand them, because I'm past that because they don't operate in good faith, not even close to it.”
To which Sharpton responded:
And you cannot have him make America great again if he's going against the principles of what America stood for in its origin. We've had two challenges. We had the American Revolution that started the country. We had the Civil War. Both times they tried to deal with throwing away the principles of one man, one vote, the principles of a democracy. What side are you on? Are you on the side of America and what it conceptually stands for, or are you on the side of King George or the Confederates? That’s where I would cast Donald Trump. And let him defend that. I'm sure everybody in the confederate army said it was free speech. I'm sure the British said it was free speech.
Scarborough’s attack on Republicans was one of his usual unhinged hissy fits, but Sharpton’s remarks displayed mind-boggling historical illiteracy and a worrisome disdain for the Bill of Rights. To be clear, neither the British nor the Confederates ever centered their cause around free speech or the First Amendment.
The British did not even recognize freedom of speech; they were a monarchy that fought the Revolutionary War against America because they wanted to keep their colony. The British justification for their side in the war was rooting in the idea that the United States was a British colony, nothing more, and that laws passed by the British Parliament had authority over the colonists.
The Confederates fought the Civil War primarily to keep the institution of slavery, and the only constitutional argument they made was states’ rights, not freedom of speech.
Donald Trump, to date, has not said anything in support of either of the Confederate or British causes, which Sharpton should have known, since those conflicts were resolved over one and two centuries ago, respectively. Why Sharpton made those claims could have possibly been genuine ignorance of the historical realities of America.
More likely, it was an attempt to gaslight the American people into thinking Trump was a wannabe dictator, and that Democrat persecutions of him, both legal and political, were an attempt to “save democracy” and not an attempt to seize power outside an election and imprison the opposition.
Those who know anything about American history will see that it was really the Democrats and the media trying to bring authoritarian rule.
Al Sharpton’s bad history lesson was sponsored by ServPro and GoDaddy. Their contact information is linked.
The transcript is below, click "expand" to read:
MSNBC’s Morning Joe
08/07/23
9:15 AM ET
(…)
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Reverend Al, you're a man of the cloth, so maybe you can-
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: [Laughs]
SCARBOROUGH: You can teach me a little bit about charity this morning and grace. Walter says I need to understand these people who are now throwing up their latest smokescreen that this is about the First Amendment, the same people that forgave him for talking about rigged elections, the same guy who tried to overthrow the 2020 election, the same guy that was responsible for riots and responsible for a lot of working class Americans being in jail, if you take them at their own words, responsible for this scheme to undermine the Constitution of the United States.
Tell me, why should we try to understand them when it's just, it’s one bad-faith excuse after another for letting Donald Trump act like an authoritarian? Please tell me why do I need to try to understand them, because I'm past that because they don't operate in good faith, not even close to it.
AL SHARPTON: Well, it is not difficult to understand what you understand. The fact is you do understand them, and they're not asking for repentance, if that's what the question is, if I'm putting on my clergyman's hat. They are standing up and saying outright that they want to do what they want to do and determine the outcome of an election.
And I think if you were in the Republican primaries, you have to now broaden what we’re talking about here. You can't fight the case. The prosecutor will do that. But what you can say to the American people is do we want a country that people can decide elections and that if they lose, they can turn it into this kind of chaos so that we become what the country was founded on to be opposed to. The country was founded on fighting against an autocracy. Donald Trump is not fighting for you. He's fighting to be the king of this United States.
And you cannot have him make America great again if he's going against the principles of what America stood for in its origin. We've had two challenges. We had the American Revolution that started the country. We had the Civil War. Both times they tried to deal with throwing away the principles of one man, one vote, the principles of a democracy. What side are you on? Are you on the side of America and what it conceptually stands for, or are you on the side of King George or the Confederates?
That’s where I would cast Donald Trump. And let him defend that. I'm sure everybody in the confederate army said it was free speech. I'm sure the British said it was free speech. Are you for democracy or are you for autocracy? If you're for democracy, how can you say that a man that lost the election has the right to disrupt and tell a vice president to don’t certify what the people voted for?
SCARBOROUGH: Right. And a president who also told his lawyer that Mike Pence deserved lynching on January the Sixth.
(…)
