At the end of the 3 pm hour on MSNBC, Ali Velshi brought on Michael Kirk, a producer of the long-running (left-spinning) PBS documentary series Frontline. Velshi highlighted a video clip focusing on Sarah Palin as an avatar of division in the Obama years...and never mentioned that in 2013, MSNBC afternoon host Martin Bashir resigned in disgrace after insisting she should literally be "disciplined" with putting human waste in her mouth.
So who again was divisive in the Obama years?
The trademark Frontline approach is there, with the ominous music, and Palin's voice echoing like a menacing noise out of a concentration-camp speaker.
MICHAEL KIRK: Sarah Palin, by the way, by 2008, had figured that out and tapped into it and lit that match, that match that then becomes the Tea Party, based on the economic dislocation.
ALI VELSHI: Michael, hold that thought because I want to play for our audience a piece of that documentary about Sarah Palin. Let's watch together
FRANK LUNTZ, pollster (over clips of Palin speeches): If you want to pinpoint the moment when the right completely rejected the left.... I think it was over the Sarah Palin nomination.... And for one brief, shining moment the right saw her as everything they were looking for. Brash. Tough. Independent. Someone who said what they meant and meant what they said, and wouldn't edit it for anyone.
Velshi isolated the right-wingers as the divisive ones. "That is a feeling of nativist and populist movements around the world, that feeling that the establishment has lied to me. But that is a feeling that people on the left and right should have in America. Why has this movement largely occupied the right in their political movement? Why do they feel more cheated? Is it because Obama happened to be in power when this movement started to develop?"
Kirk agreed. "The right had spokespeople like Palin, and that cudgel was picked up by Trump, and by others...Right-wing radio rises up at the time, Facebook starts to emerge. All this technology starts to carry all the messages. And then the Russians come along, and by the summer of 2016 are using Facebook, Twitter, and other devices to get into the divisions that are already existing in our society."
He added "there was a tremendous dose of racism going on during that time period from the rise of the right, it all starts to make sense, that Trump didn't create all these moments, he's just the natural inheritor."
This is what your taxpayer money subsidizes at PBS -- films about a Vast Racist Right-Wing Russia-Helping Conspiracy.
