MRC's Brent Baker found that MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday showcased a new issue of The Atlantic magazine carrying the panicked headline “January 6th Was Practice.” Practice for what? For the Trump die-hards to make a "catastrophic turn toward authoritarianism, nativism and conspiracism."
Under Jeffrey Goldberg, this magazine has been aggressively partisan, just like MSNBC. They gushed all over Barack Obama's foreign policy, endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 in its first-ever endorsement, and then smeared Trump in 2020 with the claim that he said dead soldiers were losers and suckers.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: First, we're closing in on the one-year anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, if you can believe it. With that, just one month away, The Atlantic is dedicated its January and February issues to American democracy in crisis. The headline of the cover story is jarring. Quote, "January 6th was practice.’
Joining us now, the magazine's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg. And Jeffrey writes this for the new issue's editor's note. Quote, "There is insufficient space in any one issue of that magazine to trace the Republican party's decomposition from Lincoln's day to ours. It is enough to say that it's most recent and it catastrophic turn toward authoritarianism, nativism and conspiracism threatens the Republic it was founded to save. Stating plainly that one of America's two major parties, the party punitively devoted to advancing the ideas and ideals of conservatism, has now fallen into autocratic disrepute is unnerving for a magazine committed to being. In the words of our founding manifesto, ‘of no party or clique.’"
Joe Scarborough asked Goldberg for his rationale:
GOLDBERG: So I thought we should really focus now, start to really focus now on these -- it's a whole range of threats, a whole range of things that Trump and his minions are doing to try to guarantee that, by hook or by crook, that they win in 2024, and so we've pulled together this special issue just to outline for our readers all the things that could go wrong, and all the things that are happening right now that the Republican Party or much of the Republican Party is doing to make sure that the situation is geared to their favor.
As usual, Mika Brzezinski repeated the whole Madeleine Albright warning about fascism on the march.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: If you speak to people like Madeleine Albright and those who have come from this type of thing who know it so well, their fear is that January -- we're well over the edge. We're well over the edge, and we're not where we should be in terms of turning this ship around. And if you look at the way that Republicans are acting right now in Congress, it can't be looked at as "Oh, they're the crazies on the far right." This is now the behavior that's being embraced.
GOLDBERG: Right. People like Madeleine Albright who come out of Europe or Asian experiences or African experiences with authoritarianism, they're warning us. The warning is don't think you're special. Human beings are human beings. Societies are societies. People are prey to the same weaknesses and temptations across the planet. And just because we've managed to stave off authoritarianism in the past doesn't mean that you're able to stave it off in the future when you have a determined group trying to manipulate democracy to result in their permanent domination. And that's what they're saying. So I just take that very seriously.
All these DNC-pleasing warnings were brought to you by AT&T.
