On Sunday's AM Joy, as Joy Reid assembled a panel of mostly typical MSNBC-type Republicans to agree with her that GOPers are being "racist" on immigration, the MSNBC host at one point admonished one of her liberal Republican guests for uttering the word "illegal alien" as she pushed for the politically correct "undocumented immigrants" instead.
For her part, MSNBC contributor and phony conservative Jennifer Rubin oddly claimed that the media are not doing enough to call out the GOP's "racism" and "xenophobia."
After beginning the segment by fretting over a new ad supporting President Donald Trump on the congressional impasse over immigration by highlighting the dangers of allowing illegal immigrants access to the country, she likened it to the Willie Horton ad of 1988, and soon turned to Republican strategist Evan Siegfried, posing: "Is it wise ... for Republicans to essentially run on 'brown people are murderers, rapists and killers, and therefore do not belong in America'?"
Showing his liberal side, Siegfried claimed that it is not "conservative" to build a border wall because it requires seizing private property -- as if conservatives somehow oppose all eminent domain seizures even when they genuinely are in the public interest. The liberal Republican inadvertently pushed Reid's PC button as he accurately used the words "illegal alien."
The far-left MSNBC host jumped in to lecture him:
Well, we're going with undocumented immigrants. I think we're going to go with that -- it's definitely the right -- I mean, we're trying to change the conversation around here, right? There's certain terminology even -- like "chain migration" and "illegal aliens." It's a throwback conversation that does feel like -- it feels almost like the '80s.
A bit later, when Rubin got her turn, the Washington Post columnist made her latest contribution to bashing Republicans as she made charges of "racism" and suggested that there are no more "reasonable" people in the Republican party:
It should be self-evident why I and, I think, any reasonable person can no longer identify with the Republican party. That parade of lies and racism tells you that the Republican party has been reduced to a single issue -- which is race, xenophobia.
She continued:
I think it just shows the ugly face of the Republican party to the American people, and I think it's gotten to the point where, frankly, you are supporting these people and you are enabling them, then you have to take ownership of their racism. You have to take ownership of that kind of rhetoric. Every member of the Senate who doesn't denounce this, who goes along with the President, who says, 'Oh, this is just about security and the wall," they need to own that kind of language.
It's not until they are held responsible for that virulent, disgusting racism that you're going to shake any of them loose. And right now, I think they're getting a free ride. They're getting a free ride from the press, they're getting a free ride from the voters, and that should stop.
After Siegfried defended his decision not to leave the GOP and abandon it to "these racists," Reid concluded by suggesting Republicans are appealing to the kind of racism that existed in the 1960s. Reid: "I think Republicans are making a gamble that xenophobia and racism work now the way they worked in the '60s and '70s."
