Continuing to prove how obsessed with race-baiting and how ignorant they were of basic American history, left-wing shill and MSNBC All In host Chris Hayes on Wednesday night hosted a panel of guests that reached a new low when it comes to inflammatory racial comments.
Hayes introduced international lawyer Anne-Marie Slaughter by pointing out she was the president of New America and one of the 100 so-called scholars who signed onto a letter that falsely claimed Republican election integrity efforts were a “threat to American democracy”. Here’s their hyperbolic letter.
Anne-Marie Slaughter started off the vile segment by channeling previous MSNBC guests comparing American elections to those of other countries:
“if you saw this happening in other countries, as we do. where you have an election and there is, it is certified by all sorts of people. It is clearly free and fair. And then a group decides to try to overturn it. That is a grave threat to democracy in the United States and our allies”
The second guest, Ari Berman was no less biased. He’s a senior reporter for left-wing website Mother Jones, and the author of a historically challenged piece titled: “How Jim Crow killed voting rights for generations. Now the GOP is repeating history.”
Slaughter’s comparison was foolish enough but, Berman decided to run the entire segment off the rails by saying America’s history of Reconstruction and Jim Crow is repeating itself:
"The pattern between the attack on voting rights at the end of reconstruction and the attack on voting rights today is so similar it’s eerie. You had the enfranchisement of black voters followed by violence, fraud, and intimidation to keep them from the polls then you had the legal disenfranchisement of black voters through literacy tests, poll taxes, etcetera, etcetera."
“That’s how Reconstruction really ended and that’s how Jim Crow began. And what’s happening today is very similar,” he added.
Seemingly every day, MSNBC and their conga line of leftist guests repeat the same outrageous lies. No, Jim Crow was not coming back in any way, shape or form. In fact, their suggestions were inherently dishonest about what Jim Crow was. Legislation that works to ensure the integrity of elections didn’t prevent Americans of any race from voting.
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Read the transcript below by clicking "expand:"
All In With Chris Hayes
06/02/2021
8:08PM
CHRIS HAYES: Anne-Marie Slaughter is a professor emeritus at Princeton, CEO of the think tank New America she is one of 100 scholars to sign on to this letter published by New America, warning of the threats to American democracy and Ari Berman is a senior reporter at Mother Jones. His latest piece is on how Jim Crow killed voting rights for generations and now the GOP is repeating history. And Anne Marie let me start with you. As someone who signed onto that letter, who studies this and has worked in the state department and worked in the international sphere in which these sorts of issues arise all the time. contested elections, disputes about legitimacy. What do you see happening here?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: I would start by saying that if you saw this happening in other countries, as we do. where you have an election and there is, it is certified by all sorts of people. It is clearly free and fair. And then a group decides to try to overturn it. That is a grave threat to democracy in the United States and our allies, the liberal democratic world weighs in. That is what we are seeing here. And it's just much harder to recognize it at home. But If this proceeds in the 2024 election when all neutral observers say that there was a free and a fair result, these measures would actually allow the state legislatures, Republican legislatures to overturn the result if it is not to their liking and they are doing everything they can to make sure we are not a democracy, we are an oligarchy, an aristocracy something where not everyone gets to vote, and a white majority is preserved.
HAYES: That point about the international comparison is important. Because when the story does arise, right in some country that you don’t follow closely and you’re not an expert of, and they say there’s an election and it was certified and these people dispute it. I always say like, I don’t actually know what the deal is here right I’m not following this. And that kind of cloud of uncertainty, when you’re not in it, right. If as an outside observer It could be a little hard to adjudicate like ok who actually, who’s right here, right. And we’ve seen that abroad and Ari, we’ve seen it in our own history, right. This is precisely the thing that happened in the Jim Crow south, this attack on legitimacy through means both legal and extra-legal that was the way in which the Jim Crow, you know, state was constructed.
ARI BERMAN (MOTHER JONES): That’s absolutely right Chris, we had a multiracial democracy in the United States and it was taken away. And that’s what people don’t realize. And the pattern between the attack on voting rights at the end of reconstruction and the attack on voting rights today is so similar it’s eerie. You had the enfranchisement of black voters followed by violence, fraud, and intimidation to keep them from the polls then you had the legal disenfranchisement of black voters through literacy tests, poll taxes, etcetera, etcetera. That’s how Reconstruction really ended and that’s how Jim Crow began. And what’s happening today is very similar. You had new groups turn out in record numbers in 2020 to flip states like Georgia blue. That was followed by an attempt to overturn the election, an insurrection. Now they are trying to enshrine the insurrection through quote unquote legal means. That’s what the entire 2020, 2021 state legislative sessions are about. It's trying to figure out legal ways to disenfranchise voters because the illegal means failed. And that’s the lesson they took from the end of reconstruction and that’s how history is repeating itself today.
HAYES: The question about laws and legitimacy seems important here and something I am focused on. There is a legal regime. You can have a legal process in which all of the laws are followed, which is what we had in the last election. It was certified. Everyone did their job in the end. But the legitimacy problem is in some ways deeper. It’s not something that can be corrected through law. Although law serves as a kind of guard rail. The attack on legitimacy is a deeper attack in some ways.
SLAUGHTER: Well, you are absolutely right. And your point about the elections abroad are well taken. Where those of us that are outside say that well, well where there's smoke there's fire. it's hard to know. Exactly why we send in international observers and why there are all of these election monitors who are certified by many different countries and parties and indeed the international Republican institute and the international Democrat institute typically send delegations together. Here once you leave the realm of any kind of agreed truth where you can have people believing that our president runs a pedophile ring. You are in great danger. Because no amount of certification, no amount of legal fair normal process will suffice. You have a group who are determined to put the cloud on the election and then simply to push through ways of overturning what the world, the rest of the country would see as a free and fair election.
HAYES: Yeah and Anne-Marie You made the point of the state legislatures, which are key players here. Ari, you heard it in the interview, right. That was always the thing that Trump was banking on. It's where you have some of the most radicalized members of the Republican Party operating, and you are seeing this now as a cause that various Republican state legislatures are taking up, Ari.
BERMAN: Of course, and the thing is the states have already become the Republican Party’s laboratories for subverting democracy. We already don’t have functioning democracies at the state level in places like Wisconsin and Michigan because elections are already predetermined through gerrymandering. Then you put voter suppression on top of that. And the overriding goal of the Republican Party and all of these states has been to subvert the democratic process over and over and over again to build wall upon wall upon wall, Chris right? They have already insulated themselves through gerrymandering and voter suppression. Now they are adding more voter suppression and they are adding on top of that being able to overturn elections. So in every step of the process they have undermined democracy and created this feedback loop where one anti-democratic facet then entrenches another anti-democratic facet of the system.
HAYES: Anne-Marie Slaughter and Ari Berman. That was excellent. Thank you both for making some time tonight. I really, really do appreciate it.
