As we all well know, Trump and his allies never see the senseless acts of terrorist violence around the world and at home as something that can be learned from. For them, these tragic events are opportunities to push a more totalitarian military agenda while vilifying groups of people based on oversimplified and bigoted criteria. Chuck Todd’s Meet The Press is not a forum to have high expectations for when it comes to national discourse. But when Todd has public policy organization Demos’ President Heather McGhee on, there are sure to be a few things said that need to be said. With the conversation focused on the terrible events this past week in London, Todd asked about whether the UK, which does not have the First Amendment to protect citizens’ rights, will get a little authoritarian now, and so McGhee tried to refocus the discussion into something resembling “sense.”
I think this is a question of context, balance and approach. We have been so fortunate. I mean, I live in New York City. I would never have believed about how safe that I feel, even today, after September 11th. This is a moment for the people of the UK where they're experiencing a heightened sense of fragility walking into bars, and concerts, and crossing the street on the bridge. And yet, at the same time, I know that people in the communities of color in this country are also seeing that the President and the right-wing are ignoring domestic extremism here in the United States. Whether or not it's the young man who was a person in the military, who was killed by a white supremacist or the veteran who stepped in obviously in Portland, Oregon. So I think that there is a broad conversation to have about administration that is tolerating right-wing extremism and hate as well as obviously the continued threat of a war that we're continuing to not prosecute well overseas.
From there Todd moves onto the issue of why “conservative politicians” in the United States are batshit crazy when it comes to climate change, with Hugh Hewitt getting a chance to blather on about something Obama and John Kerry did that hurt his feelings. There was no chance that MSBNC would allow Hewitt to be asked to speak on things like white supremacy since MSNBC seems hellbent on grooming Hewitt into the next conservative idiot to front a show on the channel. Having him go toe to toe with McGhee would potentially expose two things about Hewitt and the right—they’re full of racists and they’re intellectually bankrupt.
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