They’re having a rough one over at MSNBC.
After keeping “Morning Joe” off the air Monday, following the assassination attempt against Donald Trump, their primetime talent has overcompensated by cranking up the crazy during coverage of the Republican National Convention.
Never mind that the network’s main anchors are delivering many of these wild takes from their Manhattan studio with an LED-screen backdrop which creates the illusion that they’re live from Milwaukee.
On a scale of 1 to 10 tinfoil hats, Alex Wagner, Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid have rated a strong 12.
Altogether, this trio has dropped crackpot monologues about Trump’s shooting, compared beating COVID to surviving an assassin’s bullet and suggested JD Vance has Aryan leanings because he named his company after a “Lord of the Rings” reference. And my personal favorite: that Vance’s speech contained “Easter eggs of white nationalism.”
Look, it’s the Republican National Convention, so I’d expect — even welcome — a healthy dose of pushback from the left-wing network.
Surely they’d find plenty of substantive disagreements with Trump and Vance. Maybe there’s something to nitpick from Vance’s past, considering the potential veep gifted the Dems plenty of opposition research in a best-selling little book called “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Nope. Instead, MSNBC’s team deployed its go-to weapons: identity and white supremacy.
During Vance’s acceptance speech at the RNC, he recalled proposing to his wife, Usha, a daughter of Indian immigrants. “Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law school debt, and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in eastern Kentucky,” he said.
It was a sweet, very personal expression of love and the hope for a shared future.
Wagner, however, said it shows that Vance “fundamentally believes in the supremacy of whiteness and masculinity.” And that the only history their family should inherit is “white male lineage,” not their Indian side.
Perhaps it would have been more romantic — and acceptable to Wagner — if Vance had included an endorsement of equity and inclusion in asking for Usha’s hand in marriage.
Wagner was also dismayed by Vance’s optimistic assertion that “America is not just an idea, it is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.”
She offered an alternative: “It’s a lot of people with different histories, different heritages.”
It’s almost as if division is her point.
Maddow didn’t even wait for Vance’s speech to verbally crawl into a Nazi rabbit hole on air. On Wednesday, she said that Vance naming his venture capital firm Narya, after a ring in “The Lord of the Rings,” meant he harbored a love of the far right.
“He called it Narya, N-A-R-Y-A,” she said. “Which you can remember because it’s ‘Aryan,’ but you move the ‘N’ to the front. Apparently that word has something to do with elves and rings from ‘The Lord of the Rings’ series, I don’t know.”
Yeah, we know you don’t.
Meanwhile, Reid seems to be growing increasingly untethered from reality. She attacked RNC speaker Amber Rose as “racially ambiguous” to delegitimize her message to minorities, and suggested that the Trump assassination attempt was a set-up.
She also asserted, with a straight face, that Biden overcoming COVID was as badass as Trump getting shot at and showing up to the RNC a couple days later.
“This current president of the United States is 81 years old and has COVID, should he be fine in a couple of days, doesn’t that convey exactly the same thing? That he’s strong enough — older than Trump — to have gotten something that used to really be fatal to people his age,” Reid said on air. “So, if he does fine out of it and comes back and is able to do rallies, isn’t that exactly the same?”
Sure, Joy. But this bizarre act shows that, as the Biden situation deteriorates and panic sets in, MSNBC is just throwing the proverbial spaghetti at the wall — to see what sticks.
Hey, conspiracy and an “Everything is white supremacy” ethos worked in 2020.
But these anchors are so out of touch with regular folks, they don’t realize that most people have simply moved on.
And some cockamamie commentary won’t pull anyone back in.