Things are getting crazy at MSNBC.
“Morning Joe” went off the air Monday in the wake of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, but the network’s primetime talent made up for it by binging on crazy content during its coverage of the Republican National Convention.
Never mind that the network’s main anchors are broadcasting many of these wild takes from a Manhattan studio with an LED screen backdrop creating the illusion of live coverage from Milwaukee.
On a scale of 1 to 10, Alex Wagner, Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid gave the tinfoil hat a high rating of 12.
Together, the three delivered outlandish monologues about shooting President Trump, compared beating COVID to surviving an assassin’s bullet, suggested JD Vance was pro-Aryan because he named his company after The Lord of the Rings, and, my personal favorite, included a “white supremacist Easter egg” in Vance’s speech.
Look, this is the Republican National Convention, so I would expect, and even welcome, a fair amount of backlash from left-wing networks.
They will surely find plenty of substantive differences between Trump and Vance, and there may be something in Vance’s past that points to something nitpicky, given that the vice presidential nominee gave Democrats a lot of opposition research with a little best-selling book called “Hillbilly Elegy.”
No. Instead, the MSNBC team deployed its usual weapons: identity and white supremacy.
In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Vance recalled the time he proposed to his wife, Usha, the daughter of Indian immigrants: “Look, I came here with $120,000 in law school debt and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in eastern Kentucky,” he said.
It was a tender, deeply personal expression of love and hope for a common future.
But Wagner said this showed Vance’s “fundamental belief in white supremacy and masculinity” and that the only history their family should have is their “white male lineage,” not their Native American side.
Perhaps if Vance had voiced his support for equality and inclusion when proposing to marry Usha, it would have been more romantic and more acceptable to Wagner.
Wagner was also put off by Vance’s optimistic assertion that “America is not just an idea, but a people with a common history and a common future.”
She offered another option: “There’s a lot of people there with different histories, different traditions.”
It’s almost as if the split is her point.
Maddow didn’t even wait for Vance’s speech to descend into a Nazi maze on air: On Wednesday, she said that Vance’s naming his venture capital firm “Narya,” after the ring in “Lord of the Rings,” meant he favored the far right.
“He called it Narya, Narya,” she said. “You can remember that because it’s ‘Aryan,’ but you move the ‘N’ forward. Apparently the word has something to do with elves and rings from the ‘Lord of the Rings’ series, but I don’t know.”
Well, we know you aren’t.
Meanwhile, Reid seems increasingly out of touch with reality: She has accused Republican National Convention chair Amber Rose of being “racially ambiguous,” delegitimized her message to minorities and suggested the assassination attempt on Trump was staged.
She also argued with a straight face that Biden’s overcoming COVID-19 was just as impressive as Trump’s attending the Republican National Convention just days after being shot.
“The current president of the United States is 81 years old, he has COVID, he should recover in a few days. Doesn’t that mean exactly the same thing, that he’s older than Trump and he’s strong enough to be infected with a disease that was once really deadly for someone his age,” Reid said on the broadcast. “So if he recovers from COVID and comes back and is able to hold rallies, wouldn’t that be exactly the same thing?”
Sure, Joy, but this bizarre act shows that as things get worse for Biden and panic sets in, MSNBC is just throwing the proverbial spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Hey, conspiracy theories and the “everything is white supremacy” mentality worked in 2020.
But these anchors are so far removed from the public that most people don’t realize they’re simply moving on.
And no one is going to be interested in a silly explanation.
