That didn’t take long. Just minutes after a choked-up Melissa Harris-Perry delivered an on-air apology for mocking Mitt Romney’s adopted black grandson, conversation turned to populism and the Tea Party movement. After acknowledging that the Tea Party stands for lower taxes and smaller government, panelist Katrina Vanden Heuvel just had to bring race into the discussion.
“Let’s be honest,” she begins. “There is a race … racism threaded through the right-wing populism, I mean which is not unusual to American right-wing populism.” Ugh.
Later in the segment, New York Times editorial writer Robert George suggests that racism played its part in both right wing and left wing populism, even calling out the unions, but Vanden Heuvel will have none of it. “Not today though,” she insists. “Not today.”
No, today, the only racists are in the Republican party. Which is the exact sentiment that led to the segment for which host Melissa Harris-Perry only just apologized this morning.
And around we go …
@CalebHowe and nothing will change! Properly used, the left gives out this candy like its Halloween!
— jason (@JasonSlusher) January 4, 2014
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