MSNBC's Morning Joe terrified by 'sick society' Trump has created: 'Those people hate democracy so much'

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough compared the crowds gathering without masks at President Donald Trump's rallies to the hippies who congregated in San Francisco in the 1960s.

The "Morning Joe" host noticed something in video from Saturday's rally in Georgia, where the president spread lies about his election loss in hopes of overturning the vote, that reminded him of the "alternate reality" that author Joan Didion witnessed being birthed in Haight-Ashbury.

"I read and reread Joan Didion a lot of these days as she was coming to terms with the radicalism of the 1960s, feeling like she lived in a country that she no longer understood," Scarborough said, "and I just thought, I thought how remarkable it was that when I was a small child, my family was scared and I think most of Middle America was scared by a lot of the radical changes they saw in a country they didn't recognize anymore, and here we are 50 years later and a lot of Americans are scared again."

Didion went to San Francisco in 1967 and wrote the landmark essay, "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," and Scarborough saw parallels to what Trump has conjured up for his followers.

"Here we are from Haight-Ashbury in 1967 and Joan Didion talking about a world going haywire, and we fast forward to 2020 and it's Valdosta, Georgia, and it's people living in another world," Scarborough said. "A people just like the hippies that Joan Didion was describing in 1967 that were trying to create an alternate reality, and how absolutely bizarre that this is where conservatism ended in response to the craziness of the 1960s and it is, by the way, I was there every step of the way. There I was in the Baptist church every step of the way, I was there in the conservative movement every step of the way. I was there in the white suburbia every step of the way. I represented it every step of the way."

"I have been living in northwest Florida, every step of the way and living in suburban communities every step of the way, where people are pushing back against the radicalism of the 1960s and, as Joan Didion said, it was an intention, it was a trail, it had gone haywire," he added, "and you look at what happened this weekend, as a representative of everything that we have seen over the past four years, and this is the mirrored reflection of Haight-Ashbury in 1967, except the radicals who are trying to tear down the institutions, the radicals who are trying to undermine America, that are trying to create an alternate reality now, are Donald Trump and his so-called conservative followers."

Scarborough said his own parents would not understand what had happened to the Republican Party and conservatism under Trump.

"I'm talking though about the masses of people that my parents would look at, and they would look at the people and they would say, who are these people?" Scarborough said. "What are they doing? Where did they come from?"

"We look at all of those people in the crowd who are following an authoritarian, who are following a fascist leader, who want to overturn democratically elected results, and I'm asking the same question of them," he added. "No moral equivocation between someone dropping acid in Haight-Ashbury and the president of the United States trying to turn this into the authoritarian country, none whatsoever. But we're talking about a sick society and a large part of that society who have lost their way and you look in those crowds in Valdosta and that's what frightens me. It's not Donald Trump. It frightens me that those people hate democracy so much, those people have been so swayed by a fascist leader that they now are actively calling for the overturning of millions and millions of votes, and what is, in effect, a coup."