Joe Scarborough (NBC/screen grab)
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough blamed a certain cable news network for a white supremacist who gunned down 10 Black shoppers at a Buffalo grocery store.
The shooter posted a lengthy manifesto online before driving more than two hours to Tops Friendly Markets, which he targeted because it was located in a predominately Black neighborhood, and the "Morning Joe" host said his hateful screed matched racist theories promoted by conservative broadcasters.
"Fear locks our minds on the past, and it makes us anxious about future," Scarborough said. "Fear allows us to hate people we don't know, and it even makes us forget the best in ourselves. Once again, fear is a tool being used by media moguls and tyrants to target the weakest and most emotionally fragile among us. Fear feeds on the dispossessed minds mired in lost causes like this."
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"Like Faulkner's Quintin, whose very body was an empty hall echoing with names, he wrote, 'It was a barracks filled with stubborn, backwards-looking ghosts,'" Scarborough continued. "Like Hitler's Germany, haunted by a shattering defeat after World War I. Russia's Putin, a tyrant who has unleashed terror on an entire continent because he is still stricken a generation later by the collapse of the Soviet Union union or, yes, like that infected appendage still attached to the GOP, the Trump wing, fueled by white grievance and wild conspiracies. Those conspiracies pushed by a former president, House Republican leaders, social media monopolies and a powerful cable news network -- billionaires, they're leveraging that fear to make more money and to gain even more power, by preying on the aggrieved, working to turn white against Black, white against Hispanic, white against Muslim, white against Jew."
"It is the most grotesque of marketing schemes that is killing, yes, literally killing those very Americans whose existence is now being used as leverage by news networks and a political party to breed that fear, to make more money and to win votes," he concluded. "It is sick."
Watch the segment below or at this link.
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