Panelists on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" struggled to make sense of Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders' rebuttal to President Joe Biden's State of the Union speech.
The newly elected Republican governor and former Donald Trump press secretary focused on right-wing grievances about the "woke mob," and made allusions to satanic conspiracy theories about dark "rituals" during her Republican response to the president's speech.
“Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace, but we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight,” Sanders said. “Every day, we are told we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags and worship their false idols.”
Panelists were put off by her remarks, which they said were aimed squarely at the hard-right GOP base and mostly incomprehensible to everyone else.
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"That was the weirdest sort of dystopian speech I think I've heard since 'American carnage,'" said Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, referring to Trump's dark inaugural speech.
Jen Palmieri, the White House communications director for Barack Obama, was unimpressed with Sanders' speech.
"What Gov. Sanders did last night, I was like, you needed some kind of MAGA decoder book to understand what she's talking about," Palmieri said. "What woke -- Washington is living in woke fantasies. What are you even -- what you saying? The speech that only makes sense to not just -- not the base, a small, some lane of the base. But I think for most Americans they have no idea what you're even talking about. It's just like this weird, dystopian America that exists only in that pretty limited MAGA lane."
Host Joe Scarborough conceded that many Americans were concerned about the issues Sanders raised, but not enough to warrant a featured role in the GOP rebuttal.
"There are a lot of Americans concerned about 'wokism' on college campuses, there are a lot of Americans, over 80 percent, who don't think, for instance, don't think that males who transition after puberty should be able to compete against girls and young women in sports," Scarborough said. "That's all right, but that's here, right? They'll talk about that over dinner tables, and they do a lot, too much to me. Can we just please talk about the Red Sox? But at the end of the day, they care about the things Biden was talking about. They care about their jobs, they care about their futures... this stuff that she was talking about last night, that's for a podcast."
Watch the video below or at this link.
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