MSNBC host Joy Reid thinks that rural Americans are “the core threat to our democracy” and pointed to a series of tweets by liberal author Jared Yates Sexton that claimed Trump supporters “do not believe in the Constitution or any founding principles unless they're advantageous” as proof of her far-left theory.
“By 2040, about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states. They will have only 30 senators representing them, while the remaining 30% of Americans will have 70 senators representing them,” MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin tweeted over the weekend.
Reid, who tweets so often that it’s amazing she finds time to do anything else, has a feed that is essentially the anti-Trump talking points of the far left on a daily basis. While Sexton never specifically mentioned the “rural minority” in his rant, the MSNBC host took it upon herself to quote Griffin’s tweet add her own commentary tied to Sexton's thread.
“This is the core threat to our democracy. The rural minority -- the people @JYSexton just wrote a long thread about -- have and will continue to have disproportionate power over the urban majority,” Reid tweeted.
Reid said gerrymandering reform and “the abolition of the Electoral College would be a start” when engaging with followers on how to fix the issue.
The Resurgent editor, radio host and Fox News contributor Erick Erickson responded, “Griffin's original tweet and Reid's response highlight a core threat to our constitutional system: basic ignorance.”
Reid seems to use hateful rhetoric on a regular basis and has called Trump supporters “deplorables,” claimed that living in Trump’s America is the “worst time to be a human” in the history of the world and even referred to the Trump administration as “the apocalypse” in recent memory.
While outwardly mocking Middle America, Reid pointed to the Twitter rant of the man who recently published an anti-Trump book titled, “The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore,” that reflects on the Trump movement. Sexton recently tweeted that “Midwesterners put up Confederate flags” because of “racism” but also “dream of being able to rise up and remake this country into a fascist place.” However, that comment was tweeted after Sexton inspired Reid with his 22-tweet thread.
“With Trump's base showing strong preferences for authoritarianism, and continuing to support a serial predator of children, it's time to look this problem in its face,” Sexton wrote to kick off the thread that inspired the MSNBC host to mock rural Americans. “This isn't a political problem. This is a societal issue, a major, major existential problem with who we are and how we view the world.”
He continued, saying the problem isn’t about Democrats and Republicans but rather “a substantial group in this country who are okay with a president who would stamp out free speech, free press, and are comfortable with foreign influence and collusion.” Sexton said the people he was referencing don’t care about mass shootings, support fascism and “didn't blink when a woman was murdered by white supremacists,” -- an apparent reference to the killing in Charlottesville, Va., last August.
“They only care about our laws and customs when they help them. They do not believe in the Constitution or any founding principles unless they're advantageous,” he wrote. “They've always been here. They've been slaveholders. They've been confederates. They've been our neighbors. They've been our family.”
He continued: “Republicans fostered them as a means to push their policies and leveraged their worst instincts. Now, they've lost hold of the leash and have been taken over from the inside.”
Sexton said Trump “didn’t create” the issue but “is the total personification of this worldview.”
The liberal author added, “there's literally no telling what they'll stand by” and noted that “there are Americans who hold Adolf Hitler in high regard” because he had “good” ideas.
“If people like Trump continue to push them further, there's literally no telling what they'll allow or what they'll support. This is how a democracy backslides into a fascist state,” Sexton wrote.
Erickson wrote, “To have a national ‘news’ host call rural America a ‘core threat’ to our democracy is both striking arrogance and striking ignorance.”