During Monday’s edition of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” host Joe Scarborough tore into “a powerful cable news network” for inciting a white supremacist who gunned down 10 Black shoppers at a Buffalo grocery store on Saturday.
The mass shooting suspect reportedly live-streamed the massacre on Twitch and posted a 106-page manifesto pushing the so-called “White Replacement Theory” that has been long promoted and championed by far-right personality Tucker Carlson on Fox News and others on the right.
Scarborough put the blame for the incident where it belongs:
“Fear locks our minds on the past, and it makes us anxious about the future,” the Morning Joe host 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.”
“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,'” he 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.”
He added: “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,” Scarborough concluded.
Watch the segment below from MSNBC:
