Michael Eric Dyson said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” that former President Barack Obama made white conservatives so crazy they became “belligerently ignorant” supporters of former President Donald Trump.
Dyson said, “The obsequious deference to a neofascist president has nearly ruined democracy.”
He continued, “In this era, to forsake the commitment to fundamental principles of democracy in the name of party, every bad thing they’ve said about the other side, everything they’ve said about Democrats, everything they’ve said about losers and unpatriotic people who do not adhere to principles broader than their party, they are the very embodiment of.”
Dyson added, “Liz Cheney, with whom I share little in common ideologically and look how stunning it was that she voted for the most part with Trump and the others in terms of their records — having said that, she stands up tall as a person of loyalty to the nation above her own party, and for that, we should congratulate her.”
Anchor Joy Reid said, “You write in your book about the sort of long conversation that we’re having on race in the country, isn’t this kind of almost inevitable given the way we saw people completely lose it over a Black president getting elected. That you were eventually going to get to a part of the other side that says, we’re losing this country. We’ll do anything to keep it, including go for the freak show.”
Dyson said, “There is no question that, you know, according to Bible, if you kick out a demon and you don’t put anything in its place, seven worse than the demon you kicked out are going to come in. What we’re seeing is the storming of the house by the lunatic fringe, if we can use a classic phrase from politics. We are seeing the despotic will of the uninformed, the belligerently ignorant, the proudly unenlightened. They beat up Obama for a tan suit and tan skin, and they beat him up because of his Harvard elite pedigree.”
He added, “So let me get this right. You tell black people they’re stupid and dumb. You tell women they’re uninterested in politics and reason, then when they go get education, they’re overdoing it. They’re defecting from the larger circle of American privilege, which means you’re not a regular citizen. You’re disloyal because now you’re a pointy-head intellectual. No matter what you do, as a woman, as a person of color, you can’t win. So the reality is, yes, this president, when it is Barack Obama, created such insanity in the larger circle of American privilege among white brothers and sisters, they have done, to quote DMX, ‘You’re going to make me lose my mind up in here.'”
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