Yale history professor Timothy Snyder told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on Monday that NBC News hiring former RNC chief Ronna McDaniel is “pretty bad.”
Snyder wrote the book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, from which Wallace read a passage to open the segment.
“What NBC has done is they’ve invited into what should be a normal framework, someone who doesn’t believe that that framework should exist at all,” Snyder began, adding:
What NBC has done of its own volition is bring into a very important conversation about democracy, one which is going to take place for the next seven months or so, someone who — Ronna McDaniel — who tried to disassemble our democracy. Who personally took part in an attempt to undo the American system.And, so, bringing that in without questioning it is obeying the advance. Because what NBC is doing is saying, “Well, could be that in ’24, our entire system will break down. Could be we’ll have an authoritarian leader. Oh, but look, we’ve made this adjustment in advance because we’ve brought into the middle of NBC somebody who has already taken part in an attempt to take our system down.” So yeah, I think this is pretty bad.
Wallace asked where the lines should be drawn between politics and media. Snyder answered:
The lines for me would be things like, if you are going to be
on American media, you should be somebody who believes that there is something called truth. That there are things called facts, and you can pursue them. You shouldn’t be someone who has over, and over, and over again, pushed the idea of fake news, educated Americans away from the facts, away from belief in the facts.And a second red line would be something like this. If we’re going to be putting people on the news who have participated in an attempt to overthrow the system, then we have to ask at the very beginning, “Why did you do that? Why is that legitimate?” And we have to ask ourselves, “Why is it that we are taking this step to bring people into the middle of our discussion?”So, my two red lines are, you should be somebody who’s at least trying for the facts, and you shouldn’t be somebody who has taken part in an attempt to undo the system, which is what we’re talking about here. We shouldn’t mince words about it.
Watch the clip above via MSNBC.