MSNBC’s Ali Velshi Smashes the Panic Button in Rant About the ‘Collapse of Democracy’: ‘It’s Not Where We’re Headed — It’s Where We Are’
MSNBC host Ali Velshi went off, Sunday — arguing President Donald Trump has launched an unprecedented assault on U.S. Democracy.
In a scathing rant at the top of the noon ET hour on his show Sunday, Velshi ticked off a list of “guardrails” which — he argues — have begun “to topple,” and painted a very bleak picture of the state of Democracy.
Here’s how he opened his six-minute monologue:
“We begin this hour with a reality check, a crucial one. The collapse of democracy is a strange, almost surreal thing. It can be abstract and hard to recognize in the moment. At first, it just feels like politics. It’s messy, it’s noisy, it is frustrating, and sometimes a bit removed from one’s day-to-day life. But then the guardrails that we’ve taken for granted begin to topple, one after another. A National Guard unit deployed to a city that never asked for it. Key parts of the nation’s electoral process attacked as illegitimate. Rulings of federal judges shrugged off as optional. Neighbors disappeared into ICE vans. Critics and political opponents suddenly faced with criminal probes. The media behaving in ways designed not to trigger the ire of the ruling party. Each new abuse is justified as temporary, necessary, even an emergency. Until one day it’s not temporary at all. Until one day the justification stop altogether because one’s power is absolute and no longer feels the need to explain itself. At best each assault may seem like an outlier until the day you wake up and realize the system itself has become unrecognizable. Well that’s where we are right now. It’s not where we’re headed. It’s where we are.”
Velshi drilled down on what he considers to be fear tactics with the deployment of troops in Washington.
“Federal troops policing petty crime on America’s main street,” Velshi said. “Think about that. Crime may be statistically down, but intimidation is way up. The police state is here! And that’s the whole point.”
The MSNBC host said: “Ultimate power in this country still belongs to the people, but every time we accept or tolerate one more red line being crossed, we normalize the next.”
And he added, “America’s democracy has withstood civil war, depressions, attacks by foreign enemies on its soil, but it has never faced an assault on this scale, an internal demolition carried out not by outsiders or even by well-armed rebels, but by the holder of the highest office in the land. The question is not whether Trump meant it when he promised retribution on the campaign trail. He clearly did. The question, is whether we are willing to see, to really see what it means that he’s carrying it out and that his playbook is being shaped by America’s enemies, strongmen who preside over brutal, illiberal regimes.”
Watch above, via MSNBC.
