MSNBC Guest Says Southerners Want to Leave and ‘Take Their Black People With Them, Just Like Before’
MSNBC guest Elie Mystal said that White Republicans in the south are attempting to break from the country, and in doing so, might take “their black people with them” during an attack on federalism Wednesday.
Mystal and fellow guest Heather McGhee joined The ReidOut with host Joy Reid to discuss a range of topics, including the Supreme Court, the culture war, and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).
Reid opened the segment by attacking DeSantis over his handling of Florida’s Covid-19 response. The host opined that under the leadership of the governor, the Sunshine State is a “giant natural herd immunity experiment.”
But Reid also attacked the Republican and southern leaders broadly over their opposition to focusing on race issues in classrooms and also a general opposition to abortion.
“If you’re not already convinced that Republican suppressing the vote and taking over the country would seriously harm our democracy, look no further than Ron DeSantis’ Florida,” Reid said. “An authoritarian harbinger wants to come for all of us if Republicans take over this country in total.”
McGhee and Reid then discussed states which are majority conservative, with both attacking the Supreme Court with regard to recent rulings signaling the court embraced state’s rights.
Mystal, later on in the segment, warned that progressives who do not live in the southeast should pay m0re attention to the court’s embrace of federalism.
He said:
When the Supreme Court rules with what’s called federalism, which is the idea that the states should have broad authority to kind of do whatever they want within their borders, there are a lot of people who think that’s a reasonable outcome. There are a lot of people who are center, center-left people, who think that, you know, it’s fine for the states to choose for themselves and that really, if I’m, you know, a northeastern liberal, you know, whatever. Who cares about Florida? Who cares about Mississippi? I live in New York. I live in California. I’m going to be fine. And there are a couple of real, deep problems with that. One of them is that most African Americans in this country still live in the states where their ancestors were enslaved, right?
Mystal noted that states such as Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida each have high populations of Black Americans, where many of their ancestors were once slaves. He then warned that those descendants could become vulnerable to the whims of rogue Republican state leaders:
So, when these Republicans, as you saw — I don’t know if you saw Marjorie Taylor Greene yesterday was just like, we just want a civil divorce from the rest of the country. When these White people in these states talk about leaving, they’re talking about leaving and taking their black people with them, just like before.
And I know that’s gonna hurt Ron DeSantis’ feefees that I’m making this analogy or comparison between what they’re doing now and what their ancestors did when they owned people, but it’s the same thought process that these states, these policies exist–these policies exist for the benefit of the White, cis, hetero males in charge. And it’s not free for anybody else, not for the Black people, not for the brown people, not for the women in these states. And so we can’t as liberals, we can’t as left-of-center people just consign the south to its White supremacist fate, because we cut off our left hand when we do that. We have to fight for these people, and that means that we have to fight the Supreme Court and fight their interpretations of federalism.
Watch above, via MSNBC.
