MSNBC Tweets Stand-Alone Slam on ‘Conservatives’ Favoring ‘Affirmative Action’ For Their ‘Preferred Demographic’

On Saturday, cable news network MSNBC tweeted an assertion deriding conservatives as hypocrites and implying racist motives on the subject of “Affirmative Action.”

The tweet from MSNBC did not tag a particular show or host, and contained no link or quote marks, but was simply tweeted as a statement. The obvious context is President Joe Biden‘s vow to make the next Supreme Court nominee a Black woman, which has generated criticism, mainly from the right. The issue was a dominating topic on MSNBC coverage on Saturday morning.

“Conservatives don’t mind affirmative action hires so long as the people hired fit their preferred demographic,” the network wrote in the stand-alone tweet.

The tweet gained a lot of traction and support on Twitter, with over 200 retweets, more than 230 quote retweets, and well over a thousand likes at the time of this posting. It also generated volumes of pushback. A sample:

The network tweeted an article a short time later on the same subject, but the line in their tweet was not a quote from that op-ed.

A while after that, MSNBC tweeted a video of Elie Mystal appearing with Chris Hayes, making the same assertion in slightly different words.

“They are happy to play identity politics when it works in their favor,” said Mystal.

Some intrepid tweeters located the same text in use in an article at MSNBC’s website, but the link was not there.

So while it is not an opinion unheard of on the network, in this case the network tweeted the claim directly, without attribution.