A guest on MSNBC argued over the weekend that former President Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004, is partially responsible for the uptick in crimes against Asian Americans, including the mass shootings in Atlanta, Georgia, last week.
During an appearance on MSNBC’s PoliticsNation program Saturday, LA Times contributor Kurt Bardella told the race-baiting host Al Sharpton the alleged racist state of the Republican party goes back to Ronald Reagan, who he claimed pandered to the “most extreme elements of the Republican party base.”
Sharpton, who is renowned for his bigoted, anti-white, anti-police, anti-Semitic views, had Bardella and Black Lives Matter activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham on the show to ritually denounce conservatives.
The “Reverend Al” began the segment by repeating the false Democrat/media talking point that the increase in “anti-Asian hate” is due to Donald Trump rhetoric.
“Over the last year as former President Trump refused to temper his racist language surrounding the Coronavirus pandemic, incidents of anti-Asian hate increased into the thousands, with other two-thirds of reported incidents targeting Asian and Asian-American women,” Sharpton stated. “Those numbers don’t include the killings in Georgia this week, where eight people were gunned down.”
In fact, FBI statistics show that most violent attacks against Asians are perpetrated by black males, a pattern of criminality that has been a scourge in Asian communities for many years.
Bardella took Sharpton’s bait an ran with it, however, blaming not only the 45th President but the 40th President and the entire GOP, as well, Newsbusters reported.
“You know, Rev, we got here, in my opinion, in part, because of the Republican Party. This is a party – and this is well before Donald Trump ever arrived on the scene—you can go back to what used to be their standard bearer, Ronald Reagan,” Bardella said.
Reagan, who, in my opinion, was a racist, who used policies such as the war on drugs, welfare demonization, the term “welfare queens,” pandering to the Christian right to cater to the most extreme elements of the Republican party base and cloaked racism in public policy. It’s no coincidence that when you look at where the Republican Party is today, now the racists are the face of the party. What Donald Trump did was he gave license and permission to those group of people that Reagan and other Republicans pandered to for so long to come out into the open with their racism and their rhetoric. And it’s manifested itself, now, into violence. It’s no surprise that we’ve gone from extreme rhetoric to extreme acts of violence. They are linked; they are connected; and part of the solution is to start calling it out for what it is and to be aware and mindful of the context of how we got here, and it’s been going on for a very long time.
As bad as Reagan was though, according to Bardella, he would be no match for today’s “craven,” “racist,” and “cringeworthy” GOP.
He went on to claim rather incoherently that Republicans use “code words” to perpetuate “more racist policies,” and he accused conservatives (not anti-police Democrats!) of “leading a race war on America”:
“Republicans have shown for decades now that they have no desire, no interest, no will to take any meaningful action on immigration,” Bardella told Sharpton.
They just see the issue of immigration as another frontier in their race war they’ve perpetrated on the rest of us. That’s all that this is for them. The code words, “border security,” “national security,” “amnesty,” those are code words for more racist policies that we’ve seen from them time and time again. It’s ironic that the last time there was an amnesty in this country, it was from their so-called hero, Ronald Reagan. For all the times you hear them quote Ronald Reagan, let’s be very clear, Ronald Reagan couldn’t get elected dog catcher in today’s Republican Party. There’s no place for someone like that in today’s Republican Party. It just shows how fringeworthy they are, how they cater to the bottom dwellers of their party, in a craven attempt to hold on to power. Because, as Brittany just said, they know that if we all show up, they will lose, we will win. That is driving every single decision they’re making right now, and that’s why they’re leading this race war on America.
Kurt Bardella is a former senior adviser to the scandal-plagued never-Trump organization Lincoln Project.