During a segment on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Thursday morning, Mika Brzezinski was less than thrilled with Al Sharpton for his comparison of anti-Israel protests and riots on college campuses to the January 6 Capitol riot.
Part of me is still trying to wrap my head around the fact that Sharpton, who has a history of antisemitism, would even make such an apt comparison. But I’ll give credit where credit is due.
Sharpton and co-host Joe Scarborough were deliberating on the political challenges these protests posed for Democrats after the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and California Highway Patrol (CHP) were forced to clear out an encampment at UCLA early Thursday morning. Scarborough argued that Joe Biden and the Democrats need to be more vocal in opposing this unrest.
“This is something that Democrats don’t get in their gut, and they never have,” Scarborough said. “It’s the thing that frustrates me about Democrats. I voted for the war before I voted against the war. You know, always worrying, well, what about the 5% on the far, far left that are going to call me this or that or the other? No. Call this out. This is wrong. Call this out. Say, ‘We need to help the people of Gaza. We need to end the threat of famine in Gaza. We need to pressure Netanyahu to move towards a cease-fire and bring those hostages home. This detracts from our bigger cause.’”
“And let me say this,” Sharpton said. “The politics of that, what is being robbed by them not doing that, Joe, where you and I agree, how do the Democrats, how do the Democrats, how do all of us on that side say January 6 was wrong if you can have the same pictures going on on college campuses? You lose the moral high ground.”
That’s when Mika Brzezinski chimed in.
“Good Lord!” Brzezinski interjected. “Don’t make a parallel to January 6. For some reason, that’s not allowed.”
According to Sharpton, “Anytime what you are protesting for becomes secondary to what you are doing, then you really aren’t protesting for it.”
“It’s about them, it’s not about pushing the cause,” he continued. “They need to ask themselves if they were sincere. Are you really focusing on what’s going on in Gaza, about the children, about the women, about the innocent people, and in Israel? Are you focusing on whether or not you are violent or whether or not you can say the most incendiary statement? How are you guiding this? It’s about them, and I think that they’ve lost the message.”
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What’s interesting about this discussion and Brzezinski’s comment about January 6 is that she made such a comparison earlier in the week.
“That’s the place we’ve all been sitting in, watching this, going, ‘What the hell is going on? What are these universities doing? Why aren’t they doing something?’ And I’ll echo the horror that this does look like January 6. What a terrible example for our students,” she said on Tuesday.
It sounds like MSNBC doesn’t want its commentators to compare the ongoing antisemitic riots and protests at college campuses and that Sharpton hadn’t gotten the memo yet. But the problem is that when people like Sharpton and Brzezinski are saying it, even the most far-left Democrats can see the comparison. It doesn’t matter whether they say it or not; the people can see it themselves. And as Sharpton correctly observes, Democrats are ceding the moral high ground on the issue.