Trump campaign accuses media of being 'complicit' in violence in US cities
CNN editor criticized for calling out Trump's uses of 'riots'; reaction on 'Outnumbered.'
MSNBC host Joy Reid gave a full-throated defense of Black Lives Matter, insisting demonstrators pushing for racial justice don't riot and blaming President Trump for the violence she said is being fueled by "white nationalist mobs."
Reid on Saturday shared a local Seattle report from June, suggesting that Black Lives Matter isn't responsible for the unrest because of the 81 arrests that were made at the time and included race in court documents, 32 were White and only eight of them were Black; in addition, more than 70 percent of those arrests were from outside the Seattle area.
"Let me repeat this for those inventing the idea of 'Black Lives Matter riots.' BLM doesn’t 'riot.' They march against police violence. And note that those caught setting fires, assaulting and shooting people are consistently of the RIGHT, not the left," Reid tweeted. "So let’s stop giving in to the narrative Trump and his allies are inventing to try and help him cling to power. Autocrats always eventually get to this place: accusing the opposition of being anarchic and violent to cover up their own rot and violence."
She continued, "You are MUCH more at risk from unmasked Trump cultists coming home to your suburb from a superspreader rally and coughing or sneezing on you in Walmart or touching the door handle after wiping their nose than you are from a Black Lives Matter rally."
In a separate series of tweets on Sunday, the "ReidOut" host accused the president of wanting to incite violence during his upcoming visit to Kenosha.
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"Let's just be clear: Donald Trump is not going to Kenosha to calm the city or to comfort the family of Jacob Blake, or the families of Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, the two young men shot to death by one of Trump's supporters. He's going to Kenosha to whip up more violence," Reid wrote. "Violence and mayhem, perpetrated by people who support HIM, unleashed at night and let's just be clear: by white nationalist mobs, often against other young white people (both Rosenbaum and Huber were white), in cities with few Black people, IS HIS RE-ELECTION STRATEGY. Period."
She explained, "The 'riots' are not Black Lives Matter marches gone wrong. Armed white nationalists are mobbing these cities to take advantage of protests and scare fellow white people into quietly siding with them. It's an old, tried and true strategy: using fear & anti-blackness for politics."
Reid went on to praise her MSNBC colleague Jennifer Rubin, the self-described "conservative blogger" for The Washington Post who argued that the violence is Trump's and the GOP's fault.
"Listen to @JRubinBlogger. She speaks as a longtime conservative Republican, so she KNOWS the party. 'Democrats needn’t accept this narrative that Biden or BLM must bring a stop to the violence Trump is creating. They must denounce HIM for it,'" the MSNBC host wrote echoing Rubin's op-ed, later writing, "Bottom line: watch the Portland mayor, who is calling Trump out directly for sparking this violence. Trump LITERALLY tweeted: “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Biden should remind him of that when he gets to Kenosha. This is Trump violence, in Trump’s America."
Reid doubled down on her show Monday night, invoking Adolf Hitler and slavery and linking them to Trump fueling racial divisions in this country.
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"Who benefits if lots of White voters believe that Black Lives Matter is threatening and violent? No one more than Donald Trump," Reid said. "Trump is losing to Joe Biden full-stop. So to sneak back in through the Electoral College, he needs to win back those American Brexit states that put him over the top in 2016. So his fixation on Kenosha, in Wisconsin, is relevant."
"There is no anarchist group on the left that listens to Joe Biden. There is no Antifa for Biden-Harris armed militia, so this is not a 'both sides' thing, but Trump is openly doing the opposite, encouraging more violence," she later told her viewers.