Those who play the proverbial “race card” do so because it allows them to engage in quick-and-easy emotional blackmail. After all, an instant claim of identity-based moral superiority requires far less thought than say, making a persuasive argument. And behind their claim lies the unspoken-yet-clearly-implied assertion that only a bigot would disagree with them or refuse their demands. Hence the emotional blackmail.
President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, however, has exposed the relative futility of that tactic. It no longer works on the majority of Americans. In fact, we will now see if it works on the establishment propagandists who make personnel decisions at MSNBC.
Monday on the social media platform X, MSNBC host Katie Phang, whose father emigrated to the United States from South Korea, described herself as “stunned” and then immediately played the identity politics game upon learning that she, like her racist now-former colleague Joy Reid, had lost her show on the network.
“I was proud to platform more [Asian American Pacific Islander] voices than any other cable show ever,” she wrote near the end of her first paragraph.
“And I was, and remain, proud to have been one of the only AAPI hosts with her name on a show. Representation matters,” she added. Phang hosted “The Katie Phang Show” Saturdays on MSNBC.
A personal note about the @katiephangshow: pic.twitter.com/k4Igb0ALVc
— Katie Phang (@KatiePhang) February 24, 2025
At best, the phrase “representation matters” amounts to a vomit-inducing platitude. At worst, it constitutes overt racism masquerading as a moral imperative.
Either way, a chorus of the usual race-mongering nincompoops joined in Phang’s pathetic paean to immutable and irrelevant characteristics.
For instance, Monday on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow, one of the network’s most notorious liars and most conspicuous examples of Trump Derangement Syndrome, played the ultimate game of emotional blackmail when she hinted in a rather cowardly fashion that the network’s on-air shakeup under new president Rebecca Kutler had racial undertones.
On X, former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, another TDS-afflicted buffoon, called the firings a “racist purge.”
“BREAKING: MSNBC racist purge escalates. Ayman Mohyeldin, Katie Phang and Jonathan Capehart ousted along with Joy Reid and Alex Wagner,” Olbermann wrote.
BREAKING: MSNBC racist purge escalates. Ayman Mohyeldin, Katie Phang and Jonathan Capehart ousted along with Joy Reid and Alex Wagner https://t.co/vgGlgUFhGI
— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) February 24, 2025
Not that decent people care about such things, but woke nitwits would characterize all of those hosts as “non-white.”
Moreover, those nitwits’ commitment to emotional blackmail precludes them from even trying to conceal their own obvious hypocrisy.
For instance, the left-wing Daily Beast characterized MSNBC’s on-air shake-up as a “bloodbath of non-white anchors.”
The same story, however, acknowledged that three “non-white” co-hosts — Symone Sanders-Townsend, Michael Steele, and Alicia Menendez — would replace Reid.
Likewise, the network expanded Kenya-born Canadian journalist Ali Velshi’s eponymous “Velshi” weekend program to three hours.
But that kind of news does not generate the same race-based resentment as the Beast’s headline. Best, therefore, to bury it in the actual story.
Meanwhile Trump himself weighed in on the controversy.
Monday on his social media platform Truth Social, the president called Reid a “mentally obnoxious racist” with “virtually non-existent ratings.”
Trump also took aim at the entire “corrupt operation” under Comcast (he called it “Concast”), which owns both NBC and “MSDNC,” through which it has operated as “nothing more than an illegal arm of the Democrat Party” and in that capacity committed the “UNPARDONABLE SIN” of perpetuating “Fake News.”
One wonders how Kutler and others at MSNBC reacted to the words “illegal” and “unpardonable.”
Does Trump know something about the financial source of modern left-wing news? Does he know or at least suspect, for instance, that MSNBC might have received funding from what Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called the “sinister” United States Agency for International Development, which Trump shattered into a million pieces earlier this month? One can only speculate.
Either way, Trump’s post on Truth Social read like a proverbial shot across MSNBC’s bow.
In sum, if that network’s executives can resist succumbing to the race-mongers’ emotional blackmail, then perhaps we may count them among the millions of Americans who finally recognize it as the morally and intellectually bankrupt tactic it is.
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