Former ESPN and MSNBC host Keith Olbermann opened his Countdown podcast Tuesday with a segment which could only be described as the ravings of a lunatic. The topic of his ten-minute tirade: “the blood of Boulder, Colorado, is on the hands of Donald Trump.” If that relatively unsupported claim didn’t seem extreme enough, Olbermann doubled down, describing Trump’s “ethnic cleansing” policy, which supposedly exclusively targeted the innocent illegal immigrants while ignoring actual criminals.
In Olbermann’s own words:
They are looking for innocent people and those guilty of misdemeanors or things less than misdemeanors to purge, to remove, to cleanse! We got little notice last week, but Rubio, rapidly rising to the top of the hypocrisy charts to replace even Lindsey Graham for largest percentage of soul sold, announced a reorganization of the State Department that would in essence eliminate all efforts inside that department to provide a haven here for foreign nationals who have helped this country, like the thousands of people in Afghanistan who fought the Taliban with us before Trump surrendered to the Taliban. It would eliminate that department and replace it with, quote, “the Office of Remigration.”
Remigration, the “word of the decade among the far-right neo-Nazis” according to Olbermann, meant nothing more to Trump than returning illegal migrants to their home countries, as he stated on an X post in September.
Apparently wanting to block illegal immigration made you a neo-Nazi these days.
Committed to his narrative of Trump’s “ethnic cleansing,” Olbermann made sure to highlight the infrequent instances of average people being detained and deported, disregarding the much higher percentage of criminals who have been deported during Trump’s first year back in office.
Olbermann instead purported that Trump’s immigration policy was based entirely on appearances:
Remigration is farther right than even those Trump cultists cheering on the disappearing of the innocents advocate, and Trump is at its forefront, and Trump is bringing it here with his little whore Marco Rubio at the helm. And the key thing to remember is, like all good ethnic cleansing, it is not about finding people who are actual threats, like the man who admitted to creating his own flamethrowers and trying to burn Jews to death in Colorado. Those people are too much trouble for the ethnic cleansers.
(...)
Because you no longer bother to look for people who are guilty or who might be planning heinous acts, you just look for their skin tone and their names, that is why the blood of Boulder, Colorado, is on the hands of Donald Trump.
Quite contrary to Olbermann’s claim, it was the exact opposite that allowed Mohamed Soliman to escape ICE detection. Prior to the terror attack in Boulder, there was no reason to suspect Soliman of any criminal intent, nor was there any known evidence that would have drawn ICE’s attention.
Rather than target individuals arbitrarily, ICE properly did its job. It was precisely because ICE spent its time tracking down convicted migrant criminals (over 75 percent of all ICE arrests involved convicted criminals) that a man with no previous criminal record like Soliman was not a priority.
Wasn’t that how it should be, Olbermann? The blood was not on Trump’s hands; it was on Soliman, whose extreme anti-Semitic views were much more aligned with the far-left’s agenda.
The transcript is below. Click "expand" to read.
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
June 3, 2025
5 min 4 sec(…)
KEITH OLBERMAN: They are looking for innocent people and those guilty of misdemeanors or things less than misdemeanors to purge, to remove, to cleanse!
We got little notice last week, but Rubio, rapidly rising to the top of the hypocrisy charts to replace even Lindsey Graham for largest percentage of soul sold, announced a reorganization of the State Department that would in essence eliminate all efforts inside that department to provide a haven here for foreign nationals who have helped this country, like the thousands of people in Afghanistan who fought the Taliban with us before Trump surrendered to the Taliban.
It would eliminate that department and replace it with, quote, “the Office of Remigration.” Go look up that word remigration on social media. Nearly everything you will find on Twitter, X, will be in German. Sometimes it will have been translated from German by some pasty white Englishman with bad teeth associated with Nigel Farage.
It is the nice way to say ethnic cleansing. It is the word of the decade among the far-right neo-Nazis and the Nordic Aryans.
(…)
9 min 15 sec
OLBERMANN: It would be patently monstrous if it were not first so patently stupid, but that is the entire existence of Donald Trump in one sentence, isn't it? And this isn't new. They sneaked it through amid the other 10 tons of shit that comes out of Trump's mouth every day.
In September of last year, in the middle of the usual racist hate dressed up as border issues as Trump escalated it towards his neo-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden just before the election, Trump wrote of his vow to quote “return Kamala's illegal migrants to their home countries,” parenthesis, “also known as remigration.”
Remigration is farther right than even those Trump cultists cheering on the disappearing of the innocents advocate, and Trump is at its forefront, and Trump is bringing it here with his little whore Marco Rubio at the helm.
And the key thing to remember is, like all good ethnic cleansing, it is not about finding people who are actual threats, like the man who admitted to creating his own flamethrowers and trying to burn Jews to death in Colorado. Those people are too much trouble for the ethnic cleansers.
Ethnic cleansing, remigration, is about convincing all the white people that you don't actually have to search for threats or investigate for threats or prepare for threats or separate those people who are threats from those people who are not. You just round up all the people who you think look like threats.
That is remigration. That is ethnic cleansing. That is Donald Trump's presidency, and that, because you no longer bother to look for people who are guilty or who might be planning heinous acts, you just look for their skin tone and their names, that is why the blood of Boulder, Colorado, is on the hands of Donald Trump.
(…)