“Somebody needs to tell me why Michael Brown has been chosen as the face of black oppression. I see actually a reverse of what happened in Trayvon, where right wingers clinged to this nasty, thuggish guy that chased a young black man through a neighborhood simply because he was black. Trayvon was guilty of walking while being black. And my right wing nutjob friends all embrace George Zimmerman. A thug.”
That was one of the controversial sentiments spoken by Joe Scarborough during MSNBC’s Morning Joe segment this morning. Scarborough, co-host of the show, said he had enough after five St. Louis Rams players entered the field Sunday before the game started with their hands in the air to support Michael Brown.
Scarborough continued expressing his frustrations, saying, “There are so many great people to embrace as heroes in the black community. Deciding you’re going to embrace a guy that knocked over a convenience store and then, according to grand jury testimony, acted in ways that would get my children shot, that’s your hero?”
The conservative co-host on the left-leaning news station said he just couldn’t take it anymore, and the St. Louis players were the last straw. He said, “I have sat here quietly and listened to BS being spewed all over this network and all over other networks, I can’t take it anymore.”
Here’s a longer excerpt, from some of Scarborough’s monologue, which you can watch above.
The whole thing in the media, you don’t hear me usually blaming the media for stuff, but it’s been extraordinarily irresponsible over the past several months, and what the media has let pass as narrative, we saw play out yesterday on an NFL football field. Guys came out ‘hands up don’t shoot’ for the St. Louis Rams. Here’s a video of it. And what is so remarkable is they might as welcome out with a flying saucer attached to all of their heads in solidarity of Michael Brown being transported to Venus on a flying saucer, because that happened as much as that happened. That’s according to grand jury testimony. That’s according to witnesses.
They are using his accomplice in the robbery that was with him at the time who also claimed that Michael Brown was shot in the back. And for some reason, the media attaches to these narratives that will stir up further protests. And I gotta say, I just got to a tipping point this weekend.
There’s another story in Cleveland where a young boy tragically was shot dead. Police officers got a 911 call that he was waving a gun scaring the blank out of everybody in this public park. Police officers came up. Stopped. Shot the young boy. He was 12 years old. But they had taken off the markings to make it look like a toy gun. It was an actual gun. Do you know what The New York Times put in the caption the video? ‘Police officers shoot child with toy.’ I don’t know exactly who puts those, attaches those, but we are doing such a grave disservice to police officers in this country by pushing a narrative, that they are just going around looking to shoot and kill black people.
And somebody has to tell me, something somebody needs to tell me why Michael Brown has been chosen as the face of black oppression.
