NBC News took the opportunity of the Paris terrorist attack to connect religious Americans to radial Islamo-Nazis who murder people who they deem as having “insulted” their religion.
On their MSNBC show “Now With Alex Wagner,” First Look Media’s Eric Bates compared the murder of 12 people to a lawsuit filed in the 1980s by Jerry Falwell against Hustler magazine.
“This isn’t just Islamic extremism,” Bates said. “If you go back to the 80s during the Reagan administration, when Jerry Falwell sued Hustler magazine for portraying him having, I believe it was drunken incest with his mother in an outhouse, again in a visual form, and won $150,000 court case against Hustler for that that was overturned by the Supreme Court I think 8 to 0. So, you know, religious fundamentalists of all stripes and all nationalities have this penchant to say ‘we want to be able to tell you what you can portray.’”
Falwell sued Hustler over a parody liquor ad they ran accusing Falwell of having sex with his mother. Falwell ultimately lost in the Supreme Court and no one was murdered, but that didn’t stop Bates from draw an equivalence between that case and a terrorist attack that left 12 people dead.
Host Alex Wagner, who recently married President Barack Obama’s former personal chef, did not challenge the assertion.
Watch:
h/t Ben Howe