Washington Examiner White House correspondent Sarah Westwood tacitly made the “Morning Joe” crew eat its words on free speech during a Thursday morning hit on MSNBC.
Westwood, discussing a recent opinion piece Bari Weiss wrote for The New York Times, argued, “It’s a dangerous trend that you can characterize speech you don’t agree with as violence.”
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“We are seeing this in a less intense way here in Washington, that policy disagreements can be reframed as moral disagreements,” she explained. “Not just as a way to invalidate the other side but as a way to avoid ever having to engage an idea on the merits.”
“So when we’re talking about net neutrality or tax reform, there are partisans on both sides that characterize, you know, tax cuts as hurting the poor, you know, or you’re going to strip internet away from rural areas and they want to harm children’s learning. It becomes a moral disagreement.”
“Right,” Brzezinski said in agreement.
Westwood’s point appears to run contrary to the line of reasoning “Joe” took earlier in Thursday’s broadcast, specifically in relation to the recent ads the NRA is running in the wake of the Parkland shooting. (RELATED: Blumenthal — NRA Ads Border On ‘Illegal Threat’)
“There are a series of these ads that clearly incite violence,” Scarborough posed to Sen. Richard Blumenthal. “Any reasonable person looking at these ads — I’m sure you’ve seen them all, they use violent language, violent images, violent rhetoric, and it — let’s just say it has caused serious complications for many people named there.”
In recent days, Scarborough has accused the NRA’s ads of specifically targeting his co-host and fiancee Mika Brzezinski and borderline called for government censorship of NRATV for “inciting violence” against Brzezinski and other media personalities.
“They’re going around making threats and certainly that’s not the only video,” he added Thursday. “I’ve seen other videos where they say to the New York Times something like you’re in our targets or we’re coming after you. It’s always — the language is just extraordinarily violent.”
Here is the NRATV ad Scarborough has objected to.
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“To every lying member of the media, to every Hollywood phony, to the role model athletes who use their free speech to alter and undermine what our flag represents…Your Time is running out. The clock starts now.”
–@DLoesch #Oscars90 pic.twitter.com/SDVjeTxyfB— NRATV (@NRATV) March 4, 2018