Appearing Wednesday on "Morning Joe," MSNBC commentator Anand Giridharadas bashed Americans for being "obsessed" with freedom, claiming that has caused them to ignore issues like the coronavirus and so-called "climate change."
After being asked by co-host Willie Geist what Americans will learn from this crisis, Giridharadas responded with a question of his own: "What's going to be our relationship to government, the idea of government, after this?"
He answered his own question by saying, "There is a primordial American tradition going back to the founders of being freedom-obsessed - even though we’re a country founded on slavery, genocide - being freedom-obsessed to the point that we’re always so afraid of the government coming for us, that we are blind to other types of threats."
So the truth comes out: America's founding fathers were absolutely consumed with being free and not being ruled by a tyrant. The nerve. I'm sure there are some people in Hong Kong who are pretty "obsessed" with that idea themselves.
Giridharadas then insisted there was a newer version of this "obsession" with freedom:
"There's also a more recent kind of 40-year version of this, which is the Reagan war on government, right? Government is the problem. That's not just an idea on the right. There's a hard version on the right. There's a small 'c' conservative militant version of it. But there's also - it has infected many people on the left."
And of course, this anti-America rant wouldn't have been complete without an attack on President Donald Trump:
"And then there's the more recent Trump-era twist in this, which is the war on government becomes a self-fulling prophecy. You undermine government. You undermine it. You undermine it. You put someone who can barely read a sentence in government, in the figure of Donald Trump, and it becomes true that government sucks, because you've made it suck by telling everybody, 'it sucks.'"