MSNBC Adds Leftist Writer Melissa Harris-Perry As Weekend Program Host

January 5th, 2012 12:32 PM

Doubling down on its commitment to left-wing programming, MSNBC announced today that Nation magazine columnist and Tulane professor Melissa Harris-Perry will anchor a new weekend program starting on February 4.

Harris-Perry has been a frequent contributor on MSNBC's dayside programming, where she's been a reliable liberal pundit, offering up such gems as arguing that it's immoral for government to lay off bureaucrats:

[W]e have to be able to talk about public and structural and political morality as well as private and personal and individual morality and accountability.

So, for example, on this question of shutting down businesses, let's look at the number of government layoffs that Republican and GOP new governors have affected in the context of this economic downturn, right. And we don't call that, we don't look at that and say, "Those unethical governors," that's economic policy.

So, so, all I would suggest is I think we have to have not only a narrative about who we are privately, but also the ethical and moral standards that ought to apply to how we do business, how we do our work together.

On the week of Thanksgiving, Harris-Perry appeared on MSNBC colleague Al Sharpton's radio program where she demonized the Pilgrims as one percenter illegal immigrants who exploited the 99 percent Indians (emphasis mine):

SHARPTON: Give me your idea of the kinds of things people ought to deal with this Thursday when their families and friends get together.

HARRIS-PERRY: You know, it's an interesting question. I've been thinking a lot about Thanksgiving and the moment that we're in because, you know, our economic crisis right now is highly tied to the European economic crisis and so I was thinking about kind of what is that first Thanksgiving when these illegal immigrants from Europe come over and are fed by the people of the actual Americas, the Native and indigenous people, you know, here on this land, that they are trying to escape religious prosecution and persecution in Europe and then you have the Europeans basically calling them dirty, no good, worthless, basically 99 percenters, right? And all of that is now playing out in a different way as we see the 99 percent pushing back against this idea that the elites are the only one that deserve to have a Thanksgiving dinner. All of that.

During last fall's push by MSNBC to trash voter ID laws as a racist conspiracy to disenfranchise black voters, Harris-Perry did little to discourage talk of such laws as "racial genocide" and invoked the specter of Jim Crow to bash an effort in Mississippi to amend the state constitution to define human personhood as beginning at conception.

For our comprehensive archive on Harris-Perry's loony left-wing pronouncements, click here.