On Thursday’s Morning Joe, one of MSNBC’s favorite bomb-throwing pundits, far-left Princeton professor Eddie Glaude, actually compared the new pro-life law in Texas to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that precipitated the Civil War. In addition, Glaude and his fellow leftist panelists hoped Democrats could use the issue to gin up turnout in the midterms.
Co-host Willie Geist complained to Glaude that the Texas law, which allows citizens to sue abortion providers and others who facilitate abortions, “sort of deputizes people with these bounties to go out and enforce it themselves and to basically call in people and, you know, become deputies of the anti-abortion movement.”
Glaude agreed, warning of “an intensification of the culture wars” and predicting the topic would dominate “the political battles in the midterms and the upcoming presidential election in 2024.” He then launched into a bizarre and incendiary historical comparison that even he conceded would “sound rather strange”:
But I also have this kind of historical analogy and it’s gonna sound rather strange initially, but the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, what it did, right? It said that every private citizen had an obligation to return a fugitive slave to their owner. And what it did, it forced a choice onto the nation, are you going to be individually complicit with the institution of slavery, you see. And so now this private citizen bounty, right, in so many ways intensifies the choices that are being made by everyday, ordinary people.
Rather than press Glaude on how a current law that defends human life could possibly be compared to an odious law of the past that treated human beings like property, Geist instead turned to political analyst John Heileman for a craven Democratic Party strategy session: “What does this mean as we look at midterm elections coming up next year, a 2024 presidential election, the President has already come out and say that this ruling basically violates the core of Roe vs. Wade. What are the politics of this?”
Heileman argued that abortion would make 2022 the most important “midterm election in our lifetime,” even after the left claimed 2020 was already “the most important election of our lifetime”:
These kinds of things happening in states like Texas kind of clarify the stakes of our politics. Now, not like for a lot of people the stakes don’t need much more clarification than they did during the Trump era, but they make this midterm election, to Eddie’s point, they raise the stakes on that. You now have people all over politics saying, “I know we said 2020, when Donald Trump’s name was on the ballot, that 2020 was the most important election of our lifetime, it may now be that 2022 has as much importance, in a lot of people’s eyes, as any election – and certainly any midterm election in our lifetime.”
Sadly, this was not the first time within the past few months that some unhinged MSNBC personality has compared something happening in Texas to the Fugitive Slave Act. Back in July, Joy Reid wailed that the potential arrest of Democratic Texas lawmakers fleeing the state to block Republicans from passing voting reform legislation was “like the Fugitive Slave Act is still in force now.”
This is the kind vile language those in the left-wing media casually throw around in an attempt to shut down debate about any number of issues. Not only is it ineffective, it shows how desperate the press are to push the Democratic Party agenda at all costs.
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Here is a full transcript of the September 2 segment:
7:11 AM ET
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JOYCE VANCE: So this majority in the Supreme Court has, and can do, what it wants. There are ways to reverse Roe without explicitly saying that they’re reversing Roe. Something that we see in the Texas lawsuit that’s a warning sign for the future of long-standing precedent in Roe is this willingness by states to use novel and really unseemly mechanisms to do what they themselves think they can’t do directly. This notion that you can create private citizen bounty hunters who can pear into women’s lives and attack in the courts the people around them who help them obtain medical care is really a new era in anti-abortion legislation. And whether the court wants to directly take on Roe or not, it seems that litigants will give them a lot of mechanisms to strip out its protections.
WILLIE GEIST: Yeah, Eddie Glaude, this was designed, this law, to sort of get politicians off the hook. It bars them from – legislatures from enforcing the law, and as Joyce has laid out for us, it sort of deputizes people with these bounties to go out and enforce it themselves and to basically call in people and, you know, become deputies of the anti-abortion movement. So this, in some ways, Eddie, isn’t a huge surprise, if you look at the three justices appointed by President Trump: Justice Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett. What did you read into this decision last night and what do you see coming down the road?
EDDIE GLAUDE: Well, good morning, Willie. What I read into the decision is the intensification of the culture wars. You have to read this decision alongside the attack on quote/unquote “CRT,” the January 6th insurrection, the overall sense that the country is at each other’s throats, right? And so I think this is again an intensification of the culture wars and will define the political midterms – the political battles in the midterms and the upcoming presidential election in 2024. So I think that’s very clear.
But I also have this kind of historical analogy and it’s gonna sound rather strange initially, but the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, what it did, right? It said that every private citizen had an obligation to return a fugitive slave to their owner. And what it did, it forced a choice onto the nation, are you going to be individually complicit with the institution of slavery, you see. And so now this private citizen bounty, right, in so many ways intensifies the choices that are being made by everyday, ordinary people. So it’s a novel way that Texas has, in some ways evaded the issue, but it’s also intensified, right, I think the culture wars that define our day-to-day interactions. So we need to buckle up, it’s going to get even more intense, Willie.
GEIST: John Heileman, let’s talk about what this means because this is just the beginning. We’re gonna look at Mississippi, the Court is taking – the Supreme Court is taking up that Mississippi law as well. What does this mean as we look at midterm elections coming up next year, a 2024 presidential election, the President has already come out and say that this ruling basically violates the core of Roe vs. Wade. What are the politics of this?
JOHN HEILEMAN: You know, Willie, I think, you know, first of all, good morning and happy Friday, not a happy Friday in the context of this for a lot of women in Texas and elsewhere. Where, you know, in this is the moment where pro-choice activists and the other side also have been kind of girding for this day, the day when laws would get to the point where we’d have a court in place that would be ready to overturn Roe and states would be employing laws that are essentially designed not to just strip the rights of abortion from most women but also put test cases in front of the court that will allow them to depart from stare decisis, that Joyce was talking about before, give them a context, give them a reason to finally knock down Roe. Which of course, as you noted, has been the goal on the pro-life – on the anti-abortion side for many years.
And that moment – there’s a moment of kind of clarity about this, in terms of the politics of it, right, where, you know, down in Texas where we also have another battle going on over voting rights. These kinds of things happening in states like Texas kind of clarify the stakes of our politics. Now, not like for a lot of people the stakes don’t need much more clarification than they did during the Trump era, but they make this midterm election, to Eddie’s point, they raise the stakes on that. You now have people all over politics saying, “I know we said 2020, when Donald Trump’s name was on the ballot, that 2020 was the most important election of our lifetime, it may now be that 2022 has as much importance, in a lot of people’s eyes, as any election – and certainly any midterm election in our lifetime.”
And I do think that the main thing that’s gonna happen is, you know, the midterm elections historically are low turnout affairs, people don’t get all that psyched for them. You often have one side fully energized, the other side kind of complaisant. I think this is the kind of ruling, this is the kind of law and the movement on the Court and the prospect of a full-on overruling of Roe v. Wade, that’s going to make both sides of the political aisle incredibly intensely energized for these midterm elections because they’re going to see with this kind of stark clarity what exactly is on the line. And I imagine we could, you know, I think people right now are girding for the notion that we could have the highest turnout midterm we’ve ever seen because both sides recognize that the battle they thought might have been over in 2020 has really kind of just started.
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