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MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell called out for falsely claiming ‘not a single’ member of the ‘squad’ is a socialist

July 19, 2019 | | Print Article

Fact-challenged Andrea Mitchell is under fire for missing the obvious about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the other progressive congresswomen of “The Squad.”

The MSNBC anchor struggled to accept Republicans, including President Trump during his campaign rally this week, calling the women “socialists,” denying it was so during a panel discussion on “Andrea Mitchell Reports” Thursday.

(Video: MSNBC)

Mitchell attempted to fact-check Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy after a news conference in which he defended the president’s remarks during the rally, saying he was waging “a battle over a socialist issue and the socialist Democrats, that’s one that he’s taken up even in the State of the Union, he promised that this country will never have socialism here.”

Mitchell referred to a tweet from Merriam-Webster listing socialism among their top searches as her jumping-off point to declare that none of the group of Democrats Trump named – Reps. Ocasio-Cortez,  Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib – are “socialists.”

“The President did call out these congresswomen by name,” she said, referring to Trump’s rally in Greenville, N.C. on Wednesday.

“Now first of all, none of these members of Congress are socialists, but that is the way the Republican leadership wants to frame this election face-off,” she declared.

“They don’t have a Democrat to run against, they’re not running against Bernie Sanders per se yet,” Mitchell argued. “There’s not a single member of these congressional representatives who are avowed socialists, so I don’t know where that is coming from other than opposition research.”

Mediaite columnist Caleb Howe noted that apparently “opposition research is more comprehensive than MSNBC’s” as Mitchell seemed to have “missed a big fact.”

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an outspoken member of the group Democratic Socialists of America, the ‘largest socialist organization in the United States’ according to their own description, a fact which has been in no way mysterious and was featured in profiles on the Congresswoman by everyone from the Daily Beast to the New York Times,” Howe wrote in an op-ed. “She also self-identifies as a ‘Democratic Socialist,’ and argues the concepts on Twitter.”

But Ocasio-Cortez has occasionally struggled to explain the differences between socialism and the Democratic Socialism she espouses.

“First of all, there’s a huge difference between socialism and Democratic socialism,” she said on “The View” last year. “Democratic socialism, and really what that boils down to me, is the basic belief that I believe that in a moral and wealthy America and a moral and modern America, no person should be too poor to live in this country.”

In an interview with Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson in 2018, the then-New York Democratic candidate said she did not “give a damn” if people called her a socialist.

“I believe in health care for all, I believe in education for all, I believe in housing as a human right, and then if people are going to call me a socialist for believing in those things, alright, call me a socialist; I don’t give a damn,” she said.

Meanwhile, Mitchell – who assumed the descriptions of the congresswomen were not true because Trump and other Republicans had said so – had an equally ridiculous take on Omar.

“Whatever her views may have been, or are, about Israel, that doesn’t define her and has nothing to do with the attacks against her,” she said to a panel that drank up every word without pushback.

“Someone who describes herself as a ‘democratic socialist’ is a socialist. The end,” NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck told Fox News. “And even if Ocasio-Cortez didn’t describe herself that way, one look at her policies and they fit the description.”

Plenty of other criticism was leveled at Mitchell for her clueless stance on the women’s views.

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Frieda Powers
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