Thursday on MSNBC’s “Live,” network Sunday Al Sharpton reacted to President Donald Trump’s tweets about South Africa.
Sharpton said, “I think he’s doing what he does often in these United States, and that is, he’s trying to distract from this cloud that he’s now clearly under with the Manafort convictions and with Michael Cohen taking a plea. He goes to race, and what better way than to give this neo-Nazi propaganda that white farmers are being killed until South Africa, when, in fact, that is not true, not based on them being white. There is a very well thought out argument going on and to deal with the fact that blacks were the ones, for racial reasons, that couldn’t own land because of apartheid. And now, almost a quarter of a century after getting apartheid politically correct, they have to deal with the fact that people’s land were taken because they were black in the apartheid era. How they do that? They’re wrestling with it. The ANC has voted on this, but this is a real issue there. I’ve been to South Africa twice in the last three years. On the ground, you hear the issue, but you don’t hear anybody talking about killing whites because of it. And for the president of the United States to put that out there like it’s a fact and to act like, in fact, they have come up with a formula is a falsehood and an attempt from him to distract from his own problems.”
He added, “David Duke and that ilk is who pushes this. This is who the president gets in bed with. There are no facts. Senator Corker, who is a Republican, by the way, is identifying it correctly. This is a base move of those same elements that think there’s a moral equivalence between neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and those that are fighting Confederate statutes. But when you really think about this, on a global scale, from a global perspective, you’ve got the land of Mandela being maligned by the president of the United States on a plan that has not even been fully formulated. This is insulting. Nothing is sacred to him—to try to get people’s minds off of what he’s doing.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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