Cuomo to McCloskey: Let's face it, you're the image of white supremacy now

Maybe Chris Cuomo should go back to interviewing his brother after all. On last night’s show, the CNN host interviewed Mark McCloskey, the man who drew his firearms when a Black Lives Matter protest allegedly knocked down his gate and threatened him and his family. McCloskey appeared with his attorney to discuss the incident, but Cuomo had other topics in mind — such as how self-defense in a mob action looks a little too politically uncorrect these days.

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Cuomo then sorta-kinda accuses McCloskey of feeding into Donald Trump’s alleged white supremacism with video he didn’t take in the first place, and McCloskey finally had enough (via Townhall’s Beth Baumann):

As you’ll see from the Daily Caller clip, Cuomo gets his Trump retweets mixed up in the middle of this interview, which is a rather big error. The tweet that Trump deleted actually did have someone yell “white power” at one point, which generated all sorts of media interest and why Trump ended up deleting it. (The White House says he didn’t hear it and deleted it when it was pointed out to him.)  The video of the McCloskeys defending themselves had no such messaging however, and let’s not forget that the McCloskeys never took the video nor were responsible for putting it out on social media.

Nevertheless, Cuomo assigns them to the role of white-supremacy boosters:

MCCLOSKEY: A guy stands in front of me, pulls out two loaded pistol magazines, snaps them in front of my face and says, ‘You’re next.’ If you were there, Chris, I think you’d feel like you had a right to defend yourself, as well.

CUOMO: Absolutely. Somebody takes out magazines, ammunition and clicks it and makes a direct threat, I would feel threatened, 100 percent.

MCCLOSKEY: That’s what happened to me.

CUOMO: Look, I know you are going through a process with this. I welcome you having counsel. If you were within your rights to do what you were doing, it should be judged as such. I wanted to talk to you about the broader implications because it’s just a horrible picture of what’s going on in America right now. So, to me, it’s not about what’s right and wrong in a court of law, it’s what we have right and wrong about how we treat each other. And that’s why the president retweeted this tweet. Mr. Watkins, you know it. And, Mr. McCloskey, you know it. He retweeted it because he liked the image of white resistance to this movement – and I’m not saying that was fair to you – but we know that’s why he did it, because that’s why he deleted it. I wanted you to speak for yourself.

MCCLOSKEY: I’m glad you are a mind reader because no one else thinks you are.

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At that point, a producer tells Cuomo that he’s got the wrong tweet in mind, but that doesn’t deter Cuomo from accusing McCloskey of ignoring a supposed white-supremacy subtext:

CUOMO: Oh, in fact, he didn’t delete it. Good, makes my point.

No, in fact it refutes the point. Whatever mind reading Cuomo does about Trump has nothing to do with McCloskey anyway. Why not just focus on McCloskey’s experience rather than try to blame him for something out of his control? The point is this — if we want to defund the police, you’d better get used to mob rule and its inevitable react, which is proactive armed self-defense. If you don’t like the way that looks, then perhaps it would be better to promote the rule of law rather than “this movement” that actively opposes it.

Cuomo is at his best when he’s interviewing his brother … and that’s not a compliment.

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