It’s all very simple to Joy Reid. In a six-minute segment of her show last night she offered a warning about tribalism from slavery to the Holocaust to the Rwandan massacre. “Tribalism makes monsters of men,” Reid said, and then proceeded to argue from her perch on a network associate with the progressive left that all of the problems taking place in American cities are the result of the other tribe.

According to Reid, the media shows too many images of vandalized, looted and burning cities what she called “the aftermath” of the Black Lives Matter protests. “The assumption that is too often made is that these two things are on thing, the protests are fueling the violence,” Reid said.

And at this point Reid veers in the direction of conspiracy theorizing. She suggests we should ask “who benefits” if white voters believe Black Lives Matter is “threatening and violent.” Obviously, the person who benefits is President Trump. Therefore the president’s “fixation” on Kenosha is really an attempt to sneakily win the election by, well, by winning the election.

I don’t want to shock Reid too much but I think it’s fair to say that most candidates for President, historically speaking, wanted to win the election. And most of them try to do so by capitalizing on issues and events that play to their strengths. Trump is trying to do that in Kenosha just as Joe Biden is trying to do it wherever he can. This is how it has always worked.

But according to Joy Reid, this is different because Donald Trump could stop the violence by commanding his followers to go home. “He could simply go on his Twitter feed and tell his supporters to go home,” she said. By contrast Reid said, “There is no anarchist group on the left who listens to Joe Biden…so this is not a both-sides thing.” Reid went on to argue that “white nationalists” have been infiltrating BLM events to create chaos. According to Reid, the arrests of most BLM protesters has been for minor things like “breaking curfew.”

“Black Lives Matter is Trump’s Willie Horton even though the violence he’s luxuriating in in these cities is largely white on white and perpetrated by his supporters,” Reid said. “It’s a campaign tactic, y’all. He’s pimping tribalism for votes.”

There are quite a few serious problems with this argument that all deserve to be mentioned. Let’s start with the easiest one which is that Trump is responsible for all the violence. If that’s true, then the violence should end today because last night Trump did tell his supporters not to confront anarchists and rioters. I guess Joy Reid didn’t see that coming.

It won’t stop the violence of course because the violence, looting and arson isn’t being carried out by Trump supporters. Given time I could easily list 100 incidents that prove this point. In fact, you could come up with a list of 100 incidents just by looking at Portland alone. But as an example, last night there was a riot in Portland by a group that broke windows, set fires and set off fireworks at Mayor Wheeler’s condo. This same group has been doing this for 95 straight nights. At least 25 riots have been declared over the past three months. As of last week at least 74 people face federal charges including arson and assault in connection with the Portland protests. These are not “breaking curfew” charges, these are violent crimes.

Speaking of violent crimes, Saturday a pro-Trump supporter was shot and killed, allegedly by a man who identified himself as “100% ANTIFA” and who signed his Instagram posts with the hashtag #blacklivesmatter. Joe Reid never once mentions this murder than happened just days ago. She insinuates that his murder was his fault for going to Portland. Imagine applying this logic to any racial group and see how it sounds.

There was a CHAZ/CHOP zone set up in a portion of Seattle by protesters, many of the black. At night the black security for this zone was accused of beating people up. Eventually five people were shot, all of them black I believe.

In Atlanta, 8 year old Secoriea Turner was shot and killed by a group who had set up a check point on the road near where Rayshard Brooks was killed. Police released video of one of the black suspects in that case. Was he an infiltrator there to help Trump win the election? Joe Reid seems to think so.

Again, I could go on with this for far longer than I have time to write this post. There is overwhelming evidence that the rioting, looting and arson has been carried out in cities around the country by both black people and white people. What they have in common is that many of them, like the rioters in Portland, are responding to calls to go to the streets from Black Lives Matter.

Finally, the real underlying failure of Reid’s entire premise is the idea that tribalism is only taking place on the right. You’d have to be a blinkered fool to think that the side of this conflict which exclusively highlights the shooting of black men by (frequently white) police officers isn’t engaged in tribalism. You have to be clueless to think groups of black people who go out and confront white strangers in their homes, demanding they give them up to a black person, aren’t playing in a tribalist sandbox. And that goes for the BLM supporters confronting white diners and demanding they give show their support or be screamed at and called white supremacists by the mob. The idea that a group whose goal is dismantling systems of white supremacy isn’t playing with tribal politics could only come from a host at MSNBC.

Here’s Joy Reid blaming leftist violence, looting, arson and murder on the President from the other party and denouncing tribalism while she does it.

Update: Can’t believe I forgot to include this above. Just goes to show you how much of this there has been. Pretty sure BLM supporter Marquise Love isn’t a Trump guy.