On MSNBC's Velshi, Angelo Carusone discusses how traditional right-wing media and far-right fringes have coalesced around the baseless claims about the government shutdown
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From October 4, 2025, edition of MSNBC'sVelshi
ALI VELSHI (MSNBC HOST): Angelo, one of the problems is we have this media environment that's so messed up that the gaslighting gained some ground. So again, I asked Hakeem Jeffries about this this morning, but he said in a more than an hour long meeting that he and Chuck Schumer had with Donald Trump to try and avoid the shutdown, about fifteen seconds was spent on this concept of having taxpayer money pay for insurance for undocumented immigrants, which would be illegal under current law. And he said it wasn't even central. He said he didn't — it wasn't 15 seconds of the discussion. And yet, this is central to the Republican argument about why Democrats are shutting the government down for.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): I mean, look, I think this is — one, they should have known that it was going to be central, because the reality is, that part of it was central before they went into that meeting.
Because whether you look at the more traditional right-wing media or the far-right fringes of the fever swamps, from QAnon to Fox News, they've all been talking about this — like they're all making the same argument. And it's not some top-down thing. It's just the easiest thing for them to understand, which is that there are undocumented people, they are bad, and the Democrats are out there fighting or threatening to shut down the government, or now actually shutting down the government to make sure that they can continue to give them money because they're trying to cheat to win elections. That's a universal thing on the right. That was the biggest thing going into the meeting, the biggest thing after.
So it's weird to me that they didn't seem to be aware of that. And I think it ties into the point that Molly was making before. The tent right now is very narrow for the communicators. They're talking to a very small consultant class and a very narrow vision. And I understand it's easy to sit on the sidelines and critique. I'm not critiquing their particular way that they're communicating.
What I'm suggesting, though, and I think there's reinforcement, Molly was saying, is that their circle is too small, they can let other people talk too and make their points as well, and demonstrate that that there are others that can make arguments to different audiences that you don't speak to, that are getting to the same destination. You know, when you put in your GPS, it gives you a couple different routes, but you all end up at the same spot. And Democrats haven't learned that lesson. But Republicans did ten years ago. It's time for them to catch up. And I think that that sort of shock, I think, is a reflection of the fact that they're just not seeing the field clearly.