Shades of Joe Biden in 2012, telling a largely black audience that Mitt Romney's "gonna put y'all back in chains." 

Saturday's edition of MSNBC's The Weekend played a wretched race card.

Co-host Michael Steele teed up Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a member of that ultraliberal gang The Squad, suggesting that Trump would take America back to the era of Jim Crow. 

Pressley upped the ante: 

"We're on the precipice of going back again to Jim Crow—and then some."

As reprehensible as it was, Steele and Pressley's resort to racial fearmongering could also be seen as a sign of the panic in the Kamala camp over the loss of black votes, particularly among black men. 

Note: Citing the ad that accompanied LeBron James' endorsement of Harris, Steele quoted Trump from back in the 1980s, when he said: "I hate these people, we should all hate these people, maybe we should bring hate back."

But Steele omitted the context. As CNN recounted the conversation, Trump recalled being asked if he hated the accused: 

“And I said, look this women was raped, mugged, and thrown off a building – thrown off a building on top of everything else,” continued Trump. “She’s got some major problems to put it mildly. I said, ‘of course I hate these people and let’s all hate these people because maybe hate is what we need if we’re gonna get something done.’”

In 1989, a woman named Trisha Meili was attacked while jogging in Manhattan's Central Park. From History.com:

Meili’s rape and attack was so severe, she lost 75 percent of her blood, suffering a severe skull fracture among other injuries. The woman, identified in the media as the Central Park Jogger until she made her name public in 2003, had been bludgeoned with a rock, tied up, raped and left for dead.

“The woman is bleeding from five deep cuts across her forehead and scalp; patients who lose this much blood are generally dead,” Meili writes in her 2003 book, I am the Central Park Jogger, of the attack. “Her skull has been fractured, and her eye will later have to be put back in its place. … There is extreme swelling of the brain caused by the blows to the head. The probable result is intellectual, physical, and emotional incapacity, if not death. Permanent brain damage seems inevitable.”

She later recovered. Trump made his comment regarding the people who were arrested and convicted of those crimes, and who came to be known as the Central Park Five. They were later exonerated when another man admitted to the crimes. 

Ecclesiastes 3 tells us that: "To everything there is a season. A time to love and a time to hate." Do Steele and Pressley believe it's wrong to hate whoever it was who committed such a heinous crime?  

Here's the transcript.

MSNBC
The Weekend
11/2/24
8:33 am EDT

MICHAEL STEELE: I want to pick up on something you said, because I think in some aspects, it has gotten lost in translation. And it was brought home, at least for me, in a very profound way by the ad that a company LeBron James' endorsement, where there is the visual of the arc of history: of Jim Crow, and racism, and segregation, and the ugliness. 

You know, the quotes of Donald Trump saying I hate these people, we should all hate these people, maybe we should bring hate back. And this was from the '80s, and now that's being lived out in his presidential campaign. 

And you just touched on this sort of this wanting to pull us back into this era. Talk about the resistance to that. Because I think, I think it runs deeper than folks may realize in this campaign. Not just for what we see around abortion and reproductive health and things like that. But even more broadly, where I think Americans, and your being on the ground, I'm wondering if you are seeing and hearing some of this. Just to a point where they go, wait a minute, hold up, what are we talking -- like LeBron said, what are we talking about here? Are we really prepared to do that? 

Do you sense that in these final hours of the campaign that folks are really resisting this, this pull back to an era where we're levelling up Jim Crow, for God sake?

AYANNA PRESSELEY: Absolutely. And again, recognizing that the Harris-Walz ticket, we are the underdogs, we know that. And that's why we are doing everything to earn the trust and confidence in the votes of as many people as possible.

And what I'm experiencing on the ground is that for those people that are late-breaking in their decision, they are breaking to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. given the stakes that we just enumerated here. People do not want to go backwards.

One of the stops that we had during the Congressional Black Caucus Institute bus tour was in Greensboro, North Carolina. And we went to the civil rights museum there. And we were very honored to touch the lunch counter that launched us into an incredible movement of desegregating lunch counters throughout the country, thanks to these four brave, young, black men. 

And it was such a reminder that we are on the precipice of going back again to Jim Crow—and then some.