When unhinged beta males like Chris Hayes are mourning your departure from MSNBC, you’re definitely doing something wrong. Mehdi Hasan’s now-defunct MSNBC show, while obscure and inconsequential, was home to some of the wildest left-wing takes ever aired on the cable network.
If one were to describe the totality of Hasan’s politics in a single sentence, that sentence would have to include descriptors like DNC cheerleader, Hamas apologist, race baiter, and, insufferable limey.
Take a gander at our Worst of Mehdi compilation for some of his greatest hits, and be grateful that you probably never even knew this show existed before it got the axe:
Over the past few months, Hasan has spent sizable weekly portions of his show equating Israel to Hamas, and complaining that people were calling him antisemitic online for equating Israel to Hamas. His response to these attacks — as well as his response to most other things that he disliked — was to cry racism. Take for example this leading question he posed to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) on October 22:
All, or almost all, of the at least 18 House Democrats who’ve called for a ceasefire in Gaza are people of color. How much of the Congressional indifference to Palestinian life in Gaza, the refusal in D.C. to acknowledge the humanity and innocence, not to mention suffering, of ordinary Gaza’s — how much of that is driven by the fact that they’re Arabs, or they’re mostly all Muslims, or they don’t look like us, do you think?
As an MSNBC host, Hasan was afflicted with the same horrific brand of Trump derangement from which all of his colleagues suffered. But he also harbored a very special, pointed hatred for Florida Governor and GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. On January 29 of 2023, he remarked: “Under DeSantis, Florida’s gone from don’t-say-gay, to don’t-say-black.”
He would later claim DeSantis had “graduated from whitewashing black history, to simply erasing it.”
Hasan often found himself far to the left of the party whose water he carried. This resulted in routine softball interviews with some of the most radical Democrats in Congress. In June of 2022, he hosted then-Representative Mondaire Jones (D-NY), a vocal advocate of court-packing. Naturally, Mehdi was enamored with the idea:
Why is there seemingly no support from Democrats — like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, or even President Biden — for real Supreme Court reform, for expanding the court, rebalancing, as you’ve proposed?
We don’t know what Mehdi’s next career move will be, but hopefully it’ll involve him talking to a camera so we can keep putting him in our cringe compilations. Until then though, we wish him the best.
