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Rachel Maddow is the Toughest Woman on Television — Of COURSE She Didn’t Break Down in Tears Over an Elon Musk Tweet

The very idea is ridiculous.

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This story is a perfect example of how well the right-wing media machine that got Trump elected works. Over the weekend, after Comcast announced that it would be breaking off MSNBC and a few other channels into a separate company and selling it, right-wing trolls decided to have some fun with the news.

Which right-wing trolls? Why, Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk, of course. Now that Elon’s officially Trump’s “First Buddy,” he and Junior practically share a bunkbed. I can absolutely see them getting stoned and prank-calling old ladies in the middle of the night.

Instead they decided to make fun of my secret TV crush, Rachel Maddow, and the rest of the hosts at the “liberal” cable news channel. It started out as a VERY obvious troll:

Then Musk responded:

It cascaded from that point from something they were joking about in a semi-serious way into full-on mockery of the channel and its hosts, primarily Maddow. All of Musk’s sycophants in his Nazi-friendly echo chamber of a social media platform piled on, pretending that the channel and its TV personalities are losing their minds over the possibility that Musk could take it over and turn it into something akin to what he did when he bought Twitter and turned it into X.

Elon then shared a stupid meme about struggling to resist the “temptation” of buying MSNBC, after which somebody shared a clip of Rachel Maddow breaking down in tears on air. Their intent was to make it look like Maddow had heard of Junior and Musk’s idea and was crying over it on television.

OF COURSE that isn’t what happened.

All the usual suspects got in on the game, beginning with Joe Rogan (who in my opinion is almost more dangerous than Musk and Junior combined) and including even random commenters adding their two cents’ worth on what should happen with the jobs of each primetime host.

Enter Alex Lorusso.

That set it all off again. Soon the internet was ablaze with people saying that Rachel had lost her mind and broken down on air over the possibility of Elon Musk and Don Junior being her bosses. Now, to me, that’s already a stretch to believe — that Maddow would in fact stay on at all on any network owned by Elon Musk.

That’s never going to happen.

So where DID Alex get that footage of Maddow crying? Well, it turns out he (obviously) superimposed Musk’s tweet as the background graphic during Maddow’s broadcast, and used footage of her crying about the children being caged at the border during the first Trump administration. He even disgustingly added the chyron at the bottom that read “Elon Musk Posts Dangerous Meme.”

This was a horrifying moment for Maddow, as the news about the children in cages was breaking while she was on air. She couldn’t continue the broadcast, and had to throw it over to Lawrence O’Donnell.

But people ate it up. And even those who weren’t fooled by the disgustingly altered video still took pleasure in the fact that other people were duped:

It finally earned itself a Community Note. “This video has been altered. This was originally Maddow’s reaction to certain immigration policies under the Trump administration, as seen in the original video,” it read.

Even if it got explained away, it still has the kind of lasting impact at this very moment that I guarantee will be around a week from now, when some right-wing friend of yours will ask you if you’ve seen the video of Rachel Maddow crying over Elon Musk coming for her job.

That’s never going to happen.

Andrew Simpson
meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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