Everywhere that Reverend Al Sharpton goes ugly racism is sure to follow. Starting in 1991 at Crown Heights in Brooklyn, NY all the way to his one hour PoliticsNation with Al Sharpton on MSNBC. Sharpton has made his bones on victimhood and racism. On Saturday, The Reverend had a more than willing ally in the Political Editor of The Root, Jason Johnson.

This video is rather long, but the section you will be interested in begins at 37:55, so you don’t have to suffer through the whole blasted thing.

Mediaite was the only news organization to report on this claim by the editor of The Root. That is probably because, um, MSNBC and Al Sharpton are so unwatchably awful with a capital AWF. Here is the Mediaite reporting:

The comment came during a discussion about how Trump has said that he is reportedly willing to compromise with Democrats but that a lot of the concessions seem to come in the form of how the wall is actually being described aka concrete wall versus steel fence.

“You know, Rev, you can call it a slap, a tap or a beatdown, I’m still getting punched in the face, right?” Johnson said in response to Sharpton’s question if changing the name but not what the wall is being erected for amounted to a compromise.

“Like you can’t change the words and change the impact on something,” Johnson continued on. “This wall that the president wants is a monument to white nationalism. Anybody who agrees to give any money to this wall is foolish.”

Well, I gave money for the wall so I am foolish.

How is the wall a “monument to white nationalism”? We don’t want to keep “people of color” out. We want to keep illegal aliens out of the country. I don’t give a good gosh darn what color they are.

I don’t know if you have ever looked at The Root online. I have much to the detriment of the left side of my brain. If The Root and it’s writers can put a negative racial spin on something they will. Not that people like Johnson or Sharpton give a fat rat’s backside about history or facts, but the first border fence on the U.S.-Mexican border was built nearly 110 years ago. Just to make sure that I didn’t get it wrong, I consulted The Smithsonian. I figured they would know. From the website:

The U.S. government had built its first border fence between 1909 and 1911—a barbed wire divide along the California border—to prevent cattle from wandering between the countries. Now, as both nations adopted new measures to monitor the border, more fences began to appear. Photographs seem to show one beside the customhouse near Tijuana and another along the border between Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Mexico. These were likely temporary wartime measures, and as in Nogales, they were intended to prevent cross-border clashes.

And, furthermore:

n early August 1918, Felix B. Peñaloza, the presidente municipal, or mayor, of Nogales, Mexico, ordered construction of a fence running along the boundary line between his city and Nogales, Arizona. The fence would consist of six wires strung to a height of six feet. His intent was to direct the flow of people crossing the border through two gateways, to make it easier for a growing number of soldiers, customs agents and other officials to oversee transborder movement. Peñaloza also met with U.S. representatives to discuss a second, parallel fence, to be built by the Americans. Mexican officials said they “would welcome the building of such a fence by the United States Government, as it would aid officials on both sides of the line in enforcing their regulations,” and they insisted that “such action would not be irritating or offensive to Mexican sentiment.”

ut on August 27, 1918, soon after Mexican workers had erected the fence in Nogales, conflict broke out when an unidentified man attempted to cross into Mexico. A U.S. customs inspector ordered him to halt, but he did not stop. Officers on both sides of the border raised their guns, and a firefight broke out. About two hours later, at least 12 Mexicans and Americans had been killed, including Peñaloza, who had built the fence precisely to minimize the risk of conflict between the nations.

Poor Senor Penaloza. Perhaps if he had built a bigger concrete and steel wall with a big beautiful door in it, things would have turned out better.

And on top of that Jason Johnson, is Mexico displaying “white nationalism” by trying to control her southern border? Only by shutting down the kind of ignorance and racism shown by Jason Johnson of The Root and Al Sharpton of MSNBC can we move forward as a nation and build the damn wall.

But then, how would Johnson and Sharpton make any money?

Feature Photo Credit: Border Wall Lake Progreso, Texas/Creative Commons License 3.0/Cropped to Square