This week’s Liberal Media Scream features the cast on MSNBC’s Morning Joe embracing the liberal Atlantic magazine’s special edition on the Jan. 6 riots that suggests the events on that day were a dry run for more GOP antics.

Hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski featured Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who said it would take more than one issue of his magazine to “trace the Republican Party’s decomposition from Lincoln’s day to ours. It is enough to say that its most recent, and most catastrophic, turn — toward authoritarianism, nativism, and conspiracism — threatens the republic that it was founded to save.”

With no mention, of course, of the Democratic efforts to turn the U.S. into a socialist state, the trio gleefully took a walk down Trump Derangement Syndrome street to suggest that the GOP and the Jan. 6 rioters are eager to turn the United States into a banana republic.

Brzezinski even raised a warning about GOP politics from Czech-born, Clinton-era Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Goldberg agreed: “People like Madeleine Albright, who come out of Europe or Asian experiences or African experiences with authoritarianism, they’re warning us.”

From the 8 a.m. hour of Monday’s Morning Joe on MSNBC:

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: We’re closing in on the one-year anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, if you can believe it. With that, just one month away, the Atlantic has dedicated its January and February issues to American democracy in crisis. The headline of the cover story is jarring. Quote, ‘January 6th Was Practice.’

Joining us now, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. And Jeffrey writes this for the new issue’s editor's note. Quote, 'There is insufficient space in any one issue of this magazine to trace the Republican Party’s decomposition from Lincoln’s day to ours. It is enough to say that its most recent, and most catastrophic, turn — toward authoritarianism, nativism, and conspiracism — threatens the republic that it was founded to save. Stating plainly that one of America’s two major parties, the party putatively devoted to advancing the ideas and ideals of conservatism, has now fallen into autocratic disrepute is unnerving for a magazine committed to being, in the words of our founding manifesto, 'of no party or clique.''

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Jeffrey, talk about your decision to dedicate this special issue to this topic. As we look behind you at a very ominous cloud hovering over the Capitol.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yeah. I arranged that for you, Joe.

SCARBOROUGH: Thank you so much.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You’re welcome. You know, we have three years until an election that might be unlike any election we’ve ever seen, which is to say the following: Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. On the willingness of the party that has lost to say, 'We lost, we’ll try next time. But meanwhile, we’ll support the elected president.' We are heading to a situation, because of Donald Trump’s behavior and because of the people who abet his behavior, in which that is not entirely clear. It’s not entirely clear that that’s going to happen.

And so, I thought we should really focus now, start to really focus now on these — it’s a whole range of threats, a whole range of things that Trump and his minions are doing to try to guarantee that, by hook or by crook, that they win in 2024, and so, we’ve pulled together this special issue just to outline for our readers all the things that could go wrong and all the things that are happening right now that the Republican Party or much of the Republican Party is doing to make sure that the situation is geared to their favor.

…

BRZEZINSKI: If you speak to people like Madeleine Albright and those who have come from this type of thing who know it so well, their fear is that January — we’re well over the edge. We’re well over the edge, and we’re not where we should be in terms of turning this ship around. And if you look at the way that Republicans are acting right now in Congress, it can’t be looked at as, oh, they’re the crazies on the far, far Right. This is now the behavior that’s being embraced.

GOLDBERG: Right. People, people like Madeleine Albright, who come out of Europe or Asian experiences or African experiences with authoritarianism, they’re warning us. The warning is, don’t think you’re special. Human beings are human beings. Societies are societies. People are prey to the same weaknesses and temptations across the planet. And just because we’ve managed to stave off authoritarianism in the past doesn’t mean that you’re able to stave it off in the future when you have a determined group trying to manipulate democracy to result in their permanent domination.

Brent Baker, vice president of research and publications for the Media Research Center, explains our weekly pick: “The Atlantic magazine and Jeffrey Goldberg seem to have decided their mission is to push the entire news media to discredit the Republican Party and conservatives because of former President Donald Trump’s continued influence within the party. Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski eagerly played along, though trying to silence a large slice of the electorate, through fearmongering over the worst possible interpretations of how some are concerned about election integrity, hardly matches basic journalistic norms of sharing multiple points of view.”

Rating: FOUR out of FIVE screams.