Good morning. It's Sunday, October 11th. I'm Ali Velshi. We begin this hour with a toxic new

strain of disinformation that's coming from the White House that could play a key role in enabling

the authoritarian slide that's happening in front of our eyes right now.

Storytelling is key to amassing the power that it takes to build an authoritarian regime.

And right now, Donald Trump is telling a story about crime and danger and violence in order to justify an immense power grab and a brutal crackdown on dissent.

He's ordered unwanted, unwelcome, unneeded, and legally

dubious National Guard deployments to cities that are run by Democrats, cities like Los Angeles,

Chicago, and Portland, Oregon, saying the streets of those American cities are war-ravaged

by crime, equating protests there to insurrection and calling for the jailing of their leaders

for standing in the way of his crackdown. After the killing of the conservative activist Charlie

Kirk, the president released an Oval Office video condemning political violence. But instead of calling

for calm across the board, he blamed only the radical left, listing episodes of violence

against conservatives while conspicuously omitting a long list of recent attacks on Democrats

and on public officials and government workers.

This was no accident.

Telling only half the story was a deliberate tactic.

Trump is building a narrative whereby the radical left is seen as

inherently violent, dangerous, and illegitimate. I'll tell you something that's going to get me

in trouble, but I couldn't care less. The radicals on the right, oftentimes are radical because

they don't want to see crime. They don't want to see crime. Worryed about the border. They're saying,

we don't want these people coming in. We don't want you burning our shopping centers. We don't

want you shooting our people in the middle of the street. The radicals on the left are the problem,

...