Rachel Maddow joked about the right-wing extremist groups the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers on Tuesday night, telling her MSNBC colleague Lawrence O’Donnell that both groups’ names “sound really gay.”Maddow, who hosts The Rachel Maddow Show, made the comments while discussing semantic infiltration, which is to adopt the same language as one’s enemies, weakening whatever argument is trying to be made.O’Donnell said that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were examples of semantic infiltration.
For O’Donnell, the Proud boys “have nothing to be proud of” and the Oath Keepers “don’t keep oaths that matter.”Maddow provided an apt queer reading of the terms.“I will say that with both of those groups, particularly the Proud Boys but also a little bit.