Talk show host Megyn Kelly on Monday poured a bucket of scorn over claims from former White House press secretary and MSNBC talk show host Jen Psaki that Republican operatives were seeking to use Muslims to attack transgender individuals.

On Sunday, Psaki claimed the Muslim parents protesting at a Maryland school board’s policies had been manipulated to do so by conservatives as part of a “right-wing strategy to divide minority groups” that echoed former President Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

“The GOP successfully managed to split off Southern whites from the Democratic Party. Now, decades later, the right wing is reviving that same playbook, this time with Muslim Americans and trans people,” she said.

“The GOP is trying to recruit Muslim Americans, a community that makes up less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, against another tiny, marginalized group of Americans, transgender people,” Psaki said.

“The right-wingers, the conspiracy theorists, the birthers, they now want us to forget the years they spent fear-mongering about Muslims and Islam,” she said.

Kelly opened up her riposte by saying, in a video posted to YouTube, that Psaki now has a “failing Sunday TV show over there. No one’s watching it. Probably because of drivel like this.”

“Whitey is at it again!” Kelly said after playing a clip of Psaki. “It’s the whites trying to pit the loving Muslims who have always been pro-LGBTQ against the poor trans people.”

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Kelly said the claim implies Muslims cannot make up their own minds.

“This is another diminishment of Muslims in America as, ‘You’re just too stupid to realize you’re being manipulated, you can’t have a genuinely held belief,’’ she said.

Honing in on the protest, Kelly explained the issue.

“Why are they mad? What actually drags a parent out 
 to protest? It has to be a lot. Parents are busy. They’ve got jobs, they’ve got kids, they don’t really have a lot of time to protest, but they did it on Tuesday outside the Board of Education meeting because Maryland’s largest school district will not allow them to opt out their children from books and lessons that have certain LGBTQ lessons that they find objectionable,” Kelly said.

“Maryland state law doesn’t allow the opt-out provision unless it’s a specific unit on sex ed, and this isn’t technically sex ed. They’ve folded it in under English language arts curriculum. And these parents think it’s inappropriately sexual and has messages with which they do not agree when it comes to trans people,” she said.

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“And so they’re going out there saying, ‘You can teach what you want,’ they’re not saying you have to shut down the lesson plan, but, ‘They’re our kids, and we should be permitted to be able to opt them out.’ And the school says, ‘No, you can’t,’” she said.

“This doesn’t get covered on its substance — a debate about whether the parents are right or wrong, or what’s in the text. It gets covered by MSNBC as ‘the white man is evil and manipulative,’” she said.

Edward Ahmed Mitchell, the national deputy director at the Council for American-Islamic Relations, said that “liberal commentators” need to “accept that Muslim parents are independent, intelligent people speaking for themselves,” according to Fox News.

“The sooner they accept this truth, the sooner they can start addressing the substantive concerns these parents are raising. Then again, maybe they just can’t and don’t want to address the concerns these parents are raising,” he said.

“Muslim Americans are not political puppets. Most of us are independent thinkers who could care less what the political right (or political left) want us to do. Most of us are speaking up for what we think is right for the sake of God’s pleasure, not at the urging of a political party,” he said.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.