According to a Tuesday segment on MSNBC Live, American voters do not trust female political candidates and are biased against them. You would think such an accusation would require evidence, but you would be wrong. The segment also provided host Craig Melvin, former Hillary Clinton aide Zerlina Maxwell and All in Together CEO Lauren Learner an opportunity to sing the praises of Elizabeth Warren.

Melvin began the segment by asking Maxwell to expand on a thought she made in a previous edition of MSNBC Live, "How does a female candidate overcome the obstacles you described?" After Maxwell praised Warren for having a campaign strategy and sticking with it, she declared, "I think the challenges that women face, they're in two buckets. I think of it as a cultural bucket and a structural bucket. So cultural is implicit biases that we may have ... because we are all raised in patriarchy, it's everywhere and so we have implicit biases against women and seeing them in positions of leadership. We associate women in positions of leadership with negative traits like aggressive or angry or bitchy."

Maxwell didn't cite any evidence to back up those claims. In fact, CNN, not exactly a conservative news organization, asked last year, "Is Nikki Haley the most popular politician in America?" Or does Haley not count, because she's a Republican?

Not to be outdone, Melvin then turned to Leader who tried to use data to back up the central argument, "56% of Democratic women said they were paying more attention to politics since 2016. In your same polling, women are more likely to expect a Democrat to beat Trump.

But if the Democratic nominee is a woman, voters give Trump the edge." Leader expanded on this point, "We saw a very similar dynamic in these gender questions that we saw when Obama was running the first time, that voters would say they, themselves, were comfortable voting for a black president but they feared their neighbors were not." In other words, it is not that voters are biased against female candidates, it is that they think other people are. Put yet another way, I believe in equality, but I believe my neighbor does not. This is not evidence of anything.

After the panel seemingly contradicted itself by citing a discrepancy in the confidence of minority women and white women in the ability of female candidates to win, Melvin then turned to the topic of Elizabeth Warren's candidacy and how the preceding conversation relates to her campaign. After playing a clip from the CNN town hall on LGBT issues, Melvin asked Maxwell, "How would a guy have answered that question?"

Maxwell said she doesn't know, but praised Warren's "authentic personality." Leader interjected to agree, "So authentic." So authentic indeed, that not just one, but two of her central life stories are false. As for the "authentic" response on CNN, the Free Beacon reported that CNN declined to disclose the fact that the questioner was a max donor to Warren's 2018 Senate campaign, a fact MSNBC also failed to disclose. As for the response itself, even the Washington Post conceded that it may feed into the narrative that Warren is an out of touch coastal Harvard elite professor who actively dislikes certain portions of the population in the same way Hillary Clinton described them as "deplorables."

Here is a transcript for the October 15 show: