The Joylessness Of Joy Reid

With its recent anti-affirmative-action ruling, the Supreme Court has once again polarized the nation. Trump's three appointees to the court have stacked the deck against the Democrats, who are once again wringing their hands. MSNBC primetime host Joy Reid has, naturally, joined the chorus, and she used the occasion to admit that she got into Harvard via affirmative action, which came as a surprise to few. I have to give the host of "The ReidOut" credit for honesty, as making such an admission is so embarrassing.

In her long, on-air diatribe, Reid claimed that she was smarter than the legacy-admission students she encountered at Harvard. That's a strange thing to say. It's a back-handed way to compliment yourself, as legacy students didn't gain admission to Harvard on their merits, just like Reid. It sounds like an implicit admission that she wasn't as smart as regular Harvard students.

Moreover, Reid's parents are immigrants from Africa, and her father was an engineer. Affirmative action started as a system to correct the injustices of slavery and Jim Crow, so helping well-off immigrants doesn’t serve any of the program’s original intentions. In such cases, it's more of  a gift of 200+ SAT points based on the color of one's skin. Reid took a spot from a more deserving black student. Affirmative action at selective schools has now morphed into a tool to achieve diversity, which is why the schools have stopped reporting on the ethnicity of their black students. If they did, we'd see how many of them come from rich families.

None of this would dawn on the self-centered Joy Reid, who lives in her own world where she has all the easy answers. That's how she carries herself on the air. This is the person who, last year, said that the word "inflation" wasn’t part of the "normal lexicon," and that the majority of Americans learned it after Republicans "taught" them the term. There are a number of ways to interpret this inanity. One is that Reid was lying. Or maybe she was being condescending to the American public from her lofty perch as a Harvard grad. But the most likely scenario is that Reid, knowing that the inflation issue is a serious drag on the Democratic Party, was searching for a way to blame Republicans, and this pathetic claim was all she could muster. Reid just can't help herself.

When Reid officially took over Chris Matthews’ time slot in July 2020, there was talk about the wisdom of that decision, given her infamous blog scandal in 2018. From 2007 to 2009, the future MSNBC host mocked former Florida governor Charlie Crist as "Miss Charlie," who would, if he ever got to the White House as John McCain’s vice president, devote his time to designing pretty napkin patterns at state funerals and "ogling male waiters." In another blog post, Reid wrote, "Part of the intrinsic nature of straightness is that gay sex is…well…gross," and, "Most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing."

A Twitter user with the handle "jamie_maz" posted a thread documenting 31 instances of Reid's weird obsession with mocking homosexuals and famous people she claimed were homosexuals, such as Tom Cruise, Karl Rove, and Chief Justice John Roberts’ son.

One tactic in Reid's playbook is to spread misinformation, and then shy away from a debate when presented with facts she doesn't like. After Vivek Ramaswamy spoke to Don Lemon on CNN on the history of guns and black Americans, Reid took issue with his views, but she declined the GOP presidential candidate's request for a live debate, knowing he’d crush her with facts. Subsequently, when the affirmative action debate heated up, she claimed, without evidence, that AA got Ramaswamy into Harvard as well. Are we supposed to believe the TV personality wasn’t aware that the lawsuit that prompted the recent Supreme Court decision was brought on behalf of Asian students like Ramaswamy? Most likely, she was but chose to lie, knowing that MSNBC would never hold her accountable.

Joy Reid works for the network that informs us that only Republicans espouse conspiracy theories, yet that same network has incessantly, hyperbolically, and without evidence promoted the discredited Steele Dossier and the entire Russia conspiracy theory. Reid’s a conspiracy theorist herself. She used her old blog to encourage her readers to watch the documentary Loose Change, funded in part by Alex Jones, that claimed the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by the US government against its own citizens.

Reid can’t be called a journalist. The most accurate description of her job is "political operative," and in that capacity her first instinct is to go with whatever information she likes—without verifying it—and ignore the truth when it comes out. Earlier this year, referencing a Washington Post article that was later corrected, she claimed that Florida teachers, under new legislation ("Don't Say Gay"), could get five years in prison for handing a child a book. The suggestion was that a teacher could be jailed for handing a kid a copy of The Life of Rosa Parks. The Post was later forced to correct its false information, because it turned out that the law against giving children pornography had been on the Florida books for some time. Anyone familiar with Reid's modus operandi knows that she never followed up with a correction.

When you don't correct your errors in the position as a cable "news" host, you're nothing but a propagandist. Propagandists are liars. When her many weird remarks surfaced, she insisted she hadn’t written them, and that the revelations were "part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago." "I was hacked," she said, over and over. But when an FBI investigation found no trace of a hack, Reid was forced to kind of apologize. The pseudo apology—replete with faked emotions—which she delivered on her show, included these weasel words: "I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me."

This is a lie because Reid was already forced to apologize to Charlie Christ for mocking his alleged homosexuality. When that happens, and when someone on Twitter can produce 30 pieces of evidence of anti-gay sentiment, such words are far from "alien" to Reid. An honest person would've just apologized, but honesty is what's alien to Joy Reid, and that didn't bother MSNBC in the least.