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“Their ancestors made this country into a slave hell, but they can clean it up now. Cause they got the Smithsonian, they can get rid of all the slavery stuff. They got PragerU, they can lie about the history to the children. They can’t originally invent anything, more than they were ever able to invent good music,” former MSNBC anchor Joy Reid claimed.
White people did invent a few things. Like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the microchip and the video technology that Joy Reid uses to complain about the worthlessness of white people.
But white people have also invented some pretty terrible things: like Joy Reid.
Reid, maiden name ‘Lomana’, was, like Kamala, the daughter of foreign radical grad students who formed a relationship that ended, in the traditional Obama and Kamala style, with a deadbeat father going back to his country and leaving the American taxpayers to raise Joy.
“I got into Harvard only because of affirmative action,” she bragged. If Harvard hadn’t been so white (and Asian), it would have had no use for Joy Reid and she wouldn’t have gotten in.
After starting out as a pre-med, Reid put that Harvard ride to good use by getting a degree in “Visual and Environmental Studies”. That’s Harvard-speak for a degree in Film. Reid might have used that affirmative action to become a doctor and save lives in the black community, but she put her time at the prestigious university to much better use getting the kind of useless degree a vapid rich kid with no clue about life would obtain and then ignore in his future career.
And that’s exactly what Joy Reid did. 6 years later, she popped up on a local South Florida station and 25 years later, MSNBC gave her a slot. Why did MSNBC decide to reward an otherwise talentless troll with the charisma of melted cheese with a show? A year earlier, Comcast had finalized its acquisition of NBC (something it would later come to regret) and to get past the political opposition, it recruited Al Sharpton, gave him a show and promised to provide minority programming. Once again, affirmative action from white people invented Joy Reid.
Unlike Harvard, MSNBC’s affirmative action made Joy Reid into a national figure. The problem was that she was badly unsuited to it. While working in South Florida local TV, Reid tried to raise her profile with an ugly hatefilled blog named the Reid Report. On it, Reid expressed her contempt for Latinos, Jews, gay people and just about everyone else. Inconveniently, the Reid Report was also the name of the poorly rated show that MSNBC had just given to Joy Reid.
A white man’s career would have ended over even a tenth of the stuff that Reid wrote. Or it would have ended due to the Reid Report’s low ratings. But instead, Joy Reid claimed that her blog had been ‘hacked’ by mysterious digital criminals who made her write mean things that she would have never said, and the search continues for them to this day. While a number of gay groups broke ties with Joy and the Daily Beast tossed her column, MSNBC stuck by her.
MSNBC’s extremely white president decided to make Joy Reid a national correspondent (all the better to enable her to catch the real bloggers) and then had her replace Chris Matthews. Matthews, a fat white guy, had been accused of ‘inappropriate’ comments about women, and replacing him with Reid would prove that MSNBC was neither racist nor sexist.
Once again, Joy Reid was invented by white men, this time as a major news personality. But where Matthews knew what was going on and could rant about it, Reid was just embarrassing. She was never going to be a national figure no matter how much money MSNBC invested in her. Reid’s first episode debuted at 2.6 million. By the time MSNBC showed her the door, she was sinking below 1 million. By then, Reid had lost over a quarter of her audience in one year.
Did Joy Reid take responsibility and leave graciously? Nah, that’s for old white men.
Instead, she blamed racism, Trump and the Jews for her firing. Joy Reid claimed that her “ratings were fine”, but that Trump was especially angry with her because she was a black woman and that she was also fired over Gaza because if there are two things that MSNBC is best known for, it’s an unwillingness to criticize Trump and advocate for Hamas.
Joy Reid claimed that her reported $3 million salary was only “a tenth of the salary of people who did literally my same job, the whole time I worked there” and “that any man that was doing what I was doing was going to make more than me.” Reid didn’t name all the men at MSNBC who were making $30 million a year. Probably because they’re as real as her blog hackers.
But even after making millions of dollars a year, Reid has to play the victim of the patriarchy.
A talking head who graduated from Harvard with a worthless degree claimed that white men “get the sort of presumption of brilliance,” and insisted that, “they work less hours and make more than us, get bigger raises, more opportunities and more grace.” The number of white men who would have kept their job, let alone gotten a promotion after writing half the things about Latinos and gay people that Joy did, or claiming that Jews spread COVID, is around zero.
Joy Reid’s entire miserable career is a testament to the grace given to her by white men.
In the same conversation, Reid bragged that “the curse of competency means you’re the best person at what you do.” For Reid, competency probably is as close to her best as can be because she’s hopelessly dumb, hopelessly privileged and wasted every chance she got.
White people invented Joy Reid. They moved her up the ladder every step of the way, from Harvard to MSNBC, gave her every possible chance that she then wasted, only to then blame them for not endlessly subsidizing her failure theater. After MSNBC canceled Reid’s first show, her supporters claimed that she didn’t fail, the cable network didn’t give her enough support because she was a black woman. So MSNBC ignored her racism, made her a national correspondent and gave her millions of dollars and a top show that she ran into the ground. And when they finally canned her, the same voices began claiming that MSNBC was racist.
Now Reid is ranting about how white men never invented anything on Substack: a platform created by, you guessed it, white men. And if she doesn’t get enough paying subscribers, will Joy take responsibility? No, she’ll blame Substack for being racially biased against her.
Is Joy Reid to blame for all this? No, white men are. You can no more expect character and responsibility from Reid than you can expect a drunken hippo not to roll over you.
White men took her into Harvard, gave her local and then national TV shows, and what did they think was going to happen? Of all the worst inventions of white men, like mustard gas, disco and CAPTCHAs, the worst person on MSNBC or as it’s now known, MSNOW, has a special place in world history. White men may have written symphonies, great novels and invented the internet, but they also invented Joy Reid and it’s hard to say if we can ever forgive them for that.
