We are not tired of winning. We may find the pace at which it’s happening exhausting, but we are not tired of it. What’s more, we never tire of seeing the ways it happens, particularly when they’re unexpected. As just one example, this week, it happened in a way that even we admit to being surprised and delighted by: Joy Reid was fired from MSNBC.
Who is Joy Reid? The short answer is, you don’t want to know. The long answer is that Joy Reid is an MSNBC anchor who can best be described as a white supremacist cartoon which came to life by mistake. Indeed, if some enterprising playwright set out to lampoon the idea that only white people can be racist with a caricature of a black bigot, that caricature would have more interesting things to say than Joy Reid, if only because the mind responsible for their words would be intelligent. We at Human Events are not fond of the practice of cancel culture; indeed, we are implacably opposed to it. But we also deplore racial bigotry, and between the bigotry she stoked in her target audience of the lowest of low IQ #Resistance liberals, and the racial bigotry which she implicitly encouraged on the Right whenever she opened her mouth, we think we have to make an exception in her case. Enough is enough. As President Trump himself put it, “Finally.”
Where, oh where, to begin with Reid’s corpus of cognitive contamination? Perhaps with the attempt on President Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Reid opined, “We still don’t know for sure whether Donald Trump was hit by a bullet, whether he was hit by glass fragments, whether he was hit by shrapnel. We don’t have those details. We actually have no details from his physician even though this man is still a Secret Service protected presidential candidate. We know almost nothing. Why don’t we know that much?” President Trump was, needless to say, struck by a bullet. But that didn’t stop Reid from also comparing Trump’s near death with President Biden surviving COVID, and trying to claim that as shows of masculinity went, they were exactly the same. Yes, surviving a bad cold is the same as defying an assassin in this woman’s mind.
Or perhaps we should talk about her response to the second assassination attempt on President Trump, when she said that the base of the Democratic party wanted to see “someone get up there and give a knuckle sandwich to Donald Trump.” Well, we suppose a knuckle sandwich is better than a bullet, but really, someone should’ve told her there was a time and a place. Though she apparently isn’t always fond of political violence, as she warned after the 2024 election that President Trump’s government would shoot Americans, while also telling people that skipping Thanksgiving with Trump-supporting relatives was exactly what those same relatives deserved.
And that’s when she could be bothered to acknowledge the results of the 2024 election. Ironically, after President Trump won last November, Reid said the quiet part out loud and admitted that “there are many ways to cheat in an election.” Which, even if you accepted the results of the 2020 election, should raise a lot of alarm bells. How, exactly, does a Leftist MSNBC anchor know so much about how to steal an election?
But you know what? That was just when she was being partisan to the point of stupidity. What about actual bigotry? Well, to see that you just have to turn back to the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, which prompted the following splenetic outburst from Reid: “In America, there’s a thing about white vigilantism and white tears. Particularly male, white tears. Really white tears in general, because that’s what Karens are, right? They can Karen out and then as soon as they get caught, bring waterworks. White men can get away with that, too, because it has the same effect.” This extraordinary declaration somehow manages to simultaneously contradict itself with dizzying vacillation, ignore that none of Kyle Rittenhouse’s “victims” were black (making it a total non sequitur), and essentially discredit the idea of empathy as a trap laid by oppressors. The first two problems are amusingly stupid, but the third is alarming. And it persisted even in apolitical situations, such as when she claimed that the only reason Gabby Petito’s case was getting attention was because of “missing white woman syndrome.” It was precisely that toxic determination to deny empathy to white Americans that drove Tucker Carlson to brand Reid as “the race lady.”
Not that it was only whites who she denied empathy to. Indeed, one of the most awkward aspects of Joy Reid’s history as a public figure is the fact of her having penned an extremely homophobic blog in the past. At first, Reid tried to claim her blog had been hacked – no doubt by the same dog that subsists on a diet of homework – before sheepishly admitting that she was, indeed, responsible, and groveling in front of her own audience. Needless to say, the target of her homophobic ire was then-Republican Charlie Crist, who she referred to as “Miss Charlie” and tried to out as gay. Apparently, total lack of empathy for your political opponents can come back to bite you.
But back to Tucker for now, because as it happens, Reid was particularly upset that Tucker brought up that she went to Harvard. Which is funny, because she, too, likes to bring up Harvard, though not in a way that most Harvard administrators would find terribly amusing. And here we have to quote her, again, and this time at length: “I got into Harvard because of affirmative action. I went to a school no one had ever heard of in Denver, Colorado, in a small suburb.[…]But someone came to Denver to look for me. A Harvard recruiter flew in, met me at a restaurant, and did a pre-interview to pull me into Harvard. I was pulled in — affirmatively. […]
“But the minute I arrived at Harvard from my majority-black little town of Montbello in Denver — the first week or two that I was in class — my presence was questioned by white people.[…]
“I had never had my academic credentials questioned. I had never had anyone question whether I was intelligent — until I got to Harvard. And it was a defining point of my experience there. It was one of the many reasons I was miserable during my freshman year. I felt completely out of place. People kept telling me, ‘You shouldn’t be here.’”
Now, we have to make a couple observations about this, because it’s inadvertently revealing: firstly, we were not aware that any black person in the history of America would ever admit to having been accepted at a major university thanks to affirmative action. Secondly, for all her talk of being nerdy and smart, Joy Reid apparently doesn’t know the difference between ethnic outreach (which is still legal) and affirmative action (which is invidious discrimination). That might explain why all those people kept telling her “you shouldn’t be here.” Because, on the evidence of her behavior and the intelligence she demonstrated, she clearly didn’t. Thirdly, there are many, many nerdy and smart kids with good grades and good SAT scores who do not get into Harvard: the school rejects 1 in 4 students with perfect SAT scores. In other words, the qualifications she cites are necessary, but not sufficient conditions to get in. Harvard students usually have something beyond just good grades and test scores; something truly extraordinary that distinguishes them from the masses of excellent applicants around them. So what was extraordinary about Joy Reid? Well, based on the manifest low caliber of her thought, what do you think was extraordinary about Joy Reid?
In fact, while we’re on the subject, let’s ask a more basic question: what was this woman doing on TV as a pundit in the first place? No, seriously, what? She majored in Film Studies at Harvard, not Government, History, or any of a number of majors that would’ve prepared her for a career in politics. Oh yes, she worked as a minor talk radio host in Miami, and at a number of political blogs before MSNBC, but the woods are full of similar liberal personalities. So why her? Well, we will once more defer to Reid herself – this time to her tearful words after having lost her show:
Now, at the risk of being cruel, if you have to tell people your show had value, it didn’t. But that’s not the point. What does Reid cite as the number one issue she “went hard” on? Black Lives Matter. Because that’s what the point of her show was: not just hateful rhetoric toward Republicans (there’s tons of that), but specifically hateful rhetoric toward Republicans from a position of ethnic narcissism. We can snigger all we like about her being “the race lady,” but left untouched in that sniggering is why MSNBC felt it needed a race lady in the first place.
There, too, the answer is simple: because of 2020’s Summer of Love. Because of the Left’s obsession with DEI. Because it did not matter if other liberals with less embarrassing, less stupid, and less bigoted opinions, which would not have embarrassed the party, existed. No, she had no business being on the air, but MSNBC needed to prove it was down with the sick woke cultural revolution, and its attendant message that if blacks were not free to act like offensive ethnic stereotypes, then America was still racist. Who better to elevate, given that, than a walking, talking ethnic stereotype? No, Joy Reid had no business being at Harvard, no more than she had business being on the air. The only value she provided both was immunity to accusations of racial bigotry.
Which is why Joy Reid’s being canceled is more than just an occasion for schadenfreude: it’s a landmark moment in American race relations. Finally, not just Harvard, but MSNBC, has realized that there are more important things in life than not being called racist. That excellence and merit matter more than LARPing the 1960s over and over again. That people—and content—without actual value, rather than symbolic value, can be cut loose. And knowing that, we can breathe easy, because Joy Reid’s cancellation is not really a cancellation at all.
She wasn’t canceled for her loathsome opinions; she was canceled because no one cared to listen to them. She wasn’t canceled because of her choices, but because of the choices of millions of Americans to change the channel whenever she was on. She’s been run out of the marketplace of ideas fair and square, and the fact that a resentful, underqualified, seething mediocrity like her can meet that fate means that President Trump’s cultural project had already accomplished the first step of its victory: it has made America sane again.
This Story originally came from humanevents.com