By Rich Lowry
Monday, January 20, 2025
There is poisonous and lame political commentary all
around us, and then there’s the work of Joy Reid.
It’s not just that the MSNBC host sees racism and fascism
everywhere, or that she is obsessed with race — these are fairly common
characteristics of left-wing opinion makers these days. What sets her apart is
her conspiratorial cast of mind that would be embarrassing if you witnessed it
in a comment thread on Reddit, let alone in prime time every night.
All you need to know about Reid is that several years
ago, she tried to cover the tracks of hateful and conspiratorial things she had
posted online with another conspiracy theory — that she’d been hacked.
There are conspiracy theorists who are disturbing because
you worry that they are going to win over people over with their insinuations,
and conspiracy theorists who are depressing because you suspect that they know
better. Then, there are conspiracy theorists who are inadvertently hilarious
since their ravings are so frankly preposterous.
Alex Jones falls in this latter category, and so does Joy
Reid, although the difference is that no one has offered Jones a cable show —
yet.
It’s hard to imagine an MSNBC executive several years ago
having a meeting about how the network needed a new, persuasive voice in prime
time and ending it by barking to an underling, “Get me Joy Reid!”
That Reid is so prominently featured on the network
speaks to a profound lack of institutional self-respect and a dim view of an
audience that is presumed to gobble up whatever dog’s breakfast of half-baked
insights and malicious lies are told to it on any given night.
Consider her rant the other day about “the billionaire right” and the
L.A. fires. The riff had so many grotesque errors and fabrications in it that
it wasn’t so much partisan dreck as an art form.
“Oh, the arrogance of the colonizer spirit,” she
exclaimed at one point, in response to attacks on the fire department’s DEI
policies. If Reid doesn’t want California to be “colonized,” she’s about 200
years too late if she’s thinking of Americans, even later if she’s thinking of
Mexicans, and later still if she’s thinking of the Spanish.
The theory of her monologue was that “the billionaire
right” wants California so it can “retrofit it with their ugly right-wing
policies the way they’ve ruined Florida and Texas and every other red state
where poverty rates are high and education is warped and non-white immigrants,
pregnant women, victimized girls, and LGBTQ folks live in fear.”
Then, if the Golden State goes Republican, she posited,
“the fight for permanent control of America is basically over.”
This would free up the billionaires to “drill and frack
California until the fires this past week pale in comparison” and to “drive out
the brown people and the black and Asian people, or just sink them into the
same apartheid they’ve created in Texas.”
This is the point when you want to back away slowly and
hope the person telling you these things gets distracted and begins to talk to
someone else.
Where to begin? Despite what Reid seems to believe,
California has had the highest poverty rate in the nation, which, as the website
CalMatters notes, is “almost entirely because of its extraordinarily high costs
of housing, utilities, fuel and other consumer needs.”
If non-white immigrants live in fear in Texas and
Florida, it’s not clear why they keep moving to those states. Texas, for
instance, is incredibly diverse (it is 40 percent white), and getting more so.
“The Lone Star State led all others in new Hispanic, Asian and Black residents
in 2023,” the Associated Press recently reported.
And Texas, the billionaire-dominated hellscape according
to Reid, leads the country in net domestic migration, with
California among the top contributors of émigrés.
As for warped education, California lags the rest of the nation in performance on the National
Assessment of Educational Progress.
And, by the way, drilling and fracking don’t cause
wildfires; in fact, California has turned its back on both and just seen parts of its largest
city burn to the ground.
Finally, as far as Texas’s being an apartheid state is
concerned, that’s a charge so hateful and dumb that it’s barely worth
responding to, but, needless to say, apartheid is illegal in America, and
surely someone else besides Joy Reid would have noticed if Austin really were
Pretoria circa 1976.
Does Reid have a private definition of apartheid? Does
she know what this definition is? Does she care?
Her L.A. fire rant is top of mind, but a similar analysis
could apply to any number of things she routinely says, whether it is her conspiracy theories about the first Trump assassination
attempt or, to take an example from just the other day, her playing around with
the idea that Elon Musk and co. may have rigged the voting machines in November.
Reid’s critics periodically say she should be fired for
the bonkers things that she says. They aren’t thinking strategically, though.
As a voice for a woke left that is irrational, venomous, and completely out of
touch with reality, she can’t be surpassed. MSNBC should re-up her and
guarantee her a lifetime annuity.
She’s that bad.
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