Thursday night’s ReidOut featured one of the ugliest news segments one will ever see. Over the course of eight-plus minutes, MSNBC host Joy Reid and far-left race-hustler Michael Eric Dyson viciously condemned Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as a “racist,” “terrorist,” ventriloquist (or “geppetto”) controlling black Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron (R), and worshipper at “the altar of whiteness” who “doesn’t give a damn” about those in poverty.
Dyson was spoiling for a fight from the get-go, denouncing McConnell as “tone deaf” and “color blind in the worst sense of the fashion” because “[h]e refuses to acknowledge the persistence of the color in the culture” in that being “black continues to be a thing that generates such deep and profound opposition.”
After Dyson said McConnell was both an “unwitting” and “conscious accomplice in refusing racial progress,” Reid derided the Senate filibuster as a “good, old-fashioned, southern technique” used by McConnell to tell Barack Obama that he was “not a real President.”
Reid turned her ire toward Cameron (whom she’s had no problem condemning as a betrayal to his race), insisting he “lie[d]” in order to “let white offices off for killing Breonna Taylor.”
As for his mentor, Reid claimed McConnell was equally responsible for the “diminution of black life over the last ten years as Trump.”
If they had changed gears to something totally different, there would have been more than enough screaming Notable Quotables. But things were only getting started.
Instead, Dyson replied that President Trump should be seen as a “fast terrorist” and “racist” (in terms of enacting physical harm to black people) with McConnell should be viewed as a “slow” “terrorist” and “racist” (in that his policies lead to “racial revulsion”).
Dyson then went full racist, spewing venom about McConnell being proof that America’s “real religion” remains “whiteness” with McConnell at the altar and playing the role of ventriloquist controlling blacks like Cameron:
And to proudly stand up and say that he wanted to make Obama a one term President, this shows us that the real religion in America is whiteness. The real politics in McConnell's orbit are whiteness. The worship of whiteness at the altar of whiteness genuflecting before the god of whiteness. And therefore, Donald Trump is the product of a womb that has generated this disfigured first person in terms of politics. But McConnell is part of that womb. Mitch McConnell gives life and breath to the very denunciation of blackness that Donald Trump has been so vehemently denounced for. And look, he then puts forward a black face representation, literally in Daniel Cameron, so that there’s a ventriloquism going on. Daniel Cameron’s mouth is moving. Mitch McConnell's thoughts are coming through his tongue. This is the worst geppetto we’ve seen and pulling those strings is one of the most — was one of the worst white supremacist enactments that we’ve seen in the last 15 years in American politics.
Reid didn’t push back on any of that, piling on the hatred by insisting that McConnell “den[ied]” Barack Obama’s “humanity and right to even occupy the office,” which was a farce considering the fact that Obama was allowed to have cabinet vacancies confirmed, debt ceiling packages passed, legislation sent to his desk, not subjected to an impeachment trial, and even granted some judicial appointments.
The deranged MSNBC host also worked in another pot shot, claiming that McConnell (and not Senate Democrats) is responsible for the lack of coronavirus relief for struggling Americans (click “expand”):
REID: [T]his guy was against -- he was for having sanctions on South Africa. That's an actual true thing. For him to have devolved into whatever this is that Mitch McConnell is now, blocking the John Lewis bill on voting rights from getting to the floor, blocking people from getting rent relief, people are hungry, people are standing in food lines. People are suffering, and he doesn't give a damn. If people can devolve that much, I don't know how we reckon with race in America. Do you have an answer for that in this book? [LAUGHS]
DYSON: Well, this is what is true. First of all, he was mistakenly there. He happened to be there. He was accidentally there. He did not deliberately go to attend the March. He even admitted that he couldn't hear the words Martin Luther King Jr. uttered that day and this many years later, he still cannot hear the resounding echo of an edifying, sonic appeal from a majestic trumpet of conscience like Martin Luther King Jr. He still is tone deaf. He still is incapable of listening to calls and cries of black people who say what will be done in the Senate to at least acknowledge the centrality of race and the degree to which black people continue to be punished by legislation and practices on the street.
And if all that was insufficient, Reid painted Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) as a betrayal to his skin color by allowing himself to be McConnell’s “faceman” for his “weaker” attempt at police reform.
Reid argued in a short segment before Dyson that “the bills the man Kentuckian first named Moscow Mitch has brought to the floor have been much weaker versions of House bills, especially the police reform legislation the Senate pushed in reaction to a comprehensive house bill following the murder of George Floyd this summer.”
And after a break, Reid added that it’s McConnell’s fault (instead of Senate Democrats filibustering) that police reform hasn’t passed.
To Reid, the Senate Republican bill wasn’t spearheaded by Scott, but instead a display of tokenism (which she falsely claimed had successfully passed): “[T]he House had passed a much more comprehensive one with chokehold bans and banning no knock warrants and qual — just — getting rid of qualified immunity. They passed a weaker version in the Senate and shoved Tim Scott out front to be the faceman for it.”
This vile, ugly rhetoric calling McConnell a racist, terrorist, and ventriloquist controlling black Republicans was made possible thanks to supportive ReidOut advertisers such as Gillette, Priceline, TD Ameritrade, and WeatherTech. Follow the links to the MRC’s Conservatives Fight Back page.
To see the relevant MSNBC transcript from December 3, click “expand.”
MSNBC’s The ReidOut
December 3, 2020
7:37 p.m. EasternJOY REID: Today, Mitch McConnell wrote an editorial touting civil rights record. Yes. That Mitch McConnell. He was responding to a piece from a voter asking what happened to the moderate he originally voted for, the one who attended the March on Washington as a young man and publicly “disagreed with President Donald Reagan about” sanctioning South Africa over apartheid. But who, once President Obama was elected, that voter says, he “watched in absolutely amazement that McConnell fought Obama on every single issue.” The writer cited McConnell saying that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term President” in his rebuke. In his defense, McConnell notes that he voted for Trump's criminal justice reform bill and one of the “former staffers, Daniel Cameron, made history...as Kentucky's first African-American attorney general.” You know, Daniel Cameron. The attorney general who was accused of lying about the Breonna Taylor case by one of his own grand jurors. And that reform? Well, that only passed after McConnell refused to bring it up during the Obama administration. Now, we could go on and on. In 2018, McConnell said blocking Obama’s Supreme Court nomination was his biggest accomplishment. Let me repeat that. His biggest accomplishment wasn't anything he did on civil rights or help the American people. It was obstructing the first black President of the United States, who he pretended was a dummy president with no right to add members to the federal bench. Here he is actually laughing — HA HA — about how he blocked the judicial nominee.
SEAN HANNITY [on FNC’s Hannity, 12/12/19]: I was shocked that the former President Obama left so many vacancies and didn't try to fill those positions, so —
SENATE MAJORITY LEADER MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY) [on FNC’s Hannity, 12/12/19]: I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. I was in charge of the — of what he did the last two years of the administration. Ha ha ha.
HANNITY [on FNC’s Hannity, 12/12/19]: And I will give you full credit for that. By the way, take a bow.
REID: HA HA HA HA. McConnell is so determined to stamp out progress in America, he literally calls himself the grim reaper when it comes to passing bills that help ordinary people, like expanding healthcare or voting rights act bill that’s named by actual civil rights hero John Lewis.
MCCONNELL [on 04/22/19]: Let me tell you this, if I'm still in the majority leader of the Senate, think of me as the grim reaper. None of that stuff is going to pass.
REID: Ha ha ha ha. And the bills the man Kentuckian first named Moscow Mitch has brought to the floor have been much weaker versions of House bills, especially the police reform legislation the Senate pushed in reaction to a comprehensive house bill following the murder of George Floyd this summer. And we'll have more of that after the break.
(....)
7:44 p.m. Eastern
REID: In the opening of his new book, Michael Eric Dyson writes directly to Elijah McCalin, the 23 year-old black man who died last year in Colorado police custody: “Dear Elijah, we are about to see if it is true that we are one, to see if your death and those of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Hadiya Pendleton, Sandra Bland, Clementa Pinckney, and untold others are viewed as worthy of the moral revulsion and, from there, the change of practice and belief. That would prove a real reckoning is taking place.” Congress has not passed police reform. And not because the House hasn't tried. Such reforms have met untimely deaths in Grim Reaper Mitch McConnell's Senate. And I’m joined now by Michael Eric Dyson, distinguished professor of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University and the author of the Longtime Coming: Reckoning With Race in America. Michael, my friend, it is good to see you. We’re going to talk about the book. But I want to very quickly ask you what you make of this attempt by McConnell to rebrand himself in part by touting police reform, having signed a bill. He blocked the one during President Obama’s tenure. And that the House had passed a much more comprehensive one with chokehold bans and banning no knock warrants and qual — just — getting rid of qualified immunity. They passed a weaker version in the Senate and shoved Tim Scott out front to be the faceman for it. Do you think there's a way that McConnell can launder his reputation based on that?
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: No. It's utterly ridiculous. First of all, this is revision history before our eyes. Usually people wait a couple years — a few years to try to tell the story again of what they did and did not do. And yet, Mitch McConnell here is caught in the very vice grip of a revisionist esthetic that says we’re going to just paint everything like we did it all great back then like we’re doing it great right now. He wasn't as great back then and he surely isn't as great as he thinks he is now. And to stand in the way of the making sure that a comprehensive piece of legislation passes after one of the most rancorous and horrible summers that we’ve endured in the long trek toward transformation of race in the country, suggests that Mitch McConnell is not only tone deaf but he is color blind in the worst sense of the fashion, in the worst sense of the word. He refuses to acknowledge the persistence of the color in the culture. He refuses to acknowledge that black continues to be a thing that generates such deep and profound opposition that a policeman can put his knee on the neck of a prostrate black man laying on the pavement as his pallet and asphyxiate him before our eyes. Mitch McConnell is an — if — if, in one sense, unwitting, but in another sense conscious accomplice in refusing racial progress in this nation and now to paint himself, to portray him as somehow Martin Luther McConnell is deeply and profoundly problematic.
REID: Your new book you talk about reckoning with race in America. And you know, I think about Mitch McConnell’s centrality in the story of race just in the last ten years.
DYSON: Right.
REID: His blanket opposition and filibustering, using that good, old-fashioned, southern technique — this is a man originally from Alabama —
DYSON: Right.
REID: — who used the filibuster prodigiously against President Obama, said you can't even put a — a — anybody on the federal court. You don't have the right. You're not a real President. And then to try to tout his deputy becoming general attorney of Kentucky. And then for that black man to lie about the grand jury proceedings so that he could let white offices off for killing Breonna Taylor, I feel McConnell is just as center to the — the sort of, you know, diminution of black life over the last ten years as Trump.
DYSON: There is no question about that. That on the one hand — you know, I talk about fast terror and slow terror. Fast terror is when bombs drop, when they lynch black people, and hurt us very explicitly by the police who hurt and harm and kill us. Slow terror is kicking kids out of school, denying opportunity to be fed both mentally and physically. Mitch McConnell, in this sense, if Donald Trump is a fast terrorist, is a racist, then Mitch McConnell is taking a slower train towards racial revulsion. He is enacting some of the worst practices we have seen in the history of this nation in regard to a senator blocking the coming to fruition of legislation that could relieve the hurt and suffering of black people. And to proudly stand up and say that he wanted to make Obama a one term President, this shows us that the real religion in America is whiteness. The real politics in McConnell's orbit are whiteness. The worship of whiteness at the altar of whiteness genuflecting before the god of whiteness. And therefore, Donald Trump is the product of a womb that has generated this disfigured first person in terms of politics. But McConnell is part of that womb. Mitch McConnell gives life and breath to the very denunciation of blackness that Donald Trump has been so vehemently denounced for. And look, he then puts forward a black face representation, literally in Daniel Cameron, so that there’s a ventriloquism going on. Daniel Cameron’s mouth is moving. Mitch McConnell's thoughts are coming through his tongue. This is the worst geppetto we’ve seen and pulling those strings is one of the most — was one of the worst white supremacist enactments that we’ve seen in the last 15 years in American politics.
REID: You know, and your — you – you — you write about reckoning with race. Talk to me about how we do that when somebody like this guy can start off at the March on Washington at 20 years old and get all the way here, right? Get all the way to the place where he's denying a black President’s humanity and right to —
DYSON: Right.
REID: — even occupy the office. If he can fall that far, this guy was against -- he was for having sanctions on South Africa. That's an actual true thing.
DYSON: Right.REID: For him to have devolved into whatever this is that Mitch McConnell is now, blocking the John Lewis bill on voting rights from getting to the floor, blocking people from getting rent relief, people are hungry, people are standing in food lines. People are suffering, and he doesn't give a damn. If people can devolve that much, I don't know how we reckon with race in America. Do you have an answer for that in this book? [LAUGHS]
DYSON: Well, this is what is true. First of all, he was mistakenly there. He happened to be there. He was accidentally there. He did not deliberately go to attend the March. He even admitted that he couldn't hear the words Martin Luther King Jr. uttered that day and this many years later, he still cannot hear the resounding echo of an edifying, sonic appeal from a majestic trumpet of conscience like Martin Luther King Jr. He still is tone deaf. He still is incapable of listening to calls and cries of black people who say what will be done in the Senate to at least acknowledge the centrality of race and the degree to which black people continue to be punished by legislation and practices on the street. So Mitch McConnell ain't never been there for real to begin with, and even now, yes, how we reckon with it because black folk know this ain't the first time we done seen this. We have seen this from get-go. We have seen this from the very beginning. White people who pretend to be our friends and then stab us in the back and what we understand is that Mitch McConnell is showing us that diversity by itself without equity, without justice, means nothing. Think about it. The police people who killed George Floyd, two white men, a black man, an Asian man, that's diversity, but diversity toward an unjust goal. That's diversity but without equity being embraced. So, Mitch McConnell is articulating the noble ideals and words but he is falling short on their follow-through. But black people always been dealing with this from the very beginning. This ain't the first time. [SKYPE AUDIO CUTS OUT]
REID: Yeah.
DYSON: We’ll be hearing people standing up, believing that God who overcomes, we believe in people who transcend barriers and we know that —
REID: Yeah.
DYSON: — blackness will survive, even in this hateful white.
REID: The book is Longtime Coming: Reckoning With Race in America. Another must-read book from Michael Eric Dyson. My friend, thank you very much. Really appreciate you being here tonight.
