Imagine being paid to appear on TV and continually lie, spew venom, and survive scandal after scandal like MSNBC’s Joy Reid. It must be quite the life as, on Thursday’s ReidOut, she offered a rather sinister lie that not only do conservatives want to make discussion of Juneteenth in schools “illegal” so “your kids can’t learn about it,” but slavery as a whole because it’s too offensive to those hateful white people.
For as long as we’ve had news cycles about critical race theory, the liberal media have sought to minimize and/or shut down debate by ascribing the worst motives to those opposing it (i.e. cry racist), deny CRT is being taught in schools, or extend the proposed bans out to include anything negative in U.S. history.
Of course, CRT and the 1619 Project are completely separate from talk of slavery and racial discrimination, but we never said we’re dealing with good people here.
Reid began her effort in a tease for a segment on Juneteenth, claiming without evidence that while Republicans say “they support the holiday while simultaneously passing laws to make sure your kids can't learn about it in school.”
Though some conservatives have suddenly decided to oppose the making of Juneteenth a national holiday (despite the fact that President Trump tried to make it one), it was unanimously approved in the Senate and only 14 Republicans in the House opposed it. In the Senate, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) led the charge to ensure its passage.
In a tweet after passing the Senate, Cornyn tweeted in part: “It has been a state holiday in Texas for more than 40 years. Now more than ever, we need to learn from our history and continue to form a more perfect union.”
And on the House side, Congressman Don Young (R-AK) tweeted that Juneteenth is “a celebration of liberty, freedom, & resilience in the face of the terrible evil of slavery” as well as celebrate the Constitution’s promise of “equal protection under the law.”
But Reid couldn’t mention that, only pointing out the 14 no votes and falsely claiming that “[i]n some red states, it could soon be illegal to teach what the holiday is all about” as they want “to dictate how historical and modern racism in America are taught.”
“That includes the state of Texas where Juneteenth was first celebrated. Governor Abbott signed a law this week intended to ban critical race theory from being taught in public schools, even though it’s not being taught in any K-12 curriculums,” Reid added.
Ask any conservative and most while state that, while it’s the greatest and most prosperous known to man, America hasn’t been without faults or areas/periods of darkness and shame.
Harvard University professor and Juneteenth author Annette Gordon-Reed was happy to oblige Reid’s antics.
Unfortunately, it’s likely Reid doesn’t know and/or like any genuine conservatives and Republicans as she reupped the lie about the right wanting to ban talk of slavery and Gordon-Reed concurred by saying Republicans have loathed changes on civil rights since the 1950s (click “expand”):
REID: Well, that’s inconvenient because that’s going to be illegal all over the country. I mean, we’re at a moment where there are a lot of Republicans who have made their cause celebre doing the opposite and saying that we’re not to talk about history that makes anyone who is white uncomfortable, to say anything sort of cast aspersions on slave owners, to make them something other than benevolent and beneficent people, to say that the Founders were not, you know, these sort of innocence on race and that they really had this master plan that they were going to end slavery — they had slaves, but they had this master plan. If you’re not saying that, they’re saying, well, it should be illegal to teach anything but that. How can that be happening at the same time we’re getting a Juneteenth holiday?
GORDON-REED: Well, it’s the American dilemma. It’s a conundrum. There — it’s a push-back. It’s a push-back against all of the efforts over the past — really since the ‘50s to bring a more realistic vision about the America — about America’s — the American beginning, slavery and so forth. And so, I think a lot of people are self-conscious about the strides we’ve made in doing that in history. You know, I — I don’t know what’s going to happen with this. I mean, there will be push-back. Teachers are very — my mother was a high schoolteacher. They’re creative people. The Texas Constitution — the Constitution of the Republic of Texas explicitly talks about race, explicitly talks about people of African descent saying they can’t be citizens. It promotes slavery, all those things. You can’t teach that topic. How are you going to talk about 1836?
REID: Right.
GORDON-REED: And it’s right there in the document. So, I mean, if you give people the documents, you read it, the questions will arise naturally, because we’re right here — we didn’t just invent talking about race.
Reid replied that, on CRT, “[t]here is this obsession right now, with taking everything that talks about race” or “anything that makes them feel uncomfortable” and “label[ing]” it “a critical race theory.”
After Reid leveled a misleading attack on the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, Gordon-Reed lied by saying “[n]o one is teaching critical race theory, K through 12” and defined CRT as “talk[ing] about the influence of race in American laws, even things that don’t have to do specifically that they’re not talking about race.”
Reid also minimized the opposition to CRT on the grounds that it’s become a major topic on Fox News to which Gordon-Reed said those who oppose them have “a perversion of the idea of history to just take something and slap a label on it that isn’t even true” and “use history for political ends” to “mak[e] people frightened.”
Huh. That sure sounds like an apt description of what the left does with history and fearmongering people into submission.
These bald-faced lies and hate-filled view of right-of-center Americans was made possible thanks to the endorsement of advertisers such as Fidelity, loanDepot, and Qunol. Follow the links to see their contact information at the MRC’s Conservatives Fight Back page.
To see the relevant MSNBC transcript from June 17, click here.
