On Saturday's AM Joy, MSNBC host Joy Reid addressed reports of a blog she formerly posted on which contained surprisingly anti-gay messages, which led her this past week to claim the website had been hacked and that she had not actually written the comments. But, on her weekend show, Reid backtracked a bit and did not unequivocally deny that she might have written the postings as she oddly stated that "I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things."
She then spent the first half hour of her show surrounded by eight gay activists who were mostly forgiving toward her because she is currently a liberal ally, and one guest even attacked the government as being run by "homophobic psychopaths" as some panel members tried to pivot to attacking the Trump administration.
At 10:00 a.m. Eastern, Reid began her show: "A community that I support and that I deeply care about is hurting because of some despicable and truly offensive posts being attributed to me."
After recalling that a friend of hers had a few months ago contacted her about her old blog site, she continued:
I was stunned. Frankly, I couldn't imagine where they'd come from or whose voice that was. In the months since, I've spent a lot of time trying to make sense of these posts. I hired cybersecurity experts to see if somebody had manipulated my words or my former blog. And the reality is, they have not been able to prove it.
As if she were leaving open the possibility that she might have had some sort of out of body experience that was responsible for the messages, she added: "But here's what I know: I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me."
Admitting to having a history of making other anti-gay comments, she continued:
But I can definitely understand, based on things I have tweeted and have written in the past, why some people do not believe me. I have not been exempt from being dumb or cruel or hurtful to the very people I want to advocate for. I own that -- I get it. And for that, I am truly, truly sorry.
She soon added: "I grew up in a household that, like many in America, had conservative views on LGBTQ issues."
The MSNBC host then introduced the first segment with an all-gay panel, and the show ran for almost 37 minutes without commercial interruption.
After the guests mostly showed leniency to the host as a fellow liberal, a few began complaining about the media highlighting Reid's anti-gay history, and one guest -- Pulse Nightclub shooting survivor Brandon Wolf -- charged that "We have homophobic psychopaths running the United States government," and that "[i]f Mike Pence, God bless him, ended up in the White House sitting behind that desk in the Oval Office, he would have us all in concentration camps hoping to pray away the gay."
