To quote our friend Bonchie at RedState, “explain how Joy Reid is any different from Alex Jones. You can’t do it.” Such was the case on Wednesday’s ReidOut as Reid argued Ma’Khia Bryant was an innocent young girl who had cute TikTok videos and didn’t deserve to be killed by a violent Columbus, Ohio officer because knife fights happen all the time and people survive them.
And despite the fact that there’s multiple body camera angles of Tuesday’s incident, Reid insisted nothing police put out or say should be trusted because it all could turn out to be a lie (which would ostensibly include the video).
She made sure to set the table for the segment by portraying Bryant as someone who “look[ed] very much like 16-year-olds do, doing her hair in the tutorials she once posted on TikTok, like this one, that is set to Bryson Tiller’s Just Another Interlude, looking adorable, exhibiting youth and joy.”
“[A]nd we wish her TikToks were a reason why Ma’Khia has risen to prominence, but, instead, it’s the other video that we’re about to show you, the body camera video showing her shot and killed by a police officer in Columbus, Ohio, minutes before a guilty verdict was announced in the murder trial of Derek Chauvin,” she added.
To further her radical narrative, she brought in far-left San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and St. Louis police officer Cheryl Orange and lamented that “police have tremendous latitude to use deadly force” and that it’s unlikely the officer would face charges.
Reid upped the ante and put on her tinfoil hat by suggesting what the public has heard and seen from police could be a lie as “they aren’t being fully transparent here.” So, people demand body cameras and police add them, but we’re going to pretend it could somehow be fake?
Somehow, she went even further by portraying knife fights as a pedestrian occurrence where people walk away without serious harm:
I remember fights in even high school or even younger than that where a kid brought a pen knife or something to school, and teachers were able to defuse that and they didn’t have guns.
Orange emphasized the incident was a tragedy and conceded that officers “can use deadly force,” but then critiqued the officer because “we’re talking about a child here that was involved in the altercation with someone else” and she couldn’t make out “how the young lady was using the weapon.”
Reid leveled another gripes she complained that one of the responding officers after the shooting supposed wore a Blue Lives Matter mask and it showed a departmental lack of respect for believing in the “value for human life” in black people (click “expand”):
REID: Somebody — one of the officers who responded to the scene had on a Blue Lives Matter face mask. Social media has shown videos of people yelling at somebody who yells, Blue Lives Matter. We don’t know whether it was one of the police. But if people — if cops are showing up to the scene of a shooting of somebody, and there’s people in pink jumpsuits running around and girls — teenage girls running around, and your response to that, given the sensitivities we’re in right now, on the day of the George Floyd verdict, is to self in a Blue Lives Matter mask, what message do you think that is sending to the community and to black people in general about your value for human life?
ORANGE: Well, yes, ma’am. I think that is — me personally — is very disrespectful and unprofessional, because you need to be — again, like I said earlier, you need to show some kind of empathy and to actually use empathy, you got to have understanding. You have to have some knowledge base and, to me, that would be just really insensitive, because it’s like right out in your face: Yes, you talk about Black Lives Matter, but Blue Lives Matter also. But what about people like myself, who both black and blue?
She then went to Boudin (who was a former translator for Hugo Chavez) and held up San Francisco as a model for criminal justice and law enforcement, including their refusal to prosecute prostitution or drug and weapons possession from traffic stops.
Implying it was offensive and wrong for critics to point out Boudin is the son of cop killers (when it is indeed a fact), Reid allowed Boudin to gloss over the city’s repulsive streets being filled with feces, garbage, and needles (click “expand”):
REID: [A]nd then when people like yourself try to sort of change the way we’re doing it and say, okay, we’re going to take police out of these situations, we won’t have them arrest people for having weed, we won’t have people arrest — you know, arrest people for, you know, prostitution and other crimes, let me show you a couple of headlines about you. A thing called Law Enforcement Today called you the son of cop killers, and went after you in really nasty terms, simply because you had eased a policy on police stops. So, they’re mad at you and put out this to law enforcement that they’re reading about it. So, like, there’s a hostile — there’s a not being honest with the public piece, and then there’s a being hostile to people like you who try to change things piece. So, what do we do about that?
BOUDIN: Well, Joy, thanks for having me on and thanks for covering such critical issues to public safety and public trust in law enforcement. In San Francisco, we’re working every day to restore the trust that communities, especially communities of color, have in law enforcement. We know we can’t build public safety if we continue to have unnecessary loss of life at the hands of police and so I’m really proud of the work we’re doing in San Francisco. I have a dedicated unit that shows up to the scene of any officer-involved shooting and we take the lead on investigating what happened and whether or not we should file criminal charges. Last year, I implemented a policy treating victims of police violence like victims of any other violent crime. We provide them with the same services and the same benefits[.]
Reid closed by claiming police “are gaining revenue for cities” by willfully exacting punishment on racial minorities by targeting their bank accounts with crimes that result in fines and asked Boudin if it should be stopped.
Of course, Boudin agreed, trashing police for having a greedy “financial interest” in harming such communities.
Reid’s deranged downplaying of knife fights as something routine and of little consequence was made possible thanks to supportive advertisers such as LegalZoom, Liberty Mutual, and Sandals. Follow the links to see their contact information at the MRC’s Conservatives Fight Back page.
To see the relevant MSNBC transcript from April 21, click here.
