Just when you thought the liberal media couldn’t go any lower, they find a way to careen over the edge. That was the case Thursday on MSNBC’s The ReidOut as host Joy Reid and former RNC chairman Michael Steele decried calls to remove sexually graphic material from schools, seemingly siding with pornography under the guise of a stereotype that teens watch pornography on their cell phones and have sex behind school during dances.
Warning that opposing it was homophobic and meddling in schools “helping students explore the world around them,” the pair also decried Virginia Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin (R) as having run a campaign of “book banning, anti-blackness, [and] anti-history” that’s become a GOP hellbent on lionizing whiteness.
The bizarre pornography tangent came at the end of the A-block as Steele mocked “all those parents worried about pornography in the literature” because “kids ain't worried about pornography in literature” and “[y]ou better take your son's phone and take a look at what that bad boy is downloading.”
With repeated interjections and bits of sarcasm from Reid, Steele added: “[Y]ou better go — go to that — go to that — go to that school — that school dance and see what they out doing out behind the school, baby. Come on, now. You better take your son's phone and take a look at what that bad boy is downloading.”
To recap, Steele argued that banning pornography in schools was neither here nor there because, according to his broad generalization, boys have already downloaded porn on their phones and everyone’s having sex behind school buildings on the night of school dances.
Of course, Reid agreed and went to break insisting parents “don't have they kid’s [sic] password, so even if they got the password, they don't know what's on it because they even don't know what they [sic] kids are watching on the phone.”
Prior to that, Reid’s hatefest began with a clip of book burning from the 1966 movie version of Fahrenheit 451 to symbolize the GOP in 2021 and spew falsehoods about Youngkin as the leader of some far-right movement to ban not only sexually explicit content, but history writ large (click “expand”):
Welcome to the Republican Party of 2021. Our future dystopia is already here. The Republican Party is all aboard when it comes to stoking the anxieties of conservative white suburbanites to maintain control, especially now that Glenn Youngkin rode a wave of fragile feelings to victory in Virginia last week on the boogieman of critical race theory and buoyed by a little book banning, mainly Beloved, Toni Morrison's novel about the legacies of slavery and its legacy of black pain, which is really a book about feeling since Youngkin's closing message was an ad featuring a white parent who advocated in banning the book in 2013 because it gave her son, a high school senior, nightmares.
And within days of the election, the Republican leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy declared the Republicans are the party of education, announcing plans to unveil “a parents' bill of rights” in Congress. Virginia is just another stop on a road that they've been traveling for months under the guise of anti-critical race theory, which is still not being taught in any public schools, only law schools, launching an all-out war on books. Books about Martin Luther King Jr., and even seahorses. This week, a Kansas school district reinstated 29 books removed from circulation after a parent objected, including Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Fences. With the approval of elected Republicans, books are also under attack in Texas. Governor Greg Abbott is demanding that the state association of school boards investigate pornographic books and told state agencies to develop standards to block books with “overtly sexual content.” That’s fresh off a state representative’s probe into hundreds of books that caused discomfort, almost all of them about race, gender identity, and sexuality. In fact, they don't even want you to learn about the history of Texas in Texas.
Reid eventually brought in Steele and complained to the possible Maryland Republican gubernatorial candidate that Youngkin’s “closing argument” was that he “took the Trumpian pill” by saying “I will ban Toni Morrison books” as part of a “book banning, anti-blackness, anti-history platform.”
Steele assured Reid that Youngkin “can’t get away with it” and he’ll be forced to choose between reconciling with Black audiences over Morrison or disappointing white people if he’s “not oversee[ing] the burning or banning of books.”
Later, Steele decried right-of-center efforts to remove sexual content from schools, grossly insinuating that droves right-wingers reliably have unseemly histories of sexual activity.
Never having to fear the likes of CNN’s Daniel Dale, Politifact or The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, Reid kept lying about Youngkin as having “played games” and “footsie with far right wing, dangerous Trumpism” by having had zero “problem with” flying “a treason flag...that flew at the Capitol on the insurrection day flew at one of his rallies.”
For good measure, she threw in the tiresome allegation of Ronald Reagan as an devout racist based on a 1980 speech in Neshoba County, Mississippi.
Along with suggesting that Texas’s probe of books was homophobic, racist, and sexist based on the authorship of a 100-book sample, Reid later expanded her smear:
I was going to say it's openly an attack on books that have to do with slavery and race. But it's also a very sideswipe attack on the LGBTQ community too. Cause they keep on saying pornography because that's the other piece of what they want to get rid of.
And moments before their gross mockery of those who abhor pornography, Steele suggested without evidence that parents speaking out at school board meetings aren’t even tangentially involved in the lives of their children and, by being so vocal, they’ve violated the freedom of teachers to have students “explore the world around them” (click “expand”):
[A]t the end of the day, these school boards on the front line of education in a whole lot of different ways. These boards are comprised of moms and dads and community activists in the education space, Joy, as you know from your coverage of them, both in Florida and nationally who are concerned about providing good education, right? They’re — so, they're not in the business of banning and burning books. They're in the business of helping students explore the world around them and expose them to as much as is possible given, you know, the prescriptions that may be provided by their parents or whatever, their religious faith, et cetera. All that's respected. What Republicans are doing are not respecting that tradition. They're trying to say we decide what is morally correct. We decide what is the best book for you to read and we know in — in history what that is and what that looks like, looks like what it means. So when communities see this, to your point, they're like, oh, hell no, we don't want all that. We're not looking to ban a book. We just want to make sure that the best education is being provided for our kids and these individuals who are — that we elected in the last cycle, they haven't changed. They're the same moms and dads and good citizens as they were four years ago or two years ago, depending on what the term was.
So, people got to get it. Virginia may be an outlier more than anything else, Joy. Not necessarily the norm that we're going to see going into the next election cycle in '22 and beyond. I think parents by and large understand. Remember, those people showing up at school boards screaming and shouting, I bet you a dime to a donut, if they’re parents, ask them the last time they went to a PTA meeting. Ask them the last time they actually had a teacher's conference with the teachers of their kids, and I bet you find, ehh, they aren't the parents who show up when they're required. They show up for the noise. They don't show up for the work.
MSNBC’s support for pornography being shown to children and attacking of parents who oppose it was made possible thanks to the endorsement of advertisers such as Fidelity, Kayak, and Volvo. Follow the links to see their contact information at the MRC’s Conservatives Fight Back page.
To see the relevant MSNBC transcript from November 11, click here.
