Four years ago this week (July 20, 2020), MSNBC elevated their nasty, ultra-partisan weekend host Joy Reid from weekend mornings to primetime, with The ReidOut taking over the 7pm ET time slot from Chris Matthews’s Hardball. Matthews had abruptly quit four months earlier, after allegations he’d made creepy sexual comments to female colleagues and guests.
With Reid, MSNBC knew exactly what they were getting. A veteran of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, she had already used MSNBC’s airwaves to falsely denounce Republicans as the “fascist” and “cruel” enemies of “brown people;” to falsely claim the “far right” yearned to “send women back to the Dark Ages;” and to shamefully trash GOP Congressman Steve Scalise mere days after he was critically wounded by a wannabe assassin steeped in MSNBC’s anti-Republican rhetoric.
Promoted in the midst of the hard-fought 2020 election, Reid has delivered the same vituperative partisanship to an even larger audience. Then-candidate Joe Biden even headlined her first program, lamely flattering Reid that she had been on his list of potential vice presidential nominees.
Culling through Reid’s quotes from the past four years, there’s no shortage of extremist and hateful rhetoric, much of which is complete nonsense. In 2020, she claimed federal law enforcement “abuse” and even “kidnap” people off the streets (they don’t), and spun sinister theories that Donald Trump was going to use the United States Post Office to steal that year’s election (he didn’t).
Routinely employing poisonous demagoguery, Reid has claimed Republicans would trade “all the tax cuts” for the right to use openly racist language, and she’s accused the GOP of “bringing back the lynching vibe.” She’s even stated that, because regulating abortion is again constitutional, the “Christianist majority” on the Supreme Court has made women “state property.”
And rather than display a basic level of humanity, just on Monday she grumbled that last weekend’s assassination attempt would “allow Donald Trump as he is, you know, bathed in the glory and grandeur of his party, to rewrite himself as both a hero and a victim.”
For four years, Joy Reid has been the most insanely inflammatory hosts on a network chock full of inflammatory hosts; you can find hundreds of examples of her lunacy right here on NewsBusters. Here are 20 quotes showing how she’s degraded political discourse since her primetime debut in July 2020:
■ “A generation ago, when federal forces were deployed into American cities, it was a relief to people of color because it meant that a little girl may get walked into school….The cavalry was coming. Now, when federal forces are being deployed into America’s cities, it’s to teargas and abuse people and in some cases just snatch people off the streets without identifying themselves, and essentially to kidnap them. It’s a secret police sort of, you know, vibe instead of a cavalry.”
— Host Joy Reid on TheReidOut, July 21, 2020.■ “In 2016, Donald Trump relied on foreign help and voter suppression to help him squeak by Hillary Clinton. This year, he’s literally going postal to do the same thing against Joe Biden. Donald Trump is actively working to ensure that your vote, the vote that you plan to cast in the presidential ballot, may not count in November.”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, August 13, 2020.■ “Does Donald Trump actually care?...Do you think that he cares that some of his own people could get sick and maybe die by being at this event in the White House?...This is a cult of personality....I have literally seen interviews where people would say, ‘I don’t care if I get sick. I have to see him.’”
— Co-host Joy Reid during MSNBC’s Decision 2020: Republican National Convention, August 27, 2020.
■ “Donald Trump continues to behave like an itinerant dictator….bulldozing over our democracy and hunkering down in the White House, refusing to relinquish the reins of government or even to admit he’s been fired by the American people….Trump is no longer an autocrat in the making, he’s already there.”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, November 18, 2020.■ “I’ll say it again: people on the right would trade all the tax cuts for the ability to openly say the n-word like in ‘the good old days.’ To them, not being able to be openly racist and discriminatory without consequence is oppression.”
— March 3, 2021 tweet by MSNBC’s The ReidOut host Joy Reid.
■ “What Republicans are saying is they’re going to make it torture for you to vote in line by having fewer machines, beat-up machines at places….places where black folks live...make it impossible or torture for you to vote in line. And they’re going to make it impossible for you to vote by mail. They’re going to lock off every way that you can vote….This is the end of democracy in America. This is the beginning of the South Africa strategy…..It’s Jim Crow America.”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, March 25, 2021.■ “Your drunk, mostly absentee, Nazi-curious, authoritarian Republican Party is doing this circus, waiting around for you to put their ridiculous, embarrassing, democracy-hating, Trump-cult authoritarianism, open-racism-embracing, dangerous behinds back in power.”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, November 18, 2021.■ “Please stop thinking that there is some body count, some level of brutality and carnage that will move them — these Republicans and their two pet Democrats....Because their tolerance for blood and the NRA’s tolerance for slaughter are bottomless, as is the grief and the torture that the parents of slaughtered children and slaughtered grandmas and shoppers and Bible study parishioners, all the slaughtered Americans will feel every day for the rest of their lives. So honestly, to hell with anybody who says ‘don’t politicize this.’...”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, May 25, 2022.■ “Welp. The Christianist majority on the SCOTUS has made it clear that they intend to return this county to its 18th century state and they are accomplishing their goal....We have raced backwards, against the tide of history. The Republican Party did this. Gilead states are doing this. It’s time to wake up, y’all.”
— June 24, 2022 tweet by MSNBC’s The ReidOut host Joy Reid, following the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
■ “More than 100 million women and queer folks with uteruses too, woke up to another day in America, basically as state property in the more than 20 fully or partially Republican-controlled states that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority unleashed to literally take physical control of half the population.”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s TheReidOut, July 5, 2022.■ “How long before an American woman is prosecuted for an abortion?...What’s even worse than a woman prosecuted for a miscarriage or stillbirth? Death. In states with strict abortion laws, doctors may hesitate before offering essential lifesaving measures when a woman is bleeding out during a miscarriage. Because remember, the doctors face fears of prosecution, too.”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, July 6, 2022.■ “It’s also important to unpack the myth of Thanksgiving. It is a holiday riddled with historical inaccuracies. Built on this myth that the indigenous welcomed their colonizers with open arms and ears of corn. A simplistic fairytale interpretation of a 1621 encounter between indigenous tribes and English settlers that erases the genocide that followed. It’s the truth that Republicans want banned from our textbooks because here is the secret they want so desperately to keep. We are a country founded on violence.”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, November 23, 2022.
■ “They seemed to have gotten back into lynching, hanging, all sorts of other draconian 19th century fare. What is going on with Republicans that they seem to be bringing back the lynching vibe?”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, April 10, 2023.■ “You can’t even say slavery was bad now in the Republican Party. That’s how far it’s gone.”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, July 27, 2023.■ “The conservative majority on the court led by Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have already waged a full frontal assault on modern society, including repealing the Civil Rights era, abortion access and affirmative action, and they are currently gunning for contraceptive access, and maybe even gay marriage. And that is because justices like Alito and Thomas share the religious far-right’s grievances about society’s evolution.”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, February 20, 2024.■ “This mad man [Donald Trump], whose brain is clearly addled and little more than a ball of smooth clay at this stage of its deterioration, makes these promises to feed chum to a base that has been drilled by right-wing media to now care more about stopping migrants — even if they themselves live thousands of miles from the southern border — than about the economy or inflation or literally anything else.”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, March 18, 2024.
■ “As dangerous and clearly deranged as Trump is, we have to start asking not just what’s wrong with a society that produces so much support for this chaos theater, but also who is it that so badly wants Trump to be President?”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, March 19, 2024.■ “The first person to actually criminally prosecute Donald Trump is a black Harvard grad....And a black woman is doing the same exact thing in Georgia. And a black woman forced you to pay a $175 million fine….Trump is being held to account by the very multicultural, multiracial democracy that he’s trying to dismantle. And for me, there’s something poetic and actually wonderful about that. It says something good about our country that we’re still capable of having that happen. Go, DEI! My DEIs are bringing it home.”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, April 15, 2024.
■ “So, now he’s flying a Christian nationalist, pro-Trump flag as well….He [Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito] is a lawless individual, a clear Christian nationalist, and now a dual insurrection flag flier.”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, May 22, 2024.■ “His [The Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo] preferred list of wannabe justices in a second Trump presidency is already out there. Let me be blunt. You all should be very worried. These judges would lock us into a multi-generational nightmare. Fox spoke with a number of sources and the latest list is a veritable who’s who of young, forced-birth, anti-LGBTQ activists who have made a living stripping away rights from minorities in America in the name of Christian nationalism.”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, June 17, 2024.
For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
