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MSNBC host Joy Reid claims she hates Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, aimed at stopping public school teachers from teaching young children about sexual orientation and gender identity. But the Joy Reid of 2009 was all about hating on gays and would have championed this bill wholeheartedly.
Here’s what we know so far about the Joy Reid hacking scandal: after Reid’s homophobic blog posts dating from 2007 to 2009 were uncovered and published by Mediate in 2018, Reid deployed a hired gun to claim her blog had potentially been hacked. This claim by an “independent security consultant” was amplified by NBC News’s press agents.
But an investigation by the Daily Beast, where Reid was a paid contributor at the time, found there was no indication of hacking or screenshot manipulation and concluded the claims of hacking were false. Reid’s hired gun was forced to admit there may have been some mistakes in his methodology.
Reid doubled down, and soon the FBI said they were investigating her claims of ten-year-old blog hacking. Joy Reid may hate white men, but it turns out one probably saved her ass. Around the same time, NBC personality Tom Brokaw was embroiled in claims of sexual harassment from women at the network. The news sucked all the attention away from Reid, who was quietly allowed to keep her job.
What we learned about Joy Reid from her blog is that she’s sort of obsessed with, and very disgusted by, gay people. Reid openly opposed gay marriage, wrote about cringing at the sight of two men kissing and said she refused to see the movie Brokeback Mountain because the onscreen gay love affair was a bridge too far. She defended people who called homosexuality immoral and said a part of straightness is viewing gay sex as gross. And while some of that might be true, it’s the hypocrisy and privilege that makes Reid so loathsome.
We also learned she’s obsessed with sniffing out homosexuals in media, entertainment and politics — it’s something of rainbow witch hunt for Reid. This was all over her blog, where she couldn’t let go of her suspicion that former Florida Governor Charlie Crist might be gay. She also created a “totally not gay” list in 2006 that included Anderson Cooper and Clay Aiken, who weren’t out of the closet at the time.
Keep in mind, this wasn’t Joe Biden in 1973, when he said gay federal employees shouldn’t receive certain clearances because they could be “security risks,” or even Joe Biden in 1994, when he was among 23 Senate Democrats who voted in favor of an amendment to “cut off federal funds to any school district that teaches acceptance of homosexuality as a lifestyle.” This wasn’t squeamish, tippy-toeing Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama opposing gay marriage up until the very last possible moment, when it was politically safe to support the policy.
This was 2009, when Joy Reid was forty years old. Forty! Who was still homophobic in 2009? What middle-aged woman, who was raised in New York City and attended Harvard, was still grossed out by gays in the late aughts? Well, Joy Reid, that’s who. Talk about a hardcore bigot. I’m impressed.
Reid is not a slave-descended black American. Her parents were immigrants. Her dad came from the Congo and her mother from Guyana. They ended up both going to graduate school and sending their daughter to Harvard — a true American success story if I ever heard one and a testament to the greatness of this country. But there she is, nightly, on MSNBC with her crocodile tears for racism and torching the American flag for George Floyd. Her family’s success could have never happened in Africa, but then again neither could gay marriage, so I guess for Reid it’s a toss-up as to which place is better.
But this behavior wasn’t simply the actions of a bygone, now enlightened, Joy Reid, who went on her LGBTQAI2S++ apology tour after the scandal broke. Just last year she was up to it again, on national television, when she insinuated Tucker Carlson might be gay. That summer, rapper Nicki Minaj came out against vaccine mandates, claiming she knew a man whose genitals became disfigured after getting the jab. Carlson covered the story on his Fox News show. Reid, the ever-diligent enforcer of state rules, responded the next night, suggesting Carlson should inspect the genitals himself. It was the funniest thing in the world for Reid. She was like a middle schooler, giggling away at the gay joke, even acknowledging her remarks were probably not very wise given her history, saying, “Let me stop before we get into trouble.”
Unlike Reid, who I’ve never met, I won’t assume things about her personal life for the sake of cheap character assassination. But there’s often a pattern with people who obsess about homosexuality in the way Reid does. They might be keeping a secret. She has been known to wear her hair very short, not that that means anything. She tends to be a bit masculine — but I suppose some women are — and men do run for cover when they see her coming, I would imagine. But let’s not jump to conclusions.
Today Reid might pretend to be against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, but she was onto something during her blog days. She wrote, prophetically, about powerful forces trying to turn kids gay. “Ditto with gay rights groups that seek to organize very young, impressionable teens who may have an inclination that they are gay,” one post says.
But according to Reid, she didn’t write that. It must have been the Russians. As for the FBI investigation into Reid’s claims of being hacked, we never heard anything else about it. Funny, that. Fortunately, we now have a name for a situation where an individual falsely claims to be the victim of a crime, contacts law enforcement and wastes taxpayer resources on investigating a hoax. It’s called pulling a Smollett. For Reid, being compared to Jussie Smollett might be the greatest insult imaginable. Smollett is, after all, a homosexual. And she’s not very fond of those people.
