After being dragged up and down the block this week by black entertainers for criticizing rapper Nikki Minaj, MSNBC’s Joy Reid retreated to a safer target: Republican legislators.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis “may be a sociopath,” Reid said in a tirade this week, obsessing for the umpteenth time over the Florida executive. “We don’t know what his pathology is, but he’s not stupid. And I think that he understands that if he is going to inflict death on schoolchildren, he’s going to have to make it real hard for their parents to vote.”
She continued, claiming Republican governors “love” the coronavirus.
“They heart COVID,” she said. “This is how they feel about COVID. They want to spread it.”
With a few exceptions, Reid added, GOP governors are screaming “more COVID” and “more COVID in your schools.”
Reid is clearly overcompensating after being savaged by black entertainers, including radio host Charlamagne Tha God, for criticizing Minaj’s COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. It’s as if cable host ratcheted up the demagoguery as some weird form of penance.
“COVID is the precious, and you love it,” Reid said this week of conservatives who oppose onerous state lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. “You love COVID so much you want it to spread into schools, in the office, in the Walmart, on the cruise ships, and at the club.”
She added, “That great, spongy ball with the red spikes. You want it pumping through your veins with an ivermectin chaser. Why do you love it so dadgum much? Well, we have absolutely no bloody idea. But here’s the thing, you weirdos, everyone else, everyone else hates COVID. It is ravaging classrooms and hospitals across the nation.”
This Reid vs. Minaj business started when the rapper tweeted a bizarre note explaining why she is vaccine hesitant. Reid responded by scolding the artist, claiming she is doing a great disservice to the black community by raising doubts about the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 vaccines.
“My God, sister, you can do better than that!” said Reid.
For the record, the cable news host was among the loudest anti-vaccine voices last year when Donald Trump was still president, telling anyone who would listen they shouldn’t trust anything OK’d by the federal government.
“I mean, will anyone … anyone at all … ever fully trust the [CDC] again?” Reid asked her 2 million Twitter followers in September 2020. “And who on God’s earth would trust a vaccine approved by the [FDA]? How do we get a vaccine distributed after this broken, Trumpist nonsense has infected everything? Even if Biden wins?”
That was different, Reid explained this week. Her hesitancy was the “good” kind because her political opponents were in power. “I was hesitant,” she said. “When Donald Trump was out there controlling the CDC & controlling the FDA & manipulating them and making them put out falsehoods, anybody rational was hesitant.”
This is more rationalization than rationale. Republicans wanted to kill people with vaccinations before, and now they want to kill people with the virus. It’s dizzying.
Minaj, for her part, responded to Reid’s criticism by accusing the host of being an “Uncle Tomiana,” who was “thirsty” to take down “another black woman” at the behest of the “white man.” Radio host Charlamagne Tha God and his Breakfast Club radio crew — in comparison, paragons of steady rational thinking — likewise criticized Reid for being all too eager to attack Minaj rather than use the artist’s hesitancy as an opportunity for a teachable moment.
For the record, blacks account for a large percentage of the unvaccinated in this country. So, the issue of vaccine hesitancy in the black community is one that apparently needs to be approached with both delicacy and understanding. As her ridiculous, over-the-top rhetoric about Republicans loving COVID-19 and wanting to murder people might suggest, neither of these things is Reid’s strong suit.
