MSNBC’s Chris Hayes has been on a tear against Fox News. He complains on a near-nightly basis that no one at the right-leaning network has the guts to highlight the contrast between host Tucker Carlson’s vaccine skepticism and News Corps’s strict vaccine mandates.
As with most lefty criticisms, Hayes’s complaints regarding cowardice apply more to his own team.
Indeed, for a left-wing network that dedicates nearly all its coverage to hunting down and deciphering supposedly malicious racist dog whistles, it’s amazing there’s not a single person at MSNBC with the courage to speak up about the vile racism appearing regularly on the network’s airwaves.
Republican Winsome Sears won the Virginia lieutenant governor’s race Tuesday evening, defeating her opponent, Democratic Virginia Delegate Hala Ayala.
Sears is black. She immigrated to the United States from Jamaica as a child, growing up in the Bronx before moving south. With her victory on Nov. 2, she will also become Virginia’s first female lieutenant governor.
For MSNBC, Sears’s victory is no reason to celebrate. This isn’t a win for blacks or women. This certainly isn’t a win for black women! It’s a win for white supremacy, according to MSNBC anchor Joy Reid and her guest Michael Eric Dyson.
“The problem is, here,” Dyson said. “They want white supremacy by ventriloquist effect. There is a black mouth moving but a white idea running on the runway of the tongue of a figure who justifies and legitimates the white supremacist practices. We know that we can internalize, in our own minds, in our own subconscious, in our own bodies, the very principles that are undoing us. So to have a black face speaking on behalf of a white supremacist legacy is nothing new.”
Reid sat there, dumbly nodding along like a puppet — ironic considering the claim they were making about Sears’s utter lack of agency in selecting her own life story and political beliefs.
“It is to the chagrin of those of us who study race that the white folk on the other side and the right-wingers on the other side doesn’t understand: This is politics 101 … This is the pre-K of race,” Dyson droned on. “If you tell black people, ‘Look, there is a person of color who I am in favor of,’ and that person of color happens to undermine and undercut and subvert the very principles about which we are concerned, you do yourself no service by pointing to them as an example of your racial progressivism.”
It can’t be Sears is her own woman, with her own fully formed beliefs and principles. That’s not even allowed if you’re not white! No, because she doesn’t believe what black liberals such as Reid and Dyson believe — or maybe even because he doesn’t support what white liberals believe — Sears is a black white supremacist tool, a political minstrel show saying whatever white people want to hear.
This is an objectively racist way to talk about Sears. It is poisonous, it’s toxic, and it’s dehumanizing. It’s bad enough already that liberals believe black people are not allowed to think independently of them — but Reid and Dyson are actually saying Sears is a phony black person, based on nothing, certainly on no evidence that she has any sympathy for white supremacism or holds any white supremacist beliefs.
It’s a scandal that not a single person at MSNBC, where hundreds of segments are dedicated to “educating” viewers on racist dog whistles and other problematic rhetoric, has the backbone to say publicly that Reid’s programming is way out of line. No one at MSNBC, which is all-too-eager to accuse everyone else of racism, can spare a word for the insane woman down the hall who has been caught lying and keeps promoting racist demagoguery on her prime-time show.
MSNBC hosts and contributors have argued in the past that the words “charged,” “angry,” “Chicago,” “Baltimore,” “golf,” “privileged,” “education,” and even “apartment” are racial code words. Yet not one of them has anything to say about Reid and her guest calling Virginia’s black lieutenant governor-elect a white supremacist “black mouth” — a ventriloquist dummy for racists.
You want to talk about cowardice, Chris Hayes? Maybe look no further than your own break room.
