Well, you get what you pay for, MSNBC.
New prime-time host Joy Reid proclaimed this week that the modern Republican Party is no different than South Africa’s since-disbanded National Party, which established apartheid as law.
“Ideologically,” said Mother Jones Washington bureau chief and MSNBC contributor David Corn, “the Republican Party is indeed Fox. Fox is state television, but what happens when you don’t have the state and you’re state TV? What happens when you don’t have the voters, and you want to be bigoted or authoritarian like Trump? It’s not going to work out.”
Reid responded, “Look, it worked in South Africa.”
“I’m just being honest,” she continued. “The Republican Party — go and read the history of the National Party, the National or nationalist party in South Africa. It’s the same party as the Republican Party in the United States.”
Yes, the same. Practically twins!
“It’s about white interest politics and white grievance politics and fear of losing power to a brown or black majority,” the MSNBC host continued. “That is the Republican Party now.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, she continued in a long-winded aside that devolved quickly into a hodgepodge of non sequiturs and other nonsense, “can go pretend he is the [COVID-19] mask man, that he is the biggest advocate of masks. No one believes that. They just know he got his 200 judges, so he doesn’t give a damn about Trump anymore because he got what he wanted out of Trump, all those judges that keep the powerful empowered for the next 40 years. Now that he has 40 years of power in the bank, now he’s like, ‘Wear a mask.’ No one believes him.”
This? Her?
This is who MSNBC chose to replace Chris Matthews with, granting her the all-important 7 p.m. weekday spot?
It would be nice if Reid’s comments were not indicative of a deeper rot at the cable network. It would be nice if her going off the rails has been of some concern among her more mature and responsible colleagues, including the network’s executives.
But you know what? MSNBC knew exactly what it was getting when it handed Reid the seat vacated abruptly by Matthews in March over allegations he sexually harassed network guests (he later copped to the allegations). MSNBC had plenty of warning about Reid, including her past homophobic rants and her claiming once that it seems “a tad cheeky” that the British government “unilaterally awarded” Holocaust victims “land belonging to living Palestinians as restitution.”
“After all,” Reid wrote in a 2005 article on her old blog, “God is not a real estate broker. He can’t just give you land 1,000 years ago that you can come back and claim today.”
MSNBC executives would be lying if they claimed today that they have been blindsided by Reid’s penchant for partisan fanaticism, hyperbole, and bomb-throwing. This stuff has been well documented for years. The inescapable conclusion, then, is that Reid is exactly the sort of person MSNBC wants headlining its marquee programs, meaning her brand of political hackery is not going to be an exception for the cable news network. It will soon be the norm.
