Political commentator Joy Reid joined host Don Lemon on the Don Lemon Show in September 2025, responding to resurfaced comments from conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who allegedly suggested successful black women such as Reid advance primarily because of affirmative action.
“As smart as I know my a** is, [Justice] Ketanji Brown [Jackson] is smarter, smartest person I’ve met in my life,” Reid said. “You smart, I’m smart, that lady is smart on a level I’ve never seen before, and her three roommates were even smarter. These girls were so smart that we were shocked that we’d met anybody that intelligent.”
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In an X post, Kirk appeared to reference comments from Reid, late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, and former first lady Michelle Obama, saying they used race to take spots from more deserving people.
“Amy Coney Barrett, on the other hand, is a Supreme Court justice just like Ketanji, even though her qualifications are minuscule compared to Ketanji’s,” Reid said. “Maybe that’s the affirmative action we’ve been getting: white people who are essentially mediocre in scale to a black person getting the spot because they want a conservative.”
Reid argued that conservatives have also benefited from forms of affirmative action and diversity initiatives.
“Maybe the way JD Vance got into Yale is because they were tired of just letting in white men from New York, from all the elite schools, and they wanted an Appalachian white,” Reid said. “That’s how that man got into Yale, I promise you.
“They wanted to just get out of the New York-D.C. matrix, Massachusetts matrix, and let somebody into Harvard and Yale who came from a different place, that’s also affirmative action and DEI,” she said.
Her comments sparked backlash from online users, including Washington Examiner columnist Joe Concha, who said, “Or… JD Vance graduated Ohio State following his enrollment in the Marines by graduating summa cum laude, which requires a 3.9 GPA or higher.”
Concha also said Lemon and Reid were two people fired from low-rated networks coming together to share thoughts.
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Reid also argued that institutions have long considered background and regional representation in admissions decisions, framing her criticism of what she described as selective outrage surrounding DEI policies.
“So before y’all start going crazy about DEI just being, ‘They let black people in just on the basis of being black,’ think a little more critically and think about the fact that it’s also disabled people, military people, veterans, people who came from Appalachia, white folks who come from Alaska and different places they don’t normally come from,” she said.
