By Scott Ross
In April 2018, posts from an old, deleted blog of Joy A. Reid’s surfaced, embarrassing the MSNBC host — who just last December was forced to apologize for previous bigoted, anti-gay comments — anew. Those posts, from 2007, unearthed by Jamie Maz and re-posted on Twitter, concerned John McCain’s potential Vice-Presidential pick, Charlie Crist. In them Reid continually referred to the former Florida governor as “Miss Charlie,” and indulged in tired “faggot” stereotypes meant to impugn his masculinity — a tactic both impossibly passé and, curiously, still much in evidence, usually among what is laughingly referred to as the religious right… and smirking liberals. Since Reid presents herself as a liberal (she used to call herself progressive, and even plumped for Bernie Sanders, until he had the sexist effrontery to exercise his rights as an American citizen and run for President against The Chosen One) these remarkably recherché accusations of closeted homosexuality against Crist were more than humiliating to her; they were, potentially, ruinous to her now-lucrative career as a news actress. (Not ruinous enough, however; her self-contradictory “apology”… for remarks she claims she never made… appears to have been enough to save her. For now.)*
Among the many ugly and appallingly insensitive remarks Reid made in these posts — which Reid, bizarrely, claims must have been written by others who somehow managed to “hack” a defunct and deleted blog site in order to distress her and which the internet back-up organization The Wayback Machine has verified were not — were, as Glenn Greenwald writes in The Intercept, items “promoting the ugliest and most destructive stereotype of gay men as pedophile predators by suggesting that anti-gay attitudes are based in ‘concerns that adult gay men tend to be attracted to very young, post-pubescent types, bringing them “into the lifestyle” in a way that many people consider to be immoral’ and that ‘gay rights groups seek to organize very young, impressionable teens who may have an inclination that they are gay.’”
In a response as predictable as it was nauseating, Reid made the utterly insupportable (and, as it turns out, wholly unsupported) claim that “an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog… to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology. I began working with a cyber-security expert who first identified the unauthorized activity, and we notified federal law enforcement officials of the breach. The manipulated material seems to be part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago. Now that the site has been compromised I can state unequivocally that it does not represent the original entries.” The Wayback Machine, as noted above, un-categorically denies this spurious and self-serving assertion.
Moving on from this easily-discreditable claim Reid said of these posts “being attributed to me” (emphasis mine) that “I genuinely [emphasis hers] do not believe I wrote those hateful things.” She then went on, bizarrely, to further damn herself as a lifelong homophobic dogmatist, recalling that some of her “closest friends” (shades, to use a deliberately pointed word, of “some of my best friends are Negroes…”) kept secrets “because they didn’t know what I would say, or if we would still be friends, or whether I would look at them differently.” Their secretiveness appears to have been wholly justified. Setting aside the inevitable question of just how “close” a friend must be who feels he or she cannot trust you enough to be open, especially concerning his or her sexuality, Reid’s attempt to justify her bigotry by asserting that, when she wrote these posts “a decade ago […] the country was in a very different place” are patently ridiculous. Alas, even her severest critics, as we shall see, follow directly on from that absurd statement.
Joy Reid thinks 2007 was “a very different place”? Try 1977, when I came out. Or 1987, when gay men were dying in their thousands, the President said and did nothing and the New York Times still refused to name their nearest survivors as anything but “longtime companions.” That country was “a very different place.” But a mere ten years ago? All these types mean — and you will see a sick-making plethora of examples of this historically ignorant thinking in the commentary of the young men I cite below — when they claim the country is not now what it was then is that, in 2007, there was no same-sex marriage. That is the sum total of their knowledge of the long fight for basic rights among gay Americans, a struggle which did not begin at Stonewall, but for which that watershed June 1969 event serves nicely as a foundation stone from which to measure modern progress.
And if I seem, once again, to be pillorying Millennials exclusively here, as I did in my previous essay concerning the current unthinking misuse of language, it is merely because the more interesting of the current crop of progressive YouTube commentators are, by and large, of that demographic. Reid, even at her most absurd, at least opines that she (still resolutely clinging to her central lie) hopes that “whoever corrupted the site recognizes the pain they have caused, not just to me, but to my family and communities that I care deeply about: LGBTQ, immigrants, non-Caucasians and other marginalized groups.” This, troublingly, actually puts Reid one up on the majority of young, heterosexual male progressive commentators, who, taken as a whole, never give a thought to any gay person’s feelings. It is as if they presume all of their followers are heterosexual. And for them, the latest edition of The Reidcapades represents only one thing: An opportunity to gleefully point up her hypocrisy.
Kyle Kulinski, on his 30 April “Secular Talk” video, correctly points out that Reid also Tweeted some of those old comments she now pretends she didn’t write. (Joy: “I couldn’t imagine where they’d come from, or whose voice that was.”) As a grammatical side-note to this piece I will point out that, should he ever see his remarks in transcript, Kulsinki’s millennial overuse of the empty filler word “like” ought to shame him into, if not silence, at least recourse to a professional speech instructor. I doubt it will. Nothing else appears to shame the man. (Although he certainly knows that MS-NBC is “shameless.”)
Kulinski remarks, “I give less than no fucks about what she said back then… akin to, like, me and friends of mine, who, when you saw something you didn’t like, in, like, high school, your reaction was, like, ‘Gay.’ Now, as ‘South Park‘ brilliantly points out, that doesn’t mean that, like, when somebody like me was saying that, I was saying, ‘Hey, being a homosexual is inferior, and wrong, compared to heterosexual.’ No, it’s something that developed over time, that become de-coupled with being hateful…” [Emphasis mine.] Since I have not seen the ‘South Park‘ episode in question, I cannot say with certainty what the intentions of Messers Stone and Parker were. However, given my past exposure to the series, I cannot believe those two would go out of their way to create an episode whose point is that it’s OK to say, “That’s so gay,” as long as you don’t actually mean “homosexual.” (Oh, and Kyle? A television show points out nothing, brilliant or otherwise. Its writers do.)
“But,” Kulinski continues, digging his own grave with a fervor that recalls Joy Reid at her least self-aware, “that doesn’t mean that I haven’t at times, in jest, said, ‘Gay,’ or at times you would say to your friend, ‘Faggot’ — if you want to have an impact and hit him, ‘Faggot.’ Would I do that now? Probably not [emphasis mine]. But I would vehemently deny that when I said those things that was me being anti-gay, because it’s simply not. You can say those things and be, y’know, not politically correct but at the same time you’re not saying what people insist you’re saying…”
“Probably not.” Which I take to mean, “I might.” With the smug, tacit assurance that we would all, like, know, he didn’t, like, y’know, mean it.
“I’m in favor of gay marriage,” Kulinski foes on. “I’ve always fought for gay rights, but at the same time I also don’t bite my tongue…” [Emphasis mine.] In case you miss the point, the enlightened Mr. Kulinski is saying, “Don’t tell me I can’t say ‘faggot’ when I want to.”
With friends like these…
And I for one would like to see Kulinski’s battle-wounds for his gay rights “fight.” I’ve got 40 years’ worth of them, Kyle. All interior, I should add… so far. No one “fights for gay rights” only to claim for himself the right to say “faggot” when he chooses. No one but a hypocrite. You’ve only to substitute “black” for “gay” and “nigger” for “faggot” to comprehend how ludicrous Kulinski’s insupportable position is.
That Reid is a hypocrite as well does not let Kulinski off the hook he baited for himself, and on whose barb he so eloquently flounders. It isn’t, you see, what Reid said that matters to the likes of Kulinski, only that she denies saying it. The lie is all that signifies. He actually seems to believe, despite the explicit evidence before him, that, because Reid says she’s now an ally, she is, ipso facto, no longer anti-gay. This self-ordained liberal-humanist-progressive champion and pundit (or, to use the term so often bandied about by the likes of Kulinski, “pundint”) is incapable, in his indifference to the hatefulness of what Reid wrote, to sense what is most obvious and salient about her: The woman says anything… if she thinks it will help her earn a paycheck. She was pro-Sanders, before he ran against The Queen; demonized him after. Because her bosses determined the contours of the debate, from which none shall deviate if she wishes to keep getting those lovely $30,000-a-day paychecks. Even little Kyle admits Reid is “a liar.” Yet he’s certain “she’s on the right side of those issues now.” Who says she is? She does.
For Kulinski, the issue at hand isn’t the ugly, hurtful, appallingly insensitive slurs Reid hurled. No. “The problem is that she’s a goddamn liar.”
Meanwhile, the allegedly upright Jordan Chariton reveals (also on 30 April) that he, like Kulinski, cannot see the hideously tangled forest for the more obviously stunted trees… nor his own homophobia, even as he speaks it.
“Do I wish anything ill will [sic] towards [sic]” Reid, he asks? “Absolutely not, I’m not that kind of person.” So what “kind of person” is Chariton? Like Kyle Kulinski, not the kind of person who is in any way comfortable with faggots. For Chariton, “If Joy Reid wrote nasty things about homosexuals, over a decade ago, I would think it’s a bad thing…” Well, there’s a ringing endorsement against bigotry. And “homosexuals,” please note, not “gay men.”
Again we see that mantra, “over a decade ago.” A decade ago was still well into the 21st century. But such progressives as Chariton don’t think they, or liberals generally, should have (to use their curiously un-ironic phrase) “evolved” on gay issues, I would suppose, before 2015, the year in which the Supreme Court found for the plaintiff in Obergefell v. Hodges. This seems, on evidence, to be a problem of perspective for many Millennials; what they themselves did not live through, they know little to nothing about. They’ve heard of AIDS, one supposes, but do not seem to understand its monstrous impact upon one especially vulnerable community, nor do they object when a hypocritical shill like Hillary Rodham Clinton, sensing a means of inserting herself into an obituary, praises Nancy and Ronald Reagan for “helping to start a dialogue” on a plague whose acronym neither would utter publicly and whose toll among gay men was so pronounced, and so devastating, that, after 1996 the National Mall could no longer host the AIDS Quilt as it was then constituted because its vastness was simply beyond the means of exhibiting in one place.
Further, “homosexuals” is a word which, revealingly, this progressive uses repeatedly, even as he rushes to assure us he “never had a problem with” his — presumably countless — gay friends. Even when Chariton does utter the word “gay,” he invariably stumbles over it, saying, “homo” first before correcting himself.
This, ladies and gentleman, is what, in poker and bunco circles, is called a tell.
“Joy Reid’s said a lot of bad stuff,” Chariton bravely observes. “And, by the way, I’ve probably written things ten years ago that I’m not proud of. We probably all have.” Speak for yourself, Chariton. I have written nothing about others in the last decade which it shames me to recall, or that was offensive to any racial, ethnic or even religious group (no mean feat for an atheist who is pretty much fed up to the teeth with the God-boys, few of whom exhibit the same restraint toward him). Nor to any sexual or physiological (so-called) “minority” within the wider culture. Why? Because, aside from not wishing to offend, and being aware that it is not kind to use language that is insensitive to others, I choose my words with care. Does Chariton?
“Let’s not be hypocrites here,” little Jordan concludes. “We can’t hold anyone to a perfect standard… We’ve all written things we’re not proud of.” I hear in this an echo of liberal Democrats and their “purity tests”: Expecting an alleged liberal to not write a string of deeply offensive remarks is, somehow, holding her to a “perfect standard” When, in your opinion, Mr. Chariton, does someone like Reid actually step over the line into hatefulness and bigotry? When she suggests queers should be murdered?
This story, Chariton claims, is not about someone “evolving, or not evolving.” Again, for him, as for Kulinski, it is only the lie Reid tells that matters, not what she is lying about.
Even those young progressive men with largely impeccable track records stumble over this one. David Doel, in his 25 April “Rational National” video, of the initial December 2017 story anent the catty Crist pieces Reid wrote on her old blog, says, “I didn’t cover it — because I didn’t think it was a big deal.” I submit that Doel might have thought it “a big deal” if he was gay… or genuinely cared about how gay men and Lesbians are vilified. He, no doubt, would protest that he does care, but his words belie his supposed progressive humanism.
Doel then quotes one of Reid’s more nauseating statements, to wit: “By screaming [as in “screaming queen”?] so loudly about making gay marriage a kind of litmus test for true progressives and humanity, they have embraced a fight that only a small sliver of the population can relate to, and put their credibility on the line by painting Barack Obama as an enemy, at a time when most Americans consider him their only hope.” A clear progression backwards, from todays’ phony “Resistance” to yesterday’s “Help us, Obama-Wan, you’re our only hope.” One begins to forgive Sarah Palin her “hopey-changey” crack.
To Doel, “Back then, it was more normal to think this way.” And by “back then,” remember, we are referring to the late-2000s! Doel correctly praises Kucinich (and other leaders, like Sanders, who has, from the early 1970s, always been an ally) for being on “the right side of history,” even as they were being made fun of for being so… and not merely by conservatives. As he notes, we might have expected so crude a joke from the likes of Dennis Miller. But from Jon Stewart? So when Doel refers to 2004 as “back then,” I begin to comprehend: For a 20-something Millennial, ten years is nearly half his lifetime. It’s nearly unfathomable, the way 25 years was to me when I was a child.
Doel does, correctly, hoist Joy Reid with her own petard when he quotes one of her own Tweets, in which she smirked at a Trump nominee, “Nobody tell her about The Wayback Machine.” Doel adds, “She should have taken her own advice.” However, to again quote his own words, he did not cover the December 2017 story because he “thought it was a nonstory… The issue here is that she is lying.”
At the risk of beating a horse not only dead but on its way to the Alpo cannery, Doel might care if he was gay.
But he ought to care anyway.
On his subsequent 30 April video, Doel doubles down on his blind heterosexist obsession. “My issue with Joy,” he says, “isn’t that she once held these backwards views on the LGBT community, because a lot of people did.” Once again, a young man equates 2007 with ancient history. And even if, as he avers, “a lot of people” held such retrogressive views that decade so long, long ago, does he also believe that such a mass should be excused for having them? I would submit that, if the targets of Reid’s remarks had been any group other than gay men and Lesbians, Doel would, quite properly, pillory those statements for the short-sighted bigotry they represent. No, to Doel, as to Kulinski, the problem is not Reid’s horrendous — and hideously rendered — prejudices. The problem is only that “she didn’t own it to begin with.”
On this follow-up video, Doel is joined by his dithering unseen partner Mary (or “@MarysR00m, Artist”) who, in extempore, makes Kyle Kulinski sound like Gore Vidal and whose weird “co-hosting” is at best a puzzlement. Speaking of the gay community, Mary opines: “Like, they know the way things used to be. Like, they are understanding.” (I would quote Mary in greater detail but, like, I just, like, can’t because, like, I could, y’know, like, vomit?) No, Mary, we are not “understanding.” We are fed up. We’ve heard bigots of Reid’s ilk all of our lives. We no longer pat them on the head, or pity them, or “forgive” their loud-mouthed impugning of us — the smug Rachel Maddow, who gushed about her MSNBC coeval’s splendid honesty notwithstanding. And while I am aware that by harping on this at such length I am inviting comparisons to a broken record (ask your grandfather) if 2007 is your yardstick for measuring “the way things used to be,” I respectfully suggest you open your mind a little further and try to comprehend that a mere decade ago is not concomitant with recalling the Punic Wars.
By the end of this mind-numbing conversation, Doel returns to his well-warmed theme: Reid “forgets the homophobic views she held in the late 2000s.” [Emphasis mine.] “We know she’s lying. That’s the problem here.”
“The problem here,” it seems to me, is a young heterosexual male being selectively incapable of empathy.
Relief of a kind comes with Jamarl Thomas’s 25 April video, but only of a kind; such respite is mitigated by the more than occasional wince one experiences while listening.
The first such arrives early on, when Thomas observes that what Reid wrote was “kind of homophobic” (emphasis mine) and that she herself was, “somewhat homophobic.” (Ditto.) “Kind of,” Jamarl? “Somewhat”? The way Jesse Helms was “kind of” a racist? The way Ezra Pound was “somewhat” anti-Semitic? (Although here I will grant that that exposure to Thomas’ commentaries has convinced me that he is seemingly incapable of, as my junior high school journalism advisor commanded, making war on modifiers.) He does, however, correctly observe that, “If a right-winger said [what Reid did], there would be outrage.” Yet he reminds us that he finds “some of this funny,” reserving his disgust, as with his contemporaries among the YouTube commentator class, for the hypocrisy of Reid and the identity-driven DNC.
Later he, quite properly, leaps with glee on Reid’s “I’m not homophobic; I have gay friends” remark, correctly linking it to the old “I’m not racist, I have black friends…” ploy as a prime example of paralogical political thinking. But that Thomas is black should not be the reason he alone recognizes the kinship between Reid and other types of bigots.
Yet as with his YouTube coevals, Thomas too imagines a Reid apology in which she admits to writing such ugliness “in the past, when it was somewhat more socially acceptable to say such things.” “In the past,” in this case, as I have pointed out repeatedly — if not at this point obsessively — means a mere decade ago. We are not, as is often the case with historically narrow viewpoints, referring to something said, or written, in the 1800s, or even the mid-1900s. Thomas is, like Kulinski, Chariton, and Doel, apparently incapable of understanding that 2007 is not The Dark Ages. America had by that point already experienced Stonewall, Anita Bryant, the murder of Harvey Milk, the acquittal of his killer, Ronald Reagan, the AIDS pandemic, Jerry Falwell, Jesse Helms, The NEA Four, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue,” Fred Phelps and “God Hates Fags,” the murder of Matthew Shepherd, Brokeback Mountain, Milk, and the very public coming-out of Ellen DeGeneres and Neil Patrick Harris (among others) well before the turn of the century. 2007 is a mere wisp across the roiling surface of modern time. It is as yesterday.
To his credit, Thomas reminds his viewers that Reid already admitted, in December of 2017, that she had written such things. Yet while he refers to the Wayback Machine refutation of Reid’s spurious claims, he does so merely as a preface to the inevitable theme: Again, it is not the words she wrote, but her denial of them now that is the crux of the matter.
Thomas does, however — and nearly alone among his coevals — see through Reid’s phony righteousness. “I am more inclined to believe,” he notes, “that this is just the way she is, and just the way she was.” That at least is a step ahead of the simpering benefits of the doubt Chariton and others extend to her. Thomas further asserts that Reid’s perspective is merely one of party, and “problematic” for her because she is a mouthpiece of the Democrats, whose members “hug identity because they don’t want to deal with other issues… the economic realities of those identities.”
Yet, on his subsequent 28 April video, Thomas again finds Reid’s persistent speculation, bordering on obsession, with, and bitchy “jokes” about, Charlie Crist’s sexuality “funny but fucked-up.” While Thomas is a humanist, his susceptibility to sneering “jokes” about another man’s sexuality limit that humanism to a purely heterosexual — if not, indeed, heterosexist — perspective. If he had spent any time in the skin of a gay male bombarded from childhood with ugly, emasculating japes, or a Lesbian (or even a somewhat androgynous or “butch” looking straight female) subjected to the correspondingly-gendered jeers, I doubt he would find anything remotely amusing about such junior high school bullying. As with Kulinski, Chariton and Doel, Thomas exhibits in this area an alarming lack of empathy, something one would think was de rigeur intellectual and emotional equipment for anyone calling himself a humanist or a progressive. But then, even the redoubtable Jimmy Dore is prone, when angry, to label this or that professional hypocrite a “cocksucker.”
Thomas further asserts that Reid could say, “It was acceptable, during that time, to say bad things about gays,” and that she merely took advantage of that. I don’t wish to belabor this, or to pillory Thomas at length, because he is not only far more relaxed and open-minded than most of his “progressive” compatriots on gay issues generally — and, specific to Reid, he alone at least states that it is not, as Reid asserted in 2009, “intrinsic” for heterosexuals to believe that “homosexual sex is… well… gross” but, like racism, “societally-driven.” He also points out that the worst of Reid’s commentaries during this time lay in her assertion that gay men are intrinsically pedophiles and predators seeking out “impressionable teens.” (I’ll let pass for the moment the fact that most people in the English-speaking West have no notion that there is a vast difference between a pedophile and an ephebophile, as witness the ubiquitous assertion that Judge Roy Moore, prone to hitting on well-developed 17-year old girls, is a “pedophile.” Or, further, that there is an equally broad distinction to made between an alleged pedophile and a rapist.) Still, Reid’s “Miss Charlie” epithet for Crist is “funny” to Thomas. And again, it wouldn’t be, if he was gay… or even empathetic enough to place himself in a gay man’s shoes. On the other hand, he maintains that Reid’s “pedophile” comment was “ghastly”; Kyle Kulinski never mentioned her use of such wretched stereotypes, nor did Jordan Chariton, or even David Doel. Only Glenn Greenwald — naturally suspect, I suppose, because he is himself gay — expressed outrage about that.
Yet while Thomas is entirely correct in his observation that Obama “evolved” on same-sex marriage in 2012 the minute the polls ran in its favor (just as his putative successor did in 2016) he lets Reid’s viewers off the hook by asserting of Reid that “if this is your disposition, and if people watch you knowing this is your disposition,” then doing so presumes she isn’t lying to them. But why would we assume this? Dissembling is what a hack does.
Cenk Uygar (who, of course, is not a Millennial) in his 5 Dec. 2017 video defends Reid’s outing of anti-gay, Republican politicians. But her “outing” of Crist — always presuming he is homosexual, which he still denies — is one thing; feminizing him and employing the rankest queer stereotypes in order to do so, is quite another. In common with so many of his compatriots in the progressive movement, Uygar too lacks not merely an empathic perspective on homosexuality but betrays as well a rather stunning inability to perceive what is directly in front of him. But then, what can one expect from a man who backed Sanders in the primaries only to succumb to Trump Terror in the general, peddling fear and exhorting us all to vote for the more evil of the two lessers in that race, a woman he had to know was not one whit less reactionary, or frightening, than her opponent.
The most Uygar can muster, when quoting Reid’s disingenuous claim that “At no time have I intentionally sought to demean or harm” is to chide her as “over-zealous in prosecuting the case against Charlie Crist.” (I hear now, in my mind’s audio theatre, Robert Klein, anatomizing Watergate and citing the ubiquitous use of the term over-zealous: “Or O-Z, as we call it in the profession.”)
Uygar of course is, as usual, incapable of any such appreciation of irony.
Alas, even the otherwise estimable Gordon Dimmack, in his 25 April video, reminds his viewers that Reid’s blog posts, written “a decade ago… could be considered [emphasis mine] homophobic.” I cannot determine Dimmack’s age, but he appears to be in his late 20s or early 30s and thus a possible Millennial. In any case, this ordinarily keenly perceptive young man simply cannot see Reid’s utterly despicable snark for what it was.
Dimmack and I agree, however, when he avers that he is only surprised Reid didn’t claim the Russians hacked her old account; had The Wayback Machine not refuted her claims, I suspect she’d have gotten around to it in due course. And he does point out that Reid had already admitted writing previously cited statements and apologizing for having done so. Further, he absolutely nails her hypocrisy when he notes that Reid has not made similar comments about Crist since he switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party. He also cites her queer-baiting of celebrities such as Anderson Cooper and Tom Cruise in a manner that points up how obsessed she is, or (to give her a wholly unmerited benefit of the doubt) has been, with homosexuality, and correctly notes that alleged lefty “social warriors” like Reid only ever criticize those they don’t personally like… or who are in the “wrong” political party.
Nor does An0maly, in his 28 April video, reassure.
While this weirdly iconoclastic Millennial performer quite properly cites Reid as “delusional” and exhibiting a “complete lack of self-awareness,” he can only offer a limp “I guess her blog posts were homophobic.” As with Kulinski, An0maly claims that he “support[s] the LGBT community,” and — also like Kulinski — admits that he made similar ugly remarks when he was a “young and dumb” 18. Reid, however, was not a teenager when she wrote those posts. She was an established figure at the Miami Herald, a self-proclaimed political expert, and knew damn well what she was doing: Appealing to what she perceived as the (nascent or explicit) bigotry of her readers.
An0maly does, however, quite properly assert that Reid’s own citing of a remark she made in college to a gay male friend directly contradicts her “I can’t believe those words were written by me” justifications, and that her apology is negated by her denying she penned the very words she did in fact write. “They have no shame,” he bemoans, “they have no accountability”; he further calls out what he deems the “pandering and phoniness” of the pussy-hat apologists as “delusional activism.”
On the YouTube Channel Pop Trigger’s 1 May video meanwhile, the young (male) host Jason notes that Reid “had some blog posts from pretty much a decade ago that seemed kind of [emphasis mine] homophobic.” Once again we are confronted with a male Millennial “progressive,” this one presumably gay himself, who cannot perceive the evidence of his own eyes. No one in his or her right mind, giving Reid’s old posts even the most cursory of glances, could fail to see the militant viciousness of her remarks. “Kind of” homophobic? What would make them decidedly so? Actually saying “faggot”? After hearing this repeatedly, one strongly suspects the people commenting on these posts have not read them. They are responding purely to other commentaries. This gets to the root of what depresses one about social media generally, and YouTube commentators specifically: They don’t read. They merely react.
Concerning an item labeled, on Reid’s original blog, “Harriet Meyers and the Lesbian Hair Check,” Grace Baldridge, one of Jason’s female co-hosts, chimes in, “Okay, that’s fair.” The two then share a giggle. Grace, who is Lesbian, also thinks that “gay” as an epithet was acceptable, and doesn’t wish “to tear anyone down now” for their homophobic statements in the past. Again, we are talking about statements written a mere ten years ago. I won’t go so far as to label this young woman a self-hating Lesbian… but Jesus, Mary and Joseph! What does it take to get these kids to call a bigot a bigot? Actual blood on the woman’s hands?
It is with great relief, then, that we turn at last to Sahil Habibi, The Progressive Voice. On his video of 26 April he alone — significantly, the youngest-looking at least of all the Millennial male commentators cited here — calls Reid’s posts “homophobic” with no qualifier, ridiculing Reid’s claims of having been “hacked” in addition to her “disgusting homophobic past.”
Why is this young man seemingly alone in his ability to perceive the bleeding obvious?
I have always preferred the rank, explicit sexual bigotry of the right to the snickering public “acceptance” of parlor liberals like Joy Reid; at least we know who our enemies are. With Democrats — Sanders, Kucinich, Nina Turner and a select small group emphatically excepted — we never know.
Neither, it seems, do we really know about young “progressives.”
*It also, predictably, made the increasingly un-hinged Rachel Maddow gush like Old Faithful. But of course; these obscenely over-compensated types always protect their own… unless they’re on a rival network.
Text Copyright 2018 by Scott Ross
Articles concerning Joy A. Reid and which contain more of her posts from her defunct blog The Reid Report:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/business/media/joy-reid-homophobic-blog-posts.html
So few critics, so many poets 