MSNBC Weekend host Joy-Ann Reid – who in December apologized for a series of homophobic blog posts from 2007-2009, thought it would be a good idea to pour lighter fluid on herself and tell Mediaite that the offensive posts were “somehow put in by an “external party” that “manipulated material from my now-defunct blog.””
In a statement to Mediaite, Reid said that the allegedly hacked entries do “not represent the original entries on her site.”
“In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, 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.” –Joy Reid
So Reid is now claiming that hackers authored numerous anti-gay articles on The Reid Report to make her look bad. AKA the “I didn’t do anything wrong” defense.
Pictured: Joy Reid’s hacker. pic.twitter.com/Hc7WGuPl6i
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 25, 2018
In December, Mediaite reported on the offensive content, noting that “Reid wrote a dozen blog posts in 2007, 2008, and 2009 that contained homophobic conspiracies and anti-gay jokes.“
Reid wrote numerous bigoted blog posts smearing, mocking, and attacking former Florida governor Charlie Crist. These rants included calling Crist “Miss Charlie” and sarcastically using the tags “gay politicians” and “not gay politicians” — despite the fact that the twice-married, heterosexual man has never come-out as gay.
Reid went on to spread the crackpot conspiracy theory that Crist was actually a closeted gay man who refused to come out for fear that his sexual orientation would hurt his political career. Additionally, the AM Joy host claims Crist’s marriages to women are part of this elaborate cover up.
As bad as the conspiracy theory is in itself, Reid doesn’t just suggest Cris is gay — she assumes he is gay and proceeds to attack him for it. “Miss Charlie, Miss Charlie. Stop pretending, brother. It’s okay that you don’t go for the ladies,” wrote Reid in a 2007 post. –Mediaite
It gets worse
As The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald notes – “THE LAST 24 HOURS have changed the Joy Reid situation considerably. Last week, the same left-wing Twitter user (Jamie Maz) who first unearthed Reid’s anti-gay tweets about Crist unearthed far more toxic, bigoted, and vicious anti-gay articles that appeared to be from Reid’s old blog.”
Reid has removed her blog from the internet, so Maz found the articles using the “Wayback Machine,” the internet digital archive that stores old online content even after it’s been removed or deleted by the publisher. Last night, the news outlet that reports on TV news media, Mediaite, published an extensive story on these newly found articles that appear under Reid’s byline.
But unlike the posts for which Reid apologized in December — which she said were intended to mock the hypocrisy of GOP officials who are simultaneously closeted gays, but also anti-gay in their politics — these newly discovered articles have nothing to do with GOP hypocrisy. They are just hateful, bigoted, and homophobic in their own right.
Click on any of the three tweets below to read the original Twitter thread by Jamie Maz, full of screenshots similar to the above.
Thread – 1/x Joy Reid’s homophobic blog posts were far worse than 1st reported.
They also had nothing to do with Republican hypocrisy on gay marriage. Joy also opposed gay marriage at the time. She gleefully accused people of being gay and posted a number of questionable things. pic.twitter.com/ZloivXczTS
— Not a bot (@Jamie_Maz) April 18, 2018
2/x Top 5 “totally not gay celebrities of the year”.
Using your media platform to out people you think is gay to get clicks has nothing to do with Republicans hypocrisy on gay marriage. pic.twitter.com/0B921itHkj
— Not a bot (@Jamie_Maz) April 18, 2018
19/x Joy – I am not a gay marriage supporter pic.twitter.com/wbf2QSkx7n
— Not a bot (@Jamie_Maz) April 18, 2018
Some of the lowlights, as Mediaite itemized, include (via The Intercept):
- “defend[ing] former NBA star Tim Hardaway’s aggressively anti-gay comments by writing that while such comments are stupid for a public figure to make: ‘most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing’”;
- saying she “couldn’t go see [Brokeback Mountain] either, despite my sister’s ringing endorsement, because I didn’t want to watch the two male characters having sex. Does that make me homophobic? Probably”;
- arguing that “intrinsic” to being straight is finding gay sex acts “gross”;
- “defending Marine General Peter Pace after he condemned ‘homosexual acts’ as ‘immoral’ by suggesting his views are actually normal”;
- opposing Harriet Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court by implying she is a closeted lesbian and comparing her “lesbian haircut” to those worn by the presidents of NOW and GLAAD;
- 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.”
The Wayback Machine Hits Back
Responding to Reid’s claims that the entries were hacked, the folks over at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at archive.org responded, claiming they hadn’t identified anything “to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine” versions of Reid’s blog.
This past December, Reid’s lawyers contacted us, asking to have archives of the blog (blog.reidreport.com) taken down, stating that “fraudulent” posts were “inserted into legitimate content” in our archives of the blog. Her attorneys stated that they didn’t know if the alleged insertion happened on the original site or with our archives (the point at which the manipulation is to have occurred, according to Reid, is still unclear to us).
When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions. At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities.
We let Reid’s lawyers know that the information provided was not sufficient for us to verify claims of manipulation. Consequently, and due to Reid’s being a journalist (a very high-profile one, at that) and the journalistic nature of the blog archives, we declined to take down the archives. We were clear that we would welcome and consider any further information that they could provide us to support their claims.-Internet Archive
That leaves Reid with only one option; hackers must have broken into her website prior to the internet archive cataloging it, and made dozens of homophobic, bigoted entries, which just sat there for years until they were unearthed nearly a decade later.
Unfortunately we can’t check out Reid’s old blog posts, as “sometime after the story broke last December, Joy Reid had the archive taken down,” by adding a “robots.txt” file to the website which tells the Internet Archive to exclude the site. Unfortunately for her, Jamie Maz took copious screenshots to document Reid’s comments.
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