I wasn’t going to do a front page post on this, but the same clown has tried to spam two different posts on two different nights about this, so now that Joy-Ann Reid has formally apologized, I reckoned I’d put up a post on it. Here’s her apology:
.@MSNBC's Joy Reid addresses homophobic blog posts:
"I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things … But I can definitely understand, based on things I have tweeted and have written in the past, why some people don't believe me." pic.twitter.com/PWjdPfs5KB
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) April 28, 2018
And here’s her guest/fill in host and Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart’s transcribed response:
.@CapehartJ: The beauty of what you did at the open was put into context where society was. That chronology you just showed shows where society was. I would not even be talking to my own mother is she had not evolved. #AMJoy pic.twitter.com/CX9EqMJtuq
— AM Joy w/Joy Reid (@amjoyshow) April 28, 2018
My guess is that this won’t put the issue to rest. That the same people who have been screaming for Reid’s head all week will continue to do so. Especially as the person who went spelunking through a ten year old defunct blog in order to bring things to this point has now decided to go after Markos Moulitsas over something someone else posted on Daily Kos back in 2005 and appears to now be going after Rachel Maddow for backing (at this point in time) Tom Brokaw in regard to the sexual assault allegations against him (I’m not linking to that, you can go and find it if you want. Same twitter handle that was publishing Reid’s old blog posts).
I don’t know who this puritanical pony is who has decided to make it his or her work to go after these people because he or she is hiding behind a nym, nor do I really care why they’re doing it. But I reckon that he or she won’t stop because too many people are now weaponizing his or her work, which was likely the point.
One final and important point: does anyone actually want to be judged on something they wrote ten years ago? Or twenty? Or five? Or, in some cases, one? When they’ve clearly based on recent words and deeds changed their positions? Just in my professional work alone my views have changed significantly in the past decade largely because of adding first an experiential element to my work when I left academia and began doing applied work for the military and then when I transitioned from doing tactical work to strategic level work. Nothing is static – not people and not the world. Everything changes. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes for the worse. Perhaps, just maybe, we should cut ourselves and each other a bit of slack. After all we’re only human.
Open thread.