July 20, 2021

It's always fun to see MSNBC hosts appear on late-night tv shows. They get a chance to speak off the cuff about their industry and politics in a way that they can't on their own shows.

Joy-Ann Reid is celebrating the one-year anniversary of "The Reid Out" this week. She appeared on Monday night's Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

I loved how she connected the Republican's efforts to suppress voting with Donald Trump's claims of voter fraud, and the long history of the Republican Party pretending that voters of color were automatically guilty of "fraud" when the Democrats win elections. Reid started with the example of Trump 2020: "He made it very clear the only way Joe Biden could win the election was through cheating and fraud and was telegraphing he was going to anchor that alleged cheating and fraud in the votes of African-Americans, and he targeted cities and counties after the election, as expected, where black and brown people majority vote. And it’s not an unusual strategy, let’s just say, for the Republican Party, over the decades, to allege voter fraud and to fixate that voter fraud on voters of color. It’s not exactly a strategy … Well, not to the point where they then encourage people to go and overthrow the result by invading — physically invading the Capitol. That is a new one.”

Reid went on to connect the dots between claims of voter "fraud" and vaccine disinformation. “This is what frightens me because — I tweeted this and I’ll just say it again — the same people are telling you you should not be vaccinated are the same people who are saying there are bamboo shards of Trump ballot in chicken poop in Arizona, and you should comb through the chicken poop, find the bamboo ballots which are obviously from China because — bamboo ballots — and therefore Trump won by a bazillion votes, and those same people are saying 'don’t get vaccinated.' They’re going to kill you! Don’t listen to those people!"

Her definition of a "cult" points directly to the heart of right-wing media: "In a religion, your savior dies for you. In a cult, you're expected to die for your savior." Wow.

In the second segment, Reid went right after Fox News. "...it doesn’t make sense why folks at that particular network, we all know who we mean, would want to kill their own viewers. ...And I don’t understand what the point is of killing them because everyone on-air at Fox has been vaccinated. I would put any money on it. They were vaccinated first. I’m sure they shoved little old ladies out of the way to get their vaccines first. They’re all vaccinated... no way the corporation would allow them in the building without being vaccinated."

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