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Take a Minute and Watch Joy Reid Obliterate Tucker Carlson, You Deserve It

Joy Reid rests her chin on her hand above a chyron reading 'The 'race lady' responds to Tucker Carlson'"

I don’t know what could have made Tucker Carlson think he could come after MSNBC’s Joy Reid and come away unscathed but on her show, The ReidOut, Monday night, Reid proved just how naive Carlson has been.

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Carlson has become somewhat obsessed with Reid recently, repeatedly bringing her up on his show and referring to her as “The Race Lady.” That’s his way of saying he thinks she needlessly makes everything about race—or as he calls it, “haranguing whitey.” So he calls her that when playing clips of her talking about the police killing of Ma’Khia Bryant (which he somehow twists into being an attack on white people), but he also calls her The Race Lady when commenting on her segments about COVID-19, masks, and vaccines.

After nearly two months of this, Reid finally fired back, and oh boy, she did not miss.

Tucker Carlson, the man who thinks having children wear masks is tantamount to abuse and encouraged his viewers to aggressively confront strangers they seeing wearing masks outdoors, took issue with Reid saying she wore a mask while jogging, despite already being vaccinated. I still cannot believe Carlson doesn’t have bigger things to worry about than other people’s decision to wear a piece of fabric on their faces but given the amount of energy he’s dedicated to the subject, I guess he really doesn’t.

Reid addressed “Tuckums'” obsession with her mask-wearing but not before ripping into his many, many failures.

In addition to calling her The Race Lady, Carlson also repeatedly brings up the fact that Reid went to Harvard. Put those two together and it’s pretty clear what Carlson is saying. It’s a dog whistle about affirmative action, implying that Reid only got into Harvard because she’s Black. Carlson is so fixated on Reid’s alma mater that it realllllly seems to be less about her education than it is about him.

“I mean, did you want to go to Harvard? Did they reject you? And you think, ‘Oh, they let the race lady in, bleh, affirmative action, bleh!'” Reid says, proving that Carlson isn’t the only one who can do funny voices.

“Well, listen, let me cheer you up, OK?” she continues. “I got into Harvard, and okay, Yale, Vassar, and the University of Denver, too, because I had really high GPA and fantastic SAT scores. And that’s how affirmative action works, love. Schools search for smart people from diverse backgrounds so these schools won’t be as dry as the major sports leagues were before they desegregated. See?”

So sure, maybe Carlson didn’t have the grades or test scores to get into his first-choice school, and maybe he needed his “girlfriend’s daddy to help [him] get into college,” and maybe he spent his college years delighting in bigotry, and even though the CIA rejected him, and MSNBC canceled his show, and CNN canceled his show, and yes, Fox News literally had to argue in court that no one takes him seriously as a journalist—despite all of that, “Things are going great for you,” Reid says.

As for the decision to continue wearing a mask after being vaccinated, she says “the reason I continue to mask up in crowded places is because I don’t know how many people in those crowds that I’m jogging around didn’t hear about the court case where your bosses said that your show isn’t news. So, they listen to you like you are the news.”

She continues:

And I don’t trust that people who listen to you, Tuckems, are taking precautions against COVID rather than freaking out about a piece of cloth and busting into Target to cough on the cereal boxes like they’re 17th-century colonizers touting measles blankets with them.

People like you and your friends and the B.S. factory are keeping us steeped in COVID sickness and rage and paranoia, and the ways in which you, lil’ Tucker, are making America worse are why I will continue to keep my mask on in a crowd.

(image: screencap)

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Author
Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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