A group of fanatical Bernie Sanders supporters went scrounging around the Internet recently, digging up old blog posts of a homophobic nature published many years ago by JoyAnn Reid, host of MSNBC’s popular morning talk show AM Joy.
There are no doubt the content of the posts were wrong. Reid apologized for the unkind things she’d said in the past, owned it, and moved forward. Her apology serves as a model for us all.
But that is not the issue here. Those posts were dug up and released for a reason. And genuine concern over the threat Joy Reid might pose to the LGBT community does not appear to be it.
One recent article published by Medium’s Investigator recently was called “The Twitter lynching of Joy Ann Reid by the Bernie Left.”
An outsider might be taken aback by the vehemence of such a statement, especially as a headline. But it happens to be true. And its contents tell a very ugly story.
An Internet campaign was started by Bernie supporters under the hashtag #FireJoyReid in November 2017 after Reid “made the mistake” of mentioning Jane Sanders in a series of tweets.
What we're also learning is that it's not just a media problem. The same dynamic plays out throughout our society, from the restaurant boss to the White House. The change that's needed here is a system-wide societal reboot.
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) November 29, 2017
Um… I get that he has a hardcore following, but his own attitudes toward women, from his weird early writings to his physical dismissal of women in his presence (including his own wife) make that an incredibly dubious prospect.
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) November 29, 2017
“Don’t ever use me to demean my husband,” she shot at Reid on Twitter.
The ongoing conflict between Reid and Sanders supporters is something anyone can witness for themselves, through a quick Google search for “Joy Reid Bernie Sanders.”
Their hatred of Joy Reid is fanatical at best. At worst it is dangerous and insane, like Bernie supporter James T.Hodgkinson, who shot up the Congress last summer and winged Rep. Steve Scalise.
From 2015 forward, a group of extreme leftists has systematically harassed, stalked and targeted for doxing black activists, journalists, and contributors on Twitter and other social media sites. The list includes many notable figures, such as Donna Brazile, Kamala Harris, Maxine Waters, and Joy Reid.
Medium’s Investigator did the research necessary to identify its core members- a tightly knit group of Bernie Bros.
They identify usually as members of the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), and they all proudly proclaim to have voted for Jill Stein.
Among many other unpleasant characteristics, the group makes a practice of producing, tweeting, and retweeting racist pictures, like this one of Kamala Harris.
Behind this campaign is the fact that a lot of black voters didn’t vote for Bernie. The anger this produced by a part of the Bernie left has been gigantic. That’s hard to understand, given Bernie’s record, but that is beside the point.
This Millennial Democrats contributor would be hard-pressed to think of a single other circumstance, in which white people could treat black people like this, without hardly a soul being outraged.
The Sanders insurgency is largely a white revolution. All the talk about Sanders representing the future of the Democratic Party because of his titanic popularity among young people ignores a crucial factor.
Minority voters weren’t buying it.
Back in 2016, when Hillary Clinton won big in the Southern primaries, Sanders sniffed that scheduling early primaries in the South “distorts reality.” The message that sends? They’re just black voters.
Anecdotally, this writer remembers being told during the election, that the South “did not matter”, because their states would go red in the general election. Were that to be accepted as truth, it would disenfranchise half the country’s Democrats and a huge percentage of the black ones.
Back in 2014, during a number of interviews, Bernie described the type of voters he wanted to appeal to.
And more recently, when he scoffed at President Barack Obama on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, his comments made it all too clear just how greatly he values the rest.
“Well, here’s what you got. What you got is an African-American president, and the African-American community is very, very proud that this country has overcome racism (Editor’s note-????) and voted for him for president. And that’s kind of natural. You’ve got a situation where the Republican Party has been strongly anti-immigration, and you’ve got a Hispanic community which is looking to the Democrats for help.”
“But that’s not important.”
We beg to differ, Senator Sanders.
Right now, in America, racism is the strongest it has been since the 50’s. We all remember what happened in Charlottesville last summer, and that is far from the only notorious example.
A Virginia newspaper ran a full KKK recruitment flyer as its front page ad earlier this week.
This week a video showed up online exhibiting a white manager of a Plano, Texas, restaurant making a blatant attempt to kick out a prominent black couple dining in his restaurant after they refused to give up their seat to a white customer. He threatened the couple with the police.
It is very important that the left be there for persons of color, especially at a time like this. The racist right is on the attack beyond anything recent decades have seen. We have to be there in stark opposition. It’s part of what it means to be a Democrat.
There is no word in the English language that the Democratic Socialist supporters of Bernie Sanders like to use more than progressive. They’re convinced they’re the only ones with any right to it.
But if progressive values do not include fighting racism and sticking up for at-risk groups, then what exactly is progressive about them?
The Bernie supporters who have been savaging Joy Reid ought to take a good look at themselves.