Despite her name coinciding with Christmas cheer, Joy Reid really seems to be more of a Scrooge. She spent her Wednesday show doing what she loves best, stirring up hatred and fear against people she doesn’t like, ie: the right, but also included the military and the unvaccinated on this episode.
She opened her show gawking at a Washington Post op-ed by three retired generals warning that the right-wing would launch another “coup” attempt in 2024, with the aid of the U.S. military. She raved to one of its authors how the opinion piece filled her with “terror” and “scared the hell” out of her before pleading with him to share “what we have to be afraid of.”
“A lot of military people were there. But what is your biggest fear when it comes to whether the military itself will hold the line when they try this again?” she asked.
Her guest, Brigadier General Steven Anderson blamed Congressman Jim Jordan and used rather weak evidence to back up his assertion that many in the military wanted to help overthrow the government. He even claimed soldiers refusing Covid vaccinations backed up his theory.
Reid was enthralled and begged her next guest, what they could do about these “armed, heavily trained” people?
But there are, you know, the group, the Oath Keepers, is made up of military and police. So, there are a lot of armed, heavily trained people who are falling into this cult, Stuart, on the right and I don't really know what we do about that. Do you have ideas?
In case she didn’t get her fearmongering clearly across, there were at least 10 instances of Reid warning viewers to be “afraid”---or similar language– of this far-fetched conspiracy warned about in the op-ed.
The cherry on top was how Reid ended the segment. She asked Lincoln Project senior advisor Stuart Stevens how Jim Jordan could defy a subpoena while “lynch mobs” attacked the Capitol. In years past, the liberal media yawned when Democrats defied subpoenas before Congress. But Stevens suggested we needed to treat Congressman Jordan as an “enemy,” which Reid agreed with (Click "expand")
JOY REID: Stuart, I'm going to end this with you. Congressman Jim Jordan is a member of Congress. They were the body that was attacked on January 6th physically. Their lives were threatened. They were hiding and dodging and hiding under chairs and tables and trying to keep those brutal people out, these lynch mobs out. Jim Jordan, how can it be that he could defy a subpoena from the body in which he serves?
STEVENS: Look, I don't think you should look at Jim Jordan as sort of an American Congressman. He is someone who wants to change the American government. He wants to overthrow the American government. And I think we need to start looking at these people like this. He's not a regular United States congressman who is trying to uphold an oath.He's trying to overthrow of the government of the United States, call it for what it is, and I think they should be held accountable.
I don't know. This isn't a conspiracy. A conspiracy is not -- conviction is not predicated upon successful completion. I mean, when you plan to rob a bank, you don't have to get away with the money. I just -- it's baffling to me. We have to treat them as enemies.
REID: Unfortunately, yes...
Reid kept up her hateful schtick in the next segment, this time against the unvaccinated.
The insufferable host accused the unvaccinated of spreading the virus to the vaccinated, when recent studies have shown otherwise:
Dr. Gupta, I'm sort of reaching my kind of peak fatigue, mental fatigue level, and I'm not even dealing with what the doctor and what you guys are dealing with in real life. But it's like, I know, just off the top of my head, at least a half-dozen people who've gotten COVID, who are vaccinated, but who got it in settings where they were around mixed groups where people were not necessarily unvaccinated -- or not necessarily vaccinated.
So the unvaccinated are spreading this thing. And it's mutating, let's be frank, because of the unvaccinated, OK?
This isn't exactly true. But because this is Reid’s show, her medical expert guest didn’t correct her, even though he should’ve.
According to the British medical journal The Lancet's October 29 publication, “fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts.” Another recent study out of UC Davis found the same thing with the Delta variant: “no significant difference in viral load between vaccinated and unvaccinated people who tested positive for the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2.”
There is the caveat that vaccinated people clear the virus out of their system faster than the unvaccinated. Still, recent studies have concluded that whether vaccinated or unvaccinated, you spread at least certain variants of COVID equally to others.
Her guest, Dr. Vin Gupta also floated a scary suggestion— that Reid very much agreed with—that hospitals shouldn’t give unvaccinated people the best care possible and they should be put lower on a list behind vaccinated people. It seems he forgot his Hippocratic Oath of “do no harm.”
Reid also trashed Dr. Ben Carson as someone who “used to be” respected and was “supposedly a doctor” for saying that it didn’t make sense to clog up testing centers by getting asymptomatic, vaccinated people tested for COVID. “This is literally the "stick your fingers in your ears" strategy, Dr. Gupta. But the NFL is basically doing that. The NFL has listened to this bananas idea,” she wailed.
If you believe Reid, half the country is either trying to kill you with a virus or wants to violently overthrow the government. Merry Christmas!
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Read transcript portions below:
MSNBC’s The ReidOut
12/22/21…
JOY REID: Brigadier General Anderson, thank you so much for being here. I was eager to speak with you. I read your op-ed that you wrote with two other retired generals in absolute terror, to be honest with you, scared the hell out of me. The idea that not only do we have to worry about the people who plotted the first coup launching another, which I firmly believe they will. I think most of the people on this panel, if not all firmly believe they will try, but that we can't necessarily count on the military to hold the line. That scares me. Because it means that we have a breakdown internally in one of the most important and trusted institutions in the country.
So, walk me through what we need to be afraid. I know there were a lot of people with military credentials.I think it was one in ten initially who were charged with crimes or accused of crimes on that day, had military backgrounds. A lot of military people were there. But what is your biggest fear when it comes to whether the military itself will hold the line when they try this again?
BRIG. GEN. STEVEN ANDERSON, U.S. ARMY (RET.): Thank you very much, Joy, for having me, and it's an honor to be part of this. First of all, I want to make it understood that 31 years in the Army, I've always been taught to be apolitical, to not be involved in politics. In fact, I always voted Republican up until 2016. But the party is absolutely lost its soul and forgot its ideology and Jim Jordan is an actual poster child for that happening.
He and the leaders like him in the Republican Party are why we've wrote the op-ed that we did. 43 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, the foreign and domestic, and little did I know that 43 years later we'd have the kind of domestic threats that we have right now and, again, Jim Jordan is why.
I mean, but you look at some of the other things out there that make us chill to our bones. I mean, as you mentioned, over 100 military people participated in the actual insurrection. That's pretty scary. Then you got guys like Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, former NSA, who is advocating using the military to conduct a coup. I mean, are you kidding me? That's disgraceful.
You have 124 senior leaders that signed a letter supporting Trump's big lie. Evidently, the authoritative source for election integrity with those people is the pillow guy. You have a general officer out in Oklahoma who is refusing federal mandates. You know, please remind him that he works for the National Guard.
And then you got all these soldiers that are refusing the COVID vaccine. I mean, every soldier has to take 12 inoculations to even get through basic training. But we so politicized things like COVID by the likes of Jim Jordan, and then, of course, you got Fox News adding fuel to the fire and the Republican Party spent now 11 months since the 6th of January essentially regarding the insurrection as a tour that got out of hand.
I'm deathly afraid for our troops and deathly afraid for our democracy. Our troops will unfortunately, with people like Jim Jordan, they will confuse allegiance to the Constitution, which they swore an oath to uphold and defend, allegiance to the Constitution versus allegiance to a party, a person like a Jim Jordan or a Donald Trump. We love democracy and that's why we're concerned.
REID: Yes, and I share your concerns. But hearing it come from you all, honestly, made me even more afraid, to be honest with you. This is part of what the op-ed said. It said, we're chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time. The potential for a total breakdown in the chain command among partisan lines from the top of the chain to squad level is significant should another insurrection occur.
And here is -- I'm just going to stay with you for just one more moment. There are people in the military now who quietly supported what happened on January 6th and wish that it had succeeded, and I don't know who all of those people are. We do know that Michael Flynn, who used to be a very decorated member of the United States military, very respected and then went wrong somewhere, something went haywire, now he's like more QAnon than he is military. His brother still has a position of authority inside of the United States military. Michael Flynn, the former general, requested a restraining order to stop the January 6th committee from getting his documents, the judge said no. There is no basis for that.
But Charles Flynn, Brigadier General Anderson, is still in place. The Army first falsely denied that Charles Flynn was involved in the response to the insurrection then Flynn denied that he ever opposed sending the National Guard to quell the violence. But now, Flynn has been accused of lying to Congress about his role in delaying the response that day. It scares me that people like he are still in place and that they might be on the wrong place. Does it scare you?
ANDERSON: Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that we recommended is that we gather intelligence against people within our ranks, people like Michael Flynn's brother, Charles. I don't know the man. I served with his brother though in Iraq and he was fine over there. But, obviously, he's lost his mind since then. But we've got to know who within us is going to be a potential mutineer.
And the thing that we need to do is to find those people and get them out of the army. We need to remind them all that serving in the military is a privilege. It is not an inalienable right, okay? And so to be a part of an extremist group or any kind of a hate group or Oath Keepers or any of those Proud Boy organizations, stuff like that, you can't be a member of the group and still be a member of the Army.And we need to make sure that we conduct the intelligence to find the people and root them out.
REID: Stuart, let me go to you on this, because we did have a Proud Boy plead guilty today, and his name is Matthew Greene. Remember, the Proud Boys pleaded guilty today of obstructing Congress. Some of them are flipping, right? Some of them are telling about the conspiracy. But there are, you know, the group, the Oath Keepers, is made up of military and police. So, there are a lot of armed, heavily trained people who are falling into this cult, Stuart, on the right and I don't really know what we do about that. Do you have ideas?
STUART STEVENS, SENIOR ADVISER, THE LINCOLN PROJECT: Well, look, I think the greatest danger here is that the Republican Party has shown that it will not stand up to this, that it will actually go along with it. I mean, that's an extraordinary thing to me, not that there are a group of people who tried to crash the Capitol, attack the Capitol. You can say, okay, maybe that's just a small-ish group.
But the Republican Party, one of the two major parties in the United States of America, the world's only super power, has made it clear that if this was successful, there is no reason to believe that they would oppose it...
…
JOY REID: Stuart, I'm going to end this with you. Congressman Jim Jordan is a member of Congress. They were the body that was attacked on January 6th physically. Their lives were threatened. They were hiding and dodging and hiding under chairs and tables and trying to keep those brutal people out, these lynch mobs out. Jim Jordan, how can it be that he could defy a subpoena from the body in which he serves?
STEVENS: Look, I don't think you should look at Jim Jordan as sort of an American Congressman. He is someone who wants to change the American government. He wants to overthrow the American government. And I think we need to start looking at these people like this. He's not a regular United States congressman who is trying to uphold an oath.He's trying to overthrow of the government of the United States, call it for what it is, and I think they should be held accountable.
I don't know. This isn't a conspiracy. A conspiracy is not -- conviction is not predicated upon successful completion. I mean, when you plan to rob a bank, you don't have to get away with the money. I just -- it's baffling to me. We have to treat them as enemies.
REID: Unfortunately, yes. And I want to thank all three of you, retired Army Brigadier General Steven Anderson, thank you so much for your service, which continues with you standing up for democracy, as you are so publicly doing. So, thank you for doing that. Stuart Stevens, who grew, in many ways, the modern Republican Party and understands when it was time to talk away and push it back, and Glenn Kirschner, who is always brilliant, always here for us to talk about what the DOJ should be doing at day time (ph). Merry Christmas to all of you, God bless.
…
JOY REID: It's -- Dr. Gupta, I'm sort of reaching my kind of peak fatigue, mental fatigue level, and I'm not even dealing with what the doctor and what you guys are dealing with in real life.
But it's like, I know, just off the top of my head, at least a half-dozen people who've gotten COVID, who are vaccinated, but who got it in settings where they were around mixed groups where people were not necessarily unvaccinated -- or not necessarily vaccinated.
So the unvaccinated are spreading this thing. And it's mutating, let's be frank, because of the unvaccinated, OK? So I'm running out of ideas about what to do if people are refusing to protect themselves and other people.
There is stats out today that we're talking about -- let me find this here -- 140 new COVID infections -- 140 million new COVID infections to the U.S. in the next two months, according to the latest model, 140 million new cases.
I mean, I will just let you comment, because I don't know what we do at this point, honestly, Dr. Gupta. I don't know what else to do.
DR. VIN GUPTA, NBC NEWS MEDICAL CONTRIBUTOR: Good evening, Joy. It's great to be here with you and Dr. Watts.
What I will say here is, I think we have to move away from this paradigm of even thinking about caseloads day over day, because it's overwhelming, it's psychologically depressing, it's discouraging, and really thinking about, for the vaccinated, the triple-vaccinated, are there serious breakthrough illnesses that are landing in Dr. Watts's hospital or my ICU, and really following that metric, number one.
So I think we have to frame-shift here, because these vaccines, like the flu shot, will mitigate the risk of severe illness. They do that really well. They won't prevent a positive test. So, psychologically shifting that frame, critical.
To your point, what can we do moving forward? I'm really encouraged that the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals remove the stay on the Department of Labor's order to private employers to say, either do a weekly test or mandate the vaccine. That is going to have traction here, number one. So, we're going to see more movement in the private sector. And then I do think negative incentives, whether it's a vaccine mandate in the workplace, or -- and this is where it gets controversial, but we need to start talking about this, the bioethics of it broadly, because this is not the last respiratory pandemic we're going to face, Joy.
What do we do with somebody who's unvaccinated who's taking advanced ICU therapies from somebody who is vaccinated in the hospital? How do we rank- order that priority?
REID: Right.
GUPTA: We do it for organs, kidneys, livers, lungs. We say, did you smoke? Did you drink recently? If you did, you're lower on the list, even if you need it.
We need to start thinking of that model, have bioethics around it or framework, because this is not going to be the last respiratory pandemic we face.
REID: Yes.
WATTS: Joy, we also -- we can't give up.
(CROSSTALK)
REID: Not only that, but there are other countries -- go on. Go on.
WATTS: No, we just don't give up.
We are still seeing folks changing their mind. I tell you, in the hospital, once people get COVID, it's like a lot of things in life. They don't believe it until they have actual evidence of it with their own eyes. We have people, they -- every time, they say, you know what, I just didn't get around to it. I see it now. I'm talking to my family.
This is something I hear every day. It is sad to see it come too late, but we know that with -- truthfully, with experience and seeing with their own eyes, people do come to believe.
So, I have not giving up hope. I do believe that we will continue to see people move forward with vaccination, despite all the other efforts that we have put forward.
REID: Let me play another person who technically is a doctor and used to be a very respected one. Here's Dr. Ben Carson saying, don't test people. Here he is.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BEN CARSON, FORMER U.S. HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT SECRETARY: I personally think that we should seriously give thought to not testing people who are asymptomatic.
I mean, like I said, we're going to end up with a real problem. We're going to have massive numbers of people who test positive. What are we going to do? We're going to shut everything down? It just doesn't make any sense, and particularly when you're dealing with something that doesn't make people very sick.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
REID: This is literally the "stick your fingers in your ears" strategy, Dr. Gupta.
But the NFL is basically doing that. The NFL has listened to this bananas idea. Unvaccinated players will still get daily testing, but vaccinated players in the NFL won't be tested. So, it's the -- if we just don't know, maybe it'll just go away.
That is not smart, right?
