Here is the trouble with giving in to even obvious ratf*ck*ry, even when you know it is dubious, because you want to sent the right message. It opens you up to more ratf*ck*ry, and each time it gets a little more difficult to fight back. I disagree with Joy Reid on some big things (Bernie, cough, cough, Sanders) but she is still a great commentator and reported that I watch whenever I can. She is also possibly the bravest champion of human rights on any of the news channels. People went back and explored her blog, when she wasn’t so well known. A few months ago people found some posts on Charlie Christ. She described Christ as being in the closet and made some disparaging remarks about his sham marriage. It is not the type of post you are supposed to make as it was “outing” Christ, even though everybody at the time knew Christ was closeted. If she wrote it she probably didn’t even think about it. And that’s just it. It was more than ten years ago. She probably didn’t remember whether she wrote it or not. But she stepped up and took responsibility for it because it was political, in the middle of a hot political battle, and Joy does tend to get overwrought sometimes (which I’m sure she knows) and she might have written it.
A new batch of homophobic posts have emerged from her blog feom around the same time. I’m not going to link because I don’t believe them but you can go to Mediate to find them. These are qualitatively different. They have nothing to do with politics. They show a direct disgust with male homosexual behavior. Joy Reid looked at those and thought to herself, “No, I couldn’t have written that, it’s not me,” and denied they were hers. Honestly, with what I know of Joy Reid I do not recognize this in her (the same way I felt, and most people I knew felt, about Al Franken). You need to find other examples of this type of thought and behavior in her work. She would have had to go through a complete character change over the last ten years (spoiler alert, in spite of what the press says about their favorite politicians, this simply does not happen.) Joy Reid hired a security consultant (I have to say I am a little dubious about him, he seems to have taken his definition of the Dark Web from television commercials). But he says Reid’s blog was broken into (can we please stop using the word hacked for every damn thing). Have used blogger during the same period I can attest that their security was not great and you wouldn’t need the “Dark Web” to break into one of these blogs. Plus Reid was probably an Internet neophyte at the time and had a really bad password (Remember when Sony’s password was password/).
The Internet archive, which maintains the platform that Reid used even after it shut down says that Reid’s blog wasn’t broken in to. Please. If somebody figured out the password there’s no way they could know. This is Tech Bro, Masters of the Universe Bullsh*t. “We’ve got everything covered, we protect all data.” Where have we heard that before.
Back to the point. I think this is a direct result of what happened to Franken. And if she don’t set up a Firewall it will just keep happening again and again to liberal icons.