Joy Reid: Not Only Are Conservatives Terrorists, But They Want to Kill Your Kids with Covid

On Wednesday night’s ReidOut, MSNBC’s Joy Reid decided to double down on her poisonous narrative that not only are right-of-center Americans bad people, but they’re murderous terrorists. Along with a series of like-minded guests, Reid insisted these conspiracy theory-laden savages want to overthrow the government while having their Covid-infected children flood schools.

This came after a deranged Tuesday episode that posited that Governors Greg Abbott (R-TX) and Ron DeSantis (R-FL) are purposefully killing their citizens with Covid.

Reid’s A-block touched on the three year anniversary of the deadly events in Charlottesville, Virginia, but the actions of those individuals were quickly branded as representing the core of the American right and the 74 million Americans that voted for Donald Trump in 2020.

She told Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and MSNBC contributor Malcolm Nance that the GOP’s “harboring” an “insurgency and it is a white nationalist insurgency, let’s just be blunt.”

After a clip smearing Tucker Carlson, Reid asked Swalwell if he “feel[s] comfortable and safe working with” Republicans “who at minimum are willing to live with that kind of fascism and white nationalism.” For the record, the House Republican caucus was 212 (and 210 if you take out Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger).

Swalwell took the divisive and dangerous route, telling viewers that the presence of people with an R next to their name make him feel unsafe and that’s why he won’t be “working with them.” He also went onto accuse the GOP writ large of believing that vaccines are ineffective and thus promulgating murder.

Reid agreed, saying the GOP “is an insurgency and is housing an insurgency” while the Democrats make up “a normal political party.”

Reid then gave the floor to Nance, who validated what conservative author and podcast host Ben Shapiro told him on HBO, which was that the far-left partisan has a penchant for ascribing the worst possible motives to tens of millions of right-leaning Americans (click “expand”):

You know, there’s a substantial portion of, you know, the gun-slinging conservatives base that — that — that really doesn’t support QAnon. Even though, and I said this a year ago on this program, QAnon would — would take over the Republican ideology and it has. Even though they don’t allow Q-shirts at Trump rallies and things like that, the belief in the inherent evilness of all Democrats and that there’s a global cabal that must be destroyed by force of arms, that is now standard throughout the conservative base. So let me prognosticate a little bit more. The Republican Party — you know, I used to joke that they were vanilla ISIS, right, all of these militia men and everything out there. They were like ISIS. They were like al-Qaeda in the sense that they radicalized online, they would meet together in secret and they did all of these activities which were very much like a terrorist, you know — terrorist insurgency. Now I think they have shifted. The Republican party is more like Shin Fein and the — the relationship between Shin Fein, the Irish Nationalist Party, and the Irish Republican Army — Provisional Irish Republican Army Terrorist group and — who called themselves freedom fighters and insurgents. And had Americans — American congressmen sending them money to buy, you know, heavy machine guns. These guys view themselves as this fanciful group of patriotic freedom fighters, the second coming of the sons of liberty. And there are many of them who are preparing for civil war right now. All the shame that we tried to give them after January 6? That’s gone. There are many of them right now that are ready to fight and we’re seeing politicians in the statehouses and the Capitol who are actually, you know, pushing them subliminally to fight.

Reid kept up the hate in the B-block as she returned to the topic of schools, using the parking lot of a hectic Tennessee school board meeting to suggest those who oppose mask mandates and Covid restrictions are violent loons out to attack administrators, teachers, and health care workers.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona was eager to join in this demonization, refusing to rebut Reid’s concern that such threats exist from “people who are willing to get violent over mask mandates.”

Reid asked Cardona if there’s a way to provide financial and physical security to teachers seeing as how they know what’s best for students. In response, Cardona framed the behavior of DeSantis and those parents as “dangerous” (click “expand”)

REID: I mean, is — and I don’t know if there even is, it’s just a genuine question I don’t know, is there anything that the federal government, the Department of Education can do, to provide for the fact that we now have to potentially have security for teachers who want to have their students masked, for school administrators, and also financial security? Because in the state of Florida, the governor is threatening to dock the pay of people who don’t make a lot of money, teachers and administrators, simply because they want to keep kids alive. Can the federal government do anything? 

CARDONA: That’s literally adding insult to injury. We — we have policies that are being implemented now that are not safe for students. So yes, we’re working closely with all — all states, but in particular with Florida, we’re having conversations about what we can do to make sure that, number one, our students have access to safe learning environments, that educators are given the opportunity to do what they do best. Let’s let our superintendents do their jobs. They know what to do. It’s tough enough reopening schools during a pandemic and they shouldn’t have to have their salaries threatened or deal with repercussions of making the right decisions. Unfortunately, look at the data. Look at the data. We are talking about the rates in Florida going up. It’s dangerous and we want to make sure that our schools are reopened for our students and that parents feel confident sending their children to school. They have been through enough already. 

The MSNBC charlatan wasn’t done as she argued without evidence (debunked here by the Daily Caller’s Andrew Kerr) that schoolchildren were in danger of dying from Covid if anti-mask mandate parents get their way and send their Covid-infected kids to school:

[T]here are kids, first of all, too young to get vaccinated. And then there are also kids who have pre-existing conditions who could die from covid. And there are screaming, sometimes violent parents saying they want no mask mandates and they want to be able to send unmasked, potentially contagious kids to school…[D]o you feel that American public schools at this point are safe with those people out there?

Once Cardona concluded by arguing that “the rights of…students are being violated” by DeSantis and the like, Reid reiterated her belief that right-leaning parents don’t care what happens to children: “[T]hese kids have rights too, or at least they should. It would be nice if both parties cared about them equally.”

Reid’s continued caricature of right-leaning Americans as murderous terrorists who now want to kill America’s schoolchildren with the coronavirus was made possible thanks to the endorsement of advertisers such as 4imprint, Ensure, Farmers Insurance, and Liberty Mutual. Follow the links to see their contact information at the MRC’s Conservatives Fight Back page.

To see the relevant MSNBC transcript from August 11, click here.