Q Toon: Diss Belief

MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid opened her program last Saturday by apologizing for some posts which apparently appeared on her weblog in the '00's — or perhaps some hacker managed to go back in time and put them there. She "genuinely do[es] not believe" that she wrote them herself.

In the posts on her now-deleted blog, which lives on on the Wayback Machine, she (or her impostor) refer to Senator Lindsey Graham and then Governor Charlie Crist as "Miss Lindsey" and "Miss Charlie," alluding to rumors of their closeted homosexuality. Other posts complain about "Brokeback Mountain" and two men's lips meeting in a Snickers ad that ran during the 2007 Superbowl. There's also a post making fun of Harriet Myers's supposedly lesbian hair-do.

“In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology,” Reid said. “The manipulated material seems to be part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago.
“Now that the site has been compromised I can state unequivocally that it does not represent the original entries,” she continued. “I hope that whoever corrupted the site recognizes the pain they have caused, not just to me, but to my family and communities that I care deeply about: LGBTQ, immigrants, people of color and other marginalized groups.” 

This kerfuffle has the aura of having been generated to distract interested parties away from more significant media misbehavior (say, e.g., Sean Hannity's intimate relationship with Team Trump). Twitting Graham, Crist, and others for rumors of homosexual orientation is fairly common (who, me?); and when Reid's supposed posts about them were dredged up last December, little notice was paid to them.

So someone kept digging and came up with the Brokeback and Snickers stuff, which make it sound as though she believes us LGBTQ folk need to keep our PDA's private. If the posts are genuine, they call into question Reid's ally cred with LGBTQ issues (PFLAG is rescinding a Straight for Equality award they were planning to give her next week). If they're not, it can only mean that Russian, Breitbartian, or Gallifreyan hackers are sophisticated enough to fool the various experts who claim that the posts can't possibly be forgeries.

Gay journalist and Glenn Greenwald is one of the people pushing the Joy Reid allegations. Perhaps his buddy Edward Snowden can clear things up for us.

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Meanwhile, as followers of this blog know, I draw my syndicated cartoons several days before I post them here; so this week's cartoon was created without the foreknowledge that Kanye Kardashian-West would be under fire this week for musing that 400 years of slavery was a "choice."

I think Ms. Reid is probably relieved that Kanye is not in her corner.

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P.S.: Nothing on the internet ever really dies.