MSNBC host Joy Reid’s final broadcast of The ReidOut saw some of the network’s most high-profile figures drop in to say goodbye—and to strategize about how to produce change in the current political environment.
Reid’s 7 p.m. weeknight show, which had begun in 2020, was cancelled over the weekend—part of several lineup changes at MSNBC. Unaffected, though, were Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, and Lawrence O’Donnell—all of whom joined Reid on Monday.
“First, I want to say I love you, Joy, and I am bereft that The ReidOut is ending,” Maddow began, before offering her view on how people can organize politically.
“Find people who you respect and trust and love and make common cause with them, and help yourself by learning from them, and help them by standing up for them,” she advised.
“I think we have tried to do that, and I think that in important ways, we have failed, but I still think it’s the right thing to try to do. And so whether that means joining something locally or whether that means making some sort of unofficial common cause with people in your life who you respect and who you think are people you can depend on—like I feel about you—you’ve got to join forces," Maddow continued.
Reid, sporting a purple jacket with MSNBC and The ReidOut insignia, returned the praise. “No one fights for us harder in this company” than Maddow, “our fearless leader,” Reid said.
When it was Wallace’s turn to weigh in, she announced to Reid that she would “break the rules the way Rachel broke the rules and tell you that I love you.”
“The happiest times I’ve had, not just at MSNBC, but ever being on television, have been sitting next to the two of you—no offense, Lawerence. We love having you there, too,” she said.
The ReidOut being cancelled is “like losing a limb,” Wallace added, claiming she felt “despair.”
“[But] the only thing that chips away at that for me, is that despair is the autocrat’s tool. It’s their most effective weapon. It costs nothing, it’s easy to deploy, it’s contagious, and then it puts in motion all the actions they want: hopelessness, isolation, exasperation, giving up,” Wallace explained.
“And so the only reason I will not wallow in what I feel about you leaving is because I think that’s what they want,” she said as Reid, who gave a tearful defense of her show 24 hours prior, nodded in agreement.
Later, O’Donnell began his remarks by “skipping the love stuff—we did that on Saturday,” he said. Instead, he read from Medgar and Myrlie, Reid’s 2024 biography about civil rights icon Medgar Evers and his wife.
“This is the decisive battleground for America,” O’Donnell quoted northern civil rights activist Michael Schwerner, who ended up being killed in the South by members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1964.
“Now that really feels like something someone said five minutes ago, or anytime this year,” O’Donnell remarked.
After summing up Schwerner’s and others' contributions to the civil rights movement in the face of danger, O’Donnell said, “That choice is there for everybody all the time.”
“Michael Schwerner didn’t join a political campaign. He didn’t need a leader to tell him what to do. He just did it. He just got on that bus and he went to Mississippi and he just did it,” O’Donnell said. “And everyone can just do it.”
