MSNBC host Joy Reid fired back at Tucker Carlson on Monday night after the Fox News star repeatedly labeled her the “race lady” in recent weeks, running down Carlson’s past failures and controversies while claiming the conservative host was “making America worse.”
Last week, after Reid announced on air that she was still wearing a mask despite being fully vaccinated, Carlson devoted an entire segment to mocking her. “Well, Joy-Ann Reid, the race lady over at MSNBC, took a quick break from haranguing whitey yesterday to reveal something deeply personal about herself on television,” he sneered.
Liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America later noted that Carlson has made a habit lately of referring to the Black host as the “race lady,” bringing up her Harvard education, and insisting that she’s lived “an unusually privileged life.”
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Reid, who recently called Carlson a “male Karen” for urging viewers to call the cops on kids with masks, began her fiery takedown of Carlson by referencing that moment.
“At least three times in last month, Tucker Carlson took time off from badgering strangers in parks and bouncy houses to demand they show him their children’s unmasked faces to refer to moi as the ‘race lady’!” Reid said. “‘The race lady’? Why’d he call me that? I used to run track in high school but honestly, I’m not that fast. What else could it be? Hmm.”
Reacting to a montage of Carlson running her down with that insult, Reid delivered a mini-biography of Carlson’s personal and professional life.
“Did he say ‘whitey’?!” Reid declared. “Oh, honey! Tuckums! Is this really about me fixating on race or is it about you fixating on race? I mean, when you recently went off on me for continuing to mask up post-vaccine while jogging in crowded Central Park, you weirdly threw in my attending Harvard. And I don’t know, maybe I’m sensitive to this stuff, but it felt kind of like a dog whistle.”
From there, she rhetorically asked Carlson if he had wanted to go to Harvard but was rejected, noting that while he probably thinks she was accepted because of “affirmative action,” it was actually because she “had a really high GPA and fantastic SAT scores.”
After saying Carlson’s “girlfriend’s daddy” helped get him into Trinity College and bringing up the recent controversy over his college yearbook, Reid then noted that Carlson was canceled by MSNBC and lost his CNN show after “Jon Stewart kind of humiliated” him.
“But you’re fine! Things are going GREAT for you,” she said, adding: “And about that race thing, I’m not the one who spools over my neighborhood ‘changing’ like I’m some segregationist housewife from the 1950s! That would be you, Tuckums!”
Reid wrapped up her takedown by blasting him for endorsing the white supremacist “Great Replacement” theory and claiming Carlson, who she said is “making America worse,” is partly why she was still wearing face masks in public.
“The reason I continue to mask up in crowded spaces is because I don’t know how many people in those crowds I’m jogging around heard about the court case where your bosses said your show wasn’t news,” Reid said, referencing Fox News lawyers successfully arguing that Carlson shouldn’t be taken seriously.
“They listen to you like you are the news,” she added. “And I don’t trust [that the] people who are listening to you, Tuckums, are taking precautions against COVID rather than freaking out about a piece of cloth and busting into Target to cough on all the cereal boxes like they’re 17th-century colonizers touting measles blankets with them!”
