Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we recap Joy Reid’s latest hysterical screeds, hit back against the media’s friendly reporting on a pro-abortion study, and cover more media misses.
Joy Reid’s at It Again
Last week, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow claimed the network would not air Donald Trump’s victory speech in Iowa because broadcasting the former president’s “lies” would damage MSNBC’s pristine brand.
And yet, the network keeps Joy Reid on the air.
Reid has become a regular feature in Forgotten Fact Checks and reliably offers some of the most inflammatory and inaccurate takes the network has on offer.
This last week alone, Reid compared Trump to Hitler and dismissed lawmakers and voters who are concerned about the U.S. border crisis, claiming they are acting as “old southerners” who resisted integration “by any means necessary” did.
Reid’s Trump-Hitler comments came during a segment on “fascism and how it takes root.”
She said fascism does not usually advance through a coup, but “more often a deal, a bargain between the would-be dictator and the establishment, both political and media,” who believe power would tame the dictator.
“Like Trump, Hitler was also viewed as a clown, a goon who could be kept in line. And then there are the accommodations that the media makes with autocracy,” Reid said.
She then likened Hitler’s failed coup, the Beer Hall Putsch, to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
And Reid’s comments weren’t even the first time the network had entertained such comparisons: In November, MSNBC political analyst Claire McCaskill claimed Trump is “more dangerous” than Hitler or Benito Mussolini.
“A lot of people have tried to draw similarities between Mussolini and Hitler and the use of the terminology like ‘vermin’ and the drive that those men had towards autocracy and dictatorship,” McCaskill said at the time. “The difference, though, I think makes Donald Trump even more dangerous, and that is he has no philosophy he believes in. He is not trying to expand the boundaries of the United States of America.”
On the topic of the border, Reid lashed out after Representative Chip Roy (R., Texas) defended the Lone Star State’s battle with the Biden administration over the border, after the Supreme Court issued a ruling allowing the administration to remove razor wire fencing that Texas had installed.
“It’s like, if someone’s breaking into your house, and the court says, ‘Oh, sorry. You can’t defend yourself,’ Roy said during an appearance on Fox News. “What do you tell the court? You tell the court to go to hell, you defend yourself and then figure it out later.”
Reid, who regularly makes everything about race, discussed the congressman’s comments on her show, saying: “And very quickly, this massive resistance, it sounds like the old Southerners who said that we will resist integration by any means necessary, that Chip Roy language.”
She then asked guest Paola Ramos, a Vice News reporter and author, “How does that read inside of the Latino community?”
“It’s very simple,” Ramos replied. “If you’re the Republican Party, you’re allegedly the party of laws and order. And you’re essentially telling local authorities to break the law. So, I think once again, going into this image of, you know, who is the party of law and order and who is the party for ‘democracy.’”
“I think that’s where we have to highlight the hypocrisy, regardless of the politics. They’re essentially telling people to break the law,” Ramos added.
The pair’s dismissal of the issue comes as the U.S. recorded the highest number of illegal border crossings ever last month.
Before Reid took Roy to task, she said there is “no better example of what MAGA World wants for the rest of America than Texas: A total ban on abortion, failing infrastructure, and draconian measures meant to secure the border — which includes letting migrants, including a mother and her two children, drown, setting up buoys with buzz saws, barring federal agents from assisting with border control, and passing legislation that makes it a state crime to cross the border.”
However, Reid’s comments about Texas letting migrants drown is based on faulty reporting by CBS that was later retracted. “The Justice Department said the three migrant drownings had already occurred when Border Patrol requested access to Shelby Park to help other migrants,” the outlet later said in an editor’s note.
As we reported last week, Reid offered her own race-based takes on the Iowa caucus as well.
She claimed existing knowledge about candidate electability means nothing “when you believe that God has given you this country, that it is yours, and that everyone who is not a White, conservative Christian is a fraudulent American, is a less real American.”
“Then you don’t care about electability. You care about what God has given you,” she said.
It’s no surprise then that Reid cannot process the idea that Nikki Haley, an Indian American, would be a Republican.
“The elephant in the room, she’s still a brown lady that’s got to try to win in a party that is deeply anti-immigrant, it’s still a challenge. I don’t see how she becomes the nominee of that party. With Donald Trump still around, I can’t picture it happening,” she said earlier this month.
“Maybe it could happen,” she added.
For her part, Haley dismissed Reid’s comments and said the MSNBC host “lives in a different America than I do.”
“I mean, yes, I’m a brown girl that grew up in a small rural town in South Carolina who became the first female minority governor in history, who became a U.N. ambassador and who is now running for president. If that’s not the American dream, I don’t know what is,” she told Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade.
Megyn Kelly recently blasted Reid over an interview the MSNBC host did with Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice. In the interview, Reid asked Justice, “What is the expertise that you have and other Moms for Liberty advocates have to decide that a book, an award-winning book . . . isn’t appropriate for students read.”
Justice replied: “In what context is a strap-on dildo acceptable for public school, I mean that’s my question to you.”
The back-and-forth centered on a “memoir-manifesto” by George M. Johnson, All Boys Aren’t Blue, that features a chapter on sexual abuse the author faced as a child. The chapter includes graphic descriptions of sex, including the use of lube, dildos, and anal penetration.
Kelly responded to the interaction, saying, “I don’t want to know about Joy Reid’s weird sexual predilections or what she thinks is okay content for minors, but it’s not the same as what I think. And if she wants to expose her kid to that stuff, she can go right ahead and do it on her own time and her own dime.”
Headline Fail of the Week
“64,000 Pregnancies Caused by Rape Have Occurred in States with a Total Abortion Ban, New Study Estimates,” read a Scientific American headline this week. The study published in JAMA Internal Medicine was written up by numerous outlets this week, including NBC and NPR.
But as Michael New wrote for NR:
First, the authors of the study claim that approximately 12.5 percent of rapes result in a conception. That is an exceptionally high figure. The results of a survey of over 4,000 women that was published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in 1996 puts that figure at closer to 5 percent. Furthermore, the 5 percent figure cited in this 1996 journal article is probably high because several survey respondents reported being raped more than once.
Second, there are extremely wide disparities in reported rape statistics. The authors use data from the CDC’s 2016–17 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, which estimated that over 1.4 million women were the victims of a completed forcible rape during a twelve-month period. That is over four times higher than the estimates provided by the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey and over ten times higher than FBI data on the number of rapes reported to law enforcement. Furthermore, the CDC data have been criticized for significantly overestimating the incidence of rape. Fair-minded researchers would have at least acknowledged these disparities. However, the authors of the JAMA Internal Medicine article simply assume that the much higher CDC estimates are the most accurate.
And the authors of the article are not without bias: The lead author, Samuel Dickman, is the medical director of Planned Parenthood of Montana, while Kari White is the executive and scientific director of Resound Research for Reproductive Health.
Media Misses