Stripped of their fancy titles and fat salaries, they’re just another drop in the cesspool of internet cranks
It’s been a rough few years for deranged left-wing hacks masquerading as “mainstream” or even “relatively sane liberal” journalists. In an effort to recapture a modicum of respectability, failing media outlets such as CNN and MSNBC have sought to purge their ranks of mindless partisans who seem incapable of forming an original thought that doesn’t involve Donald Trump and the word “fascist.” Time will tell if cutting these freaks loose will be enough to save these floundering companies, but in the meantime, the fired journalists keep reminding us why they never deserved our respect.
Joy-Ann Reid lost her job (and multimillion-dollar salary) at MSNBC earlier this year on account of her terrible ratings. Even the liberals at MSNBC thought her unhinged rants and racial grievance-mongering were too toxic for TV. Reid, whose Harvard degree significantly undermines the university’s reputation for academic excellence, was widely ridiculed for wondering why Latinos did not prefer to be called “Latinx,” and for expressing disbelief that Kamala Harris could lose the 2024 election after waging a “flawlessly run” campaign and being endorsed by Queen Latifah.
Since getting fired, Reid has launched a Substack page where she charges $8 per month for access to enlightening content such as, “American gestapo,” “The Republican war on democracy,” and “When we call them fascists, it’s because they ARE.” Her rants have grown increasingly unhinged and racially charged in recent days. During a recent appearance on The Left Hook podcast with Wajahat Ali, a radical socialist who used to appear on CNN and write for the New York Times, Reid denounced white people as an inferior race.
“They can’t originally invent anything more than they were ever able to invent good music,” she fumed. “We black folk gave y’all country music, hip hop, R&B, jazz, rock and roll. They couldn’t even invent that, but they have to call a white man [Elvis Presley] the king.”
Reid posted a video from the podcast on her Substack under the headline, “How Mediocre White Men and Their Fragility is [sic] Destroying America with Joy-Ann Reid.” In another video that raises troubling questions about Reid’s mental health, the disgraced journalist ranted deliriously at the “unqualified” white Republicans who are “deleting all the blacks and brains [browns?] and making sure that they all get deported and locked up so that they don’t have to compete.”
We hope she gets the help she needs.
Jim Acosta “resigned” from CNN earlier this year, turning down a humiliating demotion to the graveyard shift from midnight to 2 a.m. Acosta made a name for himself during the first Trump administration as that annoying guy at press conferences who wouldn’t shut up, and became a minor celebrity with virulent Trump-haters over the age of 65. Acosta also launched a Substack page where he charges $8 per month for access to exclusive interviews with respected newsmakers such as Molly Jong-Fast, Beto O’Rourke, Judd Legum, Lev Parnas, and Steve Schmidt.
Earlier this month, Acosta united liberals and conservatives in disgust after he published an “interview” with an AI-generated version of a child who died in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018. Acosta asked about gun control, and the AI bot “said” he favored the same vague policies endorsed by Democratic politicians. Even users of Bluesky, the social media app for lunatics who think MSNBC is too right-wing, thought it was an appalling stunt, even by Acosta’s low standards. “You are a fucking monster,” one user wrote in response. “An actual opportunistic ghoul.”
John Harwood was a relatively respected journalist who wrote for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and CNBC. He was even allowed to moderate a Republican primary debate in 2015, which he opened by asking Trump if he was running a “comic book version” of a campaign. It was later revealed Harwood had reached out to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, for suggestions on what to ask the GOP candidates. He also complained his fellow journalists were spending too much time talking about Hillary’s emails, and attacked Republicans for “veering off the rails.”
Harwood’s anti-Trump derangement grew increasingly vitriolic over the years, especially after joining CNN in January 2020. He compared the GOP to the “old Confederacy” and suggested Trump supporters would “smack their moms in the face” to please the president. He lavished praise on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats. He denounced Republicans for pushing “false” claims about Joe Biden’s fitness to serve. “The gears of his mind are working,” Harwood said in June 2022, several months before Biden attempted to converse with a dead congresswoman.
In 2024, Harwood became a contributor to Zeteo. He writes a weekly column for the online publication, which was founded by Mehdi Hasan, the former MSNBC host whose show was canceled due to anti-Semitism. Zeteo charges $12 a month for access to Harwood’s insightful commentary about how Trump is “objectively bad for America” and “behaving like a gang leader.” His most recent column—”How White Resentment Fuels Trump’s Openly Racist Agenda”—echoes the paranoid rantings of Joy Reid. “After decades of fitful attempts to ameliorate the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, the federal government has now made catering to and protecting whites its organizing principle,” Harwood writes in the opening paragraphs. Only subscribers can read the rest, but who wants to pay for that shit?
In a way, it’s somewhat refreshing to watch these former “mainstream” figures debase themselves. Stripped of their fancy titles and exorbitant salaries, the likes of Reid, Acosta, and Harwood have revealed themselves to be no different than all the other Trump-addled internet posters shrieking into the void. That they were ever taken seriously as journalists is a damning indictment of the media class, and a major reason why Americans’ trust in journalistic institutions is at an all-time low.
