Dissociative Joy
If Joy Reid's Regrettable Blogs of the Mid-to-Late-Aughts Saga has escaped your attention, here is a brief recap. (For a deeper dive, feel free to get fully EXPLAINERED to elsewhere.)
1 -- December 2017 -- Joy Reid apologizes for some homophobic posts on her blog from back in 2006-2009--mostly centered around derisive suggestions that then-governor of Florida Charlie Crist was a closeted gay man--which had been dug up by some Twitter detective. Charlie accepted her apology. It was another time, after all! There was minimal kerfuffle. Everything was fine.
2 -- A couple of weeks ago -- Twitter detective guy unearths another cache of posts--and they're...homophobic-er, I guess. Instead of apologizing again, Joy claims that somehow or another her old blog was compromised, and she won't be held responsible for the hateful and offensive content. She hires, and deploys to the media, a cyber-security expert for back-up. The fucking federal fuzz are involved. We now have kerfuffle. Everything is not fine.
3 -- By last Thursday, Joy's and her expert's claims that she was hacked fall apart.
4 -- This past Saturday Joy takes to her MSNBC television program and says: "I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things, because they are completely alien to me." She goes on to apologize for some things she admits she did say, blog, tweet, or feel at various times in her past.
The sensible thing to do, upon the recent surfacing of more homophobic-er posts, would have been to simply repeat the steps taken back in December--apologize, blame upbringing and culture, point to more recent activism, and move on. I think this would have been the sensible thing to do even if she actually thought there was a chance she'd been hacked. Joy should have just taken the loss, here! She's already reckoned with this! It's a cultural double jeopardy kinda thing--she was tried, convicted, and granted clemency back in December, and the only way for the culture to get her back in court is if she starts issuing implausible denials. New crime and new charges, your honor!
The other problem with her "I was hacked" nonsense is how big of a deal it would be if she had been hacked in the way she claimed. We're not just talking about somebody having her log in credentials and posting falsely under her byline, or photoshopped screenshots--she and her expert initially claimed that hackers planted altered screengrabs of her blog on the Wayback Machine's Internet Archive. If hackers were now deploying such potentially history-rewriting tools for the relatively silly task of making a cable-news-famous blogger appear slightly homophobic-er ten years ago than she'd recently admitted, that'd be a rather big fucking deal, actually! One might even be persuaded that such a thing could be the work of foreign state-sponsored trolling, on a mission to sow discord among THE RESISTANCE, if one were batshit fucking crazy.
Given how implausible Joy must have known it was going to sound to start pleading "HACKERS DID IT," I actually believe her. Not that she was hacked, of course--that's plainly bullshit. I actually believe that when confronted with the things she actually wrote a decade ago, she literally could not believe she had really written them. Despite knowing that she was at least some homophobic back then, she simply cannot process that that Joy is also this Joy. She cannot think of a moment when the switch was turned, when she learned the error of her ways, when she suddenly became less hateful and more woke and above progressivism's shaming reproach. At some point in the last decade, it became rather gauche to be so casually homophobic. Joy didn't discover or decide that homosexuals and trans folks are people, too, in the last ten years--the wider culture shifted radically, and she followed suit. But it happened so completely that she doesn't even recognize her words as her own when confronted with them.
The Obama administration only ended "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in September of 2011. (https://nyti.ms/2jEQm7i) When running for president in 2008, Barack Obama said: "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage." Obama didn't announce his "evolution" on gay marriage until May of 2012. (https://goo.gl/uBhngx) Only 27% of Americans believed same-sex marriage should be legal in 1996. (https://goo.gl/wu7hdu) It wasn't until the 2000s that even half of Americans believed that same-sex *sex* between consenting adults should not be explicitly illegal. (https://goo.gl/f71krX) "Gay marriage" was so thoroughly a non-issue, not even a part of the conversation, for so long that it doesn't appear that anyone bothered to poll Americans on the issue until the 1990s.
The point is, it's difficult to overstate the degree to which American views on these social issues have shifted. Just in my relatively short lifetime, Americans have gone from being absolutely morally certain that "The Gays are Bad" to being absolutely morally certain that "The Gays are Fine, Actually."
(...)
There has been a thoroughly bonkers cultural shift in the last generation. (Again, to be clear, in case I have to be, I recognize the progress as progress.) The zeitgeist has changed to the point of being utterly unrecognizable to many, many millions of Americans--and that's fine, actually, and even Good, in a lot of ways! The world changes, people's views "evolve," and we beat on. Progress! But preaching from the smug moral high ground within the perfect bubble of Online Enlightened Liberaldom is no way to continue the project.
When you refuse to even nod in the direction of the rapid pace of change, when you dismiss the sincere concerns--to be clear (again again again) I think they're mostly wrong--of millions as absurd random nonsense, you only exacerbate the divide. You're not interested in conversation with these people, you believe them to be outside The Project. And then they go and elect a screaming lunatic and huckster as *president of the United States,* the shrieking and growling fruit of our rotten tree, just for the indignant satisfaction of having a flaming middle finger in your face all the time.
(Emphasis, ahh, mine.)
Joy Reid has been subject to the thoroughly bonkers pace of change mentioned above, and no longer even recognizes her former self. There is something to be learned here, I think!
A recent study concluded that what animated Trump voters was not an economic anxiety, but an existential one. (Thank God there was a STUDY--we couldn't possibly have figured out that the prolonged MAGA-aggrieved yawp of the last two years connected to something fundamental in people without it, right?) The homosexual question is but one (radically changed) data point of a larger cultural set--things really are different now, man. Things are so different that a liberal media personality whose politics have not ideologically shifted in the last decade does not even recognize her former self.
I don't know why some people were susceptible to and accepting of the shifting cultural tides while others clamor for the good old days. (Though this won't prevent me from speculating! Why else have a goddamn blargh!-ing website?!) Maybe it's just stupid biology. From the left, part of it is maybe as simple as the LGBTQ folks gaining protected-class status within the larger liberal tribe--an alchemical reaction to the decades-long accumulation of the voices and work and victimization of activists and martyrs slowly pushing the wider conversation to the tipping point. From the right, I suspect the recalcitrance has something to do with the difference between soft, unexamined bigotry and a sort of fundamental, identitarian bigotry that isn't as easy to dispense with.
For Joy, her previous disdain for homosexuality was not (to her) a remotely important part of her ideology and political identity. She found the physical expression of homosexual affection revolting, but it was with a sort of tossed-off incuriosity about the squickiness of gay sex, not anything consequential (to her) to how she sees the world. She came from a culture that did not require her to interrogate this bigotry--as evidenced by the polls listed a bit above--and so she didn't. At some point between, say, Prop 8 and Obergefell v Hodges, this all changed. There was no moment of "Huh! The Gays are people, too!" epiphany--the evolution was subtle. As LGBTQ folks were folded into the greater liberal Project, her uninterrogated casual homophobia did not suddenly come under examination--rather, it slowly fell away, because it never really meant all that much to her in the first place. Whatever amount it did matter to her was certainly overwhelmed by her larger ideological identity. Why doesn't Joy think she wrote those posts? Because she is certain that her primary concern has always been the righteous defense of humanity, and there isn't a point in the last ten years she can point to where she began to recognize the fundamental humanity of gay people, so she must have always felt that way, really, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
For people who maintain their adversarial relationship with The Gays despite the sudden culture-wide reversals, the bigotry is the result of the same fundamental, identitarian impulses that leave Joy Reid unable to recognize her former self. They have interrogated these beliefs, and managed to build an identity upon them--not just (or necessarily at all, in a larger Trumpian context) on the homosexual question, but on a whole spectrum of specific aggrieved concerns about their world slipping away that is only tribally reinforced by Enlightened Liberaldom being ontologically incapable of dealing with its own recent past. It becomes a perverse act of self-preservation to double down on these beliefs. As ever, the goal of getting more and more people to recognize the fundamental humanity of more and more other people is a process--a collaborative process that takes years to properly cycle through, as one generation's deeply, sincerely held bigotries fade into the casual, (relatively) easily discarded unexamined prejudices of the next.
So maybe an "IF I DID IT..." apology followed by a twenty minute chat with all your favorite Supportive Gays, while perfectly nice and seemingly contrite, isn't actually very useful at all. The only message conveyed to anyone outside The Project is: we protect our own, even when they're probably absolutely full of shit, because she's on our team now. A far more interesting--and potentially productive--conversation would be one in which Joy engaged with some people who also used to think like she (allegedly) used to think, and maybe they could begin to grapple with the whys and whats of the change in perspective.
Or, you know, maybe she's just lying. Plausible! With any luck, in ten years we'll have a generation of conservatives claiming that their Facebook was definitely hacked from 2015 to 2018, that they certainly never could have possibly written anything in support of Donald Trump.
I've certainly got my defense against future woker-me at the ready:
