If you’re following this situation with Joy Reid play out, it’s important to recognize how much of this is about chaos agents and useful idiots.
Chaos agents plant seeds and provoke. They count on useful idiots to do the rest. They count on the narrative getting so obscured that facts cease to matter.
As near as I can tell the current timeline is:
* Old problematic posts are highlighted, Joy apologizes and moves on.
* Joy discovers her old site has been compromised, starts investigating.
* More old posts are highlighted. Joy says some are false, reveals hack.
* Old problematic posts are highlighted, Joy apologizes and moves on.
* Joy discovers her old site has been compromised, starts investigating.
* More old posts are highlighted. Joy says some are false, reveals hack.
* FBI is contacted to investigate.
Already, just from that basic timeline we have lots of misinformation and people are arguing and defending things Joy and her consultant don’t appear to have ever claimed.
Lots of “internet experts” are ranting about how ridiculous it is that Joy is claiming Wayback was hacked. Except Joy isn’t claiming Wayback was hacked. Her expert’s statement merely said they investigated to see is a Wayback compromise was related to Joy’s site’s compromise.
However, as my previous threads note, manipulating Wayback results are fairly easy for anyone with access to a targeted site and don’t require hacking directly into Wayback servers.
People are also claiming that Joy is disavowing all posts, including ones she previously apologized for. That’s also false, unless she’s made a new statement I’m unaware of. She has only said some of the newly highlighted posts are false.
All of this misinformation is being repeated in many of the articles posted in mainstream news. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point but is still shameful.
This is why it’s always best to track down people’s full statements and not the partial quotes in articles. Also, never trust an article that doesn’t link to a full statement for the same reason.
This type of stacking the narrative is intended to paint Joy into an all-or-nothing corner where any nuance will be regarded as lying. Using that ploy against someone that has to go through lots of old writing and remember what’s real and what isn’t, is some serious fuckery.
But, if you note anything about this, here’s the most important: this is right out of the Rove playbook during the Bush years. Right down to which communities are being targeted. Why are people supposedly on the left using a Rove playbook? Hmmm.
There are legitimate concerns on both sides of the “blacks vs gays” Rove ploy. Many religious POC were on the wrong side of same sex marriage. Some have evolved on the issue and others have not. Equally, many in the LGBTQ community appropriate POC culture they shouldn’t.
These are developing and evolving issues. But it’s really not difficult to distinguish good faith actors from bad faith actors. Joy Reid put out a thoughtful and meaningful apology regarding her personal evolution when this first came to light.
But now we’re supposed to believe she’s a closet homophobe that is willing to lie to the FBI in order to avoid dealing with something she’s already apologized for and moved on from? Really?
