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Agitate against tech billionaires. Against oil companies toasting the planet for profit, and the politicians they’ve bought. Agitate against racism, fascism, and the new feudalism.
AGITATION NATION, the podcast featuring America's agitators, scientists, activists, and insurgent thinkers working for a better country. Hosted by David Fenton, from the Fenton Forecast newsletter.
AGITATION NATION, EPISODE 1: JOY REID
Audio version transcript
ANNOUNCER (0:01)
A quick change for our audio podcast listeners. The Fenton Forecast podcast is now Agitation Nation, with even more of the activists, advocates and agitator voices you need to hear. Our Substack is now the Fenton Forecast, where you can subscribe for our regular newsletter. For more information, go to AgitationNation.com and TheFentonForecast.com. Now on with the show, hosted by the one and only David Fenton.
ANNOUNCER
Coming up on this episode, journalist Joy Reid.
JOY REID (clip)
So I actually think the Democrats need a Tea Party. The Democrats need a Tea Party movement like yesterday.
ANNOUNCER
Agitation Nation, where free speech is under attack in America. Trump, like all authoritarians before him, is assaulting the media. He's suing the networks, threatening broadcast licenses and getting billionaire friends to buy media platforms, all to destroy independence. Today's guest is a victim of media censorship who fought back. One of MSNBC's top hosts, Joy Reid, was fired in 2025, largely because she spoke out against Israel's overkill war against civilians and the death and suffering of children in Gaza. Joy fought back by establishing her own independent journalism platform. Now her show has half a million subscribers on YouTube and growing. Like other journalists going the independent route, Joy can now speak her truth without censorship and give you that message unfiltered. In this episode, it's unfiltered talk about Israel and AIPAC. DSA versus the Democrats, and where Joy sees independent media going next. Your host is David Fenton, activist and agitator for over 50 years, a pioneer in the use of PR and advertising for social change. Here's his conversation with Joy Reid. This is Agitation Nation.
DAVID FENTON (1:40)
Welcome, Joy Reid. Thank you for joining us. So good to see you.
JOY REID (1:51)
David, it has been too long, and it is great to see you too.
DAVID FENTON (1:55)
And we have a very good morning today, because we had a lot of victories last night, which we'll talk about in a minute. Joy, you made a big shift to independent media. How does it feel?
JOY REID (2:08)
Honestly, I'm really actually quite grateful to my former employers for sort of liberating me out into the world, because I realize now that I'm outside of the bubble that I was in a bubble. When you're in, that's the whole idea of a bubble, that you don't know you're in it, right? Everything looks clear. You feel like you can see out. You have no idea. But I do realize now that it was its own bubble. And I love being on the outside of it and being able to really just sort of speak my truth without filter. My fireaversary was, yes, it is, February 24 is my annual fireaversary, and I will celebrate it every year.
DAVID FENTON (2:46)
It's like now, right, people have divorce celebrations, right?
JOY REID (2:51)
I'll tell you, divorce can be liberating. Listen, I'm not mad. Sometimes marriages don't work out. And this one was a long one. It was a good one while it, while it was good, but it didn't work out. And I think everyone is happier for us being separated. My
DAVID FENTON (3:04)
Our audience hasn't really heard from you, so can you tell us a little bit about what happened?
JOY REID (3:09)
Yeah, I mean, it was a strange thing because, you know, my agent was in the process of doing the thing that we do in TV, which is my contract renewal. So I had had a three year contract that was up for renewal. And we just assumed that we would just re-up it and it would be, you know, similar to the previous renewals. But this one was actually quite challenged. You know, during last summer, they weren't really negotiating, and then sort of we got into the fall and then they started negotiating, and it was just like sort of torturous. And my agent came back to me and said, you know what, I think we're just gonna do a one year, because they're really, they're, you know, they're not making it easy. And I had, ever since October 7, 2023, been at odds with people inside of my network. And these were anonymous people, people I don't still to this day know who they were, but constantly complaining about my coverage of what quickly emerged to be a genocide in Gaza. And my use of that term bothered people, my social media posts about it. And I would always be careful, given that I work for NBC News, to post news organizations. I would post The Guardian, or I'd post Al Jazeera, or I would post Middle East Eye. Like, I wasn't posting like random people. But I was really posting a lot because, you know, for me as a journalist, but even just as a human being, seeing a genocide unfold is not something you see every day, right? If we had had cell phones and This type of social media during the Rwanda genocide, people would have posted it every day. And this is happening. We're seeing children being buried in the rubble, churches being bombed, nuns being killed and snipered, children being shot in the head, schools being demolished. It was an unreal, surreal situation, watching all of Gaza be completely obliterated. And the media felt like they were treating it as a war. It isn't a war when the people on one side of the war have stones, rocks and tarps over their heads, and the other side are the IDF. So my human feeling about it and my journalistic approach to it was to aggressively cover it. And myself and a handful of other people were really calling it a genocide and calling it what it was. And I suddenly started to rack up HR complaints, something I had never had.
DAVID FENTON (5:22)
This or other things? Yeah.
JOY REID (5:23)
People complaining, some anonymous person says they were offended by something I posted on social media, or offended by the way that I spoke about the genocide on my show. And I would always ask the HR person, well, who is it? And they would say, well, we can't say. And I'd say, well, did it, someone on my team? No. So I'm like, at least it's not someone on my team, you know, because we had very, you know, robust meetings, and they would have just said if they were upset about it. And so it just kind of happened, but then it sort of eased up, and we got to a negotiation. And by the end of the year, my previous boss, Rashida Jones, who was the president of MSNBC at the time, renewed the contract. So we, you know what, it was not easy, but we, so I get to the top of the year and I'm like, we're renewed. Let's just keep going. We're gonna do another year. Then we won an NAACP Image Award for our show and for our coverage of the Brittney Griner situation. This was the young basketball player who was, you know, thrown into a gulag in Russia. Yeah, and we got an Emmy nomination. So I'm like, wow, we got an Emmy nomination. through it. I've, like, we got through it.
JOY REID (6:20)
We won the NAACP Image Award. So now we're all going almost into February. And my interactions with management were congratulatory. It was them congratulating us on our show, talking about the PR, how we were gonna promote it. And then literally out of the blue, a rumor drops on Puck or one of these social media insidery Substacks, saying that I and another colleague of mine were gonna be fired. And I didn't believe it, because again, I had just renewed my contract. Yeah, we had gone through a lot.
JOY REID (6:50)
when it came to that, and also a lot of discomfort with kind of the way that I would snark about Donald Trump and the way I would speak about him, quite disrespectfully. And I will admit, I am quite disrespectful toward Donald Trump. Who can blame you? Right. And my bosses didn't like that either.
JOY REID (7:04)
Either, so I knew a lot of the stuff that I said and did, but I mean, but we renewed. And then on that rumor, came, dropped on a Friday night. We'd done our show. We do our Mondays and Fridays from home, because post pandemic we were still doing a lot from home. So I'm upstairs pouring a cocktail, and my EP calls me to tell me about this rumor that's circulating online, that we're gonna be fired. And I said, I haven't heard anything negative like that. And then I get the text from my new boss, Rebecca Cutler, saying, can you meet with me by phone tomorrow at noon? And that's when I knew it was true. She and I didn't text. You know, I had a really, like, close relationship, you know, we would fight and have a relationship, but with Phil Griffin, who's the boss who gave me my primetime show and my weekend show and all my shows, actually. And so he's somebody who would text me. Rebecca wasn't, you know, we didn't have a relationship like that. So for her to text me and ask to meet, I was like, okay, the rumors must be true. And sure enough, the next day, a Saturday, she got on with the head of HR and told me they were not renewing my show. What she didn't say, and what we soon found out, was that everyone on my team was laid off.
JOY REID (8:03)
and that a bunch of teams were going to be laid off, including Rachel Maddow's team, Alex Wagner's team, and a bunch of teams all had to reapply for their jobs, which, that's what sent me over the edge. That's what enraged me. So it was quite a weird experience.
DAVID FENTON (8:18)
There's still a lot of people who don't like that word being used, genocide, but as an American Jew, and as someone who knows people at human rights organizations, both in Israel and around the world, many of which are run by Jews, it does meet the technical and legal definition of genocide and apartheid. And it's very tragic, it's sad. But you know, when you see what's happening with your own eyes and ears, I'm sorry, the party can't tell you to ignore it.
JOY REID (8:44)
It's hard because, you know, I have a lot of friends, you know, who obviously have a lot of affection for Israel and who grew up with an affection for Israel. But even they agree with me that it's a genocide, right. I mean, like I said, B'Tselem and other Jewish run human rights organizations who specialize in locating and identifying and naming genocides, they say it's a genocide. The ICC has concluded that at minimum it's war crimes. And if you think about what the reaction, response was by Benjamin Netanyahu, who by the way
JOY REID (9:14)
bears a lot of responsibility for the October 7 attack.
DAVID FENTON
Definitely.
JOY REID
You know, he knew for a year that this was a plan, a written plan that leaked and was discovered by three women in his national security services who he didn't listen to.
DAVID FENTON
Right.
JOY REID
But there was a warning about it. The response to October 7 was weirdly late. It took a long time.
DAVID FENTON
Yeah, very strange.
JOY REID
Right. Yeah, the poor little kibbutzim
DAVID FENTON (9:36)
And he's resisting an investigation.
JOY REID
Absolutely. The little kibbutzim are down there with no protection.
JOY REID (9:41)
It takes hours and hours to get protection to the people in the kibbutzes who have nothing to defend themselves with. They sort of fudge the numbers of dead. They first, they said 1,400, then it was 1,200. They didn't tell you how many were military and how many were police. They made it sound like they were all civilians. And then there is plenty of evidence. You know, I'm a Haaretz subscriber, have been for years.
DAVID FENTON (9:59)
Yeah, let people know what that is.
JOY REID (10:03)
Yep. Yeah, Haaretz is the most liberal, but really one of the, journal, most journalistically sound news outlets in Israel. And they aggressively covered their administration. I wish we had Haaretz to cover ours. Yeah, right. Right? Like, they're aggressive. They don't have it, they pull no punches. And they covered some really disturbing facts about October 7, including the delayed response, including the funding of Hamas by Netanyahu, who deliberately propped this organization up.
DAVID FENTON (10:32)
That's a fact, folks. He wanted them funded in order to avoid having to create a Palestinian state. Well, this is all pretty well established. I do want to, because, you know, whenever you talk about this, of course, well, what about Hamas's war crimes? And of course, we denounce that, right?
JOY REID (10:49)
And also, by the way, the same arrest warrant that was issued for Benjamin Netanyahu and for his former defense minister was also issued to the leader of Hamas. It's just that he was dead. But Bibi Netanyahu is very much alive, and Yoav Gallant is very much alive. And that is why they have active arrest warrants and the Hamas leader doesn't. And so you can acknowledge that there were war crimes on both sides, but you have to acknowledge that the reaction by the Israeli state was not to say we're gonna do a tit for tat against Hamas. It was to wipe out every school, every mosque, every church
DAVID FENTON
Every building. Every apartment.
JOY REID (11:35)
And Bibi Netanyahu himself said, these people are the Amalek. Well, what is the Amalek? The Amalekites in the Bible, is God told Israel, the Israel of the Bible, to wipe out every man, woman, child, ox and ass,
DAVID FENTON
Right, I know.
JOY REID
leave nothing. He said that was what they were doing. You announced the genocide. You said it was your goal.
DAVID FENTON (11:56)
Too much truth for American cable TV. And that led to you having a new career. And you're doing really well. You have a top 50 political Substack, you have a million and a half followers on Instagram, you have almost half a million on YouTube. You're doing great. You said we have to build our own media, you're doing it, and there are others doing it, but the legacy media is not doing so well. So what have you gained being independent? What can you talk about that you felt constrained about before?
JOY REID (12:25)
Well, I mean, I definitely used my words very, very carefully when it came to the Israel Hamas situation, because it was just very clear that it was just not welcome. You know, we internally were very concerned for Mehdi Hasan, because he was aggressively making these cases too. And I always felt a responsibility as somebody who's not Arab or Muslim. And so I'm outside the community. So I'm like, I am coming from outside as an objective voice. Let me use my privilege to be able to talk about this, to protect them. He ends up getting fired anyway, builds his great thing at Zeteo. But I mean, I feel like outside of the media, and I think Mehdi would say the same, I'm now free to really speak freely about what I see. And it is crazy to be a journalist and feel like you're not free to say what you see, what your eyes and your brain are telling you, and to feel like you have to self-censor. And so I'm really relieved to be in a position where I don't have to self-censor at all, where I can really say what I'm seeing, the way that I'm seeing it, and to speak the way my audience is speaking to each other. You know, I'm one of them. I'm able to just say what I'm seeing and say it plainly, in a way that I don't have to worry that I'm gonna get an angry call or email from my boss. You
DAVID FENTON (13:35)
used the word unfiltered. I guess you could say it's unfiltered Joy.
JOY REID (13:39)
Unfiltered Joy. Like, to say that, Katie Phang, who used to work there as well, now is also independent, and I borrowed this from her. The idea is that we have to be truthful but not neutral. You know? We wish the media had been less neutral in the 1930s. I like to collect things, typewriters, old newspapers. And I have these really creepy, you know, New York Times headlines from the 1930s that were talking about Hitler's bungalow and the design therein, and sort of speaking about him as if he was
JOY REID (14:08)
just talking. He was just saying crazy things, but he would eventually, you know, step into his role as a statesman.
JOY REID (14:19)
Times in media tried to normalize this guy. And I think we've done that, unfortunately, to Trump. They sort of tried to make this feel normal and make it feel like politics, when this is fascism that is running our country right now. And we need to feel free to say that.
DAVID FENTON (14:34)
Brings to mind one piece of history that I was involved in, where the US media also abetted essentially a genocide, death squads, and that was in El Salvador. All three American network news anchors all broadcast from the roof of the main hotel in San Salvador during the Salvadoran elections in the early 1980s, which was the sham elections staged by Reagan. The main person they were interviewing, Roberto D'Aubuisson, was running for president, was the head of the death squads who killed 50,000 Salvadoran civilians in that tiny country. That's like killing many millions of Americans. And they were celebrating it. I come from the era of the anti Vietnam War movement, where of course we got completely fed up with the mainstream media for not telling the truth about Vietnam, which spawned hundreds of anti war underground newspapers around the country. So independent media is essential. So You're a lifelong Democrat. Now you see Bernie was right. We had a lot of victories last night in Michigan, et cetera, but we also had a big loss in Cori Bush, and AIPAC spent what, 9 million dollars against her. Where do you think the Democratic Party is at?
JOY REID (15:47)
I started out as a Jesse Jackson voter, in 1988, who was Bernie before Bernie. So I think, you know, my politics have always been in the left end of the Democratic Party, but I also am somebody who feels like it's important for the Democratic Party to win. And I say that because
JOY REID (16:06)
The Republican Party has warped itself into something mutated and increasingly dangerous over time. Really, since Nixon and accelerating through Reagan, the party structure and the incentive structure inside the Republican Party is truly warped. And so I root for Democrats, and I'm also a political analyst, right? And so my thoughts on the Bernie Sanders race in 2016 were mainly analytical. I did not think he could win the election. That was just my analysis at the time. But I do think, and I think now even more so, that his policy ideas were correct, and they were more correct than Hillary Clinton's. I think there are lots of analyses you can make of that race. I don't think he had a race a race strategy that was smart. I don't think that he really understood how to, you know, promote his ideas to African Americans, to black people, the way Jesse Jackson did. And I think that was a problem. It's why he ultimately couldn't win in South Carolina, et cetera. So you can go through and parse all of that. But I will say that the Democratic Party has a similar warping that has happened to them, in which they have gone from being a populist party of the working man.
DAVID FENTON
Right.
JOY REID
Where black voters fled from the Republican Party into the civil rights party, the sort of aggressively pro-poor people party, they've turned into a corporate party that is mainly about creating peace and calm rather than justice. And we know that King said, beware of the moderate that wants calm and peace rather than justice. And I do think that is a problem, because the Democratic Party, because it is more about calm than about justice, and more about peace than about change, they frustrate voters who actually have needs. And who vote for them because they have needs. And then when they say, thanks for your vote, we really can't meet those needs, we need 60 votes, there are all these process arguments or all these reasons we can't do it. Voters will then run back to the fascist party because they think, well, maybe they'll meet my needs. And so I think the Democrats' sort of inability to truly create change, and also articulate the creation of change, is actually dangerous to the Republic. So I actually think the Democrats need a Tea Party.
JOY REID (18:17)
The Democrats need a Tea Party movement like yesterday.
DAVID FENTON
Yeah.
JOY REID
And I think that the DSA, Working Families Party, this Democratic Socialist wave, is the Tea Party the Democratic Party desperately needs in order to become a party that truly is about change and justice.
DAVID FENTON (18:32)
Yeah, I completely agree. It needs disruption, the sclerotic leadership of the Democratic Party. I mean, every time Chuck Schumer goes on television, I cringe.
JOY REID (18:42)
Same.
DAVID FENTON
And of course you have all the AIPAC corruption in the leadership of the Democratic Party, which is so out of touch with voters now, including the young Jewish voters.
JOY REID
Yeah.
DAVID FENTON
And you have them cozying up to these tech fascist billionaires. And their so called all of the above energy strategy, which of course
DAVID FENTON (19:01)
means rewarding oil and gas companies so they can cook the planet. Yeah, we need some differentiation here, don't you think?
JOY REID (19:08)
Agreed. The Democratic Party complains that they can't get young voters off the couch. Yeah, well, young voters want to solve the climate change problem, because they're going to inherit a scorched and burning earth. They won't hear any excuses for why we need to send bombs to Israel to kill brown people and brown children. There's just no argument that makes sense. That the surveillance state is something that we oppose. Sorry, your base opposes the surveillance state you're cozying up to. No one wants these AI farms in their backyard
DAVID FENTON
Right.
JOY REID
that are polluting the water, making the air befouled, causing noise pollution.
DAVID FENTON
Raising people's bills.
JOY REID
Absolutely, and making it unaffordable. The Democratic Party has no solutions. They just have slogans. And this is an electoral problem and it's a moral problem. And I have to say, even Hakeem Jeffries is deeply disappointing for me in that regard, because I think he has so much potential. He has star qualities in some ways, but he's being held captive by the same corporate interests that hold Schumer hostage. And so I think this is not inspiring leadership, to say the least. And they have to change if they're going to survive and be strong enough to beat the fascists. I
DAVID FENTON (20:16)
A supporter of DSA positions and the candidates, I will say I get a little afraid, from my own experience in the 1960s, that some of the rigid ideological far left factions of DSA are causing problems that we don't need. We don't need Republicans running ads saying these people are for abolishing the police and prisons. And I hope these people wise up, that we have to deal with a mass audience and meet people where they're at. You know, you can have your utopian, ultra radical visions, but we can't run on that. So are you concerned about that, or you think I'm overstating it?
JOY REID (20:55)
Really concerned about it. I mean, I think if you think about it pragmatically, the police are not gonna be abolished, right? But you could abolish ICE. But I don't have a problem with people having a radical vision, because I think if you think about it, Dr. King had a radical vision, universal basic income, you know, universal health care. These seemed like radical visions until they suddenly seemed like necessities, right? The idea of universal health care was seen as a completely radical vision. And we ended up with something short of that with Obamacare, but we tried for universal health care and we ended up with Obamacare. And so I think sometimes you do need to present, and look, especially young voters, they don't understand the constraints that we put on their ideas. And so it doesn't bother me when people have a radical vision. But I think what it takes is that these people that are DSA purists, as you say, are you willing to ally with people who are just as progressive but maybe don't have the full radical vision? Will you partner with people who are where you are and try to win these elections? What is your tactical strategy to gain actual power? And one of the people I think that is the smartest about this is Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani had what everyone believed was an incredible radical vision: free child care, free preschool, city-owned grocery stores. This is crazy talk, right? But he said, no, no, no, I have a radical vision, but I also have a strategy to gain power and to actually implement my vision. That's what I think is missing from some of the activists. I need to hear your radical plan, not just your vision.
DAVID FENTON (22:22)
And he's doing so well that the whole energy in New York has changed, coming out of his personality. Isn't it amazing?
JOY REID (22:30)
I love it. It's fun and cool again. I love it.
DAVID FENTON (22:33)
So, speaking of the mayor and your recent interview with hizzoner, you've pointed out Chris Van Hollen can call Netanyahu a war criminal. People hear him out. And Bernie is saying the same thing too, and he's Jewish. So Mamdani says it and the Democrats lose their mind.
JOY REID
Yeah.
DAVID FENTON
You asked him if it was Islamophobia, and he deferred and said, you know, others have to judge that, like you. So do you think it's Islamophobia?
JOY REID (23:01)
Yes, I do. I think that people hear a Muslim man say that the prime minister of the Jewish state, which, I'm a bit offended of putting Israel on all Jewish people. I think there's some people who, you know, love Israel, and you know, but there are a lot of black people who love Liberia. Liberia's not the African state, right? You know, and if you dislike Liberia, I don't think that means you hate black people. Or if you do, you disagree with them.
JOY REID (23:29)
So I think it's a bit dangerous, and I think it's what Bibi Netanyahu wants, which is to say everything I do is on every Jewish person on earth, which is just to me, insane.
DAVID FENTON (23:41)
No thank you.
JOY REID
It's crazy.
DAVID FENTON
This Jew says no.
JOY REID (23:42)
There you go. Exactly. I find it just
JOY REID (23:45)
wild. It's like he, but I think he says it, people hear it through the lens of a pre-existing Islamophobia that has always painted Arabs and Muslims as the bad guy, as terrorists, as anti-American, as anti-West. And I think people cannot, and you know, the anti, as anti-colonial. And they are anti-colonial. By the way, I'm anti-colonial. Colonialism destroyed, you know, my people, you know on all the continents they're from. And so people hear it
JOY REID (24:11)
differently than when Bernie says it. They say, well, he's in the community, he can say it. Chris Van Hollen, well he's white, so he can say it. It is a hundred percent Islamophobia, and Democrats need to acknowledge, y'all got everything that everybody else has: the racism, the sexism, the ageism, all the isms, the misogyny. It's all in the Democratic Party, just like it's in the Republican Party. It may present differently, but these are human issues, not partisan issues. And so, yeah, I believe it's a hundred percent Islamophobia.
DAVID FENTON (24:39)
Yeah, it's interesting, your reference to Liberia. Of course, that was a response to another Holocaust
JOY REID
Yes.
DAVID FENTON
slavery. And people don't think of it that way.
JOY REID (24:48)
And it was actually the same, I make this analogy a lot, that it was actually done with the same sort of ideological basis, right? I mean, Zionism, it was a European phenomenon. European Zionism in the 19th century was made in part by people who wanted to create a homeland for Jewish people, and also in part by people who wanted to get Jewish people the hell out of Europe.
DAVID FENTON
Right.
JOY REID
And who didn't want Jewish people to be in Europe at all, and wanted to expel them to someplace.
JOY REID (25:17)
And inside of the United States after enslavement, there were people, including Abraham Lincoln, who were like, we're against slavery, we certainly don't want those blacks here, we want to send them someplace where they can have a homeland. It was very similar, to the extent that some of them called it an American version of Zionism, that they were like, we're gonna create this colony, this sort of new land for our former enslaved people, our former slaves will go somewhere. And that was Liberia. And they literally took over a country that had people in it.
DAVID FENTON
Right.
JOY REID
made those people second and third class citizens, and made the former enslaved the top class. If you look at the leaders of Liberia, they all have American sounding last names.
DAVID FENTON (25:57)
Right, right.
JOY REID
For a reason.
DAVID FENTON (25:59)
Well, you know, I have a slightly different view. After the Holocaust, I think, you know, a country for the Jewish people made sense. The way it was done was wrong, and there's gonna be no peace in Israel if there's permanent occupation of another people.
JOY REID
Agreed.
DAVID FENTON
And you know, those of us who want to see security for Israelis understand, as many in the former Mossad agents and generals understand, that the occupation means permanent insecurity, permanent terrorism. It's religious fanaticism, it is a disaster. And by the way, I was just in Montgomery, Alabama, at Bryan Stevenson's slavery museum and memorial to lynching. I'm sure you've been there.
JOY REID (26:41)
Yeah, brilliant. Brilliant.
DAVID FENTON
Oh my goodness. So moving and so beautiful at the same time. Everybody should go. Go see these monuments. So here we are, and we have a racist presidency. The whole pushback on
DAVID FENTON (26:55)
DEI in the government. Every time I hear them say DEI, what I hear them saying is black.
JOY REID (27:01)
Yes, it does. It does. Because, yeah. In, functionally, DEI mainly benefited white women. It also benefited military veterans. You know, all sorts of people were benefiting from it. But I think when the right says DEI, they just mean black.
DAVID FENTON (27:14)
That, and that's what Trump means. And now, disgusting partisan thuggery, Supreme Court of Injustice, I think you call it that, wiping out black representation on purpose. And you have Trump, you know, the only immigrants that can come in are white South Africans. And I can't imagine what black people in America feel as they see this happening. So you're covering this and you're living it. So what is that like for you, and how does it compare now that you're unfiltered, to when you worked in a traditional newsroom?
JOY REID (27:46)
I think when I was there, I definitely felt freer on this topic. I never really had any of the kind of pushback, not much of the kind of pushback that I had on the Israel Gaza stuff, when it came to race, because I think that my bosses saw this as kind of my beat. So there's really not without any consequences.
JOY REID (28:24)
I feel like we, community, live this nightmare basically every 50 to 100 years. It just keeps happening. You know, we have enslavement, we get freedom, we get Reconstruction, that lasts 12 years, but then the backlash is insane. And you get the Redemption movement and they send all the rights into the dustbin. And then we fight our way back, we get a civil rights movement, that's in World War One, World War Two, blacks go out and fight for their country and come back and say, hey, now we want to be treated as equals. Absolutely not. Then we have to fight another civil rights movement. And it just keeps happening. It's unfortunately, and to me, what's so crazy about it, it is the death knell of democracy that is just waiting. If the American experiment could accept the idea of racial equality, think of how much more prosperous we would be. There's a Citigroup study that talks about the trillions of dollars in lost GDP because people are just so emotionally bereft that they have to keep 13% of their population poor on purpose. The idea of black or brown people being equal is such an anathema to people that they'd rather be poor. They'd rather burn their own house down than share it. It is just absolutely nonsensical and insane. But it is the disease that is slowly killing, you know, that is metastasizing inside of the body politic of the United States. And until we can cure it and figure out some way to stop it, this disease of whiteness and white supremacy, it will kill this democracy eventually. And black folks know that, because this is what the black experience has already, always been here.
DAVID FENTON (29:52)
When things are plainly racist, how do you deal with the need for so called objectivity in covering things?
JOY REID (30:00)
Well see, I don't believe object, that objectivity, it was a made up thing. And it was the sort of objectivity movement in the early 20th century was created when the media only consisted of white men. And they created this idea of objectivity, and they covered things like lynching with objectivity, meaning they didn't question whether or not the lynching was a crime. They simply assumed that if the white people that lynched this black man said he committed a crime, then he did. That whoever was being hung, that must have done something. And this is the way it was covered. It was Ida B. Wells and other black journalists who insisted that this fake objectivity go away. Eventually, the northern newspapers, and I'm talking northern newspapers, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, you know, all of the northern newspapers covered lynchings as if they were a benign non-threat. And then when black journalists really forced the media out of this fake objective form, you had the coverage of the civil rights movement that created this huge, huge backlash among white Southerners who said, "oh, the media hates us."
DAVID FENTON
Right.
JOY REID
The media isn't fair. The media is biased. And that is where this idea of bias came from. So objectivity, it's like saying you can have comity in the Senate, and those were the good old days. Well, that's because there was only white guys there.
DAVID FENTON
[laughing] Right.
JOY REID
Whether you were a right wing white guy or a left wing white guy, they were all white men, so they could relate on that form. So yeah, there was a lot more comity and they could have cigars together. There were no women or people of color, you know. So I think it's a fake idea
JOY REID (31:29)
I don't think we need objectivity. I think we need fairness. Yeah. But there's no one who's objective. Everyone has a point of view. It's absurd to think there is some voice from nowhere.
DAVID FENTON (31:38)
I mean, striving to be fair and to tell the truth is a great ideal.
JOY REID
Absolutely.
DAVID FENTON
But it's impossible to do it perfectly. Everybody has their own biases. You know, at the lynching museum in Montgomery, one of the things that really struck me is that they were lynching black people in Minnesota in the 1950s.
JOY REID
Yes.
DAVID FENTON
1950s. So what do you think is being reported neutrally today in the mainstream media that historians will later call sanitized?
JOY REID (32:11)
I think that this rash of hangings of black men found hanging, and I covered one in between shows, when my dayside show got cancelled and Phil Griffin sent me out to be a reporter. And I covered a bunch of church burnings in the South, and a hanging in Mississippi that every black person in that community believed was a lynching, but all of the white media and the law enforcement all insisted it was a suicide. No one believed it was a suicide. And I've covered other cases that are similar, in which the black community is certain that this person was killed. And the media and the authorities say no, it was definitely self-inflicted. I mean, there's one case in Indiana where an 18-year-old black teenager goes to a July 4th party, same weekend as Nolan Wells disappeared in Mississippi, and he is shot in the head, found with a gunshot wound to the head. The excuse made by the all-white, this is at a white household, they said, well, we were playing Russian roulette, and that's how he shot himself. But the bullet casings that were found next to his body don't match the gun that was used. And yet the authorities still insisted it's suicide. How? So, you know, and so I think when we look back, we're gonna find that we are back in a lynching era. I hate to say that. It pains me to say it, but I am very suspicious about the rash of hangings and mysterious deaths, particularly of young black men in the South. And I think when we look back, we're gonna realize we're back in a very, very dark era. And the reason I say that is that if you think about it, the way that whiteness created a bond between poor whites and rich white people is that they said to poor whites, you can't have economic prosperity. We're gonna give you nothing economically, but whiteness is your superpower. And if you need to let off steam, kill as many black people as you want, you'll never go to jail. That was the law essentially in the South until the 1960s. You could literally kill at will, man, woman, child. Hang them from a tree, shoot them full of holes.
DAVID FENTON
Drag them out of jail and hang them.
JOY REID (34:09)
At any point the sheriff will protect you. The sheriff might help you. The Klan was in and out of uniform. They were sheriffs, they were mayors.
DAVID FENTON
And people cheered.
JOY REID
And people came to it. It was- They were so bold-
DAVID FENTON (34:19)
It was like a public spectacle and they brought their kids to cheer. That's American history, folks, that they're whitewashing.
JOY REID (34:26)
A thousand percent. They made postcards of the lynchings. People took home body parts.
DAVID FENTON
That's true.
JOY REID
There are white families right now that have noses, toes, fingers, ears in their collection of family heirlooms.
DAVID FENTON
Come on, really?
JOY REID
Because- yes, people took home body parts as souvenirs. And this is the history, the savage history. It's the purge. It's saying to white poor people, this is the power we're gonna give you, the power of life and death over these other people, which existed during slavery too. We're gonna give you that quasi-slaveholder power over bl- and nothing else. That's the power of whiteness. And so I think you've created a culture amongst some in the white community that has this sense of impunity. If a black person dies in your presence, just cover it up. You don't have to do anything about it. You don't have to worry about it. That life is less valuable than your life. Your future is more important than their actual life. And that is a culture.
DAVID FENTON (35:15)
Yeah, those are the Christians.
JOY REID (35:17)
And that's the ones who go right to church. And it's a problem. So I fear, just as this rash of church burnings back in the mid 2000s felt like it was deliberate and that it was systematic, I feel like there's something very, very dark going on when it comes to young black men turning up dead.
DAVID FENTON (35:35)
Well, I think the other thing that's being sanitized is, you know, reporting on the Supreme Court as if these are legitimate legal doctrines rather than pure racism coming out of John Roberts and his crew. It's pure racism to end representation of black congressional districts while claiming you're doing it in the name of freedom and equality. It's hard.
JOY REID (35:58)
And I think the other thing, if you want to talk about undercovered stories, yes, the credibility gap in our government is vast. I mean, I think globally no one trusts the US government.
JOY REID (36:09)
We're, reliable electorate. We just keep electing fascists and then we go back to a nice guy and then a fascist. It's just ridiculous. But I also think that this, the emergence of the surveillance state, and the sort of recreation of a kind of plantation economy based on AI compute and who's gonna control it in the West, and who's gonna be, you know, whether it'll be China or us that will have primacy in AI, is creating another plantation economy and a very terrifying surveillance state. And I think the media is looking the other way. I don't think they're really dealing with it. And it will be one of, well, if we can still cover the news, in 20 years, it'll turn out to be one of the most undercovered stories.
DAVID FENTON (36:48)
Boy, I so agree. I call it the refeudalization of society, the concentration of all this wealth and power in these tech barons, and now of course the vast concentrations of wealth corrupting the democracy, as we said, all too often in both parties. You know, there's a very important book about to come out about this. I don't know if you've heard about it. A friend of mine's publishing a book in a few weeks called The Nerd Reich, Silicon Valley and the attack on democracy. And these people like Peter Thiel and Elon and David Sacks and Marc Andreessen, their plan is to take over.
JOY REID (37:30)
I think you're, there, it's true. I mean, and these are people who, you know, sort of had awkward beginnings in their young lives, and they've just decided that the answer to that is to take over the world and run it like a giant plantation. And for them, all of us are just cattle. And they do believe that that is the right way to go, because they think that they're naturally superior. And that's never a recipe for good things for the vast majority of people.
DAVID FENTON (37:57)
Well, it's happening fast, but you know, we have a tax on billionaires on the ballot in California coming up, and the polls are showing it ahead, and I certainly hope that it passes. It's been kind of amazing to watch some of these billionaires flip out about, you know how much this tax is? It's one percent a year. One percent. Which I like to point out is half what they pay their investment managers.
JOY REID (38:23)
Yes. That's exactly right. But they think you should pay zero taxes. I mean, if you go back and you sort of look at their literature, I mean, they're offended by the fact that Woodrow Wilson, who did a lot of really actually awful things
DAVID FENTON
Horrible.
JOY REID (38:34)
They think the one bad thing he did was pass, was sign the legislation to create the income tax. Like, they're like, other than that, we have no problem with Woodrow.
DAVID FENTON (38:42)
Yeah, Woodrow Wilson, who in the Palmer raids rounded up 20,000 people and deported many of them, and put Eugene Debs in jail and forced him to campaign for president from prison.
JOY REID (38:52)
Yeah. Exactly. One of the worst. And still got to be a top ten
JOY REID (38:57)
president according to the gathered historians, which still makes no sense to me.
DAVID FENTON (39:01)
So Trump has his picture on the wall, you know.
JOY REID (39:04)
Of course. Yeah. Of course he does.
DAVID FENTON (39:06)
Unbelievable.
JOY REID (39:08)
He and McKinley, his two favorite presidents.
DAVID FENTON (39:10)
So what's your North Star now about what you won't cover? What's the check and balance on you now that you're free and on your own?
JOY REID (39:18)
That's a great question. I haven't thought about what I would not cover, because I almost feel like, just as a person who's just eternally curious, there's almost nothing I wouldn't cover. You know, I feel like if a story comes to me, you know, we have a news tips, you know, email, where we just get, we get unsolicited news tips and we try to run them down. I feel like every story is valuable in its own way and in its own right. So I feel like there is nothing that I wouldn't cover. The one thing I miss about being in a big news organization is having a fleet of reporters. And when we were at MSNBC, we thought we had a fleet of reporters because we were borrowing them from NBC News. Once they separated, that's when reality hit us and we realized we didn't have any reporters at all, and they all worked for NBC. But it really truly is a sort of the Four Seasons of news, having a fleet of producers and reporters. With a very, very tiny team is actually, it turns out to be quite difficult. That's one of the challenges that we're looking to sort of rectify going forward, is how to sort of build our core of journalists around the country and around the world who we can go to, the correspondents that we need to really do the job I want to do.
DAVID FENTON (40:32)
And also to fact check, and to have access to checking sources. It's a different thing. I wonder how it's gonna evolve. You know, Substack's a great thing, but you know, at a certain point people can't afford to pay for, you know, a hundred different separate journalists. I think the models will probably evolve, don't you?
JOY REID (40:53)
I agree. And I think that is a challenge, right? For growing your Substack and growing these businesses, is that, look, people are hurting. This is a really difficult time. And I'm not a person that really believes in paywalls. And so I, you know, struggle with that idea of, do we want to paywall anything? Because we want people to be informed, and we don't want economic crises to mean that you don't get access to information. So that, I think, is a huge challenge. We have to figure out a model that will allow people to access this information for free, but that these businesses can still stay afloat. Somebody smarter than me has to figure out how to do that, but I think it must be done. Like, public media, I think, is everything. And I think the attacks on PBS are absolutely egregious, because that is the thing we want, right? BBC exists in Britain for that, right? They've got to have a publicly funded media that answers not to the government but to the people. I think the PBS model is great, but it also requires people to donate. Again, if people are broke, they can't do that. I'm concerned.
DAVID FENTON (41:56)
Well, of course the BBC is funded by a fee on when people buy television sets.
JOY REID (42:01)
Oh is it? I didn't know that.
DAVID FENTON
That's how it's mostly funded, and it's kind of like a Federal Reserve model. The government appoints the head of the BBC, but then they're free to do what they want. Now it's eroded some with all this right wing pressure.
JOY REID
Yeah.
DAVID FENTON
But it's still the best imperfect model that we have.
JOY REID
I agree.
DAVID FENTON
It's a huge question, what kind of information infrastructure are we gonna build that
DAVID FENTON (42:25)
creates an informed citizenry. We have this disinformation and all this manipulation on purpose for profit, and the attention economy. When we had the fairness and the equal time doctrines, things were better. And it was when they got rid of that, when Ronald Reagan got rid of those doctrines, that Rush Limbaugh emerged. Prior to that, people would have lost their licenses if someone like Rush Limbaugh was on the air, because it was so biased and one sided. So this is a whole complex question. Maybe we can talk about it in our next section.
JOY REID (42:57)
Yes, I would love to do that, because yes, and let's just say, I think that Bill Clinton eroded some of the fairness doctrine, sort of what was left of it. He kind of, le, chucked the rest of it into the bin. And yeah, getting rid of that, and you know, if you want to talk about a lack of objectivity, what true objectivity would be is having the other side able to also answer, right? If you had Rush Limbaugh on one side, but then whoever was broadcasting,
DAVID FENTON
Sure!
JOY REID
maybe, see, a news network had to put on the equivalent on the other side, at least you'd have an answer. But yeah, we now are in this wild, wild west of disinformation. It's truly frightening. Rush Limbaugh is quaint compared to some of the disinformation that's out now. But it's red pilling people into accepting the ideas of fascism in a way that makes, again, the American experiment, it puts it in deep and serious jeopardy.
DAVID FENTON (43:42)
Can't have a democracy without an informed citizenry. All this money buying one sided viewpoints has got to be reined in. You know, in history there are over concentrations of power and then there are rebellions. And I think with the election results last night and the mayor in New York, we're seeing the beginning of the rebellion. I'm quite confident.
JOY REID (44:07)
I am too. So I am too.
DAVID FENTON (44:09)
So that's a positive note. One of the things we do here is we call it Pass the Torch. So who else is in independent media that people may not know about that you recommend they follow?
JOY REID (44:20)
I would start with Georgia Fort. She's right now facing the government bearing down on her and Don Lemon for doing their job and going into that church to report on the protests against Christian nationalism. Georgia's a brilliant journalist, so is Don Lemon, obviously. You know, I
DAVID FENTON (44:38)
I've never heard of Georgia Fort, I have to admit.
JOY REID (44:41)
Well, there you go. She's fantastic. So she is a Minneapolis-based journalist who's been covering the uprisings all the way back to George Floyd. She was one of the principal local media, independent media people who was covering that. She used to work in mainstream, like myself, but then she got pushed out of mainstream media and formed her own independent journalistic outfit. And she's absolutely brilliant. But she's somebody who's literally covering those movements from George Floyd on, on the ground. And I think she's somebody that's absolutely worth covering. I think she's great. There's a lot of people that are good like that. You know, I cover some of the refugees from mainstream media, like Jim Acosta, who's obviously fantastic. And you can find almost anybody who's been pushed out of CNN or MSNBC online. But I think finding those Georgia Forts in the world, that is like the sweet spot of really finding really great journalists who are independent and who are vetted and who have been through the curation process of mainstream media, but who are now doing their thing outside.
DAVID FENTON (45:43)
Have to check her out, and I hope everybody else will. And I hope everybody will also follow you, to have some joy and some truth.
JOY REID (45:51)
Yes, please do. And I've got my t shirt on
DAVID FENTON
There you go.
JOY REID
at TheJoyReidShow.com. That's the YouTube version. And of course, JoyAnnReid.com is the Substack. Really appreciate everybody that's already following. But yeah, please feel free to follow and share. And thank you, David. It's just such a pleasure talking with you. I have such respect for you, and you know, and your knowledge and contributions to this wide medium. So I just thank you for having me.
DAVID FENTON (46:17)
Thank you for being here. So long.
JOY REID (46:20)
Cheers.
ANNOUNCER (46:24)
Thanks to our guest Joy Reid. Watch her on YouTube at TheJoyReidShow.com. Subscribe to her Substack at substack.com/@joyannreid. And follow Joy on Instagram at @joyannreid. Got ideas for the show, want to pitch a guest, or just want to follow the podcast? We're at AgitationNation.com. Also subscribe to David's Substack and all our socials at TheFentonForecast.com. Agitation Nation is a show from the Fenton Forecast. Our theme song is Black, used with the kind permission of Jon Batiste. Our end credits theme is Power to the People by John Lennon, courtesy of EMI Records and used with permission of the John Lennon Estate. Agitation Nation is hosted by David Fenton. It's produced and edited by R.R. Robbins. Additional producing by A.P. Hernandez. Thanks to Theo Fenton. Thank you again for listening. We'll be back with another voice you need to hear next week. Until then, advocate, activate, agitate. The democracy you save may be your own.