Joy Reid’s response to reports alleging she published very “problematic” articles on her now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, is becoming less believable by the day.
Rather than apologize, like she did the last time Internet sleuths uncovered anti-gay rhetoric on her old website, Reid is asking us to believe she is the victim of a vast conspiracy. The way she tells it, she didn’t actually write posts like that one that suggested Harriet Miers is a closeted lesbian or the one that claimed “adult gay men tend to be attracted to very young, post-pubescent types.”
Rather, Reid said this weekend, “external” hackers infiltrated her since-deleted blog and “manipulated material” to “include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology.” She claims she has asked the FBI to help her find the people who’ve wronged her.
Reid also trotted out an independent security “expert” Tuesday who claimed he “discovered that login information used to access the blog was available on the Dark Web and that fraudulent entries – featuring offensive statements – were entered with suspicious formatting and time stamps.”
Oh, come on.
Reid deleted her old blog. That much is true. But that’s not where certain amateur detectives claim they found her old scribblings, many of which were published circa 2006. The people uncovering Reid’s alleged blog post have relied mostly on the Wayback Machine, which preserves online content even if it has been deleted by the author.
This leaves us with a few options. Either Reid’s supposed hackers infiltrated her blog with “Dark Web” credentials more than 10 years ago in the hopes that it would be archived and that someone would find it in the next decade, after she had made it big and gotten her own show (um … yeah) — or someone hacked the Wayback Machine itself and manipulated it with anti-gay posts they hoped to falsely attribute to the MSNBC host.
As to the first option: Puh-lease.
As to the second: The people who maintain the Wayback Machine published a statement this week saying they’ve found nothing to substantiate Reid’s “claims of manipulation.”
This brings us to a bigger problem for Reid: Wayback isn’t the only website archiving Internet content. There’s also the Library of Congress, whose records also falsify Reid’s explanation. CNNMoney reported Tuesday: “The Library of Congress archive reviewed by CNNMoney … contains the disputed posts and lists them as having been archived on January 12, 2006.”
Translation: At least one of the Reid’s “fake posts” is definitely real. Either that, or these shadowy anti-Reid operatives hacked the Library of Congress.
Or — hello, Occam’s Razor — Reid wrote these recently uncovered posts, just like she wrote the earlier ones for which he apologized.
No one would blame you for taking the Wayback Machine’s and the Library of Congress’ word over her increasingly fantastical version of events. You have no reason to doubt either group, whereas you’d be a fool to take Reid at her word.
