Some people just can’t take the hint to disappear.
Take Joy Reid, for example. The former host of The ReidOut broadcast on the former network known as MSNBC was a headline-seeking, attention-grabbing, media whore who never let an opportunity slip by without trying to promote controversy.
The network decided not to renew her TV show when her contract was up in early 2025. Her smears of Jews, gays, white people, and others probably had something to do with it, but MSNBC was staffed by executives with a certain tone deafness, so it’s hard to say how big a role her bigotry and racism played in her demise.
Instead of disappearing as any good, decent, boring leftist should, Reid doubled down and launched The Joy Reid Show on YouTube.
With a voice made for a mime show and a face made for radio, Reid continues to annoy, shock, and disturb anyone with half a brain. Of course, that suits her fine. Her appeal lies with a certain segment of the left that, in the immortal words of Alfred the Butler, “Just want to watch the world burn.”
Reid recently turned her limited intellect on a taboo subject guaranteed to get dummies like me to write about her. She shared a video claiming that “Jingle Bells” was written “to make fun of black people.”
“In the video she shared to her 1.3 million Instagram followers, a man in a Christmas sweater and Santa hat stands on the streets of Medford, Massachusetts near a plaque marks the site where James Lord Pierpont is believed to have penned the song in 1850,” the New York Post reports.
The video caption reads, “This is where a racist Confederate soldier wrote ‘Jingle Bells’ to make fun of black people.
A “racist confederate soldier?” In 1850? No, there wasn’t even a “Confederate States of America” for another ten years, and James Lord Pierpont may have later been a Confederate soldier, but when the song was written in 1850, he wasn’t. Was he a racist? Probably, as was the vast majority of Northerners in 1850.
The video captions go on to claim Pierpont — whose nephew grew up to be legendary financier J.P. Morgan — was hard up for cash when he composed “The One Horse Open Sleigh,” and did so expressly for its use in performances in which white actors put on blackface to “mock and caricature black people trying to participate in winter activities.”
It alleges that the lyrics “laughing all the way” in the song “likely” is a reference to a racist comedic routine of the day known as the “Laughing Darkie.”
Pierpont patented the song in 1859 and changed its name to the familiar “Jingle Bells” before the start of the Civil War, at which point the video claims he “abandoned his family” to join the Confederate Army, and wrote Southern fight songs to “rouse men defending slavery.”
Reid, whose low-rated MSNBC show “The ReidOut” was cancelled in February after nearly five years, has a storied history of racially-charged fearmongering and bizarre statements, including peddling a false claim that President Trump wanted “reparations for white people” last year.
Is it even possible that “Jingle Bells” was written for minstrel shows and meant to be performed in blackface? Pierpont was a struggling songwriter at the time he penned “Jingle Bells” and would probably have wanted his song to be performed by anyone who wanted it for any reason and was willing to pay for the privilege.
But there is zero evidence that Pierpont wrote the ditty explicitly for minstrel shows. That’s just nuts, and the obscure academic, Kyna Hamill, who postulated the connection between the song and minstrelry, admits as much.
Joy Reid doesn’t care about the song’s provenance. She only cares about the controversy her postings can stir up. If she really cared about searching for the origins of “Jingle Bells” and where it came from, who performed it, and how it became such an iconic totem of Christmas time, she would have left race in the background to uncover the truth behind the song.
However, that would require actually thinking and researching the subject beyond the shallow, racialist idiocy she tried to present.
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