'A humiliation to Black people': Joy Reid unloads on the Republican Party for nominating Herschel Walker

07 December 2022

Shortly after NBC News projected that incumbent Democratic United States Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock defeated GOP nominee Herschel Walker in Georgia's runoff contest on Tuesday evening, MSNBC host Joy Reid tore into Republicans for picking Walker as their candidate.

Warnock is the Peach State's first Black senator elected to a full term.

Walker – who had the backing of his friend, former President Donald Trump – was mired in scandals that included credible allegations of domestic abuse, lying about his résumé, revelations that he paid for abortions for ex-girlfriends despite claiming to be "pro-life," having secret children, maintaining a residence in Texas, rambling incoherently about climate change, and his never-ending torrent of gaffes.

Yet the conservative evangelical voters who align themselves with Trump's Make America Great Again bloc brazenly looked past all of Walker's issues because they knew that Walker would be a reliable right-wing legislative rubber stamp in the upper congressional chamber.

To Reid, Walker's loss was both a relief as well as a searing indictment of the Republican Party's detachment from decency and reality:

But the problem is, at some point, with a country that's becoming more racially diverse and more diverse in terms of religion, you're going to have to do what Michael Steele did when he was chairman of the R[epublican] N[ational] C[ommittee]. You've gotta try to appeal to non-white voters. You just have to because the demographics are what they are. I ran into my cousin in Atlanta because he moved to Georgia from Queens, [New York]. And a lot of people are moving around and moving south. And so a lot of these states like North Carolina and Georgia are just gonna change more.

Reid then offered a scathing assessment of Walker's tumultuous candidacy and those who supported him:

So at some point, Republicans – yeah it works for y'all for now – you're gonna have to make a decision. And I'm sorry, but the Black candidates you put up and the Muslim candidates can't be Doctor [Mehmet] Oz – at a certain point, people aren't gonna go for that. You can't humiliate the people that you want to bring in.

And I'm sorry, but Herschel Walker was a humiliation to Black people. The people I talked to in Atlanta and all over the country who have been all in my phone saying 'please promise me this man won't be a senator,' because they've been absolutely kicked in the face and humiliated and had their noses rubbed in the dirt by the fact of his nomination. Because he was so inadequate, so bad, so – what did [Dave] Chappelle say? – demonstrably stupid that it made it look like you're mocking Black people. That ain't a strategy.

Watch below or at this link.

From Your Site Articles