Joy Reid, host of The ReidOut, one of the poorest-performing shows on an already-flagging MSNBC, was shown the door over the weekend. Executives let it be known that this week would be her final one as an anchor at the network. She won’t be missed. After all, Reid was arguably best known for her vicious race-baiting and her hysterical, hyperbolic takes on the state of the American nation.

Night in, night out, viewers of The ReidOut would be warned that racism, white supremacy and the far right could be found around every corner. She called the 2024 presidential race a ‘crucial election where one side stands for freedom while the other meets the textbook definition of fascism’. In 2022, she even slammed Thanksgiving, alerting everyone in time for the nation’s favourite holiday that America was founded on ‘genocide’ and ‘white supremacy’.

Reid’s unflinching identitarianism often took her down some unpleasant paths. She dismissed the media interest in young murder victim Gabby Petito as a product of ‘missing white woman syndrome’. She also had zero sympathy for Kyle Rittenhouse, the then 17-year-old who broke down crying in court when facing accusations of murder, after shooting two men in self-defence. In a video that was viewed over a million times on Twitter, she blasted the teenager’s ‘white vigilantism’ and ‘male white tears’. Rittenhouse was later acquitted.

Her woke piety was almost somewhat undercut by her previous comments, now disavowed, about homosexuality. She has distanced herself from several blog posts from the late 2000s, in which she wrote that gay sex is ‘gross’, among other homophobic remarks. ‘I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things’, she said in 2018. She even tried to blame an elaborate hack for those words appearing on her website, before eventually apologising.

Reid has also sported some conspiratorial tendencies over the years. Following the first attempt to assassinate Trump last year, she said: ‘We still don’t know for sure whether Donald Trump was hit by a bullet.’

Now that her own fortunes are on the wane, Reid would like all us to feel very sorry for her. In a widely shared video posted on Monday, she weepily tells a podcast host that ‘my show had value’ and ‘what I was doing had value’. She then went on to reiterate every incendiary position she ever took. ‘I went hard’, she said, on everything from BLM to the 1619 Project to Israel-Palestine. It’s as if she thinks these were original or interesting points of view you couldn’t find elsewhere.

I suspect Reid only really lasted as long as she did because the craven corporate hacks at MSNBC thought – wrongly, it turns out – that there was a fortune to be made pumping out identitarian screeds every evening. But even the uber-liberal MSNBC audience seems to have become tired of all that.

Even though Reid is an outrage-generation machine, her recent ratings have been consistently poor. According to former Fox News star Megyn Kelly, Reid’s show last Thursday had a dismal 59,000 viewers in the all-important 25- to 54-year-olds category. For context, Kelly claims that during her time on Fox a bad night would be getting 300,000 or so in the same demographic. Still, these obvious ratings issues haven’t stopped Reid’s fans from blaming her firing on her race. Former MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann says her sacking ‘is racist and maybe worse’.

The problems at MSNBC are not limited to Reid’s show. The Daily Mail reports that the channel just had its lowest-rated January in history. ‘In terms of percentages’, according to the Mail, ‘the figures were even more alarming; MSNBC essentially lost nearly half of its 25-54 audience since this time last year, continuing a 65 per cent slide seen since the election’. The whole liberal media’s model of constantly warning that America has succumbed to fascism seems to have largely unravelled.

Who knows what Joy Reid will do next after MSNBC. Let’s hope Americans aren’t only turning their backs on her show, but also on the vicious identity politics she so gleefully championed.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.