Joy Reid dedicated her final MSNBC episode on Monday to America’s history with successful resistance campaigns.
“We begin tonight with what I think is the question when you are in the midst of a crisis, and specifically a crisis of democracy: How do you resist when fascism isn’t just coming, it’s already here?” Reid said. “What, if anything, can you do about it? For one thing, you can try to learn from history, from what people in this situation, in countries around the world and in America, have done before. As my friend Rachel Maddow always says, History is here to help.”
News broke on Sunday morning that Reid’s show was canceled, along with many other MSNBC shakeups.
Reid went on to list several examples of resistance from the 19th and 20th centuries, including Harriet Tubman’s work on the Underground Railroad and “taking up arms during the Civil War,” along with “the women’s movement and the worker’s rights movement and the Stonewall gay rights movement.” Reid noted each example had “been versions of the fight to make this a free country for everyone and to have a true multiracial democracy, and that is history’s most important lesson, right? That the most important thing — the first rule — is to fight back, to never stop resisting.”
She continued, “Do not obey in advance, as Tim Snyder put it, do not take the knee, to throw in a Game of Thrones reference, even if it’s scary or uncomfortable or inconvenient. Just keep saying no or finding creative ways to say no in small ways and large. Medgar Evers said ‘Do not shop where they will not employ you.’ Dr King championed the Montgomery bus boycotts to become the leader of the civil rights movement. The labor rights movement shut down factories and hobbled industries to win the 40-hour work week that you enjoy right now, and more recently, to ensure the right of workers to work from home during COVID. People have marched against the Vietnam war and the war in Iraq and against the decimation of Gaza using our tax dollars. You don’t always win every battle, but the whole thing is about resisting.”
A message from MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler confirmed Reid’s cancellation on Monday. Jen Psaki is now set to take over the 9 p.m hour on Tuesdays-Fridays when Rachel Maddow finishes in April, and The Weekend hosts Alicia Menendez, Michael Steele and Symone Sanders-Townsend will shift to the 7 p.m. hour, while hosting a two hour show on Mondays from 7-9 p.m.
In a Zoom call with Win for Black Women on Sunday, a tearful Reid said that “my show had value” and “what I was doing had value.”
She went on to say that she was not sorry for going “hard” on “so many issues,” including Black Lives Baby, Asian hate, immigrant rights, Trump’s threat to the Constitution, The 1619 Project and “yes, Gaza, and the fact that we as the American people have a right to object to little babies being bombed.
“Where I come down on that is I’m not sorry, because those things are of God,” she said.
Maddow also spoke about the cancellations on Monday, telling viewers, “In all of the jobs I have had in all of the years I have been alive, there is no colleague for whom I have had more affection and more respect than Joy Reid. I love everything about her. I have learned so much from her. … I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at MSNBC, and personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door. It is not my call and I understand that. But that’s what I think.”
Maddow said it was “unnerving” that “both of our non-white hosts in primetime are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend.”
Phang, whose show will end in April, addressed her own cancellation in a note on X, writing, “I promise to continue to speak up, to speak out, and to fight the good fight.”