News/Commentary

Joy Reid digs ‘WAAAAAAY back’ in DeSantis’s past for failed race-baiting ‘gotcha’ rant

June 1, 2023 | | Print Article

MSNBC host Joy Reid took to TikTok and launched what she surely thought was an epic “gotcha moment” attack on Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, and his “super anti-immigration” stance.

Calling the Florida leader “the most functionally racist governor in America,” the antipatico Reid mocked Italians as she blasted DeSantis’s great-great-grandmother, who came to America via Ellis Island in 1917.

Yes, as BizPac Review’s “Dumpster Fire News” reported on Twitter, Reid “had to go WAAAAAAY back to find dirt on Ronny D.”

She didn’t just dive into DeSantis’s family tree to make her point, Reid pulled up a Tampa Bay Times article from 2018, which told the story of Luigia Colucci, the governor’s maternal great-great-grandmother, who arrived in the States just before the Immigration Act of 1917 was passed by Congress.

“Among other restrictions on ‘undesirable’ immigrants,” Steve Contorono wrote at the time, “it barred illiterate people from entering the United States.”

Ron DeSantis “is super anti-immigration, super anti-woke, but his great-great-grandmother Luigia Colucci came to the United States, not on the Niña, the Pinta, or the Santa María, as he might have you believe given his ‘complete devotion’ to the founders and to the people who colonized this country originally and their ‘absolute and total moral goodness.,'” Reid smugly stated, affecting a stereotypical, exaggerated Italian accent as she pronounced Colucci’s name.

“Undesirables,” Reid explained, feigning shock, “included Italians. It included the Irish. It included people who they considered to be lower Europeans — and Italians were considered to be lower Europeans, not quite white enough to fit in with the Anglo-Saxon product of the original Americas — I mean, not including the Indigenous, who they wiped out with disease because Europe was filthy and they came over here with all sorts of germs.”

That, by anyone’s standards, is a lot to unpack.

On the one hand, she is blasting the Congress of 1917 for considering Italians to be “lower Europeans,” and in the same breath, she is slamming the “filthy” Europeans who first came to America.

And she seems to forget that the most common “slur” used against the turn-of-the-century Italian migrants was “WOP” — an acronym for “Without Papers.”

While the bill she refers to did affect European migrants, it was aimed at “individuals migrating from Asia,” according to the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) website.

“Under the act, people from ‘any country not owned by the United States adjacent to the continent of Asia’ were barred from immigrating to the U.S. The bill also utilized an English literacy test and an increased tax of eight dollars per person for immigrants aged 16 years and older,” EJI explains, adding, “The new bill was not meant to impact immigrants from Northern and Western Europe but targeted Asian, Mexican, and Mediterranean immigrants in an attempt to curb their migration.”

Whether you agree with the legislation or not, the fact remains that it was not in place when Colucci legally entered the United States. Ron DeSantis’s great-great-grandma came to this country legally, unlike the millions of migrants who are now flooding over the U.S. border with Mexico.

But Reid’s point, such as it is, isn’t about immigration law, it was to say that Ron DeSantis “hails from what were considered to be undesirable aliens — Italians.”

“So he, himself, would not have made it through his own immigration system, were he to be the fascist leader that he really would love to be right now, but if he were that fascist leader in 1917,” she stated.

“How weirdly ironic,” she remarked.

The logic leaps are nothing short of stunning.

Essentially, she is saying that DeSantis wouldn’t be here had the 1917 Act stayed in place, because, if he could time-travel, he’d be too busy considering Italians to be “undesirable” and kicking his great-great-grandmother out of America because he is a “fascist.”

She went on to blast the governor for not wanting “to teach black history” because he can’t stomach the thought of anyone disparaging “the Founders.”

As has been repeatedly reported, Florida requires students to study black history, just not “re-imagined” black history, such as the lessons espoused by the 1619 Project.

If Reid thought her nonsensical rant would win her fans, she was, once again, mistaken.

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Melissa Fine
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