Joy Reid got into it with Piers Morgan after being asked about her firing from MSNBC and why she has repeatedly played ‘the race card.’

During Morgan’s YouTube show on Thursday, he questioned whether she truly believed that her show’s cancellation on MSNBC, The ReidOut, was influenced by race. The program’s viewership dropped from an initial 3 million per episode to a low of 1.1 million before her departure.

‘Now Joy. Let’s be honest here. I don’t think your dismissal after all those years was due to your skin color or the fact that you’re a black woman,’ the British journalist remarked to his guest.

‘I think your removal was because your show’s popularity declined significantly – it’s a common occurrence in television. That’s why you were let go. Why bring race into it?’

Reid –  who had just sat through a series of clips showing her on CUNY professor Mark Lamont Hill‘s podcast last week where she said ‘white fragility shaped [MSNBC execs’] decisions’ – responded by accusing Morgan of playing the race card.

A back-and-forth ensued, after which Reid took to her own YouTube to warn about the then yet-to-be released interview’s contents, framing it as a ‘race-baiting ambush’.

In one of the clips played, Reid had insisted that her ratings started to slump after she said on-air that Americans were more moved by the plight of Ukrainians than that of the Palestinians because they ‘were white.’

‘Also, I’m a black woman so I’m sure that makes [Donald Trump] angrier when I say things,’ Reid said elsewhere. She also said the black perspective on current events is not generally ‘received very well in the news business.’

After being confronted with the clips and Morgan’s question, Reid appeared to deflect.  

‘First of all, I love the fact that your “play the race card” is your version of the race card. You literally are so fixated on trying to racialize conversations with me, Piers,’ she said

‘You play the race card!’ Morgan yelled in more response, seemingly in disbelief. ‘In more conversations in your ten years at MSNBC – come on!’

Both began to shout over each other as they tried to get their points across.

‘All right. The bottom line is you take an entire conversation that I had with Mark Lamont Hill and picked the bits you can racialize,’ Reid maintained.

‘This is your shtick. And I get that this is your shtick.’

‘Oh you racialize everything, Joy!’ a now smiling Morgan shot back.

‘I get it. I understand this is your shtick, Piers, and listen – game recognizes game,’ said Reid.  

Morgan, laughing at this point, hurled the same accusation back.

Reid then brought race into the equation again, describing how she found it interesting that Morgan, ‘as a white European,’ believed that ‘people of color talk[ing] about race’ constituted ‘racializing conversations.’

‘But when people like you fixate on, “well, Barack Obama was a black president – why don’t you object to that?” 

‘That is racializing a conversation about the former president of the United States,’ she said.

Morgan, again, laughed in response, in what amounted to a noticeably tense interview that persisted for the prescheduled 45 minutes.

‘I’m sure you find that charming and funny,’ Reid said as Morgan laughed.

‘I find it hilarious! Because you’re the one who said Donald Trump… is a “white Facist”‘, he replied, as Reid repeatedly interrupted.

‘You and your friend Donald Trump,’ she said, before attempting to explain away the assertion.  

‘If that makes you sad and uncomfortable, I can’t help you, Piers,’ she said.

Morgan, in turn, said Reid’s past comments and perception of her firing instead ‘makes here a little bit of a hypocrite.’ Reid laughed in return.

Earlier on during the talk, Morgan brought up former president Obama, asking if she knew how many people he deported during his eight years on the White House. 

‘I don’t know, and I don’t care,’ answered Reid, after saying that she doesn’t ‘buy’ any statistics from the Trump administration when it comes to the southern border. 

 Reid also compared conservatives’ perception of migrants to how slaves were once viewed, causing Morgan to ask, ‘What’s that got to do with how many come over the southern border illegally?’

‘The difference is now, if you- let’s say you end all undocumented migration to the United States, all that would do is put a burden on the poll part of it, because you have industries that desperately rely on farm labor, on construction labor.’

Morgan responded by asking ‘why shouldn’t their be a system’ for legal immigration, while bringing up how people like him have had to file the necessary paperwork to stay in the US.  

‘That is how a normal, well-controlled border works,’ he said as Reid rolled her eyes. ‘Because America’s economy needs a lot of workers, we should simply have a system where anyone can come in. 

‘And if that’s not your belief, how would you regulate the southern border?’

Reid replied by saying ‘if the policy were applied the same across the board, it would be one thing. It’s not’. 

‘Marco Rubio’s grandfather didn’t do it the right way – he overstayed an order of deportation, stayed anyway, and was allowed to remain in the country,’ she said.

She also brought up how Elon Musk’s brother recently said he and his sibling overstayed both of their student visas and started a business, ‘which would have been illegal for someone on a student visa to be allowed to stay.

‘They were white migrants, and somehow that was OK. 

‘What we’re seeing is a selective enforcement of this outrage.’

During another exchange, Morgan flat-out asked Reid whether she believed ‘children at school should have access to books in their library which involves strap on dildos?’, leaving her briefly speechless.  

Morgan had just played a clip of the then MSNBC star questioning why a mother took issue with a book that follows a black, queer individual being in school libraries – despite it containing graphic sex scenes that included a strap-on dildo. 

‘What is the expertise that you have and other Moms for Liberty advocates have, to decide that a book an award-winning book like All Boys Aren’t Blue isn’t appropriate for students to read?’ Reid asked Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice during the 2024 episode of the ReidOut.  

Justice eventually quipped: ‘In what context is a strap-on dildo acceptable for public school?’

‘Tell me what the context around the strap-on dildo or the rape of a minor child by a teacher [is acceptable?]’

Justice’s response quickly went viral, after Reid censored Justice’s language in a subsequent post promoting her MSNBC show.   

‘In what context is a XXXX-XX XXXXX acceptable for public school?’ she wrote on X.

Morgan, meanwhile, played a second clip to a now smiling Reid to further solidify his point, where Reid compared Republicans’ approach to legislature that seeks to limit transitions for minors to stratagems seen by Nazi Germany.

Before Reid could get a word in, Morgan referred to past comments from Reid that many deemed homophobic.

Offered up in a blog from a then unknown Reid between 2007 and 2009, the posts first spawned controversy upon being unearthed in 2018 – after which Reid claimed she had been hacked before issuing a groveling apology.

Morgan pointed to one where Reid had expressed distaste toward the movie Brokeback Mountain due to it containing intimate scenes between two men.

‘You said you don’t want to watch the two male characters in Brokeback Mountain. You were talking about having sex. 

‘”Does that make me homophobic?”‘ Morgan said, quoting Reid. ‘”Probably.”‘

In another, Reid referred to the then Florida governor Charlie Crist as ‘Miss Charlie’ and Senator Lindsey Graham ‘Miss Lindsey’ while using the tag ‘gay politicians.’

Others questioned the legitimacy of Israel’s land claims.  

Morgan pointed out how Reid insisted at the time that the posts were so ‘completely alien’ to her that she hired cyber security technicians to see whether anyone had manipulated her words.

‘And the reality is they’ve not been able to prove it,’ Morgan said.

‘Now you’re not at MSNBC. Now you’re on your own doing your own thing, and you don’t have to worry about repercussions and stuff. Are you prepared to finally come clean and just admit that was your blog and you did say those things?’ 

‘You know, Pierce, I might have known that you would use this opportunity and interview and that – this was your  purpose, right?’ Reid, now smiling, responded. 

‘This is your purpose and that’s fine. This is your show and you can do whatever you like. 

‘You know, I could sit here and go on and on and fight with you about your strange weird obsession with Megan Markle, but I won’t do that because that would be rude,’ she added. 

‘But the point being that, I was very open with my employer at the time about what happened with that old site, which I stopped writing in, you know, before I even came back into the NBC family. 

‘And what I have not really talked about publicly – but what I can tell you – is that I had a very legitimate reason for being concerned about it because I was also on the radio at that time,’ Reid revealed.

‘And the things that I was literally talking about on the radio were quite the opposite of the things that were in that site. 

‘That is the reason that we began investigating what was going on with that site. 

‘And there was also someone who I do not know, who I still do not know, who had login access to my site for years that we did not even discover because I hadn’t looked at the site for years,’ she claimed for the first time.

‘I don’t know who that is, I don’t know why they had access to the site, but had I not been open about that, I would have been definitely fired or, you know, there would have been some repercussions. 

‘I was open with my company about that, I’ve been very open,’ she continued.

Morgan, in return, asked again if she penned the posts – to which she replied, ‘I’m willing to take responsibility for anything that was on that site.’ 

The rest of the sitdown was similarly contentious, with both Morgan and Reid taking to their respective pages to offer disclaimers about the 45-minute encounter. 

‘Now, why did I go along with such an idea?’ Reid, 56, asked during a late night live stream Wednesday of her decision to sit down with Morgan.

‘Well, sometimes you do want to actually talk to people on the right, and see if they’ve got anything interesting to say.’

The ReidOut, meanwhile, raked in nearly 3 million viewers during its first year. 

During the 2024 election, the number was down to about 1.1–1.4 million, as Morgan mentioned 0 after years of anti-Trump rhetoric and  social media rants ‘gave the Standards Department heartburn,’ an insider at the network told Politico.

NBC News boss Cesar Conde and former MSNBC boss Rashida Jones began plotting to get rid of Reid in late 2023, sources told the site in April.

Weeks before, a well-placed executive inside MSNBC told Daily Reid knew her days were numbered due to the one year renewal and pay cut – something Politico framed as ‘severance in drag.’

Instead of taking the hint and quitting after making the negotiations several months ago before the 2024 election, Reid stayed on until her firing in February.

‘[Reid] should have been totally unsurprised by her firing,’ the source said, claiming that Reid should have seen the writing on the wall for months. 

Additionally, the executive claimed that Reid’s vocal stance on the Israel-Hamas war was problematic inside the network. 

They cited Reid’s ‘very intense’ conference calls with show staff that left the impression that she had sympathy for the impact of the war on the Gazan people but little for Israelis.

MSNBC at the time had nothing to say on-the-record about the claims.

Reid, meanwhile, has also suggested that she lost her job at least in part because of her pro-Palestinian advocacy. She reiterated those claims on Hill’s podcast last week. 

Her new show, meanwhile, launched on YouTube June 9. It has has roughly 220,000 subscribers.

Morgan’s show, in contrast, has more than 4million.

Watch the full interview on Piers Morgan Uncensored on YouTube.