Joy Ann Reid managed to make a Brokeback Mountain out of a molehill. But this time she had help.

As the world knows, Joy made some mean homophobic comments on her blog a decade ago. She apologized for those remarks back in December of 2017. That was fine, that was appropriate and any drama or scandal should have ended then. But as everyone knows, another batch of homophobic posts was uncovered recently.

This time Joy didn’t handle the uproar as well. She could have just reminded everyone that she’d already apologized for homophobic remarks, or she could have just apologized again, right? But no, this time Joy tried using the same explanation that’s been used unsuccessfully by children and accused felons since time began…  Somebody Else Did It.

The theory is that over a decade ago, Somebody Else hacked into the Reid Report blog and posted articles without Joy noticing. And this Somebody Else, a most benevolent hacker, continued writing blog posts, some quite long and containing pictures, for over two years without taking credit and without Joy noticing or even, apparently, ever changing her password.

Sure…

You probably heard the blow back from this too, only it wasn’t the homophobic comments, it was the silly “external intrusion” excuse that everyone found incredibly lame.

Then the hacker revelation was followed by the well rehearsed apology on her show which seemed sincere but still a little lame.

Pro Tip: Apologizing for something, but qualifying that apology by saying you don’t think you really did it, is not an actual apology.

But as I said at the beginning, Joy had some help coming up with this brilliant damage control strategy. She was getting advice from God’s Gift to politics, Shoq, aka Matt Edelstein.

If you know of Shoq then enough said.

She never considered that perhaps she had an unwelcome editor in her blog until I suggested it. -Shoq

The Somebody Else theory was created by Shoq.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Mr Edelstein, you can check out his response to the Reid Report mess on his blog which I’ve archived here so you don’t have to expose yourself to his actual blog. The bullshit is pretty deep there. Shoq’s article consists of his unique blend of superiority, condescension and namedropping that is uniquely him.

I am the one who found the posts in the archive back in December and brought them to Joy’s attention. She was absolutely stunned by every word in them. We read them aloud together. She’d obviously never seen any of them, and had no idea what else there was to see until I pointed each item out. Though she was obviously upset, we were laughing at what a terrible job they had done trying to sound like her. We both felt no one would take such poor forgeries seriously. -Shoq

With his response, Matt tries to spin the whole incident into science fiction. He claims Joy didn’t write the homophobic posts and no sensible person could believe she did. So anyone who disagrees with him is not sensible because sensible people will believe that Somebody Else Did It. It looks like his input helped turn what should have been a molehill into the Brokeback Mountain that made national headlines.

The person who published these things has been trolling Joy for years. I strongly suspect he’s known they were there all along, and was just playing them out over time to inflict maximum damage -Shoq

Trying to kill the messenger is another bad move that reeks of conspiracy theory. Shoq implies that Jamie, the person who posted screen captures of Reid’s posts on Twitter, may be the Somebody Else who inserted the posts into Reid’s blog a decade ago. And then Jamie patiently waited until 2018 to post them. Somehow Jamie knew a Miami blogger would have a national TV show some day and became a blogging hacker to discredit Reid.

I read through several year’s worth of Joy’s blog on the Library of Congress. The nasty articles were in keeping with her writing style and her opinions on gay marriage very typical of the attitudes held by many people at that time. I can’t tell the difference between the posts she admits to writing and those she claims were written by Somebody Else.

Archive.org was contacted by Reid’s attorney in December suggesting a third party intrusion may have occurred and that Somebody Else may have altered archived copies of Reid’s blog. A hacking like this isn’t possible, but I’d guess the incriminating posts were deleted from Reid Report but there were copies of those posts at archive.org and they were hoping Archive.org would delete them if hacking was suggested. Archive.org didn’t cooperate but someone found out Archive.org will automatically remove archived items retroactively if the robots.txt of a website denies them access so Poof! The Reid Report is no longer on the Wayback Machine at Archive.org. Unfortunately for Joy and Shoq, there are still copies of the archived pages stored by the Library Of Congress…

A cyber security expert was hired to find out how Joy’s blog was hacked.  Or, perhaps more accurately, a cyber security expert was hired to find a plausible explanation of how the blog could have been hacked. Then this was reported to the police and another report filed with the FBI, most likely through the IC3 website, so it could be said that the police and FBI are investigating this horrific crime.

Of course, the Feds and cops have the time and interest to investigate a blog hacking that nobody noticed for 10 years, where no money or government secrets were stolen, where the hacker made contributions to the blog instead of defacing it. Forget terrorism and identity theft, gotta find that Somebody Else who hacked Joy’s blog in 2008 and made fun of Ann Coulter’s adam’s apple.

Thinking people are gullible enough to believe in an impossible “external intrusion” is actually more offensive than any of the homophobic comments on Reid Report. Taking career advice from Shoq was just as unwise as trying to tell Archive.Org that their archives may have been hacked.

I haven’t blogged as long as Joy Reid so I don’t have as many posts as her but I look back on something I wrote a couple years ago and often have no memory of writing it. I could easily choose to think Somebody Else wrote it, but that would be crazy. Because yes, Joy, people learn and grow and evolve. When looking back on attitudes and beliefs expressed in writings from years ago, it can seem like they were written by Somebody Else, and in a self evolutionary, philosophical way this is true. But it’s not literally true. Believing that would be self delusion.

So by now, this drama has pretty much faded away as newer news takes over the headlines. Somebody Else will never be found and eventually people will forget all about the “investigation”. But Joy Ann Reid took some bad advice to assuage her ego and sense of self rather than simply accept responsibility for what she wrote. That’s a shame, because while the specifics may be forgotten, the feeble excuses and cover up may not be. Credibility is hard to replace once it’s been lost.