Mean Girls Of MSNBC Didn't Allow Ronna McDaniel A Seat At The Table | Bobby Burack
This column originally ran on March 29, 2024. OutKick is rerunning the piece as part of our Thanksgiving Best-of series.
The Mean Girls of MSNBC got their way.
Jen Psaki, Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid did not welcome former Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel into their clique. They met her with fierce, catty rejection.
The trio moaned on television that the new girl made them uncomfortable. Like all spoiled brats, they demanded someone make it better (with the help of blokes like Chuck Todd and Joe Scarborough).
Their bosses, at least in name, predictably pampered them by alleviating their distress. NBC fired McDaniel on Tuesday, a day after the Mean Girls screeched.
The privileged ladies judged their new classmate before she arrived to class. "At least the mean girls in Mean Girls were nice to Cady Heron's face at first," said friend of OutKick Lexie Ridgen while providing a comment for the column. "The mean girls of MSNBC didn't even pretend to give Ronna a chance."
Psaki, Maddow, and Reid fixated on the notion that McDaniel "lied" on behalf of Donald Trump about the integrity of the 2020 presidential election. Clearly, their bosses did their due diligence on her previous commentary before hiring her and thought she was fetch — until the Mean Girls caterwauled.
The most self-righteous among us look in the mirror literally, but rarely figuratively.
"This isn’t about red versus blue. This is about truth versus lies," said Psaki while taking offense to comparisons of her hiring at NBC to McDaniel's.
The yes-persons in Psaki's circle wouldn't dare notify her that there are web pages dedicated exclusively to her many lies while serving as press secretary for Joe Biden.
We enjoy this one from The Federalist, entitled "Jen Psaki Lies About Lying." The piece cites the time Psaki lied about Afghanistan, called the 2016 election "rigged," lied about Border Patrol agents "whipping" Haitian migrants, and misled reporters about Omicron travel restrictions.
I'm not big for corny nicknames. But Little Red Lying Hood always gets me.
Meanwhile, Maddow and Reid reveled in McDaniel's firing on Tuesday. They said while they support diverse opinions – another obvious lie – they could not stand to work with a known liar like McDaniel.
Like Psaki, Maddow and Reid were oblivious to the sanctimoniousness of their commentary.
It's difficult to fathom that any "lies" McDaniel supposedly told as the RNC spokesperson, working on behalf of the party, were more profound than the routine lies Maddow perpetuated about the Russia Hoax.
No television host benefited more from falsifying the context around the Trump-Russia investigation than Rachel Maddow. Her primetime show experienced unprecedented growth at MSNBC from 2016 and 2019, when almost nightly she ensured her viewers that Trump colluded with Putin to take the vote from their hands.
Regina George, the queen bee in the film, would be proud to learn that Maddow never once acknowledged the objective falsity of the myths she spoon-fed her very impressionable viewers. Instead, the network rewarded Maddow with a $40 million per year contract in 2022 due to the popularity she amassed, in large part, via her lies pertaining to Trump and Russia.
And then there's Joy-Ann Reid.
Before her full-on pivot to anti-white bigotry, Reid was best known for lying about old blog posts. In 2018, Reid saved her career by asserting that the lengthy list of homophobic posts on her blog was the work of a hacker.
In addition to the absurdity of her claim, past comments on Twitter in which Reid suggested Ann Coulter and other conservative women were "men" poured colder water on her lazy excuse.
Still, beware: Joy Reid accuses those who doubt the sincerity of her hacker claim to be, wait for it, racist.
The Mean Girls of MSNBC are like the mean girls with whom you graduated. They expect compassion for their fibs. They were "having a bad day." Yet when they think you lie, they demand you atone and beg them for forgiveness.
They set the rules for the in-crowd, that only they can break themselves:
Psaki, Maddow and Reid are the co-workers who offer you a Kalteen Bar for lunch in what appears to be a sharing gesture.
Fellow MSNBC staffers best be careful what they grab to eat from the desks around the office:
Perhaps what's most cringe is the moral superiority that the MSNBC hosts flaunt. They view MSNBC as not a regular network, but a cool network – shout out to Regina's mom.
Psaki, Maddow, and Reid hold themselves up as if they provide the rest of society a service, as if viewers ought to be in awe of their intelligence and presence.
They carry themselves as above the rest of us, thus believing they qualify to decide who is worthy of a seat at the table. Obviously, Ronna McDaniel wasn't.
The MSNBC hosts have near zero tolerance for those with whom they disagree politically. To them, political ideologies are not a battle of not left versus right, but right versus wrong. Of course, they decide what is right and what day of the week you can wear pink.
Psaki, Maddow and Reid live in a bubble, unaware of the trials and tribulations that everyday Americans face. In their advantaged world, only their petty problems matter – like almost having to work with someone with opposite political backgrounds.
Your problems don’t matter.
Mean Girls require those around them to be subservient to their orders. They naturally bully, embarrass, and destroy any dissenters. They try to destroy Ronna McDaniel's media career. She was a dissenter. Her mere presence would’ve cramped the style of the locker room they control.
McDaniel never had a chance. Only a submissive, token conservative may – like a Nicolle Wallace.
The bullies have a culture to preserve. MSNBC is their network now. The executives who fired Ronna McDaniel on their behalf affirmed that statement this week.
We suspect if anyone asked the rest of the MSNBC staffers to raise their hands if the Means Girls ever personally victimized them, they'd naturally recreate a closing scene from the film:
With considerably more diversity of skin color, of course.