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The Joy Reid Show
Piers Morgan's Race-Baiting Ambush | The Joy Reid Show, Jul 16, 2025 Episode
00:25:31
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- [00:01]
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- [00:34]
Joy Reid
Okay hello everyone, good evening and welcome to the Joy Read Show. So I got a little question for you. Have you ever thought about and would you like to know and let me actually start just by reminding myself just how thirsty Piers Morgan is. And you'll be forgiven for not knowing who Piers Morgan is. He won the Celebrity Apprentice with Donald Trump way back in 2008 and was considered a journalist working at a time for a British tabloid called the Daily Mirror when the paper was implicated in a scandal for hacking the phones of famous people, though he himself denied involvement. And he has hosted various other canceled news shows on CNN and ITV and other place, including podcasts such as the one that he hosts now. But mainly as again someone who considered himself a member of the media, he has become, in this current iteration of his career, a rather thirsty little troll, desperate it seems, for attention and not just from Princess Megan. As part of our press rollout for this show, our PR team booked me on the Piers Morgan podcast. Now why did I go along with such an idea? Well, sometimes you do want to actually talk to people on the right and see if they've got anything interesting to say. And of late, you know, some people on the right have had interesting things to say and of course I do love a debate. Some on the right in the recent several weeks, including peers, have been making a weird amount of sense about Israel and the genocide in Gaza and about Trump's weirdness over releasing the Epstein files or whatever you call what the DOJ has on the late pedophile who was Trump's bestie for 15 years. So I figured okay, wouldn't be my first choice. But why not? Especially as folks begin to realize the reality of this nightmare that we all find ourselves in. And here on the screen I want to put up the email that Piers Team sent to my PR agency to get me to come on the show and I'm going to quote so it would be a free flowing conversation covering several topics in Joy's wheelhouse, including the Trump administration, Elon Musk establishing a new Political party, ICE raids and news of the day. We'd also like to discuss her leaving MSNBC and setting up her new online venture. Okay, sounds compelling, but it turns out that is not what the interview was about. Instead, piers used a 45 minute interview to ambush me, mainly about his favorite subject, race. Specifically why black people like me talk so much about race, especially when it comes to Donald Trump. Which is ironic, right? Because in bringing up the fact of race and Donald Trump, that is in fact peers literally talking about race, specifically, Piers demanded to know why I don't call the black president a fascist for deporting more brown people than Trump has. And why I brought up being black at MSNBC in an interview with Mark Lamont Hill and various other topics, most of them weirdly connected to me being black. Because of course that is Pierce's shtick, right? Just like it's Donald Trump's and Fox's and just about every other right wing content producer. What the right loves to do is fixate on race in order to accuse black people of fixating on race. Donald Trump has literally run three race centered presidential campaigns who whose themes were Mexico is sending us rapists, African countries are shitholes, and Africans and Muslims should not be allowed to come here, and Haitians will eat your pets. If that is not a campaign based on identity politics, I don't know what is. Trump is literally the white identity politics politician. And sorry peers, hate to break it to you, but white identity politics unfortunately sometimes also appeals to to non white people who want to identify with the power of the majority, including some immigrants who in this past election wound up voting to get their own family members deported. Right wingers like Piers love to weaponize the lived experiences of black and brown people to claim that even discussing those experiences constitutes playing the race card, giving people like Piers the chance to bang on about race in a way that makes their nearly all white audiences feel even more aggrieved and and even more angry so that they keep clicking and keep watching. And so it was Piers Morgan who could not stop bringing up the subject of race on his show today with the goal of trying to force me to answer for why I was discussing it. Clever boy. When Pierce demanded to know, for instance, why I will not condemn Barack Obama for deporting people, I tried to helpfully explain that I actually disagreed with Barack Obama's deportation strategy, whose purpose was to lure insincere Republicans like then Senator Marco Rubio into actually signing on to a humane immigration policy that would make border crossings more organized. And then There's a small point of Obama not claiming that immigrants are vermin who are poisoning the blood of our country. Literal Nazi language as Trump has. Piers also ignored the fact that it's not deportation that his pal and his regime are doing at all. It is expunging of mostly brown and black people without even a hearing, often to third party impoverished countries. These people have no connection to including in increasing cases, people with zero criminal history and even if they did get a hearing, have no criminal history to have a hearing about and in some cases even US citizens. I am not the one choosing the race and nationality of the deportees and internees at the place that they call Alligator Alcatraz. That would be Piers's pal Donald and his creepy expulsion crew Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller and Tom Holman. And pivoting to another group that his audience loves to hate, peers went for the ultimate gotcha. Dredging up an eight year old story of my former online blog to try to make a really rather insane point that the award winning book All Boys Aren't Blue is pornography and that parents should not be able to decide for themselves to if their high school kids can read it. Moms for Liberty gets to decide that. And I could only counter that argument according to peers if I've actually watched Brokeback Mountain and can explain 16 year old posts on a site that lives on an insecure site called blogger.com dredging up an 8 year old story about 16 year old blog posts is a hell of a way to justify insanely offensive Nazi quoting things that your boy Donald Trump said and fascist actions his regime took like yesterday. Is that what your show has come to, Piers? Churning up old news in an effort to make yourself relevant? Apparently Piers just cannot bring himself to break from his old apprentice pal Donald, even now in the Epstein times. So he decided to pivot to a familiar right wing target me. The interview which drops tomorrow was a cheap, sleazy, very Piers Morgan pivot to take the heat off of the right and Trump and put it right where the right needs it to be. On the black lady. Because here is the thing about peers. For someone who claims to not care at all about race, he spends a lot of time talking about black people, black presidents, black ex cable hosts, black princesses. He seems obsessed. Which is how Piers got himself fired from his job on Good Morning Britain over his relentless, endless, obsessive hatred of Meghan Markle, who for some reason terribly triggers Piers, who allegedly had a 2016 luncheon with her after they developed a friendship online but then she ghosted him around the time that she started dating Prince Harry. And now he seems to hate that she's a princess. And not a quiet one, but rather one who talks openly about the racism that she has faced since becoming a royal. Check out this quick summary of Pierce's exit from his former show.
- [08:28]
Piers Morgan
And I understand that you don't like Megan Marle. You've made it so clear a number of times on this program.
- [08:36]
News Presenter
Even by the standards of a show in which confrontation is nothing new, this between two of its presenters this morning was extraordinary.
- [08:45]
Piers Morgan
But yet you continue to trash her. Okay, I'm done with this. No, no, no. Sorry. No sorry. Do you know what? That's perfect. You can trash me, maybe not my.
- [08:52]
Joy Reid
No, no, no.
- [08:53]
Piers Morgan
See you later. I'm being sorry. Can't do this. Absolutely diabolical behavior.
- [08:58]
News Presenter
The clash followed Piers Morgan's angry on air reaction yesterday to the interview the Duchess of Sussex had given to Oprah Winfrey Morgan, saying he didn't believe her.
- [09:09]
Piers Morgan
This is a two hour trash. A thon of our royal family, of the monarchy, of everything the Queen has worked so hard for.
- [09:18]
Joy Reid
So were you thinking of harming yourself? Were you having suicidal thoughts? Yes, this was very, very clear.
- [09:27]
News Presenter
The fact that she'd spoken about her mental health resulted in a huge backlash against the GMB presenter. The mental health charity Mined, saying it was disappointed and concerned. And the watchdog Ofcom receiving 41,000 complaints. This evening, ITV issued a statement saying, following discussions with ITV, Piers Morgan has decided now is the time to leave. Good morning Britain. ITV has accepted this decision and has nothing further to add.
- [09:58]
Joy Reid
So, Piers, I did not get fired from MSNBC over ratings, but I would sure rather it be that than being separated from my show after a massive petition and viewers looked at me as a racist creep. This is the same peers who claimed, without evidence that Omarosa offered to launch a sexual relationship with them, a showmance during a Celebrity Apprentice filming so that they could make money off of it. And claims that when he rejected her, she hurled homophobic slurs at him. Piers definitely seems like a Brit from the old 18th and 19th century school, thoroughly obsessed with black women in the creepiest possible way he never misses an opportunity to play gotcha with black guests on his podcast whom he, like other right wing podcasters, use as fodder to keep their very white audiences angry and paranoid and clicking. And the cheap shot of using gay and trans people who Pierce cares nothing about as the pivot to do that in his interview with me was typical peers Cheap and pathetic. Joining me now is Nina Turner, who I was surprised to learn followed me in the very next segment on the Pierce Podcast. Nina Turner, my friend, thank you so much for being here.
- [11:07]
Nina Turner
Yeah, good to be with you, Joy. I'm going to tell you something. I was mortified when I was sitting in the studio waiting to come on at what you were going through. I mean, I was literally about to jump through the screen or just say, I'm not interviewing with this dude. You handled yourself. I mean, you want to talk about a master class and how to continue to fight back? I'm rope a dope. Everything that you did, but you handled that so magnificently. Says, and I'm sorry that you had to go through that. It wasn't a difference of opinion, y'. All. You guys weren't arguing over policy. I mean, he really went there in ways that should discuss anybody. And then to set you up, you know, with this Michael dude, it was crazy.
- [11:50]
Joy Reid
And who is that? I have to be honest, I don't know who that guy was. So he played a sound bite. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, it'll air tomorrow. He suddenly, out of nowhere, pops on this other random podcaster who I have no idea who it is, plays a clip of him attacking me, and then says, well, how do you respond to that? I'm like, I don't know who this guy is. Why do I have to respond to him? I don't even know who he is. It was bizarre.
- [12:12]
Nina Turner
It's weak. It's wild, and it's weak. And that's giving me a PG answer because I was cussing in my head the entire time. I was mortified. I was thinking, why is she on this show? I cannot believe this guy is doing this to her. I mean, you can ask hard questions. That's not what we're talking about here. But we're talking about a total set setup. So he plays this clip of this guy named Michael, who says, I never heard of either of him saying, I'm. He's glad you're fired and you're a race vader, you know, And I'm paraphrasing to do so that when your viewers go back, I'm just giving you the gist of what he said. And then how do you respond to that? And you answer, and then he said, oh, well, I have him here. I have WTF moment in that studio. Yeah, go ahead.
- [13:02]
Joy Reid
Well, and the thing is, is that the way you know and look, you know, and, you know, cheers to my PR team that, you know, the, you know, I think it's really important to have conversations. That's why, I mean, I think you've been on there before. It is important to have conversations with people on the other side. Right. And I think that you, you do have to at least give people the benefit of the doubt that they have ideas you may disagree with, but that you can have a conversation. They literally did an email where they lured me onto that show with the idea that we were going to have such a conversation. They listed the topics we're going to talk about and look, I don't generally tell people, you know, I try to give people an idea of what we're going to talk about. Of course, in journalism you don't hold people to exactly that. But they had pre planned clips. They had pre planned clips of what they wanted to talk about. Mark Lamont Hill interview that I did. This was not. They had clips of my re. Of the readout. They were, they told us they were going to promote this show. They didn't have a clip of this show. So this was not a in the moment. We were having a conversation. And as a journalist and what you said sparked me to bring up something new. This was pre planned because they had edited pieces ready for it.
- [14:02]
Nina Turner
It was a jump. It was a jump on a black woman. And I agree with you, they're the ones that preoccupy with race. Not just Pierce, not just this Michael guy, but the, the whole. I'm not talking about the MAGA individual people who are attracted, but I'm talking about these talking head types. They're the ones preoccupied with race. And, and then so your audience can understand this. I'm sitting there watching this and all of a sudden they pull me in without even telling me. No, nothing in. In my ear from the producer. You don't even know that I'm there, but I'm there live side by side with you. Pierce and Michael sitting there like, I mean really, wtf? And you, and I mean you handled it. I want folks to know you handle that. Grace under fire. You should have did what Pierce did on that other show because it was like, I mean you had every right to say that this interview is over. It was definitely, definitely a setup. So when you left, I ended up saying to Pierce, Pierce, what you did to Joy was wrong. How so? Man, if I got to explain to you why it was wrong, it was wrong. I said you were up there beating a dead horse. And then he had the nerve. Joy want the twin to say, are you calling Joy a dead horse? Pierce, don't play with me. You know what mean. Now he know you know what that term means. I said you went to.
- [15:26]
Joy Reid
You know what's interesting is, and I appreciate you, you're a very kind wonder twin. You know, we are the wonder twins. Even though my hair is a different color now, we still the wonder twins. I'm gonna lose like 10 pounds and we gonna be wonder twins again. The reality is, is that Piers Morgan left Good Morning Britain claiming that he was ambushed because his black co host called him out on his relentless racist abuse. Like I don't know what else you can call it of Meghan Markle. He's like obsessed with her. And he would just go on and on and on about her in a way that people like Sholaqi, Bamamu and others had said to him, dude, you're obsessed. And he keeps bringing guests on to try to demand that they retract the idea that his obsession had any negative racial connotation. I don't know Piers Morgan that that was the first time I've ever met him, talked to him at all. I know nothing about his views on race. All I know is every clip I see of him, Nina Turner, is about him talking about somebody black. Black people. Black people complaining. Black people. He seems to be the one who wants to have these conversations about race, but he wants to have them in a way that essentially accuses his guest of being the one obsessed with it.
- [16:36]
Nina Turner
That's exactly right. It's kind of like that car that don't look at the man behind the curtain. Protest too much too. So that's how we know. I gotta tell you, I think that was my third or fourth time I'm with you. Says I try to go into arenas where we ordinarily wouldn't go. Let's get some understanding. We ain't got to always agree, but let's try to get some understanding. Every single time that I've been, I won't say every, most of the time that I go on the show, it ends up with something where I'm questioning my sanity as to why I did it. And for a while my team and I had decided I wasn't going to go back on. And then this day I decided I'm gonna give him another chance. And then they berate my wonder twin in a way that is beyond the pill. I'm saying any fair minded person when they watch that show has got to know that they. That this man ambushed you. He wouldn't get off the same I mean, he kept asking you over and over and over again. You handled him since. I want you to know. And when I got on there, I let him know. I, I didn't. I didn't appreciate it. So Pierce, ask me what you brought me on the show to ask me, though. That's what I said. Because the same thing I can show you. None of that, none of what he started with, with you was what they asked me to talk about. At least we did get to some of what he asked me. But he. He left Michael there. So let me tell you what this dude did. See these microaggressions. First of all, it's a macro aggression. What he did. Let me not even call it a micro. Yeah, it's subconscious anti black racism. And I love how you said to him, so you get to define. I'm paraphrasing you. But, but, but that people think like him. They think, they get to define what, what, what hurts black people, what matters to us when it comes to race. They're. They're the only ones that get to define it. But when we talk about it, we whining and we crying, you know, it is an upside down world, but this man. So I said, pierce, just ask me what you brought me here. Let's get on the topics you brought me here to talk about because I already told you. You did.
- [18:39]
Joy Reid
But.
- [18:39]
Nina Turner
And I said she handled you too. I did. I told him. And so instead of him coming to me, instead of him asking the question and coming to me, he went to Michael.
- [18:47]
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- [19:19]
Nina Turner
He went to Michael. That. That just. They just juggers like it's death by a thousand cuts.
- [19:24]
Joy Reid
Yeah.
- [19:24]
Nina Turner
And people don't understand. Some people do not understand the weight that black people carry every single day. And can you imagine just putting weight on top of weight on top of weight on top of weight. Somebody said, this ain't my quote, sis. This country better be glad that black people want justice and not revenge. I'm telling you. But it Is that MAGA crowd, not all the individuals, but the people who are the talking heads of Charlie Kirks and them, as my grandmother would say, they are race obsessed. And they are obsessed with black people, particularly people of color in general. Black people specifically. So I let them know I just sent out a text, says, don't call me back. I'm not going on that show again.
- [20:10]
Joy Reid
And I thank you very much and I'm gonna thank you for coming on. And I wanted to have you on because I did not know, fam, that the system Nina was even on. They did not announce her. They only announced the other guy did not announce that Nina Turner's there. And I have to say, as I close, it is sad to me that the only way that you can lure black guests on your show is by lying to them about what you want to discuss and by pre planning a hit job so that the purpose of that. And I think you all have to really understand that if you're out there in YouTube land and you're out there in social media and on substack, understand that. Why? The reason they do that is getting in fights with people like Nina Turner. People like me is how they keep their audience engaged. They need their audience to stay mad and specifically to stay mad at black women and to stay mad at black people and. And they need them to stay angry. And in order to do that, they have to get in a fight with us. The purpose when we go on there was not to get in a fight. It was to have a conversation. And it is so disingenuous for you to. To essentially lie your way into a conversation with me that you and I would have never had if you'd been honest about what your plans were. So, Piers, I will tell you, that was your one and done of trying to have me on. At the end. You said, oh, maybe we can come back and have a different conversation. No, love, if you want to have a conversation with me again, you can come to my house to the Joy reach, or we can have a conversation here. And I want to talk about your obsession with the princess. I want to talk about what you said about Omarosa Manigold. I want to know if you can back those things up. Since you want to go back in the past. Let's go back in the past. Good. Nah. Turner, my wonderful, good sister, I appreciate you. Thank you so much.
- [21:47]
Nina Turner
I appreciate you too. Thank you. Before we leave, should I show that picture, his Morgan invite one more time that they sent you?
- [21:54]
Joy Reid
Oh, you want to show the invite again? Jason has Got an idea and I think you should do it. Yes. We're going to put the invite back up again to show you all. And I will reiterate what I said earlier, that it is sad in a way and it is sort of shameful, isn't it, that the only way that Piers Morgan could get me to come on his show rather than send an honest invitation, that's like CNN did, like Mark Lamont Hill did, like all of these other outlets have done that he baited me with an email that said we were going to have a free flowing conversation covering several topics in my wheelhouse, including the Trump administration, Elon Musk establishing a new political party. That never came up. ICE raids. I brought it up, otherwise it wouldn't have come up. And News of the Day. We didn't do News of the Day. You know, the news of the day is Epstein didn't bring it up at all. They also claimed they wanted to discuss my leaving msnbc. He did find a cheeky way to do that. And setting up my new venture that they never brought up this show at all. It was a complete bait and switch, Piers. It was dirty pool. And you're the guy, Piers, who walked off the set of Good Morning Britain because you claimed you were ambushed by an honest conversation that your black co host was having about your fixation on Megan Markle. You found that so unacceptable that you pulled off your microphone and walked out. I will note that I did not walk out on the Piers Morgan interview. I sat through it and in a way that he did not, when it was his time to be confronted about something that he had said not 18 or 16 years ago, not five years ago, what he had been saying right up until that broadcast. So, Piers, if you want to hold people accountable for comments, then at least have the dignity to sit through the interview in which you are being held accountable. And do not bait me or Nina Turner to come on your show with false advertising. You could have just said what you wanted to talk about. I would have been happy to oblige. And I want to just say for you all, it's a learning note for all of us because I'm sure all of us have dealt with this situation where you get baited and switched and people represent themselves one way and then do something else. But I mean, come on, having pre taped hit pieces ready to go, that's something special. But you know, we've all been through it. It's part of the game. I'm a big girl, I can take it. And we will see you guys on the next Joy Reid show. Hopefully with fewer shenanigans and fewer technical shenanigans too. We appreciate y' all like and subscribe. Love y'. All. Take care y' all for tuning in. Be sure to like and subscribe Share this this channel. Make sure that everybody subscribes to the YouTube channel. 70% of people are lurking watching these shows and not subscribing. Why would you do that? So make sure that you like, subscribe and throw some comments. And thank you all for joining the Joy Re show. See you on the next one. And goodbye for now.