Winsome Sears, the black female Republican candidate elected on Tuesday as the next lieutenant governor of Virginia, has responded to a rant on MSNBC that portrayed her as a dummy being used to spout “white supremacy by ventriloquist effect.”
Frequent MSNBC and CNN contributor Michael Eric Dyson made an incendiary attack on Sears, the first black woman elected to a statewide office in Virginia history, on “The ReidOut” with Joy Reid.
Reid attempted to enroll Dyson in an attack on Republicans, who boasted that two of the three successful GOP candidates in Virginia’s statewide election were minorities. Reid responded that Republicans could not shake accusations of racism by pointing to Sears since her Democratic opponent, Hala Ayala, is afro-Latina and part Lebanese. “You had a choice of two brown/black people, and you picked one of them. Do you get credit?” she asked Dyson. Reid ignored the role of the Virginia Republican Party in selecting Sears for the nomination over 5 other candidates at the state’s Republican Convention, including white male Delegate Glenn Davis.
Dyson proved all-too-willing to oblige in the verbal assault, taking a swipe at Sears’ integrity. Republicans, he said, want to use Sears as a dummy through which to filter “a white idea,” because Sears “legitimates the white supremacist practices”:
[Republicans] want white supremacy by ventriloquist effect. There is a black mouth moving, but a white idea through the, running on the runway of the tongue of a figure who justifies and legitimates the white supremacist practices. We know that we can internalize in our own minds, in our own subconscious, and in our own bodies, the very principles that are undoing us. So, to have a black face, speaking in behalf of a white supremacist legacy is nothing new. … [I]f you tell black people, ‘Look, I support a Negro! Look, there is a person of color that I am in favor of!’ and that person of color happens to undermine, and undercut, and subvert the very principles about which we are concerned, you do yourself no service by pointing to them as an example of your racial progressivism.
On Friday morning, Sears’ campaign tweeted a clip of Dyson’s fulminations with the message, “Still waiting for my invite @JoyAnnReid.”
Still waiting for my invite @JoyAnnReid 🤔 pic.twitter.com/qe3C5YlDmZ
— Team Winsome (@WinWithWinsome) November 5, 2021
It is Sears’ second challenge for Reid to speak to her face-to-face after Reid’s producers apparently left her previous interview request unrequited. As The Daily Wire’s Tim Pearce reported:
Sears appeared on Fox News on Wednesday to react to a clip of Reid claiming that Republicans are “dangerous to our national security” for “stoking that kind of soft white nationalism [that] eventually leads to the hardcore stuff.”
“I wish Joy Reid would invite me on her show. Let’s see if she’s woman enough to do that. I’d go in a heartbeat and we’d have a real discussion without Joy speaking about me behind my back, if you will,” Sears responded. “I mean, Joy, come on. Get your facts straight and then come talk to me.”
Reid, who rarely indulges conflicting points of view, was widely panned for a June interview of the nation’s leading opponent of Critical Race Theory, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher Rufo, as she interrupted Rufo 27 times in 13 minutes. When Rufo asked for equal time in a “dialogue,” Reid snapped, “Well, it’s my show, so it’s how I want to do it.” Ultimately, she gave herself twice as much talking time as her guest, rarely allowing him to finish a sentence. (Rufo later received a more even-handed debate from Reid’s colleague, Joe Scarborough.)
Dyson was not alone in dismissing Sears, a Jamaican immigrant and former Marine who campaigned as pro-life. On Thursday’s episode of CNN’s “Don Lemon Tonight,” Republican Scott Jennings responded to allegations that the Virginia GOP ran a racist campaign by saying, “If it is true that Republicans were running a racist campaign in Virginia, they did a piss poor job.”
Jennings went on to point out the GOP swept Virginia’s three statewide elections this week, emphasizing wins by Sears and Jason Miyares, a Republican who was elected as the state’s first Latino attorney general.
“Two of our candidates weren’t even white, and somehow all these racists showed up and elected a 66 percent minority ticket?”
Lemon retorted, “That’s an, ‘I have a black friend’ argument.” He immediately closed the segment.
Related: MSNBC Slammed Over ‘Disgusting Racist Rant’ Attacking Black Republican: ‘Unbelievably Insidious’
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.