Vice President JD Vance is once again telling people to say “thank you,” this time offering his unsolicited advice to former MSNBC host Joy Reid.
Earlier this year, Vance made headlines when he challenged Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky on whether he had “ever said ‘thank you’ once” for American aid and defense assistance during a furious showdown in the Oval Office.
Zelensky has said thank you on numerous occasions, but that did not stop the vice president from badgering him.
Vance has now turned his attention to former MSNBC host Joy Reid, who recently suggested that he was only accepted into Yale because he was a white man from Appalachia.
During an episode of Don Lemon’s podcast earlier this month, Reid suggested that “white people who are essentially mediocre in scale compared to a Black person” were unfairly given opportunities due to their race. She suggested that kind of bias was “maybe the way that JD Vance got into Yale is because they were tired of just letting in white men from New York, from all the elite schools, and they wanted an Appalachian white.”
“That’s how that man got into Yale, I promise you,” she said.
Reid’s comment were in response to Republicans’ efforts to end hiring programs that promote diversity.
On Thursday, Vance quoted a user going by the name “End Wokeness” on X, who had posted a video of Reid and scholar Ta-Nahesi Coates having a discussion at Xavier College last year. During the clip. Reid, recalled how her immigrant mother was sad to discover that the United States was “not a land of opportunity” for people like them.
“When my mother came from Guyana she realized it is not a land of opportunity for people like us,” she said during the talk.
Vance commented on the video, saying Reid should be thankful for the life she ultimately was able to have in the U.S.
“Joy Reid has had such a good life in this country. It’s been overwhelmingly kind and gracious to her. She is far wealthier than most. Yet she oozes with contempt,” Vance wrote. “My honest, non-trolling advice to Joy Reid is that you’d be a much happier person if you showed a little gratitude.”
Some social media commenters responding to his post suggested that Vance and President Donald Trump have essentially done the same thing; showing contempt for a country and society that allowed them to become more wealthy and powerful than most people.
“You are describing yourself, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, basically everyone in your administration, wildly wealthy and filled with hate and contempt for half the country, its universities, its courts,” one X commenter wrote. “[You] guys are just filled with hate for the country that made you wildly successful..”
Another user, Mansoor Ahmed Qureshi, point out that criticism does not preclude gratitude.
“Gratitude doesn’t cancel criticism,” he wrote. “You can appreciate America and still call out its flaws that’s how progress happens.”
