Former MSNBC star Joy Reid has attacked Elvis Presley and claims that the iconic singer’s nickname ‘The King’ is racist.

Reid claimed Presley owed his career to a black woman last week while slamming the Trump Administration’s anti-woke crackdown on the Smithsonian museums.

Jabbing her finger as she spoke to journalist Wajahat Ali’s The Left Hook, Reid said: ‘(White men) cant invent anything more than they were originally able to invent good music.

‘We black folk gave y’all country music, hip-hop, R&B, jazz, rock and roll. They couldn’t even invent that.

‘But they have to call a white man “The King” because they couldn’t make rock and roll.

‘So they have to stamp “The King” on a man whose main song was stolen from an overweight black woman.’

Reid appears to have been referencing Elvis’s iconic hit Hound Dog, which was originally recorded by black R&B singer Big Mama Thornton in 1952.

Elvis released his version four years later in 1956. It sold around 10 million copies and stayed atop the US pop music chart for 11 weeks, becoming his biggest song.

Joy Reid says Elvis Presley stole his biggest hit Hound Dog from black singer Big Mama Thornton
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Joy Reid says Elvis Presley stole his biggest hit Hound Dog from black singer Big Mama Thornton

Reid also took issue with Elvis's nickname 'The King' and suggested it had been dreamt up by racist white men
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Reid also took issue with Elvis’s nickname ‘The King’ and suggested it had been dreamt up by racist white men

But Thornton’s original was a hit too, shifting 500,000 records and spending seven weeks at number one on the R&B charts.

Reid’s anti-Elvis rant came during a video titled ‘How Mediocre White Men and Their Fragility Are Destroying America.’

She took aim at the White House’s August 13 announcement that it plans to audit exhibitions displayed at the Smithsonian museums in Washington DC.

Shortly after his second inauguration, Trump issued an executive order claiming the Smithsonian had ‘come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.’

The White House says its planned audits of the taxpayer-funded Smithsonian will make exhibits less partisan.

Some critics including free speech group PEN America have warned such a review ‘will rewrite history and strip truth from exhibits.’

And Reid herself appeared unamused by the prospect, telling Ali: ‘(White men) can’t fix the history they did.

‘Their ancestors made the country into a slave hell. But they can clean it up now because they got the Smithsonian, they can get rid of all the slavery stuff.’

Willie Mae 'Big Mama' Thornton (pictured in 1955) first recorded Hound Dog in 1952. It was a hit for her - but went on to become a monster success for Elvis Presley when he covered it
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Willie Mae ‘Big Mama’ Thornton (pictured in 1955) first recorded Hound Dog in 1952. It was a hit for her – but went on to become a monster success for Elvis Presley when he covered it

Reid was fired by MSNBC in February as part of cuts ahead of the network being sold by parent company NBCUniversal.

On Monday, it was revealed MSNBC will be renamed My Source News Opinion World – or MS NOW for short – later this year.

Reid was fired from her MSNBC show The Reid Out in February this year as bosses made cuts ahead of the network’s sale.

They were also said to have been concerned by the inflammatory rhetoric she’d regularly spout on-air. 

Reid sobbed during her first interview after her firing, saying she’d felt ‘anger and rage’ at being let go.

But her career has taken off again since she joined newsletter platform Substack.

Reid has amassed 168,000 subscribers there since February.

She has not disclosed how many of those are free readers and how many are paying $8-a-month for unlimited access.

Substack said Reid is one of its ‘bestseller’ authors, with thousands of paid subscribers.