Newsbusters

In Friday’s New York Times, White House correspondent Michael Shear was filing from London, as if offering a warning to left-wing trans activists in the United States: The bigots are coming for you too! “U.K. Court Ruling on Trans Women Is Part of Wider Debate on Sex and Gender.”

Shear characterized the measured decision by the U.K. Supreme Court with fiery, loaded language.

The legal assault on trans rights is being waged on both sides of the Atlantic. This week, Hungary’s Parliament approved a constitutional amendment banning public events by members of L.G.B.T.Q. communities. President Trump sued Maine for allowing trans athletes in schools.

And Britain’s highest court ruled that the legal definition of a woman under the country’s equality legislation is based on biological sex. Trans women, the court said in a headline-making 88-page document, do not meet that legal definition.

The justices said their ruling was based on the precise language of the particular law and not “a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another,” and that trans people were protected against discrimination under another part of the equality law. But anti-trans groups still claimed an immediate victory, and trans-rights activists decried what they said will have harmful effects on trans people.

“Anti-trans groups” is a hostile way to describe those who want to protect women’s spaces in sports, restrooms, prisons, and hospitals.

The political and legal moves in the United States, Britain and Hungary underscore the power of an issue that animates right-wing movements. They also highlight the stakes for trans people in countries across the world as governments grapple with how to adjudicate competing demands for rights and restrictions.

The losing left-wing side was quoted first.

“Trans communities are devastated by today’s ruling,” said Helen Belcher, the chair of TransActual, a British group that campaigns on behalf of trans people. “Irrespective of the small print, the intent seems clear: to exclude trans people wholesale from participating in UK society. Today, we are feeling very excluded.”

Susan Smith, the co-director of For Women Scotland, the group that brought the legal case, praised the decision, saying that “it’s just about saying that there are differences, and biology is one of those differences.”

….

The justices cited concerns about a need to have separate spaces in public life, including changing rooms, hostels, communal accommodations and medical services — echoing the spirit, if not the aggressive language, that Mr. Trump and many Republicans have used for years when discussing trans people and those public spaces.

….

Mr. Trump railed against trans people during his 2024 campaign and has moved quickly in his second term to put his words into reality by threatening to withhold federal education funding from states that allow trans athletes to compete in schools….

Trump is not outlawing “trans athletes” ability to complete. They are free to complete alongside other members of their biological sex, as they have in schools for decades.

Shear tried guilt by right-wing association as a tactic.

In Germany, the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has spoken out forcefully against trans rights. Beatrix von Storch, a leader in the party, has criticized a law that made it easier to make gender changes on official documents. Addressing the country’s Parliament in 2023, she mocked the government’s policies toward “all those who don’t know if they are male or female.”

The article closed as it began, with pro-transgender propaganda.

“We’re seeing a really global, organized, anti-L.G.B.T. backlash,” said Jess O’Thomson, a researcher and writer at the University of Leeds who focuses on trans rights. “Reducing women, the category of women, down to just biological sex is harmful to all women, not just trans. Britain tries to be more polite in its transphobia, but the content isn’t that different.”

CNN host Christiane Amanpour is a natural match for PBS. On her Saturday show The Amanpour Hour (that doesn’t air on PBS), she engaged in the usual claptrap about Trump being an authoritarian and nudged the Democrat governor of Massachusetts to spread the lie that it’s unprecedented to see a “weaponized Department of Justice,” ignoring everything Team Biden did to Trump.

At the top, Amanpour announced: “Defying courts and testing constitutional limits, is Trump making common cause with international autocrats? I asked Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, who’s on the front lines of American politics.”

Shortly after, she introduced the interview:

Across the world, people are asking, is this what America has become? And is it ushering in an age of authoritarianism? In the United States, long the bastion of democracy and the rule of law, many are trying to figure out how to get the ship of state back on an even keel.

My first guest today, the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, is an influential voice in her party. And her state is more and more of a target of the current administration. She told me there’s a simple answer. Stand up for your constitutional rights or risk losing them.

They talked about poor Harvard, and then Amanpour thumped the tub for Kilmar Abrego Garcia [Hat tip: Media Lies on X]

The governor of Massachusetts claims that Trump is “Weaponizing the DOJ” like we’ve never seen before.
Yes, she actually said that.
Did she live under a rock for the last decade? pic.twitter.com/5K7Jjjl3Vl
— Media Lies (@MediasLies) April 19, 2025

AMANPOUR: So when you see Senator Van Hollen going over to El Salvador to try to get one of his constituents out of their gang jail there, he was exported or deported with no due process.

This administration says too bad, you know. Yes, it was an administrative error, but we’re not getting him back. This constitutional crisis that we were told would happen when the administration, if it did, challenge or refuse a Supreme Court or higher court order, it’s here now, right?

HEALEY: It’s a — it’s really quite unbelievable where we find ourselves. And just so folks understand, my background, I was attorney general. In fact, I served alongside Pam Bondi for a time as the attorney general here in Massachusetts.

What we’re seeing is something we’ve never seen before in this country. The weaponization of the Department of Justice, the launching of completely false, false investigations under false pretenses, the refusal to comply with the rule of law, the refusal now to comply with orders from the United States Supreme Court.

We’ve not seen a president of this country ever do this. And we’re on the eve of celebrating 250 years of this great American experiment here, right this weekend in Massachusetts, in fact. Never in the course of history has a president so refused to comply with the rule of law. It’s bad for our people. It’s bad for our democracy. It’s very bad for business.

These ladies not only failed to discuss the Biden DOJ’s war on Trump — including an armed raid on his home at Mar-a-Lago — they left out Team Biden’s manipulations of the Hunter Biden case. One of the biggest lies that the media elites routinely tell is that Biden’s Department of Justice was somehow nonpartisan and un-“weaponized.”

National Public Radio science desk correspondent Rob Stein is about five years behind on COVID origin speculation, still taking the politically correct side, that it’s beyond the pale to accuse China of letting the COVID virus leak from a government laboratory, and that the alternate theory, that COVID spread naturally from animals to humans, is unassailable: “‘Lab Leak,’ a flashy page on the virus’ origins, replaces government COVID sites.”

NPR’s previous coverage looks so embarrassing now, in its arrogant certitude, that the White House encapsulated NPR’s greatest COVID misses into a press release, in a paragraph introduced “NPR repeatedly dismissed the theory that COVID-19 originated in a lab — a conclusion now deemed likely by the FBI, CIA, and Department of Energy.”

The White House’s first example of NPR getting COVID wrong was a headline from April 2020 that read “Scientists Debunk Lab Accident Theory Of Pandemic Emergence.” Oops.

A particularly arrogant NPR tweet from December 2020, which we caught at NewsBusters: “A new poll finds 40% of respondents believe in a baseless conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was created in a lab in China. There is zero evidence for this. Scientists say the virus was transmitted to humans from another species.” It was “bonkers” QAnon stuff! 

Still, it was the “lab leak” idea that Stein insists on calling “controversial.” (At this point, with new evidence tilting the other way, wouldn’t the original “wet market” theory, that COVID jumped to humans through eating infected wildlife, now be the “controversial” one?)

NPR ignored why Fauci would even be a conservative villain in the first place, skipping his support of gain-of-function research that may have originated the virus, and for squelching debate about the lab leak hypothesis early on during the pandemic.

The White House has taken down some government websites providing COVID-19 information and replaced them with a new boldly styled page dedicated to the controversial theory that the pandemic was caused by the virus leaking from a Chinese government laboratory.

….

The lab leak theory argues that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID, escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese government lab in Wuhan, China, and then spread around the world.

Federal agencies have issued conflicting reports about the origins of the pandemic and a House investigation that concluded last December found that a lab leak is the most likely scenario. But many scientists think it’s more likely the virus originated naturally in a wild animal and then spilled over into people in a wildlife market located in Wuhan.

“Many scientists” was doing a lot of work in the above paragraph.

It also singles out Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the pandemic, and President Biden’s decision to pardon him. Fauci became a hero to many during the pandemic, but was also vilified for his role in the government’s response.

NPR found some left-wing scientists contemptuous of the now-leading lab-leak theory to make it falsely appear fringe, even though several U.S. agencies have now signed on to it.

The website presents five bullet points in favor of the lab leak theory. None of them are new, noted Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.

“Every one of the five pieces of evidence supporting the lab leak hypothesis … is factually incorrect, embellished, or presented in a misleading way,” Rasmussen wrote in an email. ….”….This is pure propaganda, intended to justify the systematic devastation of the federal government, particularly programs devoted to public health and biomedical research.”

Does Rasmussen sound like an objective scientist, or one handpicked by NPR to give the answer it needed to shore up its crumbling viewpoint?

PS: The Trump press team mocked NPR on X: 

Hey @NPR! Making sure you saw our new site: https://t.co/jecm3v18a7 🤩 pic.twitter.com/Od2GdSrE54
— Anna Kelly (@AnnaKelly47) April 19, 2025

“Eighty and six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong,” said Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, in A.D. 156 before climbing onto a pyre where Roman authorities would burn him to death. Eyewitnesses reported the local authorities respected Polycarp and begged him to recant his faith in Christ. He would not. The Romans did not even tie Polycarp to a post because they knew he would not flee the fire. Polycarp fed his captors, prayed over them, then climbed the pyre to die.

Authorities carted off Polycarp’s friend Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, and fed him to wild beasts in the Circus Maximus on July 6, 108. Ignatius had refused to renounce Christ. Histories of the time, their personal writings, and the writings of others tell us Polycarp and Ignatius were students of the Apostle John. They vouched for him as the author of his gospel. John installed Polycarp as Bishop of Smyrna and the Apostle Peter placed Ignatius in charge of Antioch.

In A.D. 99, the Romans drowned their acquaintance Clement in the sea tied to an anchor for the same reason. Paul mentioned Clement in his letter to the Philippians and history shows Clement interacted with Peter, Paul, and John.

Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp were one generation removed from the direct eyewitnesses of Jesus. They were students of the Apostles. They vouched for the veracity of the apostolic letters that form the New Testament. They died refusing to reject Jesus as the Christ.

Some skeptics say Jesus did not exist, but by any historic standard, the man known as Jesus of Nazareth existed. If he did not exist, then neither did the Greek philosopher Socrates. We have no writings from Socrates himself. We only know of his existence through the writings of other people. But no one would doubt Socrates existed. We actually have more eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s existence than of Socrates. Some, however, argue that because Jesus made claims of divinity, there must be extraordinary evidence. Perhaps as to his divinity, but not for his historic existence. We must wipe a lot of people out of history to wipe Jesus out of history.

The Apostle John was Jesus’s best friend. We know this from scripture. We also know this from Polycarp, Ignatius, and others. They studied under John, recounted his stories of being with Jesus, including stories not in scripture, and confirm John, Peter, Paul and others as eyewitnesses to Christ’s resurrection.

According to John, Jesus’s own brothers, perhaps like some reading this, rejected his claims of divinity. At Jesus’s death, John had to care for Jesus’s mother because none of Jesus’s brothers or sisters went with Mary to the crucifixion. John, Luke, Paul and others tell us Jesus’s brothers then became leaders in the early Christian church.

Histories of the era recount that James and Jude, the brothers of Jesus, wrote the New Testament letters named after them. Both were executed for proclaiming Jesus as the risen Lord. In fact, the Romans ultimately exterminated the entire earthly bloodline of Jesus’s family.

The leaders of Jerusalem respected James. The oral and written histories of the early Christian church recount that they asked James to publicly push back against claims of his brother’s divinity. Instead, James proclaimed his brother Jesus, who he had rejected prior to Jesus’s death, was Yahweh. The leaders of the city, enraged, carried James to the top of the temple wall in Jerusalem and threw him off to his death.

Jesus could have been a conman surrounded by other conmen. They, in turn, were willing to die to keep the con going and got others to die keeping the con going. Or there is something else. Dozens claimed to be the Christ, but only Jesus is remembered and worshiped as the Christ. Why?

Perhaps because it is true, I, however, cannot convince you more than that the historic evidence for his existence and the willingness of many to die for him is true. But if I am right, you can ask Jesus yourself. Take to your knees and embrace the wonder of this season. Cry out to Jesus, be still and listen.

Happy Easter.

Thirty years ago, on April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh parked a truck packed with explosives next to Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The explosion murdered 168 people, including 15 small children at a day care center in the building. McVeigh and his accomplice, Terry Nichols, were arrested, tried and convicted; McVeigh was executed six years later, while Nichols was sentenced to 161 consecutive life terms in federal prison, the longest ever for an individual.

McVeigh was as far from the conservative mainstream as you can imagine — an evil madman who employed deadly violence to destroy innocent people. But the dastardly attack occurred only months after liberals suffered one of their worst-ever electoral defeats, losing the House of Representatives after 40 years of uninterrupted control. Democrats blamed what CBS’s Dan Rather (January 4, 1995) impugned as “openly politically partisan and sometimes racist radio” for their abrupt change in fortune.

So after the immediate shock of the bombing passed, liberal journalists began assigning blame to ordinary conservatives, hoping to blur the facts and discredit the competition.

It was a key talking point on the April 23 Sunday talk shows, just four days after the attack. “To what extent, if any, do you think the political rhetoric to which you just referred has helped cause a climate in which people could go in that direction? In other words, the rhetoric which says, not just against big government, or liberal government, or dishonest government, but ‘I’m against government, government is the enemy?’” ABC’s Sam Donaldson asked Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center on This Week with David Brinkley.

Over on CBS’s Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer invited invective from Democratic President Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff, Leon Panetta: “There’s been a lot of anti-government rhetoric, it comes over talk radio, it comes from various quarters. Do you think that that somehow has led these people to commit this act? Do they feed on that kind of rhetoric?”

On Fox News Sunday, the Washington Post’s Juan Williams joined the chorus: “It seems to me that you have angry white men here, sort of in their natural state, and you know, gone berserk….It’s the same kind of idea that has fueled so much of the right-wing triumph over the agenda here in Washington.”

As if his allies in the media needed any further encouragement, Clinton himself chimed in the next day (April 24). Talking about mainstream conservative radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, the President smeared: “They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, violence is acceptable….It is time we all stood up and spoke against that kind of reckless speech and behavior.”

Clinton’s comments encouraged the liberal media to double down on their condemnations of conservatives. “Never do most of the radio hosts encourage outright violence, but the extent to which their attitudes may embolden and encourage some extremists has clearly become an issue,” NBC’s Bryant Gumbel smarmily insisted the next day (April 25) on Today.

“The bombing shows how dangerous it really is to inflame twisted minds with statements that suggest political opponents are enemies,” the Washington Post’s David Broder agreed in a column published that same day.

Elsewhere in the same paper, readers saw this from columnist Carl Rowan: “Unless [Speaker of the House Newt] Gingrich and [Senate Majority Leader Bob] Dole and the Republicans say ‘Am I inflaming a bunch of nuts?,’ you know we’re going to have some more events. I am absolutely certain the harsher rhetoric of the Gingriches and the Doles…creates a climate of violence in America.”

“Public antagonism toward government has been one of the principal themes of American political discourse for nearly two decades, growing in shrillness in the past year. This sentiment has been voiced and amplified by the new Republican House,” the Boston Globe’s David Shribman scolded in an April 25 news analysis. “But now that an attack on a government building has left scores dead, including children, the allure is coming off the anti-government rhetoric.”

A day later, the Los Angeles Times’s Nina Easton caught up to the pack: “The Oklahoma City attack on federal workers and their children also alters the once-easy dynamic between charismatic talk show host and adoring audience. Hosts who routinely espouse the same anti-government themes as the militia movement now must walk a fine line between inspiring their audience — and inciting the most radical among them.”

“Who has played the politics of paranoia better in this country in the last twenty or thirty years? Answer? Republican Party,” Newsweek’s Evan Thomas blasted on the April 29 edition of the weekend talk show Inside Washington. “Politically, starting with Richard Nixon in 1968, the Republicans have very skillfully exploited fear.”

“If the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing really view government as the people’s enemy, the burden of fostering that delusion is borne not just by the nut cases who preach conspiracy but also to some extent by those who erode faith in our governance in the pursuit of their own ambitions,” Time’s Michael Kramer denounced in the magazine’s May 1 edition.

The following week, his colleague Richard Lacayo wrote the magazine’s cover story “How Dangerous Are They? An Inside Look at America’s Antigovernment Zealots.” Lacayo targeted Republicans and conservatives: “In a nation that has entertained and appalled itself for years with hot talk on the radio and the campaign trail, the inflamed rhetoric of the ’90s is suddenly an unindicted co-conspirator in the blast.”

The nasty name-calling had its intended effect. Just one day before the bombing (April 18), Clinton was asked at a prime time press conference about being ignored amid the attention showered on congressional conservatives: “Do you worry about making sure that your voice is heard in the coming months?” The President defensively answered: “The Constitution gives me relevance.”

By mid-May, the tables had turned. “Bombing Helps Clinton Approval Rating Rise to 56%,” one headline screamed.

It wasn’t “the bombing,” of course. It was a nasty and cynical campaign waged by Democrats and their loyalists in the media to blame the President’s political adversaries for a horrific crime of which they were entirely innocent.

For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
 

A coalition of nearly two dozen conservative organizations is asking legislators to implement a three-pronged effort to compel PBS, NPR and their cash cow, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), to submit to formal, independent audits and release the results.

The Media Research Center-led coalition has sent letters to members of Congress, governors and Executive Branch heads calling for them to help prompt PBS, NPR and CPB to subject themselves to the independent audits and make the results public.

The coalition’s effort has three stages, each of which is more forceful than the last:

Ask
Incentivize
Eliminate
Letters sent to the CEOs of NPR, PBS, and CPB call for them to subject their organizations to formal, independent audits and make the results public.

Letters sent to governors and Executive Branch heads demanding them to motivate NPR and PBS to conduct the audits by putting holds on all discretionary grants until the audits are conducted and the results released.

Letters sent to all members of Congress demand they refuse to meet with the broadcasters’ army of lobbyists until the results of formal audits are made public.

Letters sent to Congressional leaders urge them to legislatively repeal the statute authorizing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the organization that funnels taxpayers’ money to NPR and PBS, if the broadcasters fail to conduct the audits and release their results.

Ultimately though, complete and permanent defunding of taxpayer-funding of media is the coalition’s top priority, as it explained in a letter to President Donald Trump.

The letter urges the president to use a process known as “rescission” to cancel appropriations for funding public media that have already been authorized, but have yet to be obligated. This move, if successful, would save taxpayers $1.1 billion over the next two years.

Rescission may well be “the last, best chance taxpayers will ever have to unburden themselves from these leftist propaganda outlets once and for all,” MRC Vice President of External Affairs Dan Schneider said, commenting on the letter to Pres. Trump.

Sign the petition to help defund PBS and NPR at defundpbsnpr.org.

Related: Trump Urged to Use ‘Rescission’ to Defund NPR, PBS in Conservative Coalition’s Letter

If NewsBusters were to introduce a Scaremonger of the Month award, Symone Sanders would be the runaway winner for April.

On Saturday’s edition of MSNBC’s The Weekend, which she co-hosts, ther former Kamala Harris press aide was commenting on the Abrego Garcia case:

“Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s specific case, the case of the gentleman who’s a makeup artist out of California who was also sent to that prison . . . is so important.  Because if they could do it to them, if they could snatch students off the street without any pushback or recourse, they will do it to any of us. To be very clear, it’s going to be the people of color and vulnerable communities that are next in line.”

Show guest Democrat Rep. Glenn Ivey, who represents the district where “Maryland man” Abrego Garcia lived, agreed with Sanders’ outlandish fear-mongering: “I think that’s right.”

Sanders’ evidence in support of her alarmist allegation? Nada–as Abrego Garcia would say. Let’s review: 

No one disputes that Abrego Garcia was in the US illegally. That in itself made him a candidate for deportation. He obtained a court order protecting him from deportation on the basis, according to his lawyer, that Abrego Garcia had a “‘well-founded’ fear of persecution by Barrio-18, the main rival gang of MS-13.”

As we wrote earlier this week:

“Ask yourself: why would Abrego Garcia have a ‘well-founded fear of persecution by the main rival gang of MS-13’ unless he had a real connection to that gang?”

Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen, who made that photo-op visit to Abrego Garcia earlier this week, is doing the “Full Ginsburg” today–appearing on all the leading Sunday talk shows.

If the hosts are doing their journalistic duty, at least one of them will flatly put it to Hollen: “Was Abrego Garcia a gang member?”

Look for some world-class equivocating by Hollen in response.

“Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you” was perhaps the most consequential ad in presidential campaign history, sinking any chances Harris might have had. 

Now it seems that Democrats, with big helping hands from Symone Sanders and the rest of the liberal media, are determined to make their championing of Abrego Garcia a key issue leading into the 2026 midterms. 

The Republican ad makers are no doubt busy at work:

“Democrats are for alleged gang member and wife-beater Abrego Garcia. Republicans are for you.”

 Here’s the transcript.

MSNBC
The Weekend
4/19/25
9:01 am EDT

MICHAEL STEELE: Joining us now is the Democratic congressman who represents the Maryland district where Abrego Garcia lived, Glenn Ivey. Welcome to the table, sir. 

GLENN IVERY: Thanks for having me. 

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/trump-lawlessness-ldf/

SYMONE SANDERS: Congressman Ivey, thank you for being here. There is, I’ve been talking about this all week, but Janai Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, she penned an op-ed in The Nation this week. And her op-ed talked about that we think that democracies are, the way they die is dramatically through these wars, and blood is shed, and it’s cinematic in a sense. 

But really, the realistic way in which democracies die is that it’s dismantled brick by brick, piece by piece. 

And she says that what we are seeing now with the lawlessness from this administration are really the canaries in the coal mine gasping for air. I’m paraphrasing here. 

But to me, that is why Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s specific case, the case of the gentleman who’s a makeup artist out of California who was also sent to that prison. That is why the more, the 75% of the folks who have been sent, the men who have been sent there that don’t have criminal records, that is why this is so important. 

Because if they could do it to them, if they could snatch students off the street without any pushback or recourse, they will do it to any of us. To be very clear, it’s going to be the people of color and vulnerable communities that are next in line. 

IVEY: I think that’s right. And that’s certainly part of why the African-American community is so strongly behind the supporting Kilmar. 

SANDERS: Yeah, we’re like, we are not for this. 

IVEY: Yeah, because as you just said, if they’re going to whisk them away, what are they going to do with us? 

Disdain for President Donald Trump translates into a refusal to accept reality if doing it gives Trump a political victory. Examples include, but are certainly not limited to, the continuing assertion that Trump, about Charlottesville, said some variation of, “There were good and bad white nationalists and neo-Nazis on both sides”; the denial of the Hunter Biden laptop; that Trump “mocked” a disabled reporter; that Trump said to “drink bleach” to fight COVID; and that the Trump tax cuts “only benefit the rich.”

Former President Joe Biden, who called climate change an “existential threat to the planet,” engaged in what Trump called a “war on gas.” Yet, Democrats like Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) point to the record production levels to deride Trump’s “war on gas” accusation as merely “rhetorical.” Even Biden called his Inflation Reduction Act mislabeled and admitted it “has less to do with inflation.” He said: “Through my investments, (it’s) the most significant climate change law ever. … It’s called the (Inflation Reduction Act). We should have named it what it was.”

The American Energy Alliance wrote “100 Ways Biden and the Democrats Have Made it Harder to Produce Oil & Gas.” It compiled a list of “explicitly anti-energy actions taken by the administration since Biden took office.” As to the record level of oil production under Biden, the AEA says this occurred despite and not because of Biden’s hostile oil and gas energy policies.

This brings us to eggs. On April 9, The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg said, “(Trump) did promise to lower the price of groceries, I have not seen an egg fall one cent since this man got in.” Not one cent?

The following morning, The New York Times published an article titled “Egg Prices Continued to Rise in March”:

“For weeks, President Trump has repeatedly boasted that his administration had managed to bring egg prices down. But new data on Thursday showed that egg prices at the grocery store continued to climb in March.

“Egg prices rose 5.9 percent over the month, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They climbed at a slower rate, though, after rising 10.4 percent in February and 15.2 percent in January.”

But NBC News on April 8, the day before Goldberg’s claim, wrote “Egg Prices Decline Nationwide in March After Months of Increases: The Average Price for a Dozen is Still More than $6.”:

“After nearly six months of increases, the price of eggs declined in March. … The average nationwide price of a dozen eggs decreased about a quarter in March, according to data from consumer research firm NIQ.

“NIQ’s data is collected from real checkout prices paid nationwide at grocery stores, drugstores, mass merchandisers, selected dollar stores, selected warehouse clubs and military commissaries.”

This means NBC, like Goldberg, referred to the retail price of eggs. “The price of eggs declined in March”? Prices “decreased about a quarter”?

Two days later, on April 10, PBS wrote an article headlined “Egg Prices Increase to Record High Despite Trump Promises and Curbing Bird Flu Outbreak”:

“U.S. egg prices increased again last month to reach a new record-high of $6.23 per dozen despite President Donald Trump’s predictions, a drop in wholesale prices and no egg farms having bird flu outbreaks.

“The increase reported Thursday in the Consumer Price Index means consumers and businesses that rely on eggs might not get much immediate relief. Demand for eggs is typically elevated until after Easter, which falls on April 20.”

On April 2, CNN wrote: “The price of wholesale eggs fell again last week to $3.00 a dozen, the US Department of Agriculture reported in their weekly egg market report. That’s a 9% decline from the week before. … But despite the bright spots, it can take weeks for wholesale prices to translate to most grocery store shells, according to the USDA.”

When it comes to this pathological unwillingness to give Trump even “one cent” of credit, it’s see only evil, hear only evil and speak only evil.

Larry Elder is a bestselling author and nationally syndicated radio talk-show host. To find out more about Larry Elder, or become an “Elderado,” visit www.LarryElder.com. Follow Larry on X @larryelder. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

The New York Times insufferable pontificator-in-chief David Brooks is calling for a revolution against President Donald Trump over his economic populism and government bloat-gutting agenda.

“What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal,” proclaimed Brooks in his pretentious April 17 column. The propaganda dribbled through the entire piece, and his lede sentence set the tone for it all: “In the beginning there was agony. Under the empires of old, the strong did what they willed and the weak suffered what they must.”

Then Brooks tried to pathetically cast himself as a cheap carbon copy of a revolutionary like Patrick Henry if you bought him on Wish.com: “It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising.” He continued: “It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.” As Brooks’ concluded, “We have nothing to lose but our chains.” Might this sound like an….insurrection?  

Of course, something this unglued was then promoted during his Friday night segment on the so-called PBS News Hour.

Brooks justified his insane Marxist language through false equivalency, “Peoples throughout history have done exactly this when confronted by an authoritarian assault.” Brooks is actually insinuating Trump is comparable to murderous dictatorial figures in history. 

So what was Brooks’ stew beef? Oh, a number of things, but nothing that justifies a call for revolution: “In one lane they are going after law firms. In another they savaged U.S.A.I.D. In another they’re attacking our universities. On yet another front they’re undermining NATO and on another they’re upending global trade.” Yes, Brooks is up-in-arms over Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency targeting the millions in waste from USAID that went to a number of leftist pet projects, one of which was the grotesquely anti-American Central European University founded by billionaire radical George Soros.

Also, missing from Brooks’ agitprop was that the universities that Trump is, er, “attacking” simply involve withholding of federal dollars for institutions like Harvard University that refuse to curb the rising spread of anti-Semitism on college campuses. Because these academic organizations are choosing to be paid billions in tax dollars collectively, the government does in fact have jurisdiction to ensure those funds are being used in the public interest. But in Brooks’ lexicon, such measures constitute “attacking.” 

As far as trade goes, reshuffling the geopolitical economic deck with  the imposition of tariffs was the very platform on which Trump ran his entire 2024 election campaign prior to his landslide electoral victory. In essence, he’s doing exactly what the American people voted for him to do. What the ultimate outcome of this tariff war will be, nobody knows. However, the context obliterates Brooks’ attempt at triggering a quasi-1776 “civic” revolt against Trump, which looks even more foolish and irresponsible in retrospect given that voters democratically elected Trump to stick it to countries he sees as ripping the U.S. off with unfair trade practices:

In other words, a civic uprising has to have a short-term vision and a long-term vision. Short term: Stop Trump. Foil his efforts. Pile on the lawsuits. Turn some of his followers against him. The second is a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism — one that offers a positive vision. Whether it’s the universities, the immigration system or the global economy, we can’t go back to the status quo that prevailed when Trump first rode down the escalator.

Oh go take a Valium pill, David. You’re not George Washington, for goodness’ sake!

The front of Thursday’s New York Times by San Francisco-based reporter Kellen Browning, “Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez Electrify Democrats — Tens of Thousands at Anti-Trump Rallies.” Browning barely disguised his enthusiasm to push an old lefty and a younger lefty into the national spotlight. “Monster crowds” were touted:

The biggest political rallies anywhere in America right now are being headlined by an 83-year-old senator in the twilight of his career and his 35-year-old protégée.

Roughly 36,000 people in Los Angeles. More than 34,000 attendees in Denver. And another 30,000 on Tuesday night near Sacramento.

Those monster crowds — more than 200,000 people in all, according to organizers — have turned out to cheer on a fiery anti-Trump, anti-billionaire message from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York during their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour of Western states….

(The Times never referred to any of Trump’s huge gatherings as “monster crowds.”)

With Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez making such an obvious play to the left, the paper seemed obligated to throw in a few “left” labels, but of the celebratory type, not the typical warning labels (“ultraconservative”!) the Times hangs on the right.

As Democrats search for a spark after being routed in November, the two progressives are providing the kindling, offering the party’s beaten-down base the fighting spirit it has been missing ever since President Trump returned to office.

Even as some top Democrats tack to the center or try to find common ground with the emboldened Republican president, Mr. Sanders and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez dismiss the notion of any concessions. Instead, they have stuck to the simple argument that won over millions during Mr. Sanders’s two runs for president and endeared him to the types of working-class voters who abandoned Democrats in November: The system is broken, with the wealthy enriching themselves while others scrape by.

(The following strong accusation against Elon Musk — that he is purposely trying to benefit himself — is backed up by a February Times story which blew a lot of smoke but brought no fire: “The Times also found no evidence that Mr. Musk directly ordered that an investigation into one of his companies be shut down or stalled.”)

Fine-tuning that old message for an era in which the world’s richest person is wielding a powerful position in the federal government to benefit his businesses, Mr. Sanders is finding that Democrats are all ears.

Browning shared the glee of the Sanders narrative.

The day before their Folsom rally, Mr. Sanders and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez drew 12,500 people at a stop in Nampa, Idaho, according to a Sanders spokeswoman, who said it was the largest political event in the deep-red state since Barack Obama visited in 2008. His staff said the crowd of 36,000 in Los Angeles last week was the biggest of Mr. Sanders’s career.

The enormous turnout has surprised even Mr. Sanders’s staff members, who have had to switch to larger venues to accommodate the crowds. In Folsom, attendees waited in a line three miles long to get in, the Sanders spokeswoman said, with thousands peering through fences and watching from nearby hills.

The sparse ideological labeling came off as cautionary but not hostile.

Whether voters will ultimately trust proudly left-wing leaders to run the country is an open question.

The Times has apparently gotten over its previous selective fever for campaign finance reform and removing (Republican) money from politics, bragging about Democrats taking in big sums.

Other signs point to a growing appetite for the kind of message Mr. Sanders and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez are offering. Both raised staggering sums of money in the first three months of the year, according to new financial filings: Mr. Sanders raised $11.5 million, and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez brought in $9.6 million.

Also on Thursday, the Washington Free Beacon reported “Campaign expenditures released Tuesday and reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show Sanders’s main campaign committee, Friends of Bernie Sanders, spent $221,723 chartering private jets during the first quarter of 2025.” That doesn’t exactly match the Green New Deal line.