Newsbusters

On Thursday, two of America’s leading voices for the religious left—CBS’s Stephen Colbert and Sen. Raphael Warnock—joined forces on The Late Show to prepare for Easter by attacking Republicans as un-Christian with some casual Jim Crow and slavery analogies.

Colbert asked, “I’m going to ask you a simple question that people doubt sometimes. What is the value of hope?”

 

 

While Warnock did answer the question, he used it as an opportunity to dunk on Republicans, “Oh, hope is everything, and when you lose hope, you stop fighting, and there are those right now, I mean we can talk about the cuts and all of these things that I’m happy to talk about that. I think they are trying to push a rather immoral budget through the Congress right now where you rob from the poor in order to give to the rich, but the other—”

Colbert interrupted to add, “The famous saying goes: Show me your budget, and I’ll show you where the value is.”

The guy whose church gave him a nearly $1 million tax-free luxury home, continued, “Yes, it’s Robin Hood in reverse, and I think a budget is not just a fiscal document, it’s a moral document, but the other thing that’s happening in our country right now is that there are those who are trying to weaponize despair. They’re flooding the zone, and they are hoping you won’t fight, and you need to prove them wrong. I still believe that the power in this country really does rest with the people and not the people in power.”

Later, Colbert continued with the idea that disagreeing with liberals on economics makes one a bad Christian, “The Bible often talks about caring for the elderly, for the poor. Those who have the least power, the least of my brothers. And why do you think a nation that so frequently wants to describe itself as a Christian nation or one having Judeo-Christian values wants to shirk that collective responsibility to our brothers and sisters?”

 

 

Warnock went straight to Jim Crow and slavery comparisons, “Well, you know, that has a long history, and it’s frustrating in this moment, but we’ve seen this before. There were a whole lot of Christians who were on the wrong side of the slavery question, the wrong side of the Jim Crow segregation question, but as I read the scripture, there are more than 2,000 verses in the Bible that tell you how to treat the poor.”

The pastor whose church will evict you if you miss your rent payment by so much as a day because you accidently had a typo in your payment information or owe as little as $28.55, rolled on:

I’m a Matthew 25 Christian. Jesus said, ‘I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was sick. I was in prison, and you visited me,’ and someone said to the master ‘When were you hungry? When were you sick? When were you in prison?’ And he said, ‘Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these, you’ve also done it also unto me.’ And so what I try to do in my preaching and in my work in the Senate is center the most marginalized members of the human family, center the least of these. Give ordinary people a chance.

Warnock may not practice what he preaches, but he does allow Colbert’s liberal audience to feel good about themselves, and for Colbert himself, that is what matters most.

Here is a transcript for the April 17-taped show:

CBS The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

4/18/2025

12:07 AM ET

STEPHEN COLBERT: What’s the value, I’m going to ask you a simple question—

RAPHAEL WARNOCK: Sure.

COLBERT: — that people doubt sometimes. What is the value of hope?

WARNOCK: Oh, hope is everything, and when you lose hope, you stop fighting, and there are those right now, I mean we can talk about the cuts and all of these things that I’m happy to talk about that. I think they are trying to push a rather immoral budget through the Congress right now where you rob from the poor in order to give to the rich, but the other—

COLBERT: The famous saying goes: Show me your budget, and I’ll show you where the value is.

WARNOCK: Yes, it’s Robin Hood in reverse, and I think a budget is not just a fiscal document, it’s a moral document, but the other thing that’s happening in our country right now is that there are those who are trying to weaponize despair. 

They’re flooding the zone, and they are hoping you won’t fight, and you need to prove them wrong. I still believe that the power in this country really does rest with the people and not the people in power. 

And if a kid who grew up in public housing, number 11 of 12 children, first college graduate in his family can become a United States senator, anything is still possible in America.

…

COLBERT: The Bible often talks about caring for the elderly, for the poor. Those who have the least power, the least of my brothers. 

WARNOCK: That’s right.

COLBERT: And why do you think a nation that so frequently wants to describe itself as a Christian nation or one having Judeo-Christian values wants to shirk that collective responsibility to our brothers and sisters?

WARNOCK: Well, you know, that has a long history, and it’s frustrating in this moment, but we’ve seen this before. There were a whole lot of Christians who were on the wrong side of the slavery question, the wrong side of the Jim Crow segregation question, but as I read the scripture, there are more than 2,000 verses in the Bible that tell you how to treat the poor. I’m a Matthew 25 Christian. Jesus said, “I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was sick. I was in prison, and you visited me,” and someone said to the master “When were you hungry? When were you sick? When were you in prison?” And he said, “Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these, you’ve also done it also unto me.”

And so what I try to do in my preaching and in my work in the Senate is center the most marginalized members of the human family, center the least of these. Give ordinary people a chance.

Not only is that the right thing to do, as it turns out, very often the right thing to do is the smart thing to do, too. I think our economy will be a whole lot better off if we give tax cuts to ordinary people, middle-class people, working-class people rather than billionaires.

​Last night’s episode of NBC’s Law & Order opened with a raid on a church-based homeless shelter by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). And it only got worse – and more leftwing – from there.

The episode, “Play with Fire (Part 1),” a crossover episode with Law & Order: SVU, began with an illegal named Ana (Marisela Zumbado) whispering to another woman, Maria (Dani Montalvo), about an apparent sexual assault. As the two women are talking, ICE suddenly rushes in.

Ana: At that warehouse, on 169th. But I–I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I don’t want to get in trouble.

Maria: What are you talking about? Why would you get in trouble?

ICE Agent: United States Immigration and Customs!

Illegals: Ice!

ICE Agent: Everybody get down on the floor!

Maria: Ana, run!

ICE Agents: Stay where you are. Get in the middle! Get in the middle! Freeze!

Priest: Calm down. Slow down. Guns down! Guns down! Slow down.

ICE Agents: Freeze! Go, go, go. Stay where you are! [Indistinct shouts] Federal agent! Stop running! Stop!

Maria: Ana, come on.

NYPD Officer: Stop! Police!

Maria: Go!

NYPD Officers: Stop! NYPD!

Ana: Oh, my God. ♪ ♪ [truck horn blaring]

Maria: Let’s go. [Brakes screeching] [Horn honks]

ICE Agent: I got two running westbound, 159th Street.

Later, Maria is found raped and murdered at a nearby warehouse. It turns out she was an undercover cop investigating a sex trafficking ring that lures illegal immigrants. 

Maria’s case shares the same modus operandi and location as another rape and murder a few years earlier. Detectives investigate an illegal immigrant who fled to Mexico while under suspicion in the first case. He has snuck back over the border again. NYPD finds him with cocaine and heroin, but he has an alibi for both murders and is removed as a suspect.

Instead, the rapist-murderer turns out to be a bad cop, Maria’s lieutenant who used his power to gain control over women in the shelter. So, a police lieutenant is the villain rather than an illegal with a criminal history who re-entered the country.

The “bad cop” trope is tired and the opening scene’s portrayal of ICE is heavy-handed. Nonetheless, this Law & Order crossover deserves some credit for at least acknowledging the connection between open borders and sex trafficking. That alone is more reality than network television is usually willing to admit.

The Easter season can remind people of classic Hollywood movies with religious themes. Every year, ABC still airs The Ten Commandments. People might break out The Passion of the Christ from 2004, or head to the theater to see The King of Kings or The Chosen: Last Supper, building on that streaming TV series on the life and ministry of Jesus.

But taxpayer-funded National Public Radio is inevitably going to come at the subject from a secular perspective. On Palm Sunday, their badly named newscast All Things Considered included a conversation among three NPR journalists about their “favorite (and not so favorite) religious films.”

The segment ended with the NPR reporters lauding the recent movie Conclave, which indulged a libertine-left fantasy by having the Catholic Church tricked into electing a pope with a uterus.

Weekend host Scott Detrow began: “Even for those of us who live more secular lives, movies continue to offer a bit of a cinematic catechism with stories from the Bible and other religious traditions.” He asked NPR religion reporter Jason DeRose: “What is your general view of that genre? Does it work for you? Do you have some problems with it?”

DeRose replied: “Yeah, they just don’t really work for me. I respond badly to them. For instance, biblical epics, I find them incredibly hokey. This is where I will admit that I have never seen the film, The Ten Commandments.”

It’s easy to describe this 1956 film as “hokey,” but that doesn’t mean it can’t be meaningful. NPR anchor Michel Martin took a different view: “To me, that’s not a religious film. That’s like a family film that you see with your grandma.” This is like saying Rocky isn’t a boxing movie.

DeRose continued his lament about religious films: “But the ones that I have seen, such as, you know, The Greatest Story Ever Told, I’m kind of confused by who really watches them and who really loves them and finds them, like, religiously meaningful to them because I just…I focus on, like, they wouldn’t have been doing that, or, you know, Jesus didn’t have blue eyes.”

In that film, Jesus was played by blue-eyed Swedish actor Max von Sydow, but that’s a strange reason to choke on the whole movie.

But DeRose has a funny definition of a “religion movie”: “I have a very specific group of religion movies that I actually like quite a lot, and they are comedies,” he said. “They’re the Monty Python films – The Life Of Brian, The Holy Grail…The Meaning Of Life has one of the funniest songs I ever heard in my life, ‘Every Sperm Is Sacred.’” They played a clip, with the lyric “If a sperm is wasted, God is quite irate.”

This song is an explicit mockery of Catholic teaching against artificial contraception, but DeRose admitted “this probably says a lot about me and my sense of humor and my approach to religion…which is, you know, approach it with a real sense of humor.”

If NPR’s religion reporter comes to your church, would you perceive him as someone who will give you a fair and balanced story?

In fact, DeRose can be quite reverent and Bible-quoting – if the cause is right. On April 1, DeRose offered a gushy Morning Edition story on how “dozens of houses of worship in southern California” are sheltering illegal immigrants from the Trump administration. One minister said “faith communities are going to be in solidarity with a very vulnerable community at this moment.”

Reverence lines up very neatly with leftist politics at NPR – always at the expense of conservative taxpayers.

For its daily Eye on America human-interest feature, the CBS Evening News ran a report on the use of food banks by individuals formerly considered to be “high-income”. The report’s content leaves viewers to reasonably wonder why CBS never ran such items over the prior 4 years. 

Watch as correspondent Mark Strassman sits down with a Connecticut mother who frequents the food bank despite a family income considered to be “middle class”:

MARK STRASSMAN: You remember going to food banks? What was it like?

CHANDRA KELSEY: The first time I did it, I cried. To be in a position where you are doing okay and then you lose everything the next day, it’s humbling. It’s scary.

STRASSMAN: And yet you’d never suspect need has lived with this family. 

Household income is roughly…?

KELSEY: 150. Two people working full-time. Sometimes I work two jobs.

STRASSMAN: How can you make $150,000 and be food insecure?

KELSEY: That’s not what you bring home after taxes. You know, we have mortgage, insurance. We’ve got one kid on their way to college, one in college. Something as small as a $1,000 expense could throw things off significantly. 

Anchor John Dickerson introduced the report with a frame suggesting that the food prices phenomenon is of recent vintage, when in fact it is not:

JOHN DICKERSON: You can see the impact of inflation most clearly these days at the grocery store. But you can also see it at food banks, where people who never dreamed they’d need it are turning for help. Even some with six-figure incomes are struggling to feed their families.

Are people really waking up to the impacts of immigration on food pricing “these days?” Not likely. The fact is that there is a plethora of reporting that memorializes America’s ongoing struggle with food prices over the last four years. Of course, there was a Democrat in The White House at the time. Things were (D)ifferent,

The “victim” displayed here is a resident of a high-tax state, another fact that goes completely unaddressed. But the purpose of the report isn’t just to call attention to hunger. There was another pending issue that required attention:

STRASSMAN: Chandra Kelsey is scared about her job. She works as a program director at the Yale School of Public Health and worries about continued government funding of universities such as hers.

KELSEY: We are trying to be very cognizant that it could be around the corner.

STRASSMAN: And in its own way, Connecticut Foodshare is feeling food insecure. Government DOGE cuts last month slashed nearly $2 million from its food budget. How do you replace that?

JAKUBOWSKI: We don’t, that’s the problem.

The real villain of this story according to the media, the real responsible for families needing to go to food banks is DOGE. Fresh off of ruining vacations and potentially killing Grandma, DOGE now threatens to send people to the food bank and get them fired from their Ivy League support jobs. Joe Biden and his administration’s disproportionate role in creating the conditions that compel people to top their weekly groceries off by visiting their local food banks is virtually absolved.

The whole thing reeks of well-executed propaganda.

Click “expand” to view the full transcript of the aforementioned report as aired on the CBS Evening News on Thursday, April 17th, 2025:

JOHN DICKERSON: You can see the impact of inflation most clearly these days at the grocery store. But you can also see it at food banks, where people who never dreamed they’d need it are turning for help. Even some with six-figure incomes are struggling to feed their families. Mark Strassmann has tonight’s “Eye on America” from Wallingford, Connecticut. 

MARK STRASSMAN: Forget the image you may have of people who are hungry. In America, hunger is now as mobile as this food bank serving a line 60 deep in Connecticut.

CHANDRA KELSEY: Being under financial stress takes a lot of time, and a lot of planning…

STRASSMAN: Take Chandra Kelsey, grocery stopping on a tight budget for her family of five.

KELSEY: It’s whatever is on sale.

STRASSMAN: Food insecurity eats at her. A lifelong trauma.

You remember going to food banks? What was it like?

KELSEY: The first time I did it, I cried. To be in a position where you are doing okay and then you lose everything the next day, it’s humbling. It’s scary.

STRASSMAN: And yet you’d never suspect need has lived with this family. 

Household income is roughly…?

KELSEY: 150. Two people working full-time. Sometimes I work two jobs.

STRASSMAN: How can you make $150,000 and be food insecure?

KELSEY: That’s not what you bring home after taxes. You know, we have mortgage, insurance. We’ve got one kid on their way to college, one in college. Something as small as a $1,000 expense could throw things off significantly. 

This one is crazy looking…

STRASSMAN: On and off for a decade, Kelsey has relied on help from Connecticut Foodshare, the state’s largest food bank. Se and two of her children now give back by volunteering here. All this food, and it’s still not enough. Nationally, more than 50 million people need help getting food from charities like this one. Here in Connecticut, that’s one in eight people.

JASON JAKUBOWSKI: They’re your neighbor. They’re your friend. They could be your family.

STRASSMAN: Jason Jakubowski, Connecticut Foodshare CEO, told us demand for their food jumped 23% last year. He expects another double-digit increase this year. Are you seeing more people with higher incomes who need your help?

JAKUBOWSKI: 100%. Many of them come to us and say I donated to you for years, and I never in a million years thought I would have to use this service.

STRASSMAN: What has changed?

JAKUBOWSKI: A lot of economic unpredictability. They are scared about their cost-of-living is going to go up. They are scared about what the price of X is going to be.

STRASSMAN: Chandra Kelsey is scared about her job. She works as a program director at the Yale School of Public Health and worries about continued government funding of universities such as hers.

KELSEY: We are trying to be very cognizant that it could be around the corner.

STRASSMAN: And in its own way, Connecticut Foodshare is feeling food insecure. Government DOGE cuts last month slashed nearly $2 million from its food budget. How do you replace that?

JAKUBOWSKI: We don’t, that’s the problem.

STRASSMAN: Is there any hope here?

JAKUBOWSKI: We still live in America. People always step up to the plate. There may not be enough food, but we are going to keep doing whatever we can to try to provide it.

STRASSMAN: Provide it to more families who never suspected their new worry is their next meal. For Eye on America, I’m Mark Strassman in Wallingford, Connecticut.

Seemingly itching for another anti-gun show trial like the one he “moderated” after the Parkland shooting (and won an award for), on Thursday, CNN’s Jake Tapper decided to target gun rights by once again exploiting an hours-old school shooting (Florida State University) for political gain. He trotted out 20-year-old Jayden D’Onofrio to be the voice to push for gun control with him. But while Tapper claimed his guest was just an average FSU student, D’Onofrio had a long history of being involved in Democratic Party politics and was even in the running to be the party’s vice chair in the state.

Tapper introduced his guest, saying: “Let’s bring in Jayden D’Onofrio. He’s a student at FSU. And, Jaden, we’re so glad you’re safe. Thank you so much for joining us.”

“We have a legislature here in Florida led by Republicans who have actively actually introduced a law this legislative session to lower the age to own rifles and guns in our state, which was a bill that they passed after the shooting at MSD in Parkland,” D’Onofrio cried to Tapper. “The shooter today was, I believe, 20 years old. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s nonsensical, Jake. It’s nonsensical.”

D’Onofrio went on to suggest that the Republicans in the Florida legislature had blood on their hands:

I live two minutes from the capitol here in Tallahassee, and if I were to go speak to the legislators here specifically, I believe the Republican legislators who are passing these types of bills that allow this stuff to happen, they’re going to give me thoughts and prayers, and I don’t want to hear that because there’s people dying actively, constantly from this – these kinds of shootings.

It’s ridiculous that we continue to deal with this. They actually just – To take it back again. They just passed another bill to have the longest tax holiday in the entire state history to promote gun ownership in this state, and ammunition ownership. It’s just it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense. And it doesn’t have to be this way. But we keep doing it. We keep going down this road.

 

 

“The adults of this country are failing the children of this country, and the young adults of this country like yourself,” Tapper responded. “And this didn’t happen when I was your age. This wasn’t something I had to fear when I was your age.”

Tapper would thank D’Onofrio for his “eloquence” at the conclusion of the interview.

If D’Onofrio’s (20) “eloquence” and extensive knowledge of guns laws and tax holidays making their way through the Florida legislature make you raise an eyebrow, it should. A NewsBusters investigation discovered that D’Onofrio was not the average FSA student Tapper had portrayed him as.

In fact, the reason D’Onofrio knew so much about the tax holiday was because he spoke out against it to Florida Senate’s Finance and Tax Committee just days ago.

“Today I spoke in front of the Florida Senate Finance and Tax Committee to voice my opposition to SB7034, a bill proposed by Republicans that will create the longest tax holiday in Florida’s history, for the purpose of purchasing guns of any kind and ammunition. This legislation will further promote gun violence and the deaths of innocent Floridians. Republicans are being weak on crime!” he wrote in a Facebook post.

 

 

In another Facebook post, D’Onofrio lashed out Congressman Byron Donalds (R) with profanity over the idea of him becoming governor. “Byron Donalds is just too f*cking extreme to become Florida’s next Governor,” he wrote. “Corrupt and shady politicians is not what Florida needs!”

And his reaction to the 2024 election results? “Devastated.”

His LinkedIn profile bragged that he was “Youngest PAC Chairman in Florida with Florida Future Leaders and was the inaugural Chairman of the Florida Democratic Party Youth Council.” As part of his work experience, he interned for three Democratic legislators in Florida at both the state and federal levels: State Senators Lauren Book and Shevrin Jones, and House Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. He was also a political fellow for Charlie Crist for Governor.

 

 

WFSU, the university’s NPR affiliate, bragged back in January that D’Onofrio had “made waves in the state Democratic party in recent years” as he was running to be a vice chair of the party at the state level. “His PAC, Florida Future Leaders, raised over a million dollars in 2024 to turn out the youth vote in Florida…D’Onofrio said he wants to bring those fundraising chops to the party, while prioritizing training local Democratic parties to utilize similar tactics to his PAC,” the station touted.

“Republicans have dominated our legislature for every year since 1996 and our governor’s mansion for every year since 1999. It’s gotten us to this point where we have one of the worst property insurance crisis in the entire country. We’re also one of the most unaffordable states in the entire nation,” D’Onofrio told the station.

That doesn’t sound like an average FSU student. What it looks like is CNN trying to pass off a covert liberal activist on their viewers.

The transcript is below. Click “expand” to read:

CNN’s The Lead
April 17, 2025
5:10:48 p.m. Eastern

(…)

JAYDEN D’ONOFRIO: We have a legislature here in Florida led by Republicans who have actively actually introduced a law this legislative session to lower the age to own rifles and guns in our state, which was a bill that they passed after the shooting at MSD in Parkland. The shooter today was, I believe, 20 years old. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s nonsensical, Jake. It’s nonsensical.

JAKE TAPPER: So just to get people up to speed when the Parkland shooting happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in large part because of the efforts of students from that school and also just from all over Florida, there were gun laws changed, red flag laws passed, the age to own a handgun in the United States is 21. But in Florida, the age to own a rifle or a long gun was only 18. That was changed and made 21. And the governor at the time was Governor Rick Scott, currently a senator.

The effort after the shooting in Uvalde to make that national law failed, to make it 21 for long guns as well. And currently what our guest is referring to is there’s an effort in Florida, as Jaden pointed out, to bring it back to 18 from the 21 that it had been raised to after Parkland.

And all that, for people who don’t know, FSU and Tallahassee, all of that is going on in the same town FSU is located in the capital of Florida.

There are roughly Jaden there, roughly. 30 – 35,000 students at FSU undergraduate, plus an additional 10,000 or so graduate. This is going to affect all of you. I suspect. I don’t know if you know anybody that has been directly impacted. I don’t know if you know the shooter. But do you know anybody connected at all beyond the obvious connection of all of you being traumatized by this?

D’ONOFRIO: Yeah, I’m actually sitting here with a friend of mine who says they’ve actually seen the shooter before in class. This is a small community, and it’s – This is not the way it should be. This, this – It’s just not normal for this stuff to happen constantly, over and over and over again.

I live two minutes from the capitol here in Tallahassee, and if I were to go speak to the legislators here specifically, I believe the Republican legislators who are passing these types of bills that allow this stuff to happen, they’re going to give me thoughts and prayers, and I don’t want to hear that because there’s people dying actively, constantly from this – these kinds of shootings.

It’s ridiculous that we continue to deal with this. They actually just – To take it back again. They just passed another bill to have the longest tax holiday in the entire state history to promote gun ownership in this state, and ammunition ownership. It’s just it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense. And it doesn’t have to be this way. But we keep doing it. We keep going down this road.

And it’s I think all of us as students who, you know, see this constantly, but also, you know, knowing each other and being friends with all of each other and having such a community here, I think it’s really up to us to kind of lead the way on this, because the legislators and specifically Republicans in this state are not helping us in any real way right now. And it’s awful to see

TAPPER: Jayden. Let me just say, I have said it before on the show, and I’m sure I’ll say it again. The adults of this country are failing the children of this country, and the young adults of this country like yourself. And this didn’t happen when I was your age. This wasn’t something I had to fear when I was your age. This is something that is a relatively new development in this country. And whether one wants to ascribe it to mental health crises or lax gun laws or a combination of the two, you have every right to feel outraged. And I thank you for your time and your eloquence today. Please take care of yourself.

D’ONOFRIO: Thank you. Jake, I appreciate you.

The New York Times’s mustachioed “China for a Day” propagandist Thomas Friedman is having a nervous breakdown because President Donald Trump isn’t a climate change nut like he is. And true-to-form, he’s simping for the Chi-Coms to get Trump… Again.

“I Have Never Been More Afraid for My Country’s Future,” read Friedman’s grossly embellished April 15 item that was plastered on A22 of his newspaper’s April 17 print edition. After bellyaching over  the allegedly “[s]o much crazy [that] happens with the Trump administration every day,” Friedman then freaked over Trump’s April 8 decision “to sign an executive order to bolster coal mining.”

Oh my goodness! Wow! The horror! But what made his babbling even more nonsensical was that he tried to do some free PR for the communist Chinese government by legitimizing it as some budding climate crusader, despite it being the undisputed leader in CO2 emissions: “Wait, wait, you say, but isn’t China also still digging coal? Yes, it is, but with a long-term plan to phase it out and to use robots to do the dangerous and health-sapping work of miners.” Just take a genocidal government’s word for it, right? 

When a Hong Kong protester famously exclaimed in 2020, “Donald Trump don’t trust China. China is asshole,” he wasn’t saying it just for the kicks and giggles. The overarching point: China can’t be trusted. Period. And that even it applies to its so-called climate-friendly commitments.

China’s commitment to fighting so-called climate change is an unmitigated farce. CarbonBrief reported on February 13, 2025, that China’s mass construction of new coal-power plants reached a “10-year high” in 2024, to the tune of 94.5 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-power capacity, with an additional 3.3GW of suspended projects being resumed. In fact, Reuters reported in 2024 that China was developing 1.28 billion tons in coal-mining capacity, which is underscored by the fact that China “accounts for more than half of the world’s pipeline of new coal mines.”

Energy journalist Robert Bryce noted in a March 24, 2025, Substack blog, despite “China claiming it will hit net zero ‘before 2060,’” the communist state along with India “now account for more than 70% of global coal use, and their coal demand and CO2 emissions will continue rising for years to come.” Of course, Friedman didn’t bother expounding on any of this context while he was busy making out with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s ring. 

Friedman stupidly tried to compare China’s legitimacy with the U.S. as being somehow superior: “And that’s the point. While Trump is doing his ‘weave’ — rambling about whatever strikes him at the moment as good policy — China is weaving long-term plans.” Yes Thomas, China is “weaving long-term plans” for more coal!

Readers should not be surprised at Friedman’s “China good, America bad” ranting. After all, this is the same kook who had the temerity to blurt out that Trump’s 2016 electoral victory was a “moral 9/11.” And being a Beijing sycophant has been Friedman’s modus operandi for years. In 2009, Friedman drew fire for fawning that when a one-party communist autocracy that “is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.” Alexa, define communism for Friedman.

The Times columnist’s pro-China tomfoolery wasn’t even the only nonsense plaguing his latest column. 

Friedman even hilariously tried to invert the meaning of wokeism by accusing Trump of genuflecting to a so-called “right-wing woke ideology that doesn’t recognize green manufacturing jobs as ‘real’ jobs.” Uh, that’s not how wokeism works Thomas. Friedman also threw a fit over how Trump “singles out coal miners for praise while he tries to zero out development of clean-tech jobs from his budget — in 2023, the U.S. wind energy industry employed approximately 130,000 workers, while the solar industry employed 280,000.” He must have missed Reuters’ recent concession that the multitrillion-dollar “pursuit of net zero carbon emissions has been a resounding failure.” Not exactly a good return on investment eh, Friedman? 

Along with joining their fellow broadcast networks in rushing to the defense of illegal immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia despite records showing his less-than-stellar conduct, CBS used its flagship newscasts on Tuesday and Wednesday to bemoan the plight of Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, who helped lead the pro-Hamas protest movement on campus, which resulted in police needing riot gear to break up the hooliganism.

Correspondent Lila Luciano’s fawning coverage — which tallied 10 minutes and 38 seconds on the Tuesday and Wednesday CBS Evening News and Wednesday’s CBS Mornings — never once mentioned Mahdawi’s support for Hamas and Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, a group designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization.

If you were to add in a brief from Tuesday’s CBS Evening News Plus and full story on Wednesday’s CBS Mornings Plus, the tally would balloon to 16 minutes and 49 seconds.

Along with saying he could “emphasize” with Hamas vis-à-vis on October 7, our friends at the Free Beacon detailed his rampant hatred toward Israel and Jews, which flew in the face of his claims to CBS (click “expand”):

“Hamas is a product of the Israeli occupation,” he told a New England newspaper two weeks after the terror attack. Mahdawi, according to the newspaper, also helped pen an Oct. 14, 2023, statement issued by anti-Israel groups at Columbia that said the “Palestinian struggle for freedom is rooted in international law, under which occupied peoples have the right to resist the occupation of their land.”

“If every political avenue available to Palestinians is blocked, we should not be surprised when resistance and violence breaks out,” the statement read.

Later in December, during a 60 Minutes interview, Mahdawi said he empathizes with Hamas and argued that the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attack, which killed nearly 1,200 Israelis, should not be looked at in a vacuum.

“I did not say that I justify what Hamas has done. I said I can empathize. To empathize is to understand the root cause and to not look at any event or situation in a vacuum. This is for me that path moving forward,” he said.

In August, Mahdawi posted pictures to his Instagram account honoring the “martyrdom” of his “cousin,” Maysara Masharqa, who served as a prominent field commander in the military wing of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Mahdawi praised Masharqa as a “fierce resistance fighter” who had been fighting since he was 17, adding that he spent seven years in an Israeli prison.

“Here is Mesra who offers his soul as a sacrifice for the homeland and for the blood of the martyrs as a gift for the victory of Gaza and in defense of the dignity of his homeland and his people against the vicious Israeli occupation in the West Bank,” Mahdawi wrote in the post.

Months earlier, at a Jan. 24, 2024, campus protest, Mahdawi told a crowd of students that “there’s nothing, nothing more honorable than dying for a noble cause.”

Tuesday’s CBS Evening News used the plight of illegal immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a bridge to Mahdawi. Co-anchor John Dickerson fretted “Mahdawi is here legally, but the administration wants to deport him, claiming he could undermine the Mideast peace process.”

Luciano began with more complaining:

Look, we were wondering, how is it that, among the thousands of student protesters in college campuses around the country, the federal government landed on a few who they’re targeting for deportation? Well, our monthlong reporting took us to an activist group that then led us to this one man who is today in federal custody fighting against his deportation. This is Mohsen Mahdawi. He was one of the students leading pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. Mahdawi is Palestinian. He’s also a permanent U.S. resident.

She began with soundbites of Mahdawi being heralded in 2023 by 60 Minutes, which she said was used by “the U.S. branch of Betar, a group that claims it has sent the names of thousands of protesters to the Trump administration, urging they be deported.” She scoffed at Betar’s credibility, saying the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) “calls it an extremist group.”

The interview clips were wallowing in his situation with Mahdawi insisting his “compassion extend[s] beyond the Palestinian people” to “also…Jewish people and for the Israelis as well” (click “expand”):

 

 

LUCIANO: We’re on our way to meet up with Mohsen, who has been in hiding for weeks. And he fears that the administration is coming after him next. We met Mahdawi in Vermont on Sunday. [TO MAHDAWI] Nice to finally meet you.

MAHDAWI: Pleasure to meet you.

LUCIANO: How you doing?

MAHDAWI: Some people actually found where I was. They slipped a paper underneath my door saying: “We are watching you.”

LUCIANO: While sheltering in place and before fleeing to Vermont, Mahdawi got a notice for a long-awaited appointment to become a U.S. citizen. [TO MAHDAWI] When you got the appointment, what were your thoughts?

MAHDAWI: Mixed feelings, right? It’s the first feeling of, like, I have been waiting for this for more than a year. And the other feeling is like, wait a minute. Is this a honey trap?

LUCIANO: You think they could be calling you in to detain you?

MAHDAWI: Correct.

LUCIANO: What do you want people to hear from you in the case that you are detained?

MAHDAWI: I want people to know that my compassion extended beyond the Palestinian people. My compassion is also for the Jewish people and for the Israelis as well.

(….)

MAHDAWI: It is — it’s an irony, the irony of the destiny. And I accept the outcome. If my story will become another story for the struggle to have justice and democracy in this country, let it be.

Sure enough, Luciano and her CBS crew were there outside an office building when Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) scooped him up in what he portrayed as a trap masquerading as an interview.

Back live, she said Mahdawi was “in custody in Vermont, in federal custody” and “[h]is attorneys are fighting not just the legality of his detention, given that he has not committed any crimes” and hope they’ll win “an injunction to not just keep him in Vermont, at least to stop the deportation, but also to try and bail him out.”

“[E]xtraordinary reporting,” Dickerson replied.

Wednesday’s CBS Mornings was nearly identical in the taped report, but gave a chance for another liveshot and new set of co-hosts to react.

Co-host Gayle King framed this was another step in “the Trump administration’s crackdown on college campus protesters” and Mahdawi “was among the students who led protests at Columbia University against the war in Gaza” and accused by the U.S. of “undermin[ing]…foreign policy.”

Following Luciano’s report, King said to her his arrest was “so unsettling” because “he has in this country legally” and “a lot of people we know have that,” thus showing no one who isn’t a citizen is truly “safe.”

 

 

Of course, King didn’t provide the caveat that foreigners have nothing to worry about so long as their papers are in order and, of course, you’re not a terrorist sympathizer.

King and co-host Nate Burleson continued to throw a pity party (click “expand”):

LUCIANO: And not just that, Gayle, the fact that he was sent an e- mail for that application — not for that application, for that appointment for his citizenship, he was ready. He told me, he said he was at a fork on the road, either he’s gets closer to becoming a citizen with more or full rights, or he’s detained, and he said he was ready to take that exam, the hundred questions.

KING: Right.

LUCIANO: So you know, he’s told you’re coming in for this and we were told when the interview began — the interview began, so it sounded like, okay, this is going according to plan.

BURLESON: So, his intuition about it being a honey trap —

LUCIANO: Absolutely.

BURLESON: — was correct.

LUCIANO: Absolutely. And that’s very concerning for everybody, if the government is telling you, you’re coming in for one thing, and by the way, he’s not charged with any crimes, he’s not charged with anything.

KING: That’s what I’m trying to figure out. What is he — what are the charges against him?

LUCIANO: Just like Khalil, it is up to the State Department, the Secretary of State, to determine if your presence in the country goes against our foreign policy, without any specifics. It’s a story to keep an eye on.

BURLESON: It is concerning. Most people will receive an e-mail about their citizenship.

KING: That they’ve been waiting for, Nate.

BURLESON: You say, okay.

LUCIANO: And you cannot show up, that’s part of the process, and that’s what he told me. He said, look, I asked him, you know the stakes, why are you showing up? But he said, well, because that’s part of the process, and I still have hope that if I am a citizen, I can continue speaking on what matters.

KING: So now he’s detained where and for how long?

LUCIANO: He is in Vermont. The temporary restraining order, his attorneys tell me they’re trying to turn it into a preliminary injunction to keep him in Vermont, and they’re trying to get him out on bail as well.

On CBS Mornings Plus, she lamented that Mahdawi “became the target of online threats” because of his 2023 interview and there’s “concern” more could similarly be taken.

“There’s a lot of people who say, look, I don’t agree with the protests. I don’t agree with what they had to say at all, but there is a concern that without criminal charges, just, you know, saying this person is inconvenient for the country is concerning,” she said.

Dickerson tucked Madhawi into a news brief on Wednesday’s CBS Evening News: “Last night, we told you about Mohsen Mahdawi, a green card holder who as arrested in Vermont after taking part in protests at Columbia University. Dozens of House Democrat sent a letter to members of the administration today demanding to know why he’s being held.”

To see the relevant CBS transcripts from April 16, click here (for the CBS Evening News) and here (for CBS Evening News Plus). To see the relevant CBS transcripts from April 17, click here (for CBS Mornings), here (for CBS Mornings Plus), and here (for the CBS Evening News).

So far, at no point during the second Trump administration had MSNBC ever waivered in their far-left political leanings or hatred of Trump. But according to disgraced former CNN talking head Don Lemon, during his podcast on Thursday, the network had “capitulated” to Trump and was “favoring” him because they had fired a bunch of their race baiting and pro-terrorist hosts like Joy Reid, Tiffany Cross, and Mehdi Hasan. Lemon celebrated them as the network’s “strongest, fiercest” voices.

Proclaiming “this is gonna be an honest moment” and that he “may get in trouble” because “a lot of people are not gonna like what I’m saying,” Lemon proceeded to take swipes at the media for being an industry in trouble. “They only have themselves to blame,” he declared.

According to his warped view, the media wasn’t in trouble because they had a liberal bias but rather because of their “capitulation” to Trump.

Of course, Lemon busted out a quote from Dr. Marin Luther King Jr. to falsely claim the liberal media were trying to play nice with Trump:

This is Dr. King. Here it is. Letter from a Birmingham jail in 1963: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in its stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive piece, which is the presence of justice.”

“I want peace with the administration. What do you need, sir? I want peace with the administration,” Lemon threw on a mocking tone, pretending to be the kind of media executive who fired him.

Lemon seemingly decried that media outlets would actually speak to members of Trump’s administration or perhaps conservatives in general, broadly smearing them as “fucking racist” while he denounced them for being white:

How do we bring on your voices, even if they’re lying, even if they’re fascists, even if they are bigots, even if they’re fucking racist? Even if they are election deniers, even if they are insurrection deniers.’ Let’s bake oxygen for those people so that we can make what? Power and in many ways, whiteness feel comfortable.

 

 

It was that demand for more racism against whites that had Lemon lamenting the firing of Cross and Reid. “That was the first mistake of complying. And getting rid of your most powerful, your strongest opposition voices because those are the voices that will save you because many times, those are the voices that are speaking for the people who are speaking for the frustrated, not the comfortable,” he shouted.

“And those are the voices that you call ‘racist’ and ‘race baiters’ and um uh and ‘agitators.’ That was back in the day when they would call them, ‘you are so you’re an agitator,” he whined.

Lemon touted Reid as “a dear friend” who was “a strong opposition to something that was real. It wasn’t fake. She was a strong opposition to the fascism that she, as a smart woman, saw coming.” He ridiculously claimed it was her honesty which “made people uncomfortable.”

He followed up by lauding Cross for repeatedly calling former Fox News host Megyn Kelly a “racist,” which he doubled down on while attacking her for being “a blonde white lady.” He suggested that Kelly, like Trump, was a “Trojan Horse” for racism.

Insanely, Lemon suggested that Cross wasn’t liked by NBCUniversal executives because she spoke for “Ms. Sadie down the street in the church hat” and not “crazy MAGA conservative[s] or Republican[s].”

By accident, Lemon did speak some truth when he tacitly admitted that Hasan supported October 7 and slaughtering Jews:

Let’s talk about the Mehdi Hasans of it all. As awful, as awful, as awful as October 7th was, and it is awful, and people should be outraged and someone should pay the price for it. You don’t get rid of Mehdi Hassan. “People have other opinions than the preeminent voices in media, in business, in government, everywhere,” Lemon shouted in defense of Hasan’s sympathies for Hamas.

Lemon was reaching maximum sour as he screeched about how MSNBC had, “gotten rid of your most, your strongest, fiercest, and most outspoken, fearless people who are going to tell you like it is!” And without them, MSNBC was supposedly “favoring the MAGA Trump administration!”

“The media is getting rid of the people who speak out against Donald Trump and they’re putting people on who speak for Donald Trump with the lies,” he screamed without evidence.

The transcript is below. Click “expand” to read:

The Don Lemon Show
April 17, 2025

DON LEMON: Now, I want you to, I want you guys to be really honest with me, really honest with me. I, this is gonna be an honest moment. I may get in trouble. I know a lot of people are not gonna like what I’m saying.

It is ourselves, but also the media, it is yourselves. The media only has themselves to blame. They only have themselves to blame. The capitulation.

This is Dr. King. Here it is. Letter from a Birmingham jail in 1963: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in its stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive piece, which is the presence of justice.”

‘I want peace with the administration. What do you need, sir? I want peace with the administration. How do we bring on your voices, even if they’re lying, even if they’re fascists, even if they are bigots, even if they’re fucking racist. Even if they are election deniers, even if they are insurrection deniers.’ Let’s bake oxygen for those people so that we can make what? Power and in many ways, whiteness feel comfortable.

And that goes to the person, the people who own the media company, who sit there and they’re like, ‘okay, this makes me feel comfortable,’ when I see just this sort of anodyne product where they’re just standing there going, here’s, and they are what they are really just stenographers or they’re spouting the message that you are comfortable with. That is not what America is about. That’s not what journalism is about.

And in many ways, the journalists have not stood up. Because those folks have gotten rid of their strongest voices, their oppositions. And when people say the First Amendment is about, I will, I don’t agree with what you’ll say, but I’ll fight like hell for you to be able to say it. That was the first mistake of complying. And getting rid of your most powerful, your strongest opposition voices because those are the voices that will save you because many times, those are the voices that are speaking for the people who are speaking for the frustrated, not the comfortable!

And those are the voices that you call ‘racist’ and ‘race baiters’ and um uh and ‘agitators.’ That was back in the day when they would call them, ‘you are so you’re an agitator.’

Joy Reid is a dear friend. I did not always agree with her, but I would fight like hell for her to be able to say on the TV what she wanted to say because what? She was a strong opposition to something that was real. It wasn’t fake. She was a strong opposition to the fascism that she, as a smart woman, saw coming. It made people uncomfortable, it made the media bosses uncomfortable, and they said, ‘you gotta get rid of her.’

I’m using her as an example. There are plenty of other examples. Tiffany Cross, who used to call Megyn Kelly out for what she was, a racist, bigoted you-know-what. And instead, what happened? She got fired because someone said, ‘you gotta get rid of that because we don’t want you saying that about someone like that.’ Because Megyn Kelly – I hate to talk about her. Megyn Kelly, as offensive as she is, they’re comfortable with her. Number one, because of what she looks like, she’s a blonde white lady. She’s racist, she spouts racist things, she says things that they think and they would not dare say for themselves.

Same thing with Donald Trump, Trojan Horse, he says things with you people don’t want to hear. People, people don’t want to say, they’re afraid to say it, but they would like to be able to say it. Same thing.

So, Tiffany’s gone, even though she spoke the truth. And many times, those people who are up in the tower will use your own people to get rid of you. And so, they get rid of the voices that they are most uncomfortable with even though those voices are saying, ‘Hey, listen, I’m talking for Ms. Sadie down the street in the church hat who you are not listening to because she doesn’t have a lot of money, she’s not one of your stockholders. She’s not a crazy MAGA conservative or Republican!’

Andy, is this on?

ANDY: Yeah, it’s on.

LEMON: Okay.

Let’s talk about the Mehdi Hasans of it all. As awful, as awful, as awful as October 7th was, and it is awful, and people should be outraged and someone should pay the price for it. You don’t get rid of Mehdi Hassan.

You know what you do? You, you take Mehdi Hassan in the best version of himself and yourself, and you use it to what? In a constructive manner have conversations about how different people are, how that people have other opinions than yours. People have other opinions than the preeminent voices in media, in business, in government, everywhere.

So I say, you only have yourselves to blame because you have gotten rid of your most, your strongest, fiercest, and most outspoken, fearless people who are going to tell you like it is.

And instead of saying, ‘You know, I disagree with that person,’ but look, journalism is about people who are what? Holding people to account without fear or favor. And now, journalists are fearful and they are favoring the MAGA Trump administration! The media is getting rid of the people who speak out against Donald Trump and they’re putting people on who speak for Donald Trump with the lies.

And it’s not just about Donald Trump. It could be Bob Williams who is a fascist liar that the media is speaking out against. But it just so happens that Donald Trump is in office and he is a liar. He is a convicted felon, he is a racist, he is, uh, uh, he was an adjudicated sexual assaulter in civil court. And then the media even capitulated to that, instead of standing by their person.

(…)

CNN senior justice correspondent Evan Perez did his best Daniel Dale impression on Thursday’s episode of The Situation Room, where he attempted to fact-check President Trump’s assessment of Harvard, in his words, as a “cesspool of leftist thinking,” as false because conservatives, such as Ted Cruz, have attended the school.

The context for Perez’s failed foray into fact-checking came as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem upped the stakes in the battle between Harvard and the administration as he told co-host Wolf Blitzer, “This is an escalating series of threats from the Trump administration against the university, Wolf. And the latest one is from the Homeland Security Department, which is telling Harvard that they may lose their ability to host foreign students.”

 

 

After reading from a letter Noem sent to Harvard, Perez rolled on, “Now, this is all over their demands for Harvard to turn over disciplinary records of students, visa holders, who may have been participating in some of these protests over the last year over the Gaza War, Wolf. And obviously, the IRS is also now looking at revoking the tax exemption of Harvard University. That would be a huge hit for the university. The university has so far refused to comply with Trump’s demands.”

While concerns about anti-Semitism on campuses throughout the country are the reason for these battles, Perez insisted there is more to it than that, “Now, what they’re asking for, Wolf, is for Harvard not only to comply with what they say are anti-Semitic, control of anti-Semitic issues on campus, but they want bigger changes. They want to oversee hiring and admissions standards. They want to make sure that conservative views are being represented on campus.”

Part of the hiring concerns also stem from former university president Claudine Gay’s plagiarism scandal, but Perez didn’t mention that. Instead, he felt the need to declare, “Now, one of the things that I think is lost upon this is that there’s plenty of conservatives that have come from Harvard: Tom Cotton, Neil Gorsuch, Ted Cruz, you know, over the years, Harvard has produced a lot of conservatives. So, the idea that Harvard is some cesspool of leftist thinking, I think is not quite what the, you know, certainly what the president believes is not quite what we know is true.”

Blitzer was awed by the argument, “Excellent point. Thank you very much, Evan, for that.”

It was not excellent. According to a survey, over 76 percent of Harvard faculty identify as “liberal” or “very liberal.” By contrast, just under three percent identify as “conservative” or “very conservative.”

So, yes, the number of conservatives on staff exceeds zero, but that is a woeful standard. More importantly, in the departments that are most responsible for the spread of anti-Semitism, even most liberals would be shocked to see what gets pushed under the guise of education.

Of course, Cotton, Gorsuch, and Cruz were students, not faculty, and only 13 percent of the Harvard class of 2024 reported being conservative compared to 59 percent who self-identified as progressive. Finally, nobody at CNN would ever suggest that Fox News is a neutral outlet because they employ Jessica Tarlov, but double standards for fact-checks are an industry standard.

Here is a transcript for the April 17 show:

CNN The Situation Room

4/17/2025

11:05 AM ET

EVAN PEREZ: This is an escalating series of threats from the Trump administration against the university, Wolf. And the latest one is from the Homeland Security Department, which is telling Harvard that they may lose their ability to host foreign students.

This is obviously a big source of funding and money for universities. Foreign students bring in a lot of money to these universities. I’ll read you just a part of what Kristi Noem wrote to Harvard, saying “It is a privilege to have foreign students at—attend Harvard university, not a guarantee. Your continued work with this student and exchange visitor program certification is contingent upon meeting these requirements of the Homeland Security Department. Failure to comply with the student records request will be treated as a voluntary withdrawal. The withdrawal will not be subject to appeal.”

Now, this is all over their demands for Harvard to turn over disciplinary records of students, visa holders, who may have been participating in some of these protests over the last year over the Gaza War, Wolf. And obviously, the IRS is also now looking at revoking the tax exemption of Harvard University. That would be a huge hit for the university. The university has so far refused to comply with Trump’s demands. 

Now, what they’re asking for, Wolf, is for Harvard not only to comply with what they say are anti-Semitic, control of anti-Semitic issues on campus, but they want bigger changes. They want to oversee hiring and admissions standards. They want to make sure that conservative views are being represented on campus.

Now, one of the things that I think is lost upon this is that there’s plenty of conservatives that have come from Harvard: Tom Cotton, Neil Gorsuch, Ted Cruz, you know, over the years, Harvard has produced a lot of conservatives. So, the idea that Harvard is some cesspool of leftist thinking, I think is not quite what the, you know, certainly what the president believes is not quite what we know is true.

WOLF BLITZER: Excellent point. Thank you very much, Evan, for that.

It was Democratic Senator Wednesday for the late night comedy shows. Before Elizabeth Warren appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Tammy Duckworth joined The Daily Show’s Ronny Chieng on Comedy Central to attempt to equate downsizing the federal government with being anti-veteran.

After a brief discussion recalling Duckworth’s Iraq War service, Chieng recalled, “Then you decided to run for Congress, and you won.”

Duckworth cited veterans’ issues as a reason for her initial run, “I did, I was pissed off that we were not taking care of our veterans, so I decided to run.”

 

 

That led Chieng to wonder, “How are we treating our veterans?”

According to the left, if you don’t agree with them, you must have something personal against women or minorities, and now Duckworth insisted on adding veterans to the list, “Well, we were doing really well until Trump decided to fire 6,000 of them from their federal jobs. Veterans after they serve in the military tend to want to serve the country, continue to and—”

After Chieng interrupted to add “as civil servants,” Duckworth continued, “Civil servants. Thirty percent of the federal workforce are veterans, and so this president has fired more veterans than any other president in modern history: 6,000 and counting.”

Chieng then asked, “And that specifically, was it DOGE or was it something else?”

Duckworth answered, “It was DOGE’s across-the-board cuts. When you fire this many federal employees, you’re going to lose that many veterans, but DOGE has also come out and announced they want 80,000 personnel, just from the Department of Veterans Affairs. That’s their next target.”

The idea that cutting government is anti-veteran is simply a fallacious appeal to emotion. If 30 percent of the federal workforce are veterans, then 70 percent are not. Americans are allowed to disagree with Tammy Duckworth and Ronny Chieng on the proper size of the federal bureaucracy without being personally attacked.

Here is a transcript for the April 16 show:

Comedy Central The Daily Show

4/16/2025

11:25 PM ET

RONNY CHIENG: Then you decided to run for Congress, and you won.

TAMMY DUCKWORTH: I did, I was pissed off that we were not taking care of our veterans, so I decided to run.

CHIENG: Yeah, and, so how are we treating our veterans?

DUCKWORTH: Well, we were doing really well until Trump decided to fire 6,000 of them from their federal jobs. Veterans after they serve in the military tend to want to serve the country, continue to and—

CHIENG: As civil servants.

DUCKWORTH: Civil servants. Thirty percent of the federal workforce are veterans, and so this president has fired more veterans than any other president in modern history: 6,000 and counting.

CHIENG: And how is that, how is that, okay, we get it. All right, they don’t like it.

DUCKWORTH: Yeah.

CHIENG: And that specifically, was it DOGE or was it something else?

DUCKWORTH: It was DOGE’s across-the-board cuts. When you fire this many federal employees, you’re going to lose that many veterans, but DOGE has also come out and announced they want 80,000 personnel, just from the Department of Veterans Affairs. That’s their next target.