Newsbusters

Jon Stewart devoted his Monday monologue on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show to accusing President Trump of being an authoritarian. However, some of Stewart’s examples of authoritarianism, such as protecting women’s sports and defunding public broadcasting, were woefully unimpressive. Additionally, Stewart alleged Trump had bungled “the authoritarian bargain” that requires competence in return for compliance, as he also suggested Trump is to blame for a series of plane crashes.

Stewart began with faux reverence for Trump, “President Trump. Generalissimo. Oh, great Moses. I don’t know what your advisors have told you about the authoritarian bargain, but the basic deal is: the American people look the other way while you disappear undesirables, knuckle under the elites, ban all seven trans athletes from our nation’s beloved NCAA fencing tournaments, you know, all the people that are holding us back, and then you, in turn, make shit work.”

 

 

Getting more animated, Stewart continued, “You want to ignore the Supreme Court and all the other courts and take away people’s licenses to broadcast? Fine!”

Changing voice inflections again, Stewart squeaked, “But when the planes go up, they’ve got to come down, and not on fire. You don’t even have to have them be on time.”

A bit later, Stewart equated not funding something with destroying it, “You want to destroy NPR and PBS, the Voice of America, sell the naming rights of the Washington Monument to Hims.com? Use the R-word, the P-word, the C-word, make up your own slurs? Have the United States Naval Academy remove Maya Angelou from its bookshelves, but for some reason, keep Mein Kampf, which is a real [bleep] thing that they did, we’ll be fine!”

Stewart concluded with a reference to Vice President JD Vance’s Monday blooper, where he dropped the NCAA football championship trophy:

We weren’t that crazy about this system of government in the first place. But you keep [bleep] this up, and some of these lawyers and universities and corporate leaders are going to start to think about suggesting, respectfully, to each other in a very tightly controlled text chat, that someone should reach out to someone who knows someone in your administration to express mild dissatisfaction. Because injustice anywhere is not something we mostly think about and remember, you don’t have that much time to get it right because it’s not like your Vice Authoritarian Butterfingers is inspiring any confidence.

It is also not as if Stewart’s broad definition of authoritarianism is inspiring any confidence in the liberal opposition either.

Sign the petition to help us defund another MSNBC in PBS and NPR at defundpbsnpr.org.

Here is a transcript for the April 14 show:

Comedy Central The Daily Show

4/14/2025

11:17 PM ET

JON STEWART: President Trump. Generalissimo. Oh, great Moses. I don’t know what your advisors have told you about the authoritarian bargain, but the basic deal is: the American people look the other way while you disappear undesirables, knuckle under the elites, ban all seven trans athletes from our nation’s beloved NCAA fencing tournaments, you know, all the people that are holding us back, and then you, in turn, make shit work. 

You want to ignore the Supreme Court and all the other courts and take away people’s licenses to broadcast? Fine! But when the planes go up, they’ve got to come down, and not on fire. You don’t even have to have them be on time. You can take over Greenland, demonize Canada, dominate the golfing pro circuit, but in return, our children should be somewhat safe from most Victorian-era diseases. We love our children. We love them. We love our children. Especially, the Rizzler.

You want to destroy NPR and PBS, the Voice of America, sell the naming rights of the Washington Monument to Hims.com? Use the R-word, the P-word, the C-word, make up your own slurs? Have the United States Naval Academy remove Maya Angelou from its bookshelves, but for some reason, keep Mein Kampf, which is a real [bleep] thing that they did, we’ll be fine! 

We weren’t that crazy about this system of government in the first place. But you keep [bleep] this up, and some of these lawyers and universities and corporate leaders are going to start to think about suggesting, respectfully, to each other in a very tightly controlled text chat, that someone should reach out to someone who knows someone in your administration to express mild dissatisfaction. Because injustice anywhere is not something we mostly think about and remember, you don’t have that much time to get it right because it’s not like your Vice Authoritarian Butterfingers is inspiring any confidence.

Last month, the trade publication Variety was boosting the PBS duo of Jonathan Capehart and David Brooks by describing them as “one progressive and one conservative.” That’s not true at all. 

In the upcoming May edition of The Atlantic magazine, Brooks again cast aside his conservative coloring in a harsh 4,500-word epithet of an essay, “Everything We Once Believed In.”

The online headline deck was more ominous: “I Should Have Seen This Coming — When I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, there were two types of people: those who cared earnestly about ideas, and those who wanted only to shock the left. The reactionary fringe has won.”

Isn’t “fringe” an odd word for Donald Trump, someone who not only won the presidency via electoral vote twice but won the popular vote last time out?

Brooks accused Trump of behaving “vilely…toward our friends in Canada and Mexico, toward our friends in Europe” while joining “the rest of the world’s authoritarians” like Russian President Vladimir Putin on an “axis of ruthlessness.” He proclaimed “Maybe the best description for what I’m feeling is moral shame: To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful.”

Whatever sincere points Brooks lands get lost in his self-absorbed congratulation.

The pathetic thing is that I didn’t see this coming even though I’ve been living around these people my whole adult life. I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, when I worked in turn at National Review, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

There were two kinds of people in our movement back then, the conservatives and the reactionaries. We conservatives earnestly read Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Edmund Burke. The reactionaries just wanted to shock the left. We conservatives oriented our lives around writing for intellectual magazines; the reactionaries were attracted to TV and radio. We were on the political right but had many liberal friends; they had contempt for anyone not on the anti-establishment right. They were not pro-conservative — they were anti-left. I have come to appreciate that this is an important difference.

“Damn that television and radio!” cries Brooks — while ostensibly representing the right, on publicly funded TV (and for a number of years as a Friday pundit on NPR). It’s an easy swipe to trash Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin as anti-intellectual. It’s also not true. As if they were not “pro-conservative”??

Brooks takes a gentle, apologetic tone on the PBS News Hour in his Friday evening sparring with fiery leftist partisan Jonathan Capehart, and his contempt for the main swath of today’s Republican Party was evident in his commentary during 2024’s RNC and DNC conventions, where he was often indistinguishable from Capehart. But Brooks came out spitting in the pages of The Atlantic, calling out some well-known conservative pundits as “third-rate” intellectuals 

Even then I was appalled. Apartheid was evil, and worth opposing. A nighttime raid with sledgehammers seemed more Gestapo than Burkean. But conservative intellectuals didn’t take this seriously enough. In large part, I think this was because we looked down on the Dartmouth Review mafia, whose members had included Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. Their intellectual standards were so obviously third-rate. I don’t know how to put this politely, but they just seemed creepy — nakedly ambitious in a way that I thought would destroy them in the end.

Does Laura Ingraham look “destroyed” to anyone? Then he made a “centrist” stipulation:

Of course, the left made it easy for them. The left really did purge conservatives from universities and other cultural power centers. The left really did valorize a “meritocratic” caste system that privileged the children of the affluent and screwed the working class. The left really did pontificate to their unenlightened moral inferiors on everything from gender to the environment. The left really did create a stifling orthodoxy that stamped out dissent. If you tell half the country that their voices don’t matter, then the voiceless are going to flip over the table.

Keep in mind, as you read this string of pungent insults, that Brooks is considered the conservative voice on the tax-funded PBS News Hour. The “stifling orthodoxy” should look in the mirror — just as it should on Washington Week With The Atlantic! 

Trumpian nihilism has eviscerated conservatism….Trumpism trashes moral norms in every direction, riding forward on a tide of adultery, abuse, cruelty, immaturity, grift, and corruption….How does this end? Will anyone on the right finally stand up to the Trumpian onslaught? Will our institutions withstand the nihilist assault? Is America on the verge of ruin?.…Yes, we have reached a point of traumatic rupture. A demagogue has come to power and is ripping everything down…

Not that there haven’t been previous hints; Brooks wrote “Confessions of a Republican Exile” for The Atlantic last year, in which he confessed: “So these days I find myself rooting for the Democrats about 70 percent of the time….I think of myself as a moderate or conservative Democrat.”

Watch for Brooks on an upcoming Friday edition of PBS News Hour, where he will again cosplay conservative pundit.

The network evening newscasts have completely turned themselves over to immigration advocacy, shifting over to a lane often occupied almost exclusively by known immigration advocates Univision and Telemundo. There is no other rational way to explain the blackout, across the legacy dial, of the guilty verdict in the trial of the illegal immigrant charged with killing Maryland mom Rachel Morin.

The egregious omission occurs despite the verdict coming down with plenty of time to spare before the newscasts went on the air. Initial reports of the verdict broke during the 5PM hour. The Baltimore Sun tweeted the verdict at 5:28 in the afternoon, for example:

Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez was found guilty Monday of raping and murdering Rachel Morin on the Ma & Pa Heritage Trail in 2023, with the jury taking just over an hour to convict him. Prosecutors tied him to the brutal attack through DNA evidence and digital data. Read more:… pic.twitter.com/gfspIWgurM
— The Baltimore Sun (@baltimoresun) April 14, 2025
Per Just the News:

Morin, a mother of five, was killed while on a hiking trail in Maryland in August of 2023. Authorities arrested Hernandez last year, alleging that he entered the U.S. and continued a crime spree that began in El Salvador.

He has been found guilty on all four counts of first-degree murder, first-degree rape, third-degree sexual offense and kidnapping. He now faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without a chance of parole.

And yet, nothing on ABC, CBS, NBC, Telemundo, or Univision. Each of these networks chose instead to devote prominent A-block time to advocate for fellow Salvadoran illegal immigrant Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, the alleged MS-13 gangbanger who was recently deported and sent to El Salvador’s supermax (known as CECOT). 

The networks also devoted a not-insignificant amount of time to gawking over the Blue Orbit launch featuring various celebrities. Here’s a sample from ABC, for example:

THE DUMBEST TIMELINE: ABC couldn’t find the time to cover the guilty verdict in the murder of Rachel Morin, lest it bump these galaxy-brained insights from Katy Perry: pic.twitter.com/ntg5uMxxVc
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) April 15, 2025
MIREYA VILLAREAL: How are you hoping that this moment affects change for other people, moving forward?

KATY PERRY: I hope they can, um, see the unity, uhm, that we modeled, and replicate that and understand that we weren’t just taking up space, we were making space for the future.

Yeah. The networks made space, all right. Why omit the story in the first place? For one thing, it affirms the Trump administration’s decision to send Abrego Garcia to CECOT, judicial meddling notwithstanding. It also makes the media look awful in light of the previous administration’s open border policies. And finally, it avoids comparisons between coverage of the “Maryland Dad” vis-a-vis the “Maryland Mom”, as CNN’s Scott Jennings articulated while blowing the panel up.

.@ScottJennings triggers the panel: “And, you know, we keep calling this guy Maryland Man in the press. Nobody seems to worry about the Maryland mother, Rachel Morin, who was murdered by someone that the previous administration let out of jail. So this is a visceral political-… pic.twitter.com/aT2C2MEG3o
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) April 15, 2025

SCOTT JENNINGS: And, you know, we keep calling this guy “Maryland Man” in the press. Nobody seems to worry about the Maryland mother, Rachel Morin, who was murdered by someone that the previous administration let out of jail. So this is a visceral political- this is a visceral political issue. Visceral political issue.

Consider the coverage of Maryland Mom versus Marilyn Dad as trust in the Legacy Media continues to swirl down the toilet.

The deportation of illegal alien and alleged MS-13 gangbanger Kilmar Abrego García continues to trigger the Acela Media to the point of derangement. Case in point: the panel at CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip (A.K.A. the “Thunderdome”), who appear terminally opposed to the idea that the United States should enforce her own borders.

This particular segment was built upon President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele visiting The White House, and subsequent discussion of the Supreme Court opinion holding that President Donald Trump should “facilitate” the release of Abrego Garcia back into the United States. Much of the early panel discussion centered on the plight of “Maryland Dad”, until it was Scott Jennings’ turn to speak. His breakdown of the alleged MS-13 affiliation of the deportee met with a familiar fate:

Another classic Abby Phillip cutoff, as @ScottJenningsKY begins to lay out the immigration court findings f MS-13 affiliation against Kilmar Abrego Garcia pic.twitter.com/J0lGIX2kyR
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) April 15, 2025
SCOTT JENNINGS: I think you guys need to understand: for the Trump administration, there is no version of this man’s life that ends up with him living in the United States. Here’s the way they view it. He’s an illegal alien from El Salvador who came to the country illegally, who has a deportation order, who in their view, and in the view of some immigration courts, has an affiliation with MS-13. They also believe on the Supreme…

ABBY PHILLIP: Just to be. That’s not quite what it is. I think the issue of the MS-13 thing is probably the most unclear of this whole thing. The administration has not provided that concrete evidence that they say they have that he’s part of MS-13…

JENNINGS: Well, their view is that immigration courts… 

PHILLIP: …and he strongly disputes in court, right? So this is not me saying it. He is disputed in court that he is a member of MS-13… (CROSS TALK)

Per custom, host Abby Phillip jumps in and cuts Jennings off before he can fully flesh out an idea. In this case, the evidence of Abrego-García’s MS-13 affiliation. Phillip complains about the evidence but this is easily remedied by…doing journalism.

After another go-around of the panel, Jennings takes direct aim and lands the most brutal line of the night:

.@ScottJennings triggers the panel: “And, you know, we keep calling this guy Maryland Man in the press. Nobody seems to worry about the Maryland mother, Rachel Morin, who was murdered by someone that the previous administration let out of jail. So this is a visceral political-… pic.twitter.com/aT2C2MEG3o
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) April 15, 2025
Speaking of the “Maryland Mother”, her killer was just found guilty of first-degree murder. But you never heard about the process of this trial in the news. Unlike, say, the Idaho college murders which we hear about all the time.

The biggest and most obvious takeaway from this segment: there is an entire media infrastructure devoted to the idea that a certified MS-13 gang banger should be made to re-enter the United States and remain freely. Let that sink in.

 

National Public Radio is not an oasis of civility. It’s a nasty left-wing bubble. On Friday’s All Things Considered, they aired a positive story on black artist Amy Sherald, best known for painting a portrait of Michelle Obama for the National Portrait Gallery. 

When reporter Olivia Hampton noted the Smithsonian is now subject to an executive order by President Trump seeking to correct government-funded museums who are “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology,” Sherald’s response was divisive and race-centered: 

SHERALD: We’re talking about erasure every day. And so now I feel like every portrait that I make is a counterterrorist attack to counter some kind of attack on American history and on Black American history and on Black Americans.

Hampton didn’t object at all. That’s how NPR ended the story, with a boom. Earlier, Hampton championed her woke works. There’s the transgender Statue of Liberty with bright pink hair. There’s the 10-foot canvas the iconic World War II photo of a white male sailor kissing a white nurse in Times Square are recast as two black men kissing. Whitney Museum curator Rujeko Hockley gushes “It’s a very kind of quietly subversive but very impactful act to reimagine this image that people really have burned into their minds.”

It’s not “quietly subversive” to call anti-DEI conservatives “terrorists” trying to “erase” black Americans. 

There are other outrages. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik slammed Trump’s media policy: “you’re seeing the effort to delegitimize, and also the effort to block out and the effort to knock the economic pillars out from a number of different kinds of media outlets. And I think it’s actually part of a larger effort to control the flow of information.”

NPR is part of a larger effort to “control the flow of information.” Folkenflik crusades against Fox News and energetically backs woke caucuses inside newspapers engaged in ideological turmoil with their owners, including the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. 

Folkenflik’s pose ignores that Trump has granted broad access to the press, which isn’t “controlling the flow of information” in any way resembling President Biden’s aerobic avoidance of engagement with the press. Last year, Folkenflik admitted Biden had few press conferences and never granted an interview to his friends at The New York Times. But he offered no criticism of that, just that it made him “vulnerable” when people accused him of cognitive decline. 

We close by reviewing other recent NewsBusters items on NPR — the Fresh Air interview with author Chris Whipple on Biden’s decline, conservative Christopher Rufo getting a platform on the New York Times podcast The Daily (which airs on NPR stations), and leftist hack economist Paul Krugman’s Trump-bashing appearance on the chat show Here & Now. There’s also NPR lamentations of “pro-Palestinian” student protesters fearful of speaking out, and how “unbiased” NPR and PBS won awards from the leftist Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).

Enjoy the podcast below. 

MRC Free Speech Vice President Dan Schneider poured cold water on the left’s selective interest in free speech and highlighted outrageous censorship uncovered by MRC Free Speech America.

On the April 12 edition of Saturday Agenda with Newsmax host Rob Astorino, Schneider blasted the left for its incessant whining on behalf of the Associated Press (AP) now that President Donald Trump has limited the outlet’s access to the White House. He pointed to the fact that there were real and disturbing free speech abuses under the previous administration.  “[T]he Biden administration crashed and cratered our constitution,” Schneider said, referring to the MRC’s recent report detailing 57 different censorship initiatives. He continued noting that “At least [Trump is] trying to reverse those” Biden era initiatives. 

[Story Continues on MRC Free Speech America] 

In space, no one can hear you scream; but the aliens can apparently pick up your virtue signals on their scanners. CBS Mornings co-host Vlad Duthiers was sending out distress calls during Monday’s show after he was scolded by Dr. Mae Jemison (the first black woman in space) because he used the highly offensive term “mankind” to refer to the entire human species.

As they were sitting the West Texas desert, awaiting the launch of the Blue Origin rocket that would take their friend and co-host Gayle King to “space,” Duthiers received his first scolding by Jemison when he tried to tee her up to rebuke those who were supposedly downplaying the launch because the passengers were all women:

DUTHIERS: You heard Amanda Nguyen tell me in the interview that she’s conducting science experiments on this voyage, which I don’t think a lot of people knew. They thought it was just six women going up into space for a joyride.

JEMISON: Wait, what do you mean just six women?

DUTHIERS: Well, that’s what I mean! That was the criticism!

JEMISON: It is six women.

DUTHIERS: That’s right!

BURLESON: Right. Right. Right.

“But he’s speaking to the perspective and some of the narrative that’s are out there,” co-host Nate Burleson added, trying to defend Duthiers, who added: “The narratives that are out there, that I was hoping to correct with this interview. And I’m glad you’re here to help me correct that narrative.”

 

 

While trying to put that flub behind him, Duthiers immediately stepped in it again with his comments about space travel being a benefit to “mankind.” Again, he drew a swift scolding from Jemison:

DUTHIERS: So, explain to our audience why even a trip like this one, all the trips that we take into space, benefit mankind.

JEMISON: Um, so, it benefits humankind.

“Humankind, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Duthiers pleaded.

She then proclaimed that she was, “going to keep correcting the mankind and the man-made, and the man-missions because this is exactly what this mission is about, is expanding the perspective of who does space.”

Jemison’s high horse had legs that stretched up past the Karman line (international line that denotes where outer space begins). Earlier in the interview she stated that her reaction to being in space wasn’t to have an eye-opening revelation that made her feel small as a human, but rather: “I felt more connected with the rest of the universe. My connection wasn’t back down here to Earth, it was with the rest of the universe.”

Adding: “And sometimes people say seeing the Earth makes you feel small. But it didn’t make me feel small it made me feel bigger because I was connected to something that was so much bigger than where we think we are.”

Jemison also seemed disappointed that “we get so human centric that we forget that we’re part of this greater universe.”

She also bizarrely claimed that Earth already “no longer has an atmosphere that supports our life form.”

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

CBS Mornings
April 14, 2025
7:35:21 a.m. Eastern

(…)

DR. MAE C. JEMISON: Going up in space, it was – Believe it or not, I felt more connected with the rest of the universe. My connection wasn’t back down here to Earth, it was with the rest of the universe.

And sometimes people say seeing the Earth makes you feel small. But it didn’t make me feel small it made me feel bigger because I was connected to something that was so much bigger than where we think we are.

There’s one other thing that happened — you know how people always say “and save the Earth?” The Earth will be here.

NATE BURLESON: Oh.

JEMISON: But we might not. See, there’s a difference —

VLAD DUTHIERS: Because of how we’re treating it.

BURLESON: Right.

JEMISON: Yeah. Well, it doesn’t — no longer has an atmosphere that supports our life form. So, I think that perspective was really important too, because we get so human centric that we forget that we’re part of this greater universe.

DUTHIERS: So, one of the things we talked about yesterday, when we were preparing to speak with you live on the air, is the importance of space travel and the importance of the work that astronauts do when they are in space. You heard Amanda Nguyen tell me in the interview that she’s conducting science experiments on this voyage, which I don’t think a lot of people knew. They thought it was just six women going up into space for a joyride.

JEMISON: Wait, what do you mean just six women?

DUTHIERS: Well, that’s what I mean! That was the criticism!

JEMISON: It is six women.

DUTHIERS: That’s right!

BURLESON: Right. Right. Right.

JEMISON: I know.

BURLESON: But he’s speaking to the perspective and some of the narrative that’s are out there.

DUTHIERS: The narratives that are out there, that I was hoping to correct with this interview. And I’m glad you’re here to help me correct that narrative.

So, explain to our audience why even a trip like this one, all the trips that we take into space, benefit mankind.

JEMISON: Um, so, it benefits humankind.

DUTHIERS: Humankind, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

JEMISON: And I’m going to keep correcting the mankind and the man-made, and the man-missions because this is exactly what this mission is about, is expanding the perspective of who does space.

Why is space important? When you just look at it, when you go up, you get a perspective on this world that you can’t get from looking down on the ground, and you can get it much faster. So, whether it’s looking at roads, mapping, whether it’s looking at weather formations, we use space every day. Right? With our cellphones. We — I live in Houston, Texas, we like weather satellites, right?

BURLESON: Right.

JEMISON: Because all of those things are happening, and people sometimes forget that. From materials to the accuracy that I was talking about before with the precision of the engineering, the safety, it permeates our world in ways that we don’t — that we don’t realize every day.

(…)

Having been roundly condemned in the days leading up to its premiere and an excerpt flirting with far-left, pro-murder psychopath Taylor Lorenz, CNN correspondent Donie O’Sullivan’s Whole Story episode aired Sunday on “a new kind of American extremism” declaring “violence in the country today is mostly from right-wing extremism” with “simply no equivalent on the left.”

Unsurprisingly, it was pants-on-fire false as O’Sullivan chose to ignore both assassination attempts on now-President Trump, arson attacks on pro-life groups, the Family Research Council shooting, the rampant anti-Semitism inside college campuses, and the 2017 attempted murder of congressional Republicans by a man who was both a Bernie Sanders supporter and MSNBC viewer.

O’Sullivan instead created a strawman fixating like a crazy ex on January 6 defendants, far right figures with vile views who made a point of threatening O’Sullivan’s life, and a designer of 3D-printed guns. Oh, and the now-viral sit-down smiling and giggling with Lorenz about her support for Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson.

Let’s walk through the highlights (or lowlights).

First, there was this nonsense opening by Anderson Cooper tying January 6 rioters to the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing and painted free speech and the internet as net negatives:

O’Sullivan showed he wasn’t about facts or even showing a level-headed look at extremism. Instead, he took the sensational route from the get-go, focusing on one “far-right extremist” who threatened the CNN reporter with treason charges, punishable by death, and warning “we [will] ruin you.”

This served as a set-up to his thesis, spliced in-between clips of far-right extremists and other radicals:

O’Sullivan unsurprisingly used as his first extended case study the scene outside the D.C. jail on January 20 ahead of commutations and pardons from President Trump for those convicted in relation to their conduct on January 6, 2021.

Following a break, O’Sullivan arrived at the Mangione section, smiling from ear-to-ear as he asked deranged progressive women “what was it like seeing Luigi” at a court appearance and hilariously remarking to one that he had “met” her “before…at protests in Washington, D.C. against Trump.”

After she defended her support for Thompson’s alleged killer by saying America “massacred the indigenous people” and other Americans supporting “the Proud Boys,” O’Sullivan delivered his biggest lie to gloss over any of the far-left acts mentioned above: “And while America’s roots are soaked in bloodshed, violence in the country today is mostly from right-wing extremism. From Oklahoma City to Charlottesville to January 6th. There is simply no equivalent on the left.”

This went into his park bench date with Lorenz, whom he dubbed “an independent journalist who spoke up for people who felt the murder had justification.”

She started with a defense of her infamous comments to Piers Morgan about feeling “joy” in Thompson’s murder and feeling “empathy” for Mangione: “What I said is that I felt joy in the fact that people like Piers Morgan and other privileged millionaires in this country are finally being forced to confront the gross inequalities in our barbaric healthcare system.”

To a bedazzled O’Sullivan, Lorenz continued to fawn over Mangione as “famous,” “handsome,” “morally good,” “revolutionary” and “smart” while O’Sullivan flirtatiously said this proved “women would literally date an assassin before they swipe right on me” (click “expand”):

 

 

 

LORENZ: Thousands of Americans die because CEOs like this one and others deny essential life-saving care to Americans. I think it’s hilarious to see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone standing a murderer when this is the United States of America. As if we don’t lionize criminals, as if we don’t have, you know, we don’t stand murderers of all sorts, and we give them Netflix shows. There’s a huge disconnect between the narratives and angles that mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels. And you see that in moments like this. And I can tell you, I saw the biggest audience growth that I’ve ever seen because people were like, oh, somebody, some journalist is actually speaking to the anger that we feel.

O’SULLIVAN: The women who got her outside court in New York.

LORENZ: So you’re going to see women, especially that feel like, oh, my god, right. Like, here’s this man who’s a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart. He’s a person that seems this like this morally good man, which is hard to find. [LAUGHTER]

O’SULLIVAN: Yes. I just realized women would literally date an assassin before they swipe right on me. That’s where we’re at. I’m sure you wouldn’t like to be compared to a Trump supporter, but some of how people cannot understand why people have sympathies for Mangione strikes me as the same as our media not understanding why people support Trump.

LORENZ: I totally agree.

O’SULLIVAN: It’s because a lot of people are just really, really desperate.

LORENZ: They want somebody to take on the system. They want somebody to tear down these barbaric establishment institutions.

O’Sullivan’s next stop was Austin, Texas to see Cody Wilson, the man he said was “the godfather of 3-D printed guns” and even made a replica gun of the one that killed Thompson. He even tried to make Wilson feel comfortable by telling him he felt like he was “in Martha Stewart’s kitchen here.”

Wilson also happened to have a copy of the anti-Semitic, racist screed Turner Diaries gave O’Sullivan all he needed to connect the American right, Second Amendment supporter to the far-right and then to Oklahoma City (click “expand”):

 

 

O’SULLIVAN: What Cody is doing here is about a lot more than guns. He’s got a library. Let’s take a look. He is a collector of all kinds of extreme literature. Oh, wow. You got a copy of the Turner Diaries around here?

WILSON: You know I got a copy of the “Turner Diaries.” Did you even have to ask?

O’SULLIVAN: He’s part of an American tradition of deep suspicion and deep distrust of government.

WILSON: For me, this is a positive vision. There’s more to hope for in a world where you know you can download a gun. Everybody knows you can download a gun.

O’SULLIVAN: Families who’ve lost kids in school shootings, who are generally in favor of broader gun control, will look at you and say, oh, my god, here’s yet another way of flooding America with more guns and making the place more dangerous.

WILSON: And I’m sorry. Good that they see it that way, because they’ve been elevated in our national melodrama, as you know, given some kind of political authority for what? The very reason of their victimization? You know, this to me is the illegitimacy. You know, what’s legitimate in this process is the fact that, oops, sorry, it’s been legal the whole time, and now you need to find a constitutional way to make it illegal.

O’SULLIVAN: For personal liberty absolutists like Cody, the threat of a tyrannical government is ever present. April is actually the 30-year anniversary of Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh.

WILSON: What a gift to me you have given.

O’SULLIVAN: Tell me why.

WILSON: Well, I just — I think McVeigh, as you know, was executing or affecting revenge for Waco.

O’SULLIVAN: Timothy McVeigh was a domestic terrorist who killed 168 people. But his actions are still semi-justifiable to some because he claimed he was seeking revenge for the 1993 standoff in Waco, Texas.

WILSON: So for you to put me, at least in a symbolic line of responses to that event is quite a gift that you have given me, and I thank you very much.

O’SULLIVAN: More than 80 people were killed when federal agents sought to execute search and arrest warrants at a compound belonging to a religious cult called the Branch Davidians.

WILSON: Waco represented in the American public consciousness a definitive break, a moment where they knew that the state was more powerful than it should be, more powerful than they had allowed it to become. And so in American gun culture specifically, not just militia culture, there’s an understanding that if you take it upon yourself to live, and teach, and arm yourself and try to separate from the traditional American community it’s been legitimized for them to murder you, so I see Waco as like an important American moment which signaled the relative power of the individual versus the state and not in the individual’s favor.

O’SULLIVAN: It’s events like Waco that for people like Cody underline the need for 3-D printed guns and justify an unshakable suspicion of government.

The stacked deck got even higher with O’Sullivan visiting with former UFC fighter Jake Shields, who turned to podcasting after his fighting days and guests including Nazi sympathizers.

Coincidentally, Shields was in the news just a day earlier as, along with a meltdown over Douglas Murray schooling Dave Smith on Israel, he suffered a blow as his bud Bryce Mitchell was destroyed at UFC 314 by Jean Silva, who celebrated with Trump.

O’Sullivan and Shields went back and forth with the latter firmly entrenched in the just-asking-questions crowd and thus gave O’Sullivan another easy layer of straw (click “expand”):

 

 

O’SULLIVAN: Jake’s podcast has picked up tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of listeners….Part of the appeal of podcasters like Jake is that they have long form, unfiltered conversations with controversial or canceled people who’ve been shunned by what they call the mainstream.

SHIELDS: I just don’t like being told you’re not allowed to talk to this person. Like, why can’t I talk to him? I’m not saying I agree with his ideology, but I should hear what he has to say.

(….)

SHIELDS: I really enjoy talking to what are considered extremists because you realize you sit down and talk to these people, a lot of times they’re not near as extreme as you thought, and you have a lot more in common with them than you realize. Let’s go where we disagree a little bit. Let’s hit race because you’re a white only group.

(….)

SHIELDS: Even the white nationalists are so much more reasonable than I thought. They weren’t like, oh, we need to round up these blacks and get them out of here.

RUSSO: Americans, white folks changing fast, are on the verge of being a minority.

SHIELDS: And there’s a lot of hate push being pushed on us.

RUSSO: Exactly. Just being of and who we are, it’s seen as being something which is despicable.

O’SULLIVAN: People will hear the Patriot Front guy say, well, you know, America is a country of white people. To a lot of people, that is hate. That sounds hateful.

SHIELDS: Yes. Good question. I think because I ask him like, well, what are you going to do with these minorities? And he’s not saying like round them up and ship them off. So he’s just saying, like he’d prefer to live in more white areas. He’s being very realistic with it. Created his white organizations. And again, like I let him know I don’t agree with them.

(….)

SHIELDS: You know, I teased you a lot about being seen and coming in. It was half jokes, but half-truth because you guys are on the decline. Because I think you’ve lost the trust. So I think it’s you seem to be pretty honest and stuff. So maybe you can help bring the trust back of CNN. When you first contacted CNN, I’m just like, I don’t think so. I need to record. I don’t trust you guys.

O’SULLIVAN: You know, with that point, I’m not here to lecture you about your job and journalism, but for how journalists would go about the interviews you’re doing, right? So in terms of you having conversations with David Duke or Patriot Front or whoever, do you feel a responsibility when you have them on your show to, you know, push back, to challenge, to fact check them?

SHIELDS: Because we’re having an honest conversation right now, that’s people want to do. They don’t want these like, gotcha questions. It’s just not fun. But I could push back a little more. I could research a little more. And that’s something I’m working on doing.

O’Sullivan closed with more extremist chats, including threatening words from a slew of characters and fella who threatening him at the beginning of the documentary.

This resulted in his closing commentary, again interspersed with loaded language bemoaning the lack of trust in the legacy media and no longer being able to forcibly dictate what Americans can read and think:

 

Mr. “It’s the economy, stupid” James Carville is scheming how to exploit the economy for hapless Democrats to use as a political cudgel against President Donald Trump.

Carville’s latest guest essay for The New York Times, “How to Turn Trump’s Economic Chaos Against Him,” scrambled to find some silver lining to Congressional Democrats’ political woes, given that they’re currently “underwater” with their own voter base according to Politico March 21.

In Carville’s 20th century worldview, Trump violated the “cardinal rule” of American politics by supposedly “destabiliz[ing] the economy” with his tariffs, despite the fact that this was one of his core campaign platforms he ran on prior to his landslide 2024 electoral victory. 

Carville insisted that Trump was responsible for “one of the most ignorant acts of political leadership in American history,” completely ignoring the economic devastation brought about by President Joe Biden’s outrageous spending policies that fueled the worst inflation crisis in decades. In fact, Biden’s name didn’t appear once in his entire piece.

The irony is that Carville had the audacity to belch with gusto that “[t]he problem is that smoke and mirrors only work until you screw up so hard that no act of lunacy can pull the American people’s attention elsewhere.” Uh, did he forget this very scenario played out under Trump’s predecessor? After all, it was Carville himself who was advising Democrats in 2024 not to “tell people how great this economy is” because it was mismatched with Americans’ real economic struggles. Carville made “the economy, stupid” the central issue of the 1992 presidential campaign, and George H. W. Bush’s economy was much better than what happened under Biden.

Carville later crashed out on his own party November 10, 2024 for “farting around, going to wine and cheese parties,” and for displaying “goddamn arrogance and stupidity” that turned off voters.

To quote Lord of the Rings character Sméagol while he berated himself in Return of the King (2003), “You don’t have any friends. Nobody likes you.” Talk about a projection.

“Mr. Trump didn’t have a plan to bring down inflation and make life better (except for the rich, who disproportionately benefit from his tax cuts), and he was hellbent on tariffs at all costs,” Carville further railed in his latest column. He must have missed that inflation did in fact decrease 0.1 percent on a month-to-month basis in March, “the first decrease in nearly five years,” according to Bloomberg News, and that overall inflation slowed down to 2.4 percent, cooler than projections by economists. Bloomberg News summarized that the latest consumer inflation numbers “showed little impact so far from tariffs” that Trump already put “in place — in categories like toys and appliances that are more exposed to China.” 

If that wasn’t enough, the Producer Price Index also unexpectedly dipped 0.4 percent in March against economists’ expectations of a 0.2 percent increase, “the first decline for PPI since October 2023,” according to CNBC.

But in Carville’s deluded world, “This is where the Democrats have an opening. In February I wrote a piece calling on my party’s leaders to play dead, allowing the Republicans to punch themselves out and crumble beneath their own weight.” He continued: “Now, Democrats have an opportunity to allow the Republicans to edge closer to collapse as the party in full control of Washington — let’s please not become the story again and get in their way.” 

Flexing his crystal ball on economics, Carville predicted mass economic pain on American consumers in the coming weeks and months that the Democrats could take advantage of. “The Trump administration will not be competent enough to dig us out,” Carville prophesied. “The path to stabilizing and strengthening the country starts when Democrats can take back the economic narrative from the Republican Party and persuade the majority of Americans to close the book on the Trump chaos.” In other words, hope the economy goes belly up so Carville’s lefty party can score political points. How classy.

This is the same, er, genius who admitted in January that he got the 2024 election all wrong:

Although the U.S. economy remains the strongest in the world, with G.D.P. soaring and inflation subsiding, the American people did not settle for us being better than the rest or take that as good enough.

Missing from that narrative, is the sine qua non context that much of that GDP growth was being artificially juiced by the Biden administration swallowing an enormous amount of “Tyrannosaurus debt” and inflation was nowhere near subsiding. 

Perhaps Carville would just be better off “farting around” and “going to wine and cheese parties” with his elitist colleagues. 

Daniel Wakin, the New York Times Deputy International Editor of Opinion, had an “Opinion Today” item in the paper’s April 14th edition promoting a guest essay on the Op-Ed page entitled, “The U.S. Must Now Reckon With a Hegemon in the Mideast: Israel.”

The beginning of Wakin’s item [emphasis added] reads:

“Ancient Rome in the Mediterranean. The Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. The United States in the Western Hemisphere, for that matter. History is rife with nations and empires seeking to become dominant in a region or larger swath of the world. It is called hegemony. Aaron David Miller and Steven Simon, two experts on the Middle East, argue that the moment has come to declare Israel a hegemon, or at least something that looks a lot like it.”

Given that Wakin analogizes Israel to the Roman Empire, the Soviet Union, and the USA, you’d assume that the essay’s authors—a veteran foreign policy hand who served in several administrations, and a former Clinton foreign policy aide— did the same. In fact, they did no such thing. 

Yes, they say that Israel’s response to the Hamas terror attacks of October 7th has altered the region’s balance of power, so that “Israel now looks like the region’s hegemon.” The piece analyzes goes on to analyze the opportunities and the problems with the situation in the Middle East, and criticizes the approaches of the Netanyahu and Trump administrations.

But authors Aaron David Miller and Steven Simon made no analogy between Israel and the great powers of history. That absurdly inflated analogy was Wakin’s own. 

Let’s examine.

Roman Empire: 1.9 million square miles.
Soviet Union: 8.6 million square miles.
USA: 3.8 million square miles.
Israel: 8,522 square miles—a bit smaller than New Jersey, that other notorious hegemon.
Also consider:

Israel is surrounded by 25 Arab and Muslim countries, all of which have expressed hostility toward Israel in varying degrees.
Israel has 1/10th of 1% of the landmass of those 25 countries. 

Israel has about 2.5% of the population of those countries.

Bottom line: Instead of reality, Wakin’s analogies reflect the Times’s general hostility toward Israel. 

Call him Woke Wakin.

Look for him soon at a pro-Hamas demonstration on a campus near you. Or perhaps, at a movie theater, watching Snow White for the 11th time, starring Rachel ‘Free Palestine’ Zegler.