Newsbusters

In a huge, five-page, 3,200-word spread in Sunday’s Washington Post, Style section writer Jada Yuan heaped more liberal bile on the grossly anti-Christian, anti-family, pro-baby death, and far-left crowd behind the show The Handmaid’s Tale ahead of its final season. As is usually the case with puff pieces on the show, Yuan left out that star Elizabeth Moss is a devout Scientology which, if there ever was a dangerous cult, that’s it.

“‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is ready for its revolution; The dystopian TV drama is winding up for its big finish. Its cast members have lots to say about its relevance,” Yuan beamed in the online headline.

Despite women still having been allowed to protest en masse and abortions continuing to take place across the country, Yuan fed the narrative women have almost become lifeless, listless vessels for the patriarchy in the Trump presidencies.

Referring to the show’s premise of women being held captive and forced to be raped and impregnated by authoritarian male leaders in the dystopian world of Gilead, Yuan said while “[n]ostalgia is a natural reaction when coming to the end of something, a longing for the way things once were,” Moss “realized that sometimes it’s okay not to look back.”

“As the show reaches its climactic conclusion, there’s a drop of hope — maybe even some inspiration — amid the darkness. The dystopian Hulu series became a phenomenon when it premiered in April 2017, just months after President Donald Trump took office…[I]t felt remarkably of the moment — depicting a terrifying future America under an authoritarian regime in which women have been stripped of their reproductive freedom and are forced into sexual slavery to bear children for the wealthy and powerful,” she huffed.

Nevermind that, in this world, women are raped and “get a finger cut off if they are caught reading, and “gender traitors” (anyone not straight) are publicly hanged.” The left has spent eight years insisting America is eerily similar to this.

Yuan celebrated the show’s impact as though it had changed the world and not instead given the left the latest chance to channel their pasts as theatre kids. Notice Yuan framed the second Trump administration embracing “pronatalism” and pointing out there’s only two genders as bad things (click “expand”):

“Ugh they just need to release the rest of the handmaid’s tale episodes now so we can see what’s going to happen in real life next week,” the comedian Robin Thede wrote on Twitter in 2017, joining a chorus who couldn’t believe how closely the series mirrored their reality. The cast made a video declaring their unwavering support for Planned Parenthood, and “Saturday Night Live” aired a spoof in which politically unengaged bros are confounded by why their female friends are wearing red robes and white winged bonnets.

Around the country, women wore the handmaid costume to state legislatures to protest attacks on women’s rights, including one in which they gathered in the Texas state legislature and chanted “shame” for eight minutes straight. Mashable called the costume “the most powerful meme of the resistance.” (The show won eight Emmys that first season, including outstanding lead actress in a drama series for Moss and the first award for a streaming show for outstanding drama series.)

Everyone interviewed for this story said they felt a wild, perverse sense of déjà vu filming this final season — which starts streaming weekly on Hulu on Tuesday.

Here they were again, shooting in the winter in Canada during another election in which Trump would defeat a woman for the presidency, this time the first female vice president of the United States. And just as in Gilead, some American women were losing their reproductive freedoms. Roe v. Wade had been overturned as the show shot Season 5, and some 19 states have since enacted either total or partial abortion bans.

While the show was wrapping its finale, Trump signed an executive order declaring that there are only “two sexes,” pardoned antiabortion protesters, cut off foreign aid for reproductive health and enforced a “global gag rule” that bars federal funds to any foreign organization such as International Planned Parenthood Federation that provides abortion services, counseling or referrals. Pronatalism is on the rise, with Vice President JD Vance declaring, “I want more babies in the United States.” Civil rights activists fear that other Project 2025 agenda items — a federal abortion ban, restricting access to birth control and surveilling women to track births and abortions — may still be on the table.

“We thought we were done with Trump, and we were hoping that the show could be more of a fictional narrative, which it was always meant to be,” co-showrunner Yahlin Chang says. “And then suddenly we landed in a second Trump presidency, where things are even worse. As a TV writer, you make stuff up. You imagine an alternate reality where bad s— happens, and it’s really astonishing to see it all come to fruition in real life.”

(….)

What’s remarkable about the final season, though, is that it suggests a future that would, at least, give liberals hope.

(….)

Some have suggested that America right now feels like the beginning of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” But Gilead is already at the explosive end of the story. Everyone has lived under oppression for so long that they’ve had time to build a resistance, make plans, fight back.

(….)

“It’s a world where ordinary women show extraordinary strength,” says Warren Littlefield, whose company produced every season of the show. “The handmaid’s robe that was a prison becomes their armor.”

The Scientology omission was particularly gross when highlighting one episode Moss directed for this final season:

The first episode Moss directed this season takes place mainly on a train headed west toward Alaska, where June and others are fleeing because Toronto has been overrun by pro-Gilead mobs. Moss’s friend Tom Cruise advised her to do it on a set that shook like a real train, and so Williams put the whole thing on giant casters.

Oh, they just happen to be friends, not that Cruise is a high-ranking official in Scientology.

The irony continued when Yuan admitted that, if this final season “had aired during the final year of the Biden administration, as was planned, it might not have carried as much of a punch” and that Moss has come to view “the show differently, as not just a story of survival but also a story of motherhood, and a love letter to anyone who cares for a child.”

Ironic considering the show’s premise is making new life a commodity and cast being openly supportive of Planned Parenthood, the chief organization behind exterminating babies in the womb.

She had more bizarre, almost purposeful wallowing in past seasons claiming the show’s taping mirrored life in the first Trump administration, including the infamous handmaids shot on the National Mall (click “expand”):

That scene was shot during the rise of the #MeToo movement. In another parallel, Chang, the showrunner, consulted U.N. consultants and psychologists to write an emotional episode in which June is granted 10 minutes to reunite with her kidnapped daughter. A week after it aired, Trump announced his policy of separating families at the border.

“I think the reason why we seem predictive is that we have to get into the minds of these characters who are running an authoritarian regime,” Chang says. “And so, imaginatively, we’re just like, okay, if you’re a really flawed human being who is incredibly selfish and only thinks about what’s good for you, and doesn’t give a crap about anyone else, and follows all your worst impulses, what would you do?”

The day after Trump’s second win, even actors who weren’t on the schedule that day came to set. For many of them, the only Americans they knew in Toronto worked on “Handmaid’s.”

(….)

Moss says she most felt the show’s impact when they turned the National Mall into         Gilead’s capital in February 2019.

The day of their shoot — which had been inspired by images of rallies in Nazi Germany — Trump declared a national emergency in a bid to build his wall on the Mexican border. A sea of red-cloaked extras stood in formation between the Washington Monument, in the show a giant white cross, and the Lincoln Memorial, with the statue’s head and torso ripped off. Passersby had to look twice before realizing it was not a giant protest.

“It just felt very meta,” Moss says. “We were, physically, right in the middle of D.C. … You couldn’t be more in the middle of it unless you were sitting in the Oval Office.”

The high didn’t last. By the time they shot the end of Season 5, Roe had been overturned.

Olivers abound on Sunday when former CNN media beat writer Oliver Darcy took to his media-industry newsletter to puff up late night comedian John Oliver. Darcy praised the effort and research Oliver and his team of producers at Last Week Tonight put into each episode. But one massive recent development for Oliver was the unaddressed gorilla in the room: the defamation suit against him and the production company. A defamation suit that allegedly stemmed from poor research and the manipulation of audio.

Darcy kicked off his puff piece by specifically highlighting Oliver and Co.’s “deep dives into complex” topics:

John Oliver has spent the past decade turning late-night television into a vehicle for hard-hitting journalism. On “Last Week Tonight,” he and his team take deep dives into complex, often uncomfortable topics—policing, immigration, authoritarianism, etcetera—packaging them with enough humor to make the bitter pills easier to swallow.

As NewsBusters previously reported, an official complaint filed with the United States Southern District of New York alleged that Oliver and his producers “knowingly manipulated” the sworn testimony of Dr. Brian Morley, “and then knowingly manipulated the context” of the testimony.

The interview, which was “lightly edited for style,” started with Darcy wondering how Oliver managed to “inject humor in the segments” (bold add by Darcy to denote his questions, non-bolded text is Oliver’s answers):

You cover a lot of serious topics on “Last Week Tonight”—from policing and immigration detentions to authoritarianism—yet you find ways to inject humor into the segments. How do you approach that delicate balance of serious and funny?

It’s definitely something we think about a lot. Whether we strike the right balance is obviously subjective; I hope the jokes make some of the more complicated, or depressing material we’re presenting slightly easier to stomach, but if they make it worse, I sincerely apologize!

That purported humor by Oliver included this line seemingly promoting a violent sexual assault of Morley: “Fuck that doctor with a rusty canoe. I hope he gets tetanus of the balls.”

 

 

Darcy’s puff piece may have ultimately done more harm than good for his subject. When asking about what went into their research process, Oliver explained:

It’s very intense. We’re generally working on each story for 6 weeks, calling experts and trying to shape the piece before we even think about writing jokes. We learned that the hard way early on, when jokes we loved got killed after research came in and demolished the underlying facts. Now we try to make sure that, to the extent possible, we’re writing jokes on solid foundations.

Adding: “We really do see this as a comedy show. To the extent that we feel ‘responsibility,’ it’s to get the story right.”

But as the defamation suit alleged, Oliver and his producers ignored the facts and manipulated audio to create a false narrative.

In the story in question, Oliver played a soundbite of Morley’s testimony before a Medicaid hearing and was accompanied by an on-screen graphic showing the purported quote:

People have bowel movements every day where they don’t completely clean themselves, and we don’t fuss over [them] too much. People are allowed to be dirty … You know, I would allow him to be a little dirty for a couple of days.

Following the soundbite, Oliver declared: “when I first heard that, I thought that had to be taken out of context. There is no way a doctor, a licensed physician, would testify in a hearing that he thinks it’s okay if people have shit on them for days.” He then admitted that “we got the full hearing” but “I’m not going to play it for you.” “I’m just gonna tell you: [Morley] said it, he meant it,” Oliver claimed.

The reason Oliver probably didn’t want to share Morley’s full comments was because what the show was claiming was apparently a lie, according to the filing. The filing showed Morley’s full comments and argued that Oliver’s producers chopped up what he said, and how the hearing wasn’t remotely about what they claimed it was.

In the sub-headline, Darcy touted that Oliver was “not holding back in an increasingly hostile political climate.” Some of that hostility was apparently coming from Oliver himself.

If you got all of your news from CNN and MSNBC, you’d have a higher than 50/50 chance of believing the Trump administration had accidentally arrested and deported a naturalized American citizen living in Maryland, and for no particular reason.

Cable networks CNN and MSNBC have hopelessly twisted the story of an El Salvadoran illegal alien who recently was deported by the Trump administration. Over the past week, these two networks have referred to Kilmar Abrego-Garcia as a “Maryland man” or “Maryland father” a whopping 120 times, while identifying him as an illegal alien only seven times. Meanwhile, MSNBC alone aired thirteen objectively false assertions that Garcia was actually a legal resident.

MRC analysts looked at all coverage of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador on CNN and MSNBC, from April 1 through April 6. In that time, the networks aired a combined 72 stories about Garcia (40 on MSNBC, 32 on CNN).

CNN referred to Garcia using terms such as “Maryland man” and “Maryland father” 51 times. Across the 32 news stories about him last week, only a single segment (3%) contained any mention he was in the country illegally, and just thirteen (41%) even bothered to mention he was from El Salvador, not America.

On MSNBC, Garcia was identified only as a “Maryland father” or similar terms an absurd 69 times. Throughout the 40 segments discussing his deportation, his illegal status was mentioned in just six (15%), and only twelve segments (30%) pointed out that he was from El Salvador.

 

 

Garcia has had an outstanding order of removal since 2019. However, because of his supposed fear of persecution by gang members in his home country, an immigration court granted him a withholding of removal to El Salvador. It’s important to note that a withholding of removal does not confer legal residency; rather, it merely means that the individual in question is temporarily exempt from being removed to the one specific country for which he was granted the withholding.

In other words, Garcia still could have been deported to any other country that was willing to take him, and at no point was he granted legal residency.

Predictably, CNN and MSNBC utterly failed to elucidate this distinction to their viewers. The term “withholding of removal” was only mentioned in seven reports (17.5%) on MSNBC. On CNN, the total was a better, but still dismal, twelve stories (37.5%)

Analysts also found eleven separate instances — all on MSNBC — in which hosts or guests outright lied that Garcia was in the United States legally. These went beyond the technically-correct (but incredibly misleading) assertions Garcia had “protected legal status” — a nebulous, legal-sounding allusion to his withholding of removal:

“They got the wrong guy. He was here legally, and he’s being treated like this, and sent down there, where he’s now stuck.”
— Ari Melber, host of The Beat, April 1.

“He’s a legal resident who has a 2019 court order that prevented him from being sent back to his home country.”
— Chris Hayes, host of All In, April 1.

“The Trump administration even admits they made a mistake and deported the wrong person. A Maryland father who was legally here, on those now contested flights to El Salvador.”
— Ari Melber, host of The Beat, April 4.

“Garcia, a protected legal resident who has been living in Maryland since 2011…”
— Alicia Menendez, host of MSNBC Prime, April 4.

“A father from Maryland, who’d been in the country for a while, legal — well, he had legal protected status. Essentially. The government said, ‘You can’t deport him,’ he was sent anyway.”
— Chris Hayes, host of All In, April 4.

“The judge ordered that Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, a legal U.S. resident and a Salvadoran migrant, must be returned to the United States no later than Monday.”
— Melissa Murray, fill-in host for Velshi, April 5.

“Well, I think this case speaks to just the whole process being one that is so dangerous for all people, whether you are an undocumented immigrant or a U.S. Citizen, or like this man that had temporary protected status.”
— Christina Ramirez, President of Nextgen America on Alex Witt Reports, April 5.

On Friday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to return Kilmar Abrego-Garcia home to Maryland… An immigration court ruled in 2019 that he could remain in the United States.
— Jonathan Capehart, host of The Saturday Show, April 5.

“They had someone who was lawfully in the United States… and they’re saying, oh, well, you know, we made a mistake.”
— Rachel Barkow, NYU Law Professor on Alex Witt Reports, April 6.

“Last month, a Maryland man was mistakenly deported to a prison in El Salvador, despite an order that he could remain in the United States.”
— Al Sharpton, host of PoliticsNation, April 7.

“This is a very, very important case. This is about a father in Maryland, a long-established taxpaying member of our community, who had legal status.”
— Vanessa Cardenas, executive director of America’s Voice, on PoliticsNation, April 7.

Here are the basic facts of Garcia’s case:

He came to the United States illegally in 2011 from El Salvador, where he is still a citizen. In 2019, during an immigration court hearing, a judge determined that he was “a verified member of MS-13” based on information provided by a confidential informant. A board of appeals later upheld that first judge’s determination, and he was issued a final order of removal. With all of his other options exhausted, Garcia abruptly applied for asylum, claiming that he would be in mortal danger if he were returned to his home country. A second immigration judge denied that asylum claim and instead granted him a temporary withholding of removal to El Salvador specifically.

By contrast, this preposterously misleading coverage of Garcia’s case by CNN and MSNBC exemplifies the corporate news media’s obsession with turning illegal aliens into the sympathetic protagonists whenever they’re covering border security. This well-documented trend shows no sign of stopping any time soon.

If there’s one guy in the liberal media who should be modest about boasting, “I told you so,” it’s Joe Scarborough.
Scarborough is the guy who—in the face of Biden’s undeniable decline—assured voters that “this was the best Biden ever,” angrily bellowing, “and f-you if you don’t believe it.”

Yeah, well, we told you so, Scarborough. Biden was obviously unfit to serve.

Before you go bragging about your keen powers of foresight, how about offering a sincere apology to your viewers for having so blatantly misled them about Biden’s ability to lead? Ironically, the very morning after Biden’s disastrous debate, Scarborough, collapsing like a house of cards, was among the first calling on him to quit the race.

But on today’s Morning Joe, Scarborough, discussing the fallout from Trump’s tariffs, boasted “I spent three months after the election warning Republicans they needed to be careful. Three months. I’ve got — we’ve got about ten minutes of clips we could play you.”

Scarborough also attacked Bill Ackman, the Wall Street billionaire and long-time Democrat donor, who came to support Trump, but now says Trump should implement a 90-day time-out on the tariffs. Mocked Scarborough: “Bill Ackman. Oh! He saw the light.”

Scarborough accused Ackman of shifting to Trump because “someone said something at a college that he didn’t like,” and that we need to fight the “woke warrior.” 

Here’s the transcript.

MSNBC
Morning Joe
4/7/25
6:05 am EDT

JOE SCARBOROUGH: So, as we talk about this, and we’re at 30,000 feet talking about the stock market and talking about banks and talking about oil and talking about—all the people that we heard—those trickle-down effects are going to be felt by working Americans who can afford it the least. 

And they’re being told [slams table] by billionaires that there’s nothing to see here. They’re being told by millionaire talking heads on other networks, there’s nothing to see here. It’s a war that we had to enter. 

No, no. Let’s be very clear here. Regardless of how you feel about tariffs, this is a self-induced war that we started. All right? All right. This is voluntary. 

I spent three months after the election warning Republicans they needed to be careful. Three months. I’ve got — we’ve got about ten minutes of clips we could play you. We’ve already done it before. Like, play it again. Ten minutes of clips saying, be very careful. We have the strongest economy in the world, but we have bubbles in the market, stock market. We have bubbles in crypto. We have a fiscal bubble. Be very careful. Manage it wisely. And we will continue to see working Americans taken care of. That’s not happening right now. 

. . . 

Bill Ackman. Oh! He saw the light. How could Bill Ackman ever have seen this coming? How? How? Okay. Oh, wait a second. This is exactly what Donald Trump promised for years! In fact, he’s been talking about this since 1987. All right? So he believes in this. 

So people on Wall Street are going, oh, my God, I’m so shocked. How could this ever happen? I supported him, but I really didn’t think he was going — What do you mean? He’s been saying tariffs are beautiful, beautiful things, while the rest of the world has been saying, no, they’re not. They’re dangerous. This is what made the Great Depression extraordinarily bad and extended it, right? 

So, you knew. You knew, Bill Ackman. I’m sorry somebody at a college said something that offended you. I’m sorry, like, oh, we’ve got to fight against the woke warrior. Well, I agree with that, too. But you don’t have to do it by blowing up the world economy. 

So we’ll see what happens. But here’s the thing. Always remember, if you hear anybody today, tomorrow, next week say, oh, this had to be: no, that’s not true. That’s doublespeak. And if you hear Republicans saying we can’t do anything about it, that’s just a lie. 

. . . 

I just want you to know, though, when they’re telling you this has to be done, that’s not true. And when they’re telling you, these Republicans on the Hill, we can’t do anything about it. Well, that’s just a lie. 

Saturday’s leftist “Hands Off” protests against President Trump and Elon Musk were eagerly promoted on the network news programs – although they didn’t want to tag them as leftist. It’s quite a contrast to how these same networks barely acknowledged or skipped the annual “March for Life” protest on January 24.

The most dramatic contrast came on PBS. On Saturday, PBS News Weekend rolled out seven minutes and 22 seconds of protest coverage. By contrast, in January, PBS managed 29 seconds in a larger story.

NPR aired three minutes and 54 seconds on Saturday night and Sunday morning, compared to zero seconds for pro-lifers in January. On All Things Considered, Asma Khalid was the exception to the rule, with one ideological notice: “it seems like the Left has been struggling with how to oppose Trump these last couple of months.”

ABC led their newscast with 95 seconds of protest coverage on Saturday night and another three minutes and 18 seconds on Good Morning America. Take that 4:53 and compare it to just 27 seconds for the March for Life.

NBC broadcast 74 promotional seconds on Saturday night and then folded in 30 seconds on Sunday Today. Like NPR, NBC completely ignored the pro-life march.

CBS doesn’t really make the cut in this count, since we had no CBS Weekend News on Saturday night and there were 10 seconds on the protests on Sunday Morning. Back in January, most of the country saw golf coverage in January (on a Friday night). They had 21 seconds for the pro-life march on the West Coast.

PBS News Weekend anchor John Yang led off like a press release from protest organizers: “Across the country and around the world today, tens of thousands of people turned out for what organizers say has been the biggest single day of protest against President Trump and his second term policies and actions in this country. More than a thousand rallies were planned in small towns and major cities from coast to coast.”

NBC’s evening story featured five angry lefty protester soundbites and hyped video clips from fourteen different protest locations, and there were no labels.

NBC’s Vaughn Hillyard hyped the Saturday protests on the ‘Nightly News.’ He began: “Huge turnouts, from Washington, D.C. To Chicago, West Virginia, Utah, and beyond. Protests in nearly every state.” They showed clips from 14 locations. #pepsquad pic.twitter.com/A769CZ3eVP
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) April 7, 2025
ABC weekend anchor Whit Johnson at least described the protests as “organized by Democratic activists.”

On Saturday night, ABC News led with the Left: “We begin tonight with a mass protest from coast to coast, Americans taking to the streets, voicing their frustrations with the policies of the Trump administration and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man.” #pepsquad pic.twitter.com/oINGDGmPYW
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) April 7, 2025
When the Democrats organize protests to drive some unanimously anti-Trump coverage, the networks are arrive on the scene with pom-poms. 

As most of the media projected doom and gloom kvetching over their predicted negative aspects of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, there was a rather contrarian view on this subject from a very surprising source: Nahal Toosi, Politico’s senior foreign affairs correspondent.

She conceded that the tariffs could ultimately turn out to be successful as she wrote on Saturday in “Why Trump May Get Away With His Tariff Trauma.”

Has Toosi been somehow red-pilled? Not likely since as recently as last December she attempted via her reporting to get the incoming Trump administration hopelessly entangled in the Syria mess. However, whatever the motivation, it is very interesting that she diverged sharply from the prevailing media narrative on the subject of tariffs. 

As President Donald Trump announced historically high tariffs across the world this week, I expected a number of affected governments to rapidly and collectively fight back.

Instead, with the exception of China and a few scattered reprisals from allies, we’re seeing mainly cautious reactions. Foreign officials are talking about “calibrated” responses and keeping a “cool head.” Some are clearly hoping diplomacy will persuade Trump to back off some or many of his tariffs.

Kudos to Toosi for conceding she was wrong on an outcome she expected. But wait …There’s MORE!

In conversations with diplomats, economists and former U.S. officials, I asked why. Weren’t they concerned this muddled, cautious global reaction would be too weak to persuade Trump to change course, or even embolden him to get tougher?

But these experts argued that there are compelling reasons many governments are not acting fast or in unison — not the least of which is that the world’s countries are not good at collective action, and many believe they have a better shot at accomplishing more, for themselves at least, if they avoid escalating the fight with Trump.

Besides, it’s not at all clear if any moves by other countries will deter Trump’s tariff mania.

One motive for not acting in unison against Trump’s tariffs as most of the media believed (and hoped) would happen is that there are benefits for being among the first to make a deal and negatives for being among the last to come to an agreement as Toosi discovered:

Many countries are still trying to sift through the details of Trump’s announced tariffs, but they have come to accept that he is going to tariff the world somehow. So they’re also looking for ways to negotiate a better deal than others.

“I can’t be the last one to reach a deal with Trump, because if I’m the last one, then I’m the one who’s going to get screwed,” the foreign diplomat said. Like others, the diplomat was granted anonymity to be candid about a sensitive issue. “If I’m the first one to reach the deal, then it might be the most advantageous possible thing, and compared to other countries, I’ll be better off. And so my trade will suffer relatively less.”

…Affected countries “think they can, basically, over the next couple months, quietly negotiate. They’ll make a couple of concessions, maybe on trade, maybe on defense, maybe on other things, and things will get adjusted,” the former official said.

And as Toosi revealed, make sure you are among the first to deal with Trump on tariffs, NOT the last. Oh, and thank you, Nahal Toosi, for revealing Trump’s method to what much of the media labels as his madness.

One obvious way you can tell that CNN is “comfort food” for Trump haters — to borrow a phrase from Brian Stelter — is all the clapping and yelling when Amber Ruffin starts trash-talking Trump on CNN’s Saturday “comedy” panel show Have I Got News For You.

The show’s host Roy Wood Jr. put Ruffin in their “Offend-o-Meter” segment to discuss the White House Correspondents Association firing her from their dinner gig. The crowd wildly supported offending Trump and journalists who thought it would be best to mock both parties. 

Wood asked if Ruffin thought she was dumped for revealing her hand too early that she would only mock Republicans.

“Oh my God, I could f–king talk for the next three hours,” Ruffin said. “But what I choose to say is, it’s like, I lost the gig because I was out here talking sh-t.  And I think it’s a good thing that I lost the gig, because I was going to show up there and act all the way out. Also, it’s not anyone’s fault, because when I was hired, we were like, ‘oh, yeah, and we’ll give it to everybody.’ And I was like, bet.” 

She continued, “Then they started f–king disappearing people to a prison in El Salvador. They rolled back f–king civil rights. So I was, like, if I make this equal, then I’m also a piece of sh-t. I can’t f–king do that.” The crowd whooped some more. 

CNN’s Have I Got News for You on Sat night blamed Amber Ruffin’s cancellation from WH Correspondents Assn dinner on her planning to criticize Repubs but not any Dems. No mention of how she called Trump admin “murderers” who are not human beings. Sat night she doubled down: “They… pic.twitter.com/AFMXTEdKW7
— Brent Baker 🇺🇲🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@BrentHBaker) April 7, 2025
Notice Ruffin & Co. didn’t act offended when illegal aliens were killing people in America, which certainly rolls back a person’s civil rights. 

Wood called the decision a “blessing in disguise” for Ruffin, adding that she would have regretted doing what was expected of her and would have been haunted by the choice. Remember, the White House reporters never seemed to get across to all the leftist comedians they’ve hired to balance out the jokes. Their dinner is a party for liberals.

Sunday’s New York Times was loaded with hostile anti-administration stories, including “As El Paso Gunman Faces Sentencing, the Hate That Inspired Him Rises Again.”

Reporters Edgar Sandoval and Reyes Mata III tried to hang the 2019 massacre at a Walmart in El Paso on President Trump right from the online subhead: “The lawyer of the white supremacist who slaughtered 23 people in 2019 said his client was inspired by President Trump’s words, the same the president is using today.”

Trump’s part in that ghastly crime? Declaring the then-rampaging invasion at the southern border was an “invasion.”

Five and a half years ago, Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old with a documented history of mental illness, stopped at a Walmart in the border city of El Paso, heard everyone around him speaking in Spanish, and decided “the invasion” that then-President Donald J. Trump often spoke of was underway.

Mr. Crusius’s rampage on Aug. 3, 2019, took the lives of 23 people, both U.S. citizens and Mexican nationals who had crossed the border to do some shopping, becoming the deadliest attack on Hispanic civilians in American history.

His attorney, Joe Spencer, said on Tuesday in an interview ahead of his client’s sentencing hearing scheduled for April 21 for state charges that Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric was to blame. The president’s words, combined with “severe mental illness,” fueled Mr. Crusius’s hate, the lawyer said in his office in El Paso.

At a time when the Trump administration has dramatically secured the border and deported over 100,000 illegal immigrants, the Times is sticking with a narrative from 2019.

The ugly saga, which began in a fusillade of bullets and was then mired by legal setbacks and red tape, concludes this month just as the same anti-immigration rhetoric that may have inspired the Walmart gunman returns with Mr. Trump’s second administration. The president is embarking on an aggressive campaign to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and the word “invasion” is now a legal pretext for deportations and foreign incarceration with little to no due process, critics say.

That has cast a pall over El Paso just when the families of the victims and survivors of the deadly shooting of 2019 must confront the crime again. Christopher Morales, 39, whose aunt was killed that day and whose mother and grandmother suffered severe injures, said Mr. Trump’s influence will be on his mind when he attends the sentencing hearing.

“I do believe that Donald Trump and all of the things that he was spreading had everything to do with him, the shooter, making his decision to come and shoot my family,” Mr. Morales said.

Not mentioned: The wide popularity among not-hateful people of the measures targeting illegal immigrants, especially those affiliated with criminal gangs like Tren de Aragua and MS-13.

Mental illness and white supremacy proved to be an incendiary mix. The gunman became lost in racist, far-right corners of the internet that espoused the “White Replacement” theory, a conspiracy that maintains people of color are being imported to the country to destroy the power and prosperity of white people, Mr. Spencer said.

Is it really a “conspiracy” that liberals would welcome immigrants, illegal or legal, who will eventually start voting Democrat? It was conventional wisdom not that long ago. Politico took the idea of seriously in a 2013 article: “Immigration reform could be bonanza for Democrats.”

After romanticizing El Paso, “seen as an Ellis Island of the Southwest,” Sandoval found yet another liberal to link Trump to the massacre.

Ruby Montana, 43, a lecturer at the University of Texas at El Paso’s Chicano Studies Department, told hundreds of people gathered earlier this week to commemorate Cesar Chavez, the Mexican American civil rights leader, that the mass shooting was intertwined with Mr. Trump’s aggressive policies toward illegal immigration.

This badly disguised editorial was not presented as Democrat spin, a choice of murder anecdotes. Texas-based Sandoval didn’t report on the murder of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray at the hands of illegal aliens from Venezuela last year, but the Times spit at the topic as a Trump talking point. The subhead of one J. David Goodman story was “The killing of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston has become the latest crime seized on by Republicans to attack President Biden over his immigration policies.”

The story repeated: “Suddenly the killing, which had ripped apart a Houston family, became the latest flashpoint in the debate over immigration, seized on by Republicans and immigration opponents who drew a direct line between the crime and President Biden’s policies at the border.” These were “conservative media” anecdotes, he wrote.

As predictable as the sun rising in the East: the media’s silence in the face of President Joe Biden’s evident cognitive decline is met with a deluge of books, by some of those same media types, chronicling that decline in detail. 

This helps explain the rationale behind this weird exchange between CNN’s Jake Tapper (co-author with Axios’ Alex Thompson of “Original Sin”, to be released next month) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, wherein he presses Walz on whether Biden running for re-election was a mistake:

Having previously dismissed questions about Biden’s mental decline as a conspiracy theory, Jake Tapper now has a book to sell, taking multiple passes at Tampon Tim Walz on acknowledging Biden’s decline and decision to run for reelection as “a mistake”. Walz caves on the third… pic.twitter.com/PYQbPoI5KE
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) April 6, 2025

CNN STATE OF THE UNION

4/6/25

9:30 AM

JAKE TAPPER: Well, what do you make of the criticism that one of the reasons why your party was so resoundingly rejected last November is because Democrats were gaslighting the country, saying saying that inflation was not a big deal, heralding Bidennomics. Not only Biden, but Kamala Harris was heralding Bidennomics pretending that there wasn’t a problem at the border. And then fundamentally, this idea that President Biden was up for another four years of the job while Americans in poll after poll for year after year, were saying he’s too old to do the job, your party stood against all of those things.

TIM WALZ: Look, Joe Biden coming in and doing Covid and being a governor through Covid did, did, did a hell of a job. But I think one of the things that we didn’t do was, is we assumed that we said and it was true that we were going to have a soft landing and our economy was better than the rest of the world. Better for who? Better for the working class, who was saying groceries were- were too expensive as they are now and going up? They got to see us talk about things- again, I go back to this: don’t talk about food insecurity or housing type of issues. Talk about people being hungry and wondering where they’re going to live, or about their children’s future, about real security. And so I think your question is spot on. I think we got intellectualized on this. I think the fact of the matter is, Joe Biden did soft-land the economy. He did usher us through CCovid. None of us are saying we should be soft on the border, but we allow a vacuum. And Donald Trump fills it- the 800 pound gorilla, and their narrative starts to stick. And we look weak. We look weak like we don’t care. We look like we- look, Jake. I’m not going to say, you know, we need to do is- we need to just arrest people and ship them to El Salvador. No, we need to do invest the money on border. We need to make sure that we have the judges necessary to adjudicate things faster. We need to make sure if you’re going to be in this country, you’re legally. And when you are, you’re going to be uplifted, celebrated, and part of this great American tapestry. We didn’t do that. And then they- it fills them. They’ll find the example that is horrific, where you have someone who’s not here legally and they commit a crime that is horrific. But we don’t do a good job of telling that.

TAPPER: Don’t you think your party needs to acknowledge that President Biden was not up for the job of running for reelection, and that this was a major mistake by the Democrat- ?

WALZ: He made that decision.

TAPPER: I know, but you all went along with…

WALZ: He made that decision.

TAPPER: …the idea that he was up for it and he wasn’t. And everybody saw it. And the country rejected it.

WALZ: Yeah, well, I…look. History’ll tell us to go back on that. That- that could very well be the case, Jake.  

Jake Tapper was one of the chief pushers of “Biden has a stutter” as cover for the decline that was obvious to the rest of the world, 2022 line of questioning notwithstanding. Tapper’s most infamous instance of sycophancy is, of course, his exchange with Lara Trump on this very issue:

Seems like a good time to remind everyone that in 2020 Jake Tapper, first, accused me of making fun of people with a stutter (an atrocious accusation) and then attempted to shut me down and ended our interview when I tried to warn people of Joe Biden’s very obvious cognitive… pic.twitter.com/ZOxSGQP13J
— Lara Trump (@LaraLeaTrump) June 27, 2024
The rest of the media isn’t doing any better. Legacy Sunday shows have given the cold shoulder to Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s “Fight”, which covers this same ground. In fact, Allen was booked on last week’s Meet the Press and had the book repeatedly plugged by host Kristen Welker, without ever getting to discuss the book itself. 

In a sense, it is understandable that the media would refuse to cover these books and their underlying subject matter. Doing so would further implicate them as co-conspirators in the greatest fraud perpetrated upon the American people. Furthermore, it would force them to find the answer to the question that burns in everyone’s minds upon learning the extent of Biden’s impairment: who was actually running the country?

Tapper’s pro forma exercise with Walz was little more than adding to the long con.

 

As media-consuming stories go, Signalgate went out with nary a whimper- barely lasting a week. In its place, the media now caterwaul over the reciprocal tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent discovered during his sit-down with NBC’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Depressed.

WATCH as Bessent dismantles Welker’s appeal to authority and takes her to school over the impacts of the tariffs Trump imposed in his first term: 

KRISTEN WELKER: President Trump’s tariffs are being described as the biggest tax hike on Americans in decades. They could cost the average household thousands of dollars. Republican Senator Ted Cruz had this to say. I’m going to play it, get your reaction on the other side.

TED CRUZ: Tariffs are attacks on consumers. And I’m not a fan of jacking up taxes on American consumers.

WELKER: Do you acknowledge that President Trump’s tariffs will cause prices to go up on a range of goods?

SCOTT BESSENT: Well, Kristen, what I like is data. And if we look at the data from President Trump’s first term, and there’s a big study that just came out from a group of economists, mostly at MIT, that showed that a 20% – 20% tariff on China led to a .7% tax or price level increase over four years. I think that’s pretty good if we can take in 20% in tariffs and it’s a .7% increase. And Kristen, the – the little publicized story this week, everyone wants to look at the stock market going down. You know what else went down? Oil prices went down almost 15% in two days which impacts working Americans much more than the stock market does. Interest rates hit their low for the year. So I’m expecting the mortgage applications to pick up.

WELKER: Well, just to be very clear though, I mean, during President Trump’s first term, the cost to Americans was nearly $80 billion in new taxes due to his tariffs. Prices did go up on everything from washing machines to tires.

BESSENT: Well, no, no, no. But let’s go back. The aggregate number was. 7. So we can discern the individual things. Also households saw real net wages go up. So if wages go up faster than prices, which is not what happened over the past four years, that’s why the bottom 50% got eviscerated.

The media’s first and most predictable tactic, when attempting to gotcha Republicans on unorthodox policy, is to appeal to authority. They’ve done it for years. They despise conservatives with every fiber of their being and don’t actually agree with conservative positions, but will not hesitate to use a conservative soundbite if it advances the left’s policy goals. Such is the case with the Cruz soundbite wielded by Welker against Bessent. 

But Bessent blows right by Welker’s emotional arguments with “what I like is data”. A more highbrow version of Ben Shapiro’s classic “facts don’t care about your feelings”, if you will. Bessent proceeds to use data to shut down Welker’s prefab talking points- namely, the MIT research showing that prices rose less than 1% as a result of the 20% tariff on China during Trump’s first term. Bessent follows this by pointing to movement on interest rates and oil prices, which should help the consumer. 

Welker tried to circle back with an inflationary take on the tariffs. It should be noted that the media religiously avoided doing this during the Biden years, despite inflation AND the Trump tariffs that he retained. Here Bessent reminds Welker that real wages went up during the first Trump term, which did not happen during the Biden years. 

Regardless of where you stand on tariffs, one thing is certain: you can count on the Resistance Media to report on them as dishonestly as they do everything else.

Click “expand” to view the full transcript of the aforementioned interview as aired on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, April 6th, 2025:

KRISTEN WELKER: And joining me now is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Secretary Bessent, welcome back to Meet the Press.

SCOTT BESSENT: Kristen, good to see you.

WELKER: It’s great to have you back after a very big week. Let’s start with the market reaction to President Trump’s announcement of his tariffs. As I just laid out at the top of the program, the markets lost more than $6 trillion in value. Was this disruption always part of the plan, Mr. Secretary?

BESSENT: Look, the – Kristen, markets are organic. They’re animals. I mean, you never know what the reaction is going to be. One thing that I can tell you, as the Treasury secretary, what I’ve been very impressed with is the market infrastructure, that we had record volume on Friday and everything is working very smoothly. So, the American people – they can be very – take great comfort in that. And in terms of the market reaction, look, we get these short-term market reactions from time to time. The market consistently, the – underestimates Donald Trump. I remember that in 2016 the night President Trump won, the market crashed. The market crashed, and it turned out he was going to be the most pro-business president – the – in over a century, maybe in the history of the country, and we went on to very high after inflation returns for the next four years.

WELKER: Well, but this was the biggest two-day crash since the pandemic. And the president on Saturday urging people, quote, “to hang tough,” saying, “It won’t be easy.” And I guess the big question on people’s minds, Mr. Secretary, how difficult is it going to be? And how long are Americans going to have to “hang tough?”

BESSENT: Well, again, I – I reject that – the assumption – there doesn’t have to be a recession, the – who knows how the market is going to react in a day, in a week. What we are looking at is building the long-term economic fundamentals for prosperity that I think the previous administration had put us on the course toward financial calamity.

WELKER: But just in terms of the uncertainty, I think, that people are feeling and seeing, and President Trump saying he wants people to hang tough acknowledging there’s going to be what he has described as a short period of pain. Can you help provide some clarity for folks? How long will this period of uncertainty be here? Are we talking about weeks? Are we talking about months? Are we talking about years?

BESSENT: Again. This is an adjustment process. What we saw with President Reagan, when he brought down the – the great inflation and we got past the Carter malaise that there – there was some choppiness at – at that time, but he held the course, and, you know, we’re going to hold the course. And this has been years in the building, years in the making, you know, this unsustainable system – our trading partners have taken advantage of us. We can see that through the large surpluses. We can see this through the large budget deficits. And also, Kristen, this is a national security problem, which we saw during Covid. We saw during Covid that optimal supply chains are not resilient. And what I could say is the only good outcome from Covid is it was a beta test for what would happen if our supply chains got broken, and President Trump has given – has decided that we cannot be at risk like that, for our crucial medicines, for semiconductors — the — for shipping, and we are going to move forward so the American people can know that they are going to have a more secure future.

WELKER: And yet, President Trump promised that he was going to improve the economy starting on day one. He said prices are going to come down. More than 160 million Americans, Mr. Secretary, as you know, are invested in the market. Many of them have spent their lives saving for their retirement. What is your message to Americans who want to retire right now and who’ve just seen their lifetime savings drop significantly?

BESSENT: Kristen, I think that’s a false narrative. Americans who want to retire right now, Americans who have put away for years in their savings accounts, I – I think they don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening. And you know, in fact, most Americans don’t have everything in the market. Most Americans in a 401K have what’s called a 60/40 account. 60/40 accounts are down 5 or 6% on the year. People have a long-term view. They have a program that the reason the stock market is considered a good investment is because it’s a long-term investment. If you look day-to-day, week-to-week, it’s very risky. Over the long term, it’s a good investment.

WELKER: President Trump’s tariffs are being described as the biggest tax hike on Americans in decades. They could cost the average household thousands of dollars. Republican Senator Ted Cruz had this to say. I’m going to play it, get your reaction on the other side.

SEN. TED CRUZ: Tariffs are attacks on consumers. And I’m not a fan of jacking up taxes on American consumers.

WELKER: Do you acknowledge that President Trump’s tariffs will cause prices to go up on a range of goods?

BESSENT: Well, Kristen, what I like is data. And if we look at the data from President Trump’s first term, and there’s a big study that just came out from a group of economists, mostly at MIT, that showed that a 20% – 20% tariff on China led to a .7% tax or price level increase over four years. I think that’s pretty good if we can take in 20% in tariffs and it’s a .7% increase. And Kristen, the – the little publicized story this week, everyone wants to look at the stock market going down. You know what else went down? Oil prices went down almost 15% in two days which impacts working Americans much more than the stock market does. Interest rates hit their low for the year. So I’m expecting the mortgage applications to pick up.

WELKER: Well, just to be very clear though, I mean, during President Trump’s first term, the cost to Americans was nearly $80 billion in new taxes due to his tariffs. Prices did go up on everything from washing machines to tires.

BESSENT: Well, no, no, no. But let’s go back. The aggregate number was. 7. So we can discern the individual things. Also households saw real net wages go up. So if wages go up faster than prices, which is not what happened over the past four years, that’s why the bottom 50% got eviscerated.

WELKER: Let – let me ask you about your view. Because last January you wrote that, quote, “Tariffs are inflationary.” The Fed chair said the same thing on Friday that tariffs announced this week caused higher inflation. Have you expressed any concerns to President Trump directly that his tariff policy could be inflationary?

BESSENT: No. What – what I’ve said is, “Tariffs are a one-time price adjustment.” So there- there’s a big difference between insipid, endemic inflation within the system and consistent price level increases and a one-time adjustment. But the other thing that we’re doing is we are raising wages for working Americans. We’re bringing down regulation. So, you know, there are estimates that regulations have caused the average household about $8,000. That when we get this tax bill through, then we will make the tax levels permanent. And – and again, the drop in the energy prices, the drop in interest costs, now, I – I think real after-tax wages are going to go up for Americans. And that’s what’s important.

WELKER: One of the big questions and points of confusion I think is are these tariffs permanent? Or are they a negotiating tactic? Some administration officials have said they’re permanent. President Trump himself has said he’s open to negotiating. So let me just ask you. Is President Trump willing to negotiate? Or are these tariffs permanent?

BESSENT: Well, I think that’s gonna be a decision for President Trump, but I can tell you that, as only he can do at this moment, he’s created maximum leverage for himself, and more than 50 countries have approached – they have approached the administration about lowering their non-territory barriers, lowering their tariffs, stopping currency manipulation, and Kristen, you know, they’ve been bad actors for a long time, and it’s – it’s not the kind of thing you can negotiate away in days or weeks.

WELKER: You yourself have said that he’s using these for negotiating. He has told me directly he’s open to negotiating. So just very clearly for the American people: Can you say definitively, is he planning to negotiate? Has he already started negotiations with countries?

BESSENT: Well, I – I – I think we’re going to have to see what the – what the countries offer, and whether it’s believable, because again –

WELKER: So, he’s open to it, is what I hear you say.

BESSENT: The – no, no, no, it is – I think that we are going to have to see the path forward, because after 20, 30, 40, 50, years of bad behavior, you can’t just wipe the slate clean.

WELKER: All right. Let me ask you about one of the big questions. Recession, as you know, analysts say the chances of a recession are rising in the wake of the tariffs announced this week. Do you believe that President Trump’s tariffs are risking the chances of a recession?

BESSENT: I – I don’t. And I think we could see from the jobs number on Friday that it was well above expectations that, you know, we are moving forward. So I – I see no reason that we have to price in a recession.

WELKER: Okay. Before I let you go, I know you’ve been one of the officials spearheading the efforts to get President Trump’s budget bill passed on Capitol Hill. It includes the president’s plans for tax cuts, extending the 2017 tax cuts, for example. Are you confident that the president’s budget bill will pass before the August recess?

BESSENT: We are shooting for even a much earlier date. And Kristen, I – I can tell you the under-reported story in D.C. is, you know, it’s fun from our side of the aisle to watch the Democratic chaos. But the under-reported story is the Republican unity. And Speaker Johnson has done an incredible job with a small minority. He got reconciliation instructions out on the first try. He got a clean continuing resolution. Speaker Thune, the – the Senate issued the reconciliation instructions. So things are moving very quickly.

WELKER: Very quickly, President Trump called on the Fed chair to lower interest rates. Do you think that Fed chair Jerome Powell should lower interest rates?

BESSENT: I – I – I think that when we see inflation dropping, that the Fed will do what it always does and lower rates. But in the meantime, what we can control is the longer-term rate, the ten-year rate which hit – hit a new low on Friday. That’s where mortgages are priced. That’s where long-term capital formation is priced. And, you know, back to the tax deal, when we can pass that, we will have economic certainty.

WELKER: Okay, we’ll be watching for that timeline you just laid out very closely. Secretary Scott Bessent, thank you so much for being here. We appreciate it.

BESSENT: Thank you.