Newsbusters

CNN’s Jim Sciutto, sitting in for Kasie Hunt on CNN This Morning, teed up a Palestinian to repeatedly accuse Trump of “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza, and Israel of “genocide.”
Words that never passed the ex-Obama diplomat’s lips: October 7th, Hamas, or hostages. Instead, Sciutto created a free-fire zone for the Palestinian to attack Trump and Israel.
Much of what you need to know about the Palestinian in question, Yawa Hawari, co-director of the Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, can be gleaned from these words in a recent article she wrote [emphasis added]:

“Over the last year, Palestine has been irrevocably changed in ways that, for many of us, were once inconceivable. Since the beginning of the genocide, the Israeli regime has killed over 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza.”

 

Sciutto could only throw softballs. He began: “I want you, if you can, to describe reaction in the region to sitting U.S. president saying not only will the U.S. take ownership of Gaza, but that the Palestinian people have no right to return, to ever return, to the land that is their home.” 

So in one fell swoop, Hawari accuses Israel of “genocide,” while omitting what was the “beginning” in question: October 7th. She said “ethnic cleansing” three times, to get all the buzzwords in.

As for which group is, in fact, proposing genocide and ethnic cleansing, have a look at this photo, which adorns an Al-Shabaka article on its vision for the Palestinian future. Nakba is the Arabic word for catastrophe, employed by Israel’s enemies to describe the founding of the Jewish state in 1948.  “Abolish Zionism” is a synonym for the destruction of Israel.

Note: Last year, our Tim Graham noted Sciutto quoting General John Kelly to the effect that a second Trump term would be a “catastrophe.” Given his affinities, perhaps Sciutto would want to call Trump’s second term a new nakba.

Here’s the transcript.

CNN This Morning
2/11/25
6:37 am ET

JIM SCIUTTO: With the fate of Gaza and two million Palestinians who live there hanging in the balance, President Trump is hosting Jordan’s King Abdullah at the White House this morning. 

The president is threatening now to withhold funding from U.S. allies Jordan and Egypt if they do not agree to take in Palestinian refugees forced from Gaza. Both countries have already quite publicly rejected that idea. 

REPORTER: Would you withhold aid to these countries if they don’t agree to take in the Palestinians? 

DONALD TRUMP: Yeah, maybe. Sure. Why not? You mean if they don’t agree? If they don’t agree, I would conceivably withhold aid, yeah. 

SCIUTTO: Trump has made it clear he does not believe the Palestinian people should return to Gaza during the current ceasefire, and claims, and this is crucial, that they do not have a right to ever come back to their homeland. 

TRUMP: Think of it as a real estate development for the future. It would be a beautiful piece of land. 

BRET BAIER: Would the Palestinians have the right to return? 

TRUMP: No, they wouldn’t, because they’re going to have much better housing, much better — in other words, I’m talking about building a permanent place for them, because if they have to return now, it’ll be years before you could ever — it’s not habitable. 

SCIUTTO: I want to speak now to Yara Hawari. She is the co-director of Al-Shabaka, an independent transnational Palestinian policy think tank. Yara, thanks so much for joining this morning. 

YAWA HAWARI: Thank you for having me. 

SCIUTTO: I want you, if you can, to describe reaction in the region to sitting U.S. president saying not only will the U.S. take ownership of Gaza, but that the Palestinian people have no right to return, to ever return, to the land that is their home. 

HAWARI: Well, I think most people think the comments are absurd. It’s yet again another call for ethnic cleansing . . . And I think his reasons for these comments is because, you know, he said that Gaza has been destroyed, that it’s been uninhabitable. And so that’s why he’s sort of proposing this, this ethnic cleansing. But he never talks about why this is the case. 

This wasn’t a natural disaster. This was a manmade disaster. Israel carpet bombed Gaza, this tiny piece of land that is about a third of the size of Los Angeles for 15 months straight with U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons, might I add.  So this is a destruction that is as direct result of US foreign policy. So I think people in the region and Palestinians find his comments quite absurd and quite detached from reality. 

. . .

Firstly, I think it’s really important that we get our language right. You know, this isn’t a forced movement. This is ethnic cleansing. It’s quite a simple concept. It’s the forced removal of an entire ethnic group from the lands in which they live. 

. . . 

SCIUTTO: Before we go, you will often hear about this issue and others, that this is just bluster, this is just President Trump talking. But he’s repeated this threat in terms of taking aid away from Jordan and Egypt, but also that he wants the U.S. to take over Gaza.  From your point of view and the people you speak to there, is that a serious proposition by Trump regarding Gaza? 

HAWARI: Well, I think we have to take whatever Trump says very seriously. And you’re right, this wasn’t just an off-the-cuff remark. He has repeated it many times since he first mentioned it. 

But I think in all of this, no one has discussed Palestinian agency as if Palestinians are just these passive pieces on a chessboard. But they’re not. They’ve survived genocide, 15 months of relentless bombardments and forced starvation, and they are determined to stay on their land. And I think people including Donald Trump, underestimate that determination. 

SCIUTTO: They have agency. All right, Yara Hawari, thanks so much for joining us this morning. 

So desperate are the media to discredit the work of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and by extension that of Elon Musk, that they are willing to resort to rank fear mongering. As Major Garrett’s report for the CBS Evening News proves, they also seem to believe that their viewers are morons.

The report opens both with a recap of the CBS poll showing President Donald Trump with a 53% approval rating, and a mewling objection (by John Dickerson of course) of the manner in which Trump is fulfilling his promises:

MAURICE DUBOIS: I’m Maurice Dubois. President Trump today began the fourth week of his second term, and in the new CBS news poll more than half of Americans, 53% approve of the job he is doing. And 70% of them, whether they agree with him or not, say he is doing exactly what he promised to do. That includes cutting spending.

JOHN DICKERSON: But how he’s doing it is another matter. 

They’s like you to believe that this is about process. Yeah, right.

This ssets up Garrett’s report on DOGE with a spotlight on the Treasury’s Bureau of Fiscal Service, the bureau that processes outgoing payments. Garrett kicks off his report by implying that DOGE is nefariously hacking into sensitive systems (click “expand) to view transcript):

The former regime is going all out to protect itself from @DOGE scrutiny. Major Garrett’s report for the CBS Evening News opens by smearing DOGE with the language of spycraft: pic.twitter.com/6VARivr0l0
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) February 11, 2025

MAJOR GARRETT: Good Evening, Maurice and John. It’s called the Bureau of Fiscal Service and what they are looking for is what people in Washington have been looking for for decades: waste, fraud, and abuse. This quest is not new. The methods, however, are.

DONALD TRUMP: Come here, Elon!

GARRETT: President Trump has given the world’s richest man a temporary White House job and an ambitious order: audit the federal government agency by agency. Expose waste and fraud. And if you have to infiltrate sensitive government databases, do it. 

Garrett’s subject matter expert, of course, is a former Biden Treasury apparatchik who pooh-poohs DOGE efforts:

Major Garrett’s subject matter expert on the workings of Treasury was the person “focused on narrowing the gap between the taxes owed by the American public and those collected by the Internal Revenue Service.” In other words, she was in charge of audits. pic.twitter.com/N0ctOGz82V
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) February 11, 2025

NATASHA SARIN: The way to think about the Bureau of Fiscal Service is almost like the Accounts Payable department for the federal government.

GARRETT: Natasha Sarin worked for the Treasury Department for two years during the Biden administration. The Bureau of Fiscal Service distributes about 1.3 billion payments annually. Things like Social Security checks, Medicaid reimbursements, and federal grants.

NATASHA SARIN: I think fraud, and fraud in the government is actually like a really worthwhile cause to try to combat. The challenge is that it has literally nothing to do with what the Bureau of Fiscal Service does and what this Treasury payments ecosystem is.

GARRETT: So if you’re on the hunt for that, you don’t go here.

SARIN: You certainly don’t- that doesn’t sit in the Bureau of Fiscal Service. That sits at the agencies.

Sarin has since landed at Yale, where she is President and Co-Founder of the Budget Lab. Her bio describes her work at Treasury as follows:

…(Sarin) served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and later as a Counselor to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at the United States Treasury Department, where her work focused on narrowing the gap between the taxes owed by the American public and those collected by the Internal Revenue Service. 

To be crystal clear, this sure reads like Sarin was in charge of audits. 

The interview consisted largely of deflecting as to Treasury’s role, and fearmongering over a hypothetical Elon Musk access to sensitive personal information. What’s he going to do, use it to take out a credit card?! 

These guys are over here fearmongering about @elonmusk after they let China gain keystroke access to Treasury computers SMH pic.twitter.com/Sm672eeg6a
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) February 11, 2025

GARRETT: The Treasury Department has told Congress Musk’s associates cannot change any payments. That they have had so-called “read-only access” to the database. But those assurances have not been independently verified. There’s also a question about data security.

I file my taxes electronically. Does that put me inside the database of the Bureau of Fiscal Services?

SARIN: It sure does. And your bank account information- that’s how you get your refund electronically.

GARRETT: Not just who I am, where I live…

SARIN: How much you made, how much your refund is.

GARRETT: All of that is in there.

SARIN: Absolutely. The most private, sensitive data about American citizens all sits in the Bureau of Fiscal Service in the Treasury payments ecosystem.

We’re not two months removed from reporting about China hacking sensitive information at Treasury, but we’re supposed to believe Elon is a threat. That’s projection.

I’ll say again, much of the Ancién Regime Media’s fearmongering about data security concerns under DOGE depend on you forgetting that the Biden administration already let China run through Treasury. pic.twitter.com/r4x3u1D02m
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) February 11, 2025

GARRETT: Musk’s top Treasury deputy, a tech executive, had access until the weekend court ruling, accessing vast government databases by those not versed in federal data security could open systems to hacking.

SARIN: This is the most sensitive information about them that the federal government has historically held in the hands of very few career civil servants who are trained and experienced in how to deal with this data and these ecosystems. There are real security questions at play here.

The package portion of the report ends with Sarin suggesting that perhaps Trump voters don’t know what they voted for:

former Biden Treasury apparatchik all but calls Trump voters morons, suggests DOGE will ultimately make Americans less secure pic.twitter.com/YQ4mIJWvLd
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) February 11, 2025

GARRETT: There might be some who watch this conversation and say, “Look, I trust President Trump and he trusts Elon Musk. And I didn’t know anything about this agency and I don’t know anything about these civil servants. But I trust Trump and I trust Elon Musk. I’m okay with it.”

SARIN: Yeah?

GARRETT: What would you say to them?

SARIN: I don’t want to be hyperbolic and I understand and really respect the fact that democracies churn, and that the people voted and made Donald Trump the President of the United States for a second time. That said, I think we should all be wary and be concerned about the fact that some of the actions that might be taken are actions that make us less safe and less secure.

The desperation is such that they resort to open fear mongering about Musk’s intentions, and no evidence shown of any potential criminality or wrongdoing. There was only process innuendo pushed mostly by someone whose job it was to sic auditors on to taxpayers- an innuendo that depends on voters being morons.

Ultimately, the report falls flat, and stands as a slap in the face of the American people who voted for massive change to happen. Regardless of how the media may feel about the change.

Click “expand” to view the full transcript of the aforementioned report as aired on the CBS Evening News on Monday, February 10th, 2025:

JOHN DICKERSON: Good evening, I’m John Dickerson.

MAURICE DUBOIS: I’m Maurice Dubois. President Trump today began the fourth week of his second term, and in the new CBS news poll more than half of Americans, 53% approve of the job he is doing. And 70% of them, whether they agree with him or not, say he is doing exactly what he promised to do. That includes cutting spending.

DICKERSON: But how he’s doing it is another matter. The president made Elon Musk a kind of Sheriff of DOGE, The Department of Government Efficiency, to downsize just about everything. Our poll found Americans evenly split over how much influence, if any, Elon Musk and DOGE should have over government operations and spending. And a federal judge has blocked their access to a Treasury bureau that, among other things, sends out government payments- including Social Security.

DUBOIS: So what is this little known bureau, and what is the Musk team looking for? Questions Major Garrett is about to answer. Major.

MAJOR GARRETT: Good Evening, Maurice and John. It’s called the Bureau of Fiscal Service and what they are looking for is what people in Washington have been looking for for decades: waste, fraud, and abuse. This quest is not new. The methods, however, are.

DONALD TRUMP: Come here, Elon!

GARRETT: President Trump has given the world’s richest man a temporary White House job and an ambitious order: audit the federal government agency by agency. Expose waste and fraud. And if you have to infiltrate sensitive government databases, do it. 

NATASHA SARIN: The way to think about the Bureau of Fiscal Service is almost like the Accounts Payable department for the federal government.

GARRETT: Natasha Sarin worked for the Treasury Department for two years during the Biden administration. The Bureau of Fiscal Service distributes about 1.3 billion payments annually. Things like Social Security checks, Medicaid reimbursements, and federal grants.

NATASHA SARIN: I think fraud, and fraud in the government is actually like a really worthwhile cause to try to combat. The challenge is that it has literally nothing to do with what the Bureau of Fiscal Service does and what this Treasury payments ecosystem is.

GARRETT: So if you’re on the hunt for that, you don’t go here.

SARIN: You certainly don’t- that doesn’t sit in the Bureau of Fiscal Service. That sits at the agencies.

GARRETT: The Treasury Department has told Congress Musk’s associates cannot change any payments. That they have had so-called “read-only access” to the database. But those assurances have not been independently verified. There’s also a question about data security.

I file my taxes electronically. Does that put me inside the database of the Bureau of Fiscal Services?

SARIN: It sure does. And your bank account information- that’s how you get your refund electronically.

GARRETT: Not just who I am, where I live…

SARIN: How much you made, how much your refund is.

GARRETT: All of that is in there.

SARIN: Absolutely. The most private, sensitive data about American citizens all sits in the Bureau of Fiscal Service in the Treasury payments ecosystem.

GARRETT: Musk’s top Treasury deputy, a tech executive, had access until the weekend court ruling, accessing vast government databases by those not versed in federal data security could open systems to hacking.

SARIN: This is the most sensitive information about them that the federal government has historically held in the hands of very few career civil servants who are trained and experienced in how to deal with this data and these ecosystems. There are real security questions at play here.

GARRETT: There might be some who watch this conversation and say, “Look, I trust President Trump and he trusts Elon Musk. And I didn’t know anything about this agency and I don’t know anything about these civil servants. But I trust Trump and I trust Elon Musk. I’m okay with it.”

SARIN: Yeah?

GARRETT: What would you say to them?

SARIN: I don’t want to be hyperbolic and I understand and really respect the fact that democracies churn, and that the people voted and made Donald Trump the President of the United States for a second time. That said, I think we should all be wary and be concerned about the fact that some of the actions that might be taken are actions that make us less safe and less secure.

GARRETT: Security is one issue, transparency another. So far, The White House has not revealed who was doing this work, what they have found, what they plan to do with it.

DICKERSON: And Major, this work outside of the Bureau of Fiscal Service, where- what other kinds of departments might be getting this same treatment?

GARRETT: So you heard a reference that the real matter resides within each agency. So far, 16 agencies have been touched in one manner or another by those investigators under the DOGE umbrella. You can see some of the names there. FEMA, Department of Energy, Department of Labor, CDC, EPA. You don’t see there yet the Department of Education or the Department of Defense. President Trump has said they are next.

DUBOIS: Major, a big key here is The White House is claiming fraud and waste and abuse, have they actually proven that?

GARRETT: President Trump has said corruption, kickbacks, interestingly in one case-  U.S. Agency for International Development, a federal judge said, “Please. Bring me the evidence of this so I can understand why you believe it’s imperative to shut USAID down rapidly. The Department of Justice, Maurice, did not provide any evidence of kickbacks or corruption.

DICKERSON: Major, a question I get a lot from those people who- most of them didn’t vote for Donald Trump. It is: can he do this? Can Elon Musk do this?

GARRETT: The legal challenges are on two fronts. One, a 1974 Privacy Act law that says you cannot provide information about government payments to outsiders. This may be in violation of that. There’s also a 2002 cybersecurity law that says any outsider brought into the federal databases has to pass their own cybersecurity protocols. We have no information whether anyone from DOGE has passed those protocols. 

DICKERSON: Major Garrett for us in Washington. Thank you, Major.

 

The scandal that could be called “Subscription-gate” involves government agencies paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a media service like “Politico Pro.” But Politico claims they’ve never taken government funds, like it doesn’t make “Politico Pro.” Come on, bro.

Elon Musk’s brigade upending the U.S. International Agency for Development has caused major freakouts in the national media, which can only lead the average conservative American to guess this was a story the Left never wanted to get out. 

Joseph Vazquez found a deeply flawed “fact check” at The Dispatch titled  “Claims That Politico Received USAID Funds Are False.” Even the fact checker acknowledged government money was buying “an energy and environment publication it produces—totaling $44,000 over two years.”

Politico’s leaders issued a remarkably dishonest statement: 

POLITICO is a privately owned company. We have never received any government funding — no subsidies, no grants, no handouts. Not one dime, ever, in 18 years.

They pretended their Politico Pro product came from an entirely different source: “POLITICO Pro is different. It is a professional subscription service used by companies, organizations, and, yes, some government agencies.”

Curtis Houck passed along that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs said Monday it cancelled $178,000 in swampy subscriptions for Politico Pro that can now be used to help the VA fulfill its mission of caring for servicemen and women.

The media’s war on Elon Musk and his DOGE patrol continued with NPR White House reporter Asma Khalid spreading the argument that “the richest man in the world” was taking a “hatchet” to the poor. 

Enjoy the podcast below or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

 

Considering they just spectacularly lost a major defamation suit, CNN has seemed remarkably unconcerned about throwing around wild accusations. On Monday’s episode of Inside Politics With Dana Bash, Bash seemingly suggested that billionaire Elon Musk had made his money through illegal means, though she never provided evidence. She also lashed out at President Trump’s voters, calling them “the problem.”

Bash summed up what has always been CNN’s transparent view of Trump when she said that what we “cannot lose sight of,” is that the President had a “history” of “being litigious, slowing things down. I mean, we’ve seen that throughout his career in real estate and in business, and of course, as he made his way back to the presidency.” 

“Elon Musk,” she continued, “has that same MO, just the rules are there to be broken effectively, and that’s how he became the richest man of the world, when it comes to disrupting. But now he is applying that to the federal government” 

In effect, she accused Musk, while offering zero actual evidence, of being a criminal, of becoming the “richest man in the world” through illicit means, and of now bringing his criminality right into the heart of the Capitol itself. Not the best look when your outfit was just found liable of defamation.

 

 

Bash went on to trash Musk for his proposal to systematically weed out corrupt and incompetent judges, which she sneered was “just a window into his worldview.”

Washington Post national political reporter Sabrina Rodriguez agreed:

I think hearing Elon Musk express his world view, and hearing Trump and J. D. Vance and other Republicans talk this way is chipping at public confidence in these institutions. I think that is something that Donald Trump has done very effectively since he came into politics…The way he’s talked about the justice system over many years, can make people skeptical of it.

It could be pointed out that when the Biden administration came down very hard on more conservative courts and judges that they viewed as an impediment, CNN applauded heartily, particularly with Biden’s action on student loans. CNN also gushed about the ProPublica hit pieces on conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices funded by liberal dark money, which the liberal media eagerly amplified because it damaged the court’s credibility. Hypocrisy or double standard, anyone?

The conversation then turned to Republicans who the panel felt were too passive in the face of the monstrously evil Trump and Musk. “A lot of them don’t want to stick their neck out,” chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju opined, “because not only will they get Donald Trump on them, they also get Elon Musk. And that’s just simply a bridge too far at this point. We’ll see if that changes.”

Bash had an addition to that, though: “Because their own voters who are going to reelect them are Donald Trump’s voters. So, therein lies the problem that we’ve seen since the beginning of Trumpism.”

“So, therein lies the problem.” The “problem,” the root of what is wrong in America, being the American voter, according to CNN.

To read the transcript, click “expand”:

CNN Inside Politics
January 10. 2024
12:10:56 – 12:11:51 p.m. Eastern

(…)

DANA BASH: And the thing that we cannot lose sight of. And you mentioned that Donald Trump’s history is being litigious, slowing things down. I mean, we’ve seen that throughout his career in real estate and in business, and of course, as he made his way back to the presidency. Elon Musk has that same MO, just the rules are there to be broken effectively, and that’s how he became the richest man of the world, when it comes to disrupting.

But he is now applying that to the federal government. Just one example of one of the many, many things he posted: “I’d like to propose that the worst one percent of appointed judges as determined by elected bodies, be fired every year. This will weed out the most corrupt and least competent.”

I don’t want to read that as like something that’s necessarily going to happen. Although, in this environment, who knows. But just I think as a window into his world view.

SABRINA RODRIGUEZ (national political reporter, Washington Post): I think hearing Elon Musk express his world view, and hearing Trump and J. D. Vance and other Republicans talk this way is chipping at public confidence in these institutions. I think that is something that Donald Trump has done very effectively since he came into politics.

The way that he talks about the media, it can make someone who doesn’t follow it closely become a little more skeptical. The way he’s talked about the justice system over many years, can make people skeptical of it.

And I think that having Elon Musk on X every day, raising questions about different agencies, raising questions about different media institutions, raises questions in the American public. And I think that is the point.

I think Donald Trump wants for the American public to say, well, he did say he wanted to change it up, and he’s changing it up, and that’s how he gets to do it. And of course, the justice system here. Of course, judges are this backstop. But I think there’s a bigger question about, what impact does this rhetoric have on Americans listening in on what’s happening?

(…)

12:15:56 p.m. Eastern

MANU RAJU: A lot of them don’t want to stick their neck out because not only will they get Donald Trump on them, they also get Elon Musk. And that’s just simply a bridge too far at this point. We’ll see if that changes.

BASH: Because their own voters who are going to reelect them are Donald Trump’s voters. So, therein lies the problem that we’ve seen since the beginning of Trumpism.

As Big Tech and the U.S. government take steps away from their past censorship abuses, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) issued a warning to the anti-free speech bureaucrats across the pond. 

Jordan, in a letter to Henna Virkkunen, the new executive vice president of the European Commission (EU), warned that America would not tolerate further European efforts to punish American tech companies for allowing free speech. 

After noting that Virkkunen was in charge of enforcing the EU’s draconian Digital Services Act (DSA), Jordan wrote, “We write to express our serious concerns with how the DSA’s censorship provisions affect free speech in the United States.” He filled the letter with references to past and present EU actions that violate free speech and summoned the European Commission to explain itself to the House Judiciary Committee. 

[Story Continues on MRC Free Speech America] 

PBS News Weekend guest host Ali Rogin promised that a Saturday evening segment would “explore the deep roots of DEI in this country as it comes under increasing attack,” and it certainly delivered a strong if false defense, comparing the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” push to the fight against Jim Crow, with the host agreeing wholly with the segment’s sole guest, a leftist professor from the “USC Race and Equity Center.” .

Rogin claimed Trump’s executive orders targeting DEI programs were “dismantling decades of federal anti-discrimination policy,” which sounds dubious, then introduced John Yang’s report with solemn fanfare.

ROGIN: For Black History Month, John Yang explores the origins of DEI in America in our latest installment of Hidden Histories.

Yang, who usually anchors the PBS News Weekend, suggested a choice between supporting DEI or Jim Crow, as if DEI was just a synonym for “civil rights.”

JOHN YANG (voice-over): Long before DEI became a household term, there were other efforts to move toward equal rights for all Americans. Some of the earliest were in the late 1800s, during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, as Southern states enacted Jim Crow laws making segregation in public spaces legal, Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau….pressure from white Southerners led to the closure of the Freedmen’s Bureau just seven years after it had been established. Nearly a century later, black Americans were still battling racism and discrimination.

Yang cycled through the history of racial politics up to the police killing of George Floyd that put “Racial justice was back in the nation’s collective conscience,” concluding his potted history with “Today, DEI has become a political lightning rod, but its roots run deep in American history, and the quest for equity and justice goes on.”

Whoa! Most people conflate “equity” with “equality,” but they are not synonyms. “Equality” means treating everyone the same, while “equity” means handing out more resources and opportunities to those in categories considered historically underprivileged. This naturally results in the narrowing of opportunities for members of “privileged” categories (i.e., whites, Asians) and can inflame racial tensions.

Back in studio, Rogin spoke with Shaun Harper from the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center.

SHAUN HARPER: I think that this is a very particular moment in which the three letters DEI are being scapegoated, villainized….most polling shows that most Americans actually believe that diversity is a good thing for our country, that people ought to be treated equitably….

(There’s that slippery word “equity” again.)

Harper said the George Floyd killing had “forced a global reckoning with structural and systemic racism here in the United States,” then indulged in happy talk about what DEI was meant to be, as opposed to its true nature on the ground, with no skepticism offered by journalist Rogin.

HARPER: The intended goal of those efforts was to right America’s past and present wrongs as it pertains to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, disability, discrimination….Those efforts certainly were not intended to divide people or to sort of force them into two categories, privileged and oppressed. That’s the narrative that’s sort of wrapped around misinformation….

Somehow asking people to “unlearn racism” and recognize their “racial microaggressions” is not “divisive.” 

Rogin asked Harper what ridding DEI from the federal government would mean.

HARPER: It’s bad for our democracy. It will lead to greater polarization. It will lead to more divisiveness. It will lead to lots of people losing their jobs. Federal professionals who do DEI work as well as professionals in corporations and in other places will lose their jobs because they`re caught in the political crosshairs, not because they`ve done something bad….

In other words, bureaucrats and grifters will lose jobs and influence.

Harper’s wishful thinking aside, DEI propaganda and training sessions do pit groups against each other. It’s become a lucrative complex, taken advantage of by racial grifters. Activist Christopher Rufo has exposed Bank of America teaching the U.S. “is a system of “white supremacy,” while Lockheed Martin asks its executives to “deconstruct their white male privilege.” 

None of these facts made it into PBS’s segment, which continues to shirk its congressional mandate to maintain “strict adherence to objectivity and balance.”

This segment was brought to you in part by Consumer Cellular.

A transcript is available, click “Expand.”

PBS News Weekend

2/8/25

7:10:41 p.m. (ET)

Ali Rogin: Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives has been at the top of his agenda. He’s issued executive orders that target DEI programs, dismantling decades of federal anti-discrimination policy. For Black History Month, John Yang explores the origins of DEI in America in our latest installment of Hidden Histories.

John Yang (voice-over): Long before DEI became a household term, there were other efforts to move toward equal rights for all Americans. Some of the earliest were in the late 1800s, during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, as Southern states enacted Jim Crow laws making segregation in public spaces legal. Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau. It provided formerly enslaved people basic necessities, helped them look for jobs and acquire land of their own.

In 1866, President Andrew Johnson vetoed legislation to enforce those amendments, arguing that it discriminated against white people. And pressure from white Southerners led to the closure of the Freedmen’s Bureau just seven years after it had been established. Nearly a century later, black Americans were still battling racism and discrimination.

Crowd: Freedom, Freedom, freedom.

John Yang (voice-over): Led by icons like the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., they united during the civil rights movement, pushing back against the systems that excluded them. At the height of the movement, John F. Kennedy became the first president to call for affirmative action, using the term in an executive order targeting racial bias in the hiring practices of government contractors.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act, which banned employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin. By the 1990s, a backlash had emerged over affirmative action, voters in California, Washington State, Michigan and Arizona banned its use in public employment and higher education admissions. Then, May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, igniting months of protest across the nation and around the world.

Man: Stand Up and fight.

John Yang (voice-over): Racial justice was back in the nation’s collective conscience, this time with support from large corporations, many of them created DEI committees and pledged to invest billions of dollars to promote racial equity. But companies began ending these initiatives after the Supreme Court in 2023 banned affirmative action in college admissions.

Last month, Target joined a growing list of companies pulling back on their DEI commitments. At the same time, though, employers like Costco and Delta Airlines are doubling down on theirs.

Today, DEI has become a political lightning rod, but its roots run deep in American history, and the quest for equity and justice goes on.

Ali Rogin: Earlier, I spoke to Shaun Harper from the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center. I asked him to explain how the current debate surrounding DEI fits into its broader history.

Shaun Harper, USC Race and Equity Center: I think that this is a very particular moment in which the three letters DEI are being scapegoated, villainized. Everything is being blamed on those three letters. But as it turns out, most polling shows that most Americans actually believe that diversity is a good thing for our country, that people ought to be treated equitably, and that workplaces and retail environments and schools and so on ought to be inclusive environments. So the sort of broader ideals of DEI very much remain at the American core. But it’s just that those three letters, the three letter acronym, is being politically scapegoated during this time.

Ali Rogin: Why has it become so politicized?

Shaun Harper: Let’s rewind almost five years ago when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. And we all saw it play out via Darnella Frazier’s video footage. You know, that forced a global reckoning with structural and systemic racism here in the United States. That was a conversation, frankly, that most Americans didn’t care to have, and they were certainly unprepared to have it, but yet they were dragged into it.

So what we saw almost immediately, you know, after that summer of racial reckoning, if you will, was a bit of an allergic reaction. Well, that allergic reaction then became legislative as states across the country began to defund and ban the teaching and learning about diversity, equity and inclusion in schools and DEI offices. So I don’t blame the whole thing, obviously, on Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd, but it certainly marks a pivotal chapter in our nation’s history.

Ali Rogin: As you mentioned, there are DEI programs that came about at companies and government entities across the country. What was the intended goal of those sorts of efforts?

Shaun Harper: The intended goal of those efforts was to right America’s past and present wrongs as it pertains to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, disability, discrimination, so on and so forth. Those efforts certainly were not intended to divide people or to sort of force them into two categories, privileged and oppressed. That’s the narrative that’s sort of wrapped around misinformation.

But most of those efforts were the antithesis of that. They intended to bring people together. They intended to help close gaps, and they intended to help us think about how to make our schools and companies and our communities, you know, more fair and more inclusive.

President Trump in his initial days announced that he was going to be ridding the federal government of anything pertaining to DEI and those individual words. Certainly we don’t yet know the scope of what that really means. There’s a lot in flux. But I’m wondering, from your perspective, what is that going to mean for Americans?

Shaun Harper: It’s bad for our democracy. It will lead to greater polarization. It will lead to more divisiveness. It will lead to lots of people losing their jobs. Federal professionals who do DEI work as well as professionals in corporations and in other places will lose their jobs because they’re caught in the political crosshairs, not because they’ve done something bad.

What we will also see is an uptick in costly litigation that will cost the American taxpayers millions, perhaps billions of dollars as many Americans are experiencing harassment, discrimination and abuse. You know, DEI policies and programs, again, help to protect against those things.

Ali Rogin: Sean Harper, founder of the USC Race and Equity Center. Thank you so much for joining us.

Shaun Harper: Thanks so much.

Leave it to the Cackling Coven of ABC News’s The View to make the Super Bowl and the halftime show about President Trump and think they were witty about it. In their Monday reaction to the Philadelphia Eagles’ blowout win over Kansas City Chiefs, fake Republican Ana Navarro praised singer and songwriter Kendrick Lamar for his half halftime performance and claimed – without evidence – that it would lead to Trump “banning black people” from performing during the halftime show.

“You know I don’t do sports. You know I don’t do football,” Navarro began her comments, showing just how invaluable her opinion was going to be. She then launched into a cackle-filled rant about how Trump was somehow upset about seeing black people perform in front of him and how it was supposedly the NFL somehow sticking it to him.

“I think today Donald Trump is going to sign an executive order banning black people from halftime,” she exclaimed. “Because you remember last week we were talking about whether the NFL was capitulating to Trump by removing the term ‘end racism’ from the end zone? Boy, did they not capitulate to Trump!”

She then started boasting about being happy because purportedly “racists” were upset with the show:

When I saw Samuel L. Jackson dressed as a black Uncle Sam introducing Kendrick Lamar, who then had, like, an entire formation of all black people making a U.S. flag! Listen. This much I know. All the black people on my feed were, like, “Oh, this is blackity black black,” and all the racists who somehow get in, man were they hopping mad. So, if the racists are mad, I’m happy as a clam!

At no time did she provide evidence for her negative claims.

 

 

Of course, staunchly racist Sunny Hostin agreed with Navarro and hyped how Trump had to look at “black excellence” during the show. The two then claimed Trump would likely never attend a Super Bowl ever again because of the show:

HOSTIN: I agree Ana. With all these attacks on diversity, all these attacks on African Americans, it was so nice to see black excellence enjoyed in front of the sitting President who decided for the first time to go to the Super Bowl. New Orleans —

NAVARRO: I don’t think he’s ever going back!

HOSTIN: I don’t think he’s going back! New Orleans of course, is a predominantly black city, very close to my heart. 55 percent black.

Again, at no point did they provide evidence that Trump hated the show or took offence to it. It appeared to be all in their heads.

Hostin then proclaimed that critics who said “they didn’t understand [Lamar’s] performance” where just too stupid to understand the work of “a Pulitzer prize-winning musician and poet. Okay?”

Just before going to the commercial break, moderator Whoopi Goldberg went on a bizarre rant about football and race that seemed to falsely hint that there was a major movement to ban black players:

Here’s the thing. The Super Bowl is the Super Bowl. It’s an American sport. And we got players of all colors playing this game. So, the next time anyone decides that someone isn’t good enough or they shouldn’t be — this is what decides if you are good enough. If you made it, you were good enough. Now, winners and losers, we will always have, but there is nothing to say that any one of us can’t play. We’re all invited to this game.

Obliviously, “we’re all invited to this game.” No one is trying to stop that Whoopi, no matter what you and your co-hosts invent to complain about.

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

ABC’s The View
February 10, 2025
11:03:46 a.m. Eastern

(…)

ANA NAVARRO: You know I don’t do sports. You know I don’t do football. So, I wasn’t watching the game. But listen. [Laughter] I think today Donald Trump is going to sign an executive order banning black people from halftime!

[Applause]

Because you remember last week we were talking about whether the NFL was capitulating to Trump by removing the term “end racism” from the end zone? Boy, did they not capitulate to Trump!

When I saw Samuel L. Jackson –

SUNNY HOSTIN: Yeah.

NAVARRO:  – dressed as a black Uncle Sam introducing Kendrick Lamar, who then had, like, an entire formation of all black people making a U.S. flag! Listen. This much I know. All the black people on my feed were, like, “Oh, this is blackity black black,” and all the racists who somehow get in, man were they hopping mad. So, if the racists are mad, I’m happy as a clam!

[Applause]

It was a huge celebration of New Orleans and you can’t celebrate New Orleans without celebrating black culture. Welcome to black history month, you all!

[Cheers and applause]

HOSTIN: Yeah.

WHOOPI GOLDBERG: Sunny?

HOSTIN: I really thoroughly enjoyed it because I did predict that the Eagles would win as can be seen by my gloating outfit today.

SARA HAINES: Her subtle jacket.

HOSTIN: My subtle jacket.

I agree Ana. With all these attacks on diversity, all these attacks on African Americans, it was so nice to see black excellence enjoyed in front of the sitting President who decided for the first time to go to the Super Bowl. New Orleans —

NAVARRO: I don’t think he’s ever going back!

HOSTIN: I don’t think he’s going back!

New Orleans of course, is a predominantly black city, very close to my heart. 55 percent black. Then you have Kendrick Lamar. A lot of people said they didn’t understand his performance. Guys, he’s an award-winning — a Pulitzer prize-winning musician and poet. Okay?

So, it was a many-layered performance. You got Serena Williams Crip walking. What I also really enjoyed about Kendrick’s performance is, it was performance art if you really looked at it. It was multilayered. Yes, he had people dressed in red, white, and blue, the colors of the flag, but he also had those — he was standing in front of them as — because he’s explaining that this is a divided country at this point. He also has them leaning to the side because this country was built on the backs of black people. So it was a very multilayered.

(…)

11:09:07 a.m. Eastern

GOLDBERG: Here’s the thing. The Super Bowl is the Super Bowl. It’s an American sport.

NAVARRO: Yep.

HOSTIN: Yep.

GOLDBERG: And we got players of all colors playing this game. So, the next time anyone decides that someone isn’t good enough or they shouldn’t be — this is what decides if you are good enough. If you made it, you were good enough.

Now, winners and losers, we will always have, but there is nothing to say that any one of us can’t play. We’re all invited to this game.

We’ll be right back.

In another blow to the liberal media’s corrupt spigot of lucrative government subscriptions paid for with your tax dollars, President Trump’s Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) — led by newly confirmed Secretary Doug Collins — said Monday it cancelled $178,000 in Swampy subscriptions for Politico Pro that can now be used to help the VA fulfill its mission of caring for servicemen and women.

Collins said in a statement to NewsBusters that this marked “a new day at VA” in which “[w]e’re putting Veterans at the center of everything the department does, focusing relentlessly on customer service and convenience.”

“We’re working every day to find new and better ways of helping VA beneficiaries. That means cutting wasteful spending and redirecting resources toward programs that benefit Veterans, families, survivors and caregivers,” he added.

The VA, along with its extensive medical care for the mental, physical, and spiritual needs of those who’ve served the red, white, and blue, also provides services for homeless veterans through its Grant and Per Diem (GPD) Program. 

With the maximum per diem per veteran coming in at $71.53 a day, one could use the Politico Pro subscriptions to support one homeless veteran for over six years, which sounds like a far better use of tax dollars to us!

This marks the newest entry into perhaps the most stunning find in the early days of the second Trump term about the rot inside government agencies using tax dollars on subscriptions to liberal news outlets such as Politico Pro, a lucrative, paywalled version of Politico diving into the inner workings of government policymaking. 

Most infamously, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — which is on live support — was one such sliver of the bureaucracy shelling out money to read about itself. 

The VA cutting ties with Politico put them on par with the Department of Agriculture, which The New York Times divulged on Thursday and fulfills what Axios reported that same day was a White House demand for agencies to ax “every single media contract.”

Politico Pro has this on its website under the heading “What is Politico Pro”:

POLITICO Pro is an all-inclusive platform that empowers public policy professionals with the tools, news, analysis, and other resources needed to succeed in an increasingly complex political world.

Our features include exclusive and unbiased policy news coverage in real-time, in-depth policy analysis and a suite of tracking tools to help you keep tabs on policy developments as they happen. In addition, the fully-integrated stakeholder management solution and government directories enable you to engage with your network effortlessly.

Whether you’re a consultant, analyst, lobbyist or anything else in between, POLITICO Pro has the tools and resources you need to stay ahead of the policy curve.

Better yet, and even before Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) can set up shop at the VA, it had said back on January 27 that they “placed nearly 60 employees who had been solely focused on diversity, equity and inclusion activities on paid administrative leave” with salaries “total[ing] more than $8 million, an average of more than $136,000/year per employee.”

“Additionally, VA has identified several contracts for DEI-related trainings, materials and other consulting services, which the department is currently working to cancel. The combined value of these contracts totals more than $6.1 million,” it added.

During the last administration, NPR White House reporter Asma Khalid sounded like a foot soldier for Democrats, coddling Kamala at Christmas across multiple taxpayer-funded programs (2022), and hailing a Harris trip to Germany, with zero GOP soundbites (2024).

Over the weekend Khalid appeared on PBS, NPR, and ABC hammering away at Elon Musk as “the world’s richest man” taking a hatchet to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is automatically associated with the poor, so Musk will “increase starvation rates.” He’s a killer. 

It started on the very tilted talk show Washington Week with The Atlantic: 

DC press corps on @WashingtonWeek in high dudgeon over @ElonMusk and USAID. NPR’s @asmamk: “There’s something I think very strange at this moment of seeing the world’s richest man really take a hatchet that will essentially take people who are already in the depths of poverty and… pic.twitter.com/4EFVj3jOEg
— Brent Baker 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@BrentHBaker) February 8, 2025
Khalid: “There’s something I think just very strange in this moment of seeing the world’s richest man really sort of take a hatchet that will essentially take people who are already in the depths of poverty and, you know, increase starvation rates or increase hunger rates, which is likely what will happen if USAID is entirely cut off.”

Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic doubled down: “It’s a test case for can agencies just be abolished with no without Congress having any say, but it’s also a test case of cruelty. You know, are Americans willing to accept a high level of cruelty and death just, you know, on the president’s whim, on Elon Musk’s whim?

Khalid was back on the ramparts in the “Week in Politics” chat on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday: 

AYESHA RASCOE, host: On the domestic side of things, we see Elon Musk rolling through federal agencies and, in some cases, leaving them decimated. What stood out to you from last week, and what’s on your radar this week?

KHALID: I think what stood out to me, Ayesha, was just the scope and speed of what is happening. You know, we’ve seen the administration essentially try to shut down a federal agency, USAID, get rid of thousands of employees, gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, take over the cultural arts by firing the board of the Kennedy Center here in Washington, D.C., and then you saw the president naming himself as the chairman. So there is so much, I would say, breaking of institutions that is occurring simultaneously.

Then came a pundit spot on ABC’s This Week, where she repeated the “richest man in the world is starving people” spin. 

NPR’s @asmamk on ABC’s #ThisWeek: “This is the case of the richest man in the world and there’s something very strange about him slashing programs that prevent starvation and hunger and poverty in much of the world.” She said the same thing about @ElonMusk Friday night on PBS:… pic.twitter.com/oKq3c7WHMl
— Brent Baker 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@BrentHBaker) February 9, 2025

KHALID: I was speaking with a USAID staffer this week or maybe I call them a former staffer at this point, who said to me they were emailed at 12:42 a.m., in the middle of the night, to not appear at work the next day. This isn’t the process of Congress sitting there and going through to assess what budgetary perhaps limitations they ought to put on USAID.

This is the case of — as Susan said — the richest man in the world and there’s something very strange about him slashing programs that prevent starvation and hunger and poverty in much of the world.

They’re so wedded to this “starvation” point and they don’t seem to care at all that Secretary of State Rubio has resumed the humanitarian aid. 

Joe Scarborough feels the pain of panic-stricken liberals in the age of Trump 2.0., and is doing his best to talk them off the ledge. Here was Scarborough on today’s Morning Joe:

SCARBOROUGH: Just as we would say in Congress, a point of personal privilege, because I did something this weekend that I just had not done in a while, and I went through emails of people who watched the show and went into the public email file, deeply concerned, and did my best to reassure them that — what we need to do to get through moments like these, quoting everybody from Rudyard Kipling to Martin Luther King to James Madison. 

Scarborough also tried to rouse the audience by reading at length from a New York Times editorial board column similarly trying to encourage Trump antagonists not to lose hope, to stay engaged against “the efforts to dismantle the federal government, the performative attacks on immigrants, transgender people, and the very concept of diversity itself….they need to be challenged boldly and thoughtfully with the confidence that the nation’s systems of checks and balances will prove up to the task.”

Jon Meacham was not so sanguine. He expressed profound fear over JD Vance’s X post, which simply stated the incontrovertible fact that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Meacham worried that Vance:

“Might be setting a predicate for the kind of showdown that would potentially, potentially, break apart this constitutional system of checks and balances.”

Reading such an ominous threat into Vance’s anodyne statement says more about Meacham’s fragile state of mind than anything the Vice President wrote. But he was the Biden speechwriter who claimed we all had a “patriotic duty” to vote for Biden. The feelings of rejection must be intense. 

Note: Scarborough yet again managed, on the thinnest of reeds, to remind people that he had been a congressman. He prefaced his mention of responding to viewer emails by saying, “As we would say in Congress, a point of personal privilege.”

Here’s the transcript.

MSNBC
Morning Joe
2/10/25
6:09 am ET

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Just, as we would say in Congress, a point of personal privilege. Because I did something this weekend that I just had not done in a while, and I went through emails of people who watch the show, and went into the public email file, deeply concerned, and did my best to reassure them that what we need to do to get through moments like these, quoting everybody from Rudyard Kipling to Martin Luther King to James Madison. 

But the New York Times, it’s just one of these moments, and you know this as a writer, where people will come up to you and thank you for saying things, writing things, that they have felt in their heart and that they have tried to express, but haven’t been able to do it as effectively as you have. 

I think all the things I’ve been trying to tell people about keeping calm,  carrying on, and staying focused and staying informed, the New York Times handled it wonderfully. 

And if, if you’ll you’ll give me the privilege of time to read the New York Times and what they say. 

“What this moment calls for. Don’t get distracted. Don’t get overwhelmed. Don’t get paralyzed and pulled into the chaos that President Trump and his allies are purposefully creating with the volume and speed of executive orders. The efforts to dismantle the federal government, the performative attacks on immigrants, transgender people, and the very concept of diversity itself. The demands that other countries accept Americans as their new overlords. And the dizzying sense that the White House could do or say anything at any moment. All of this is intended to keep the country on its back heel so President Trump can blaze ahead in his drive for maximum executive power so no one can stop the audacious, ill-conceived, and frequently illegal agenda being advanced by his administration. 

“For goodness sake,” writes the Times, “Don’t tune out. The actions of the presidency needs to be tracked, and when they cross moral or legal lines, they need to be challenged boldly and thoughtfully with the confidence that the nation’s systems of checks and balances will prove up to the task.”

. . .

J.D. Vance’s tweet yesterday that courts cannot stop a president’s legitimate power, I mean, of course they can’t. But it is the courts, and not Vice Presidents. It is William Rehnquist and it is Warren Burger that determined the outlines of a president’s authority, and not Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon. That is, we saw that in Nixon v. U.S. I suspect we will see that again soon.  But it is important I, I love this editorial and I’m wondering what you took from it. 

. . . 

JON MEACHAM: The thing that is the most troubling to me in the past x number of days was the Vice President weighing in, in that way. 

Because it felt to me, and I hope, I pray that I’m wrong. It felt to me as if it might be setting a predicate. A predicate for the kind of showdown that would potentially, potentially, break apart this constitutional system of checks and balances.