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At a time when CNN should be convincing the nation that it was the best choice for hosting the first debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump before the Nov. 5 presidential election, the network has instead jumped feet first into absolute chaos.
From scandals to tantrums, the formerly revered news giant has crafted the worst possible week leading up to what will likely be the most watched program on CNN in years. And it didn’t exactly have a stellar reception at the initial announcement.
CNN declared that the rules of the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, his predecessor, would take place in its Atlanta studio without a live audience, include periodic commercial breaks (the first presidential debate to have those in history) and would give a new power to the debate moderators—the ability to mute either candidate at will.
Pundits, candidates, and Trump’s campaign all pointed out that commercial breaks would likely benefit Biden, whose mental health has come under severe scrutiny over the past several years.
The attention has included innumerable moments in which Biden appeared lost, forgot his words, confused names and locations, or mumbled incoherently. Special counsel Robert Hur ruled that he would not recommend federal charges against Biden for possessing classified documents from his terms as vice president and senator because the president was too feeble to stand trial.
Pundits also pointed out CNN’s lopsided decision to host the Biden-Trump debate without a live audience, suggesting that Trump’s communication strength is amplified in front of crowds as he draws from his stints as an entertainer and celebrity.
CNN’s choice for its two moderators drew the most ire: Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, two network anchors who consistently expressed open disdain for Trump. Tapper and Bash have accused Trump of crimes ranging from Russian collusion and corruption to channeling Adolf Hitler and not “trusting the science” during COVID-19.
Tapper has made a point to refuse showing widely covered Trump rallies and speeches on CNN, explaining that Trump was too “mean” to air clips of him with audio. I’m very certain that giving Tapper a “mute button” to use at his discretion will be handled professionally and objectively.
Regardless, I was stunned that Trump accepted these terms and joined the rest of the nation in waiting for Thursday night—and then four days before the debate, all hell broke loose at CNN.
As if CNN wasn’t already perceived as “hostile territory” for Trump, former MSNBC contributor Kasie Hunt—now a CNN host—silenced and kicked former assistant Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt off her show for the grave crime of referencing the prior statements and behavior of Tapper and Bash in the context of Thursday night’s debate.
After Leavitt answered Hunt’s question about Trump’s strategy and planning for the debate, Hunt demanded that Leavitt not “attack” her colleagues, and claimed: “If you’re attacking the moderator, you’re usually losing.”
Leavitt’s so-called attack consisted of calling CNN a “hostile environment” and mentioning thatTapper and Bash had made their prior opinions on Trump “very well known in the past eight years in their biased coverage of him.” That’s it.
Hunt asked Leavitt to describe past and present debate performances and expectations. When Leavitt began her answer by responding to Hunt’s first point about the moderators, Hunt raised her voice to lecture Leavitt, then kicked her off the air and reiterated her allegation that citing past statements from Tapper and Bash was “attacking” her colleagues.
Following this train wreck, Hunt added gasoline to the fire by defending her actions on the social media platform X:
You come on my show, you respect my colleagues. Period. I don’t care what side of the aisle you stand on, as my track record clearly shows.
— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) June 24, 2024
By standing on her “track record,” Hunt opened the door for pundits, officials, and other critics to share some of that past online—including an MSNBC segment in which she described the assault and battery of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., as “one of my favorite stories.”
As though this wasn’t enough, Tapper now finds himself at the center of a gargantuan defamation lawsuit that could result in CNN paying $1 billion in damages.
According to Nicholas Fondacaro, an associate editor at the Media Research Center, reporters and editors at CNN may have defamed Zachary Young in an investigative story about the evacuation of people from Afghanistan when the U.S. chaotically withdrew in August 2021.
Young’s lawyer alleges that the CNN reporter, Alex Marquardt, went after Young, who was hired by corporations such as Bloomberg and Audible to rescue corporate clients from Afghanistan amid the return of the Taliban regime, by maliciously accusing him of being a “war profiteer” and “human trafficker,” costing Young any future of employment.
Internal communications from the reporter to his editors about Young were laced with profanity and a stated desire to make this Young’s “funeral.”
Tapper aired this apparent hit on Young on his show “The Lead,” alleging without evidence that those evacuated by Young were given “no guarantee of safety or success.”
Judge L. Clayton Roberts, of Florida’s 1st District Court of Appeal, ruled that the circumstances surrounding the potential defamation were so severe that he would remove the typical limits for punitive damages, usually between $100,000 and $400,000.
Fondacaro joined me for a interview Monday on his developing story:
As a cherry on top of this disastrous cake, The Post Millennial reported Tuesday that CNN announced that any outlets providing commentary during the debate would be forbidden from using CNN’s live feed, resulting in more backlash from commentators, pundits, and show hosts.
CNN is now threatening any social channels that provide commentary on the debate stating they will not allow the use outside of CNN
— Tim Pool (@Timcast) June 24, 2024
Commentary on a presidential debate is the epitome of fair use and we fully intend to provide insight and real time fact checking Thursday LIVE
UPDATE: Thursday's stream is CANCELED.@CNN has announced they'll be doing takedowns of any channel streaming and running commentary of the debate, and @YouTube is on board with this. Could result in copyright strikes and full out channel suspensions. Unfortunately, I don't have…
— Liberty Doll (@TheLibertyDoll) June 25, 2024
You don’t need me to tell you that this is not the best way to engender trust and respect for your hosting of a presidential debate, especially in such a contentious time.
It wouldn’t be that difficult. After all, I praised left-leaning NBC News for doing a far better job of hosting one of the Republican presidential primary debates this year than Fox News did.
Whether CNN’s apparent “scorched earth” strategy is to drive publicity and ratings or is the network’s best internal expression of objectivity remains to be seen. But I would caution that other doomsday prophecies this year supposed to be the “end of Trump” backfired catastrophically.
The post CNN Sets Itself on Fire Before Hosting First Presidential Debate appeared first on The Daily Signal.
In our modern political dumpster fire, there has never been an art so refined and illustrious as pointless pearl-clutching.
In this, the ninth year of 2016, most everyone is fairly desensitized to the political drama emanating from the Left’s ardent claims that any conservative policy or protest is an appeal to fascism as their own organizations and protesters set fire to cities (and sometimes themselves).
Republicans pass a bill banning sexually explicit content in public schools from kindergarten to third grade? Florida Democrats and media labeled it fascism.
A U.S. Supreme Court justice’s wife flies a Revolutionary War flag commissioned by George Washington? Salon’s senior writer described Justice Samuel Alito and his wife as “extremely invested in the semiotics of American fascism.”
The New Republic, The Guardian, taxpayer-funded PBS—any time a Republican so much as upholds parliamentary procedure, defends former President Donald Trump, or questions the surge of gang and cartel members amid waves of illegal immigrants—these outlets are ready in the wings to call any to the right of Chairman Mao a fascist.
The latest banner of fascism to be shouted down in a “Two Minutes Hate” session out of George Orwell’s “1984”: flying the flag of the United States upside down. The horror!
As ridiculous as it might sound—the group that has spent the past eight years defending those who burn, shred, and desecrate the U.S. flag is suddenly outraged over many in the nation who have flown the U.S. flag upside down in a symbol of distress over Trump’s political prosecution and conviction.
Many on the Left and precious few on the Right have taken to social media to lambast those who would fly the U.S. flag upside down as “disrespectful,” “treasonous,” and “idol-worshipers.”
Is this the case? Are those who reacted to Trump’s felony convictions in New York City simply bowing at his feet in a brutal backstabbing of the United States? Is this heinous, unspeakable act the very hallmark of fascism and the alleged “cult of personality” that the Left has predicted for almost a century?
Of course not, and you know that.
We needn’t walk down the halls of easily accessible history to discern how this wrist-shattering pearl clutch is both hypocritical and ignorant. But we’ll do so, not out of necessity but because heaping good data en masse against poorly constructed arguments is entertaining.
First and foremost: Flying the flag of the United States upside down is not disrespectful, illegal, treasonous, or even unprecedented.
Although 4 U.S. Code § 8, commonly referred to as the “Flag Code,” isn’t legally enforceable (because U.S. citizens retain First Amendment rights to do with their own flags whatever they wish), flying the flag upside down under appropriate circumstances wouldn’t violate the law.
The law clearly states: “The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.” (The “union” refers to the patch of blue with 50 stars.)
Thousands in the U.S. have flown our flag upside down to express their “dire distress” in such instances over the past century.
Leftists consistently flew the U.S. flag upside down throughout Trump’s presidency to signal their deep disquiet and fear, from Washington state to Louisiana. Democrats in New Jersey resolutely flew the flag upside down in protest of Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. Some Republicans flew their flags upside down when Barack Obama was reelected in 2012.
The American flag has been flown upside down as “a tribute to veterans’ sacrifice,” and was one of the many symbols of protest against the Vietnam War used by leftist demonstrators in the 1960s.
The Flag Code doesn’t specify what “extreme danger to life or property” entails, nor does it restrict such interpretation to a physical danger or a political one. Might there be a situation today in which many Americans feel in deep distress over a perceived danger to the life and property of their republic?
Never before in American history has a former president, much less one running for office again, been charged and convicted in such a kangaroo-court fashion that even his political adversaries note the insanity of the circumstances.
In an extremely heated presidential election campaign, indicting one of the two frontrunners would be considered enough of an anathema—but the case of New York v. Trump was more than precarious, it was a circus.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, ran on the promise of doing anything he could to find something to indict Trump with. Outside his jurisdiction, Bragg used a federal election statute—which the Federal Election Commission already had stated Trump didn’t violate—as a convoluted lever to turn 34 counts of “falsifying business records,” misdemeanors that by this point were outside New York’s statute of limitations, into felonies.
As if that weren’t enough, Judge Juan Merchan refused to allow a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission to testify, refused to allow the defense to speak to the jury before deliberation, and informed jurors that to convict they didn’t have to reach a unanimous decision on what crime was committed.
Such actions by Merchan set a nation on fire even as trust in institutions already was wavering.
Elie Honig, a former federal and state prosecutor, wrote for New York magazine, an extremely liberal publication: “Prosecutors got Trump—but they contorted the law.” Honig pointed out that never before in U.S. history has there been a state prosecution using federal election law.
You’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned Trump’s sex life, his character, or his business decisions—in fact, many of those expressing extreme distress at this forded Rubicon aren’t being protective of Trump like he was some kind of nonsensical religious idol.
Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, and Mitt Romney, R-Utah, who have spent the past few years as Trump’s chief opposition within the GOP, both called this case and conviction despicable.
When a reporter asks President Joe Biden whether he used this case to politically persecute Trump and he casts a wicked grin in her direction, how is the nation supposed to respond?
Reporter: "President Trump refers to himself as a political prisoner and blames you directly. What's your response to that, sir?"
— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) May 31, 2024
Biden: *smiles*pic.twitter.com/CZY8JUMvKO
Why is the left side of the aisle afforded the right to ride through towns and cities shouting about the impending doom of the republic like some bastardized caricature of Paul Revere, and the right side isn’t allowed to call out the very sham John Adams unpopularly fought in court to prevent?
Spare me your clutched pearls, neoconservatives. Your faux dignity and condescension at the concerns of Americans whose carcass of a justice system is paraded openly don’t move me.
I don’t have to defend Trump’s personal life and sign onto a “cult of personality” to recognize that each of us has a right to be free from political persecution and election interference.
Commentator Alyssa Farah’s silly claims that flying the flag upside down signals “selling out” are as pathetic and hypocritical as the rest of the cast of “The View” with whom she clucks and quacks about abortion rights, gun confiscation, and anti-Catholicism.
Whistling past the graveyard and sending a “strongly worded letter” have only mired us further in the muck of Third World antics.
I reserve the right to fly my flag upside down to signal my extreme distress at this danger to the life and property of the republic I love, and I’ll do so whenever I find it appropriate.
The post To the Condescending Cranks Faking Outrage Over Upside-Down Flags appeared first on The Daily Signal.
“You can’t lead America with ancient ideas.”
That was the claim—shouted, not spoken—by the president of the United States in what was considered by many to be the most divisive State of the Union address ever given before a joint session of Congress.
President Joe Biden’s March 7 lecture seemed to punctuate what has become a brutally disheartening term in office, with liberals demanding Americans throw aside traditional values and institutions for a “liberating” future of hedonistic affirmation in the pursuit of an ambiguous “equity.”
This bastardized system of values—promoted by the Left to usurp the traditional American institutions of faith, family, and community—are now in the sights of Florida’s senior senator.
“Faith, family, community—teach us who we are and what we’re here for,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R.-Fla., calls out in a new video, juxtaposing some of the most stark contrasts ever seen between the American Left and Right. Older video clips of Americans from every background singing, marching, and praying are contrasted with those of more recent LGBTQ+ parades, pro-abortion rallies, and news coverage of violent pro-Hamas protests.
Unlike many political videos delivered amid the presidential election season that we observe every four years, making bland statements about the economy and the border, Rubio appears to be throwing a spotlight from his office on the stark divide between the two opposing political movements and ideological foundations beckoning to an exhausted and weary country battered by calls to abandon “ancient ideas.”
These classic institutions “are the ones who teach us who we are and what we’re here for,” Rubio intoned, “but ties like these pose a threat to the Left, which insists that relationships exist only to affirm fleeting feelings and identities.”
That charge isn’t without warrant, as public school officials and liberal activists around the country have spent the past several years and millions of dollars attempting to separate children from their parents, encouraging children to confide in those outside their “unsupportive” families.
Rubio asserted that “the Left claims the only idea worth believing is its changing definition of ‘equity.’” That contrasts sharply with an image of Vice President Kamala Harris, who in a January 2023 speech created her own definitions for the words “equality” and “equity,” drawing wide criticism.
Equality is when the teacher gives every student the same test
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 20, 2023
Equity is when the teacher gives every student the same mark
Here’s our VP explaining that: pic.twitter.com/GC0xe7pK08
“Faith in woke ideology cannot replace faith in the Almighty God,” Rubio said. “Government programs and bureaucrats cannot stand in for family, and political echo chambers on social media are no match for real community.”
Rubio’s assertion is not only correct, it’s a timely message Americans have shown they are drawn to. Favorability toward the Biden administration has plummeted sharply as a country that was told it was going to experience “unity” and “a return to normal” received instead crisis and devastation in the economy, at the border, and on the world stage.
If other conservatives continue pushing messages like those in Rubio’s video, this could be a turning point for American society. A return to celebrating faith, family, and community as essential to the success of the United States would provide a far better foundation for growth as the Left’s fearmongering and guilt trips over these institutions no longer appear to hold voters in their sway.
The post EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Rubio’s Killer Video Blow to the Left’s Depressive Values appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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