PBS Copies Kamala: ‘Second Term for Donald Trump Means More Bans, More Suffering’

After the surprise ruling by the Arizona Supreme Court to approve a Civil War-era law banning abortions except to save the life of the mother, the Friday edition of Amanpour & Co. (airing on PBS after first running on CNN International) hosted a predictably pro-choice liberal law professor as a guest. But the real liberal outrage spewed from guest host Bianna Golodryga, who let her own personal thoughts overwhelm any attempt at a balanced take, over the taxpayer-funded airwaves: "Arizona has become Ground Zero for America's battle on reproductive rights," she said. "The U.S. Vice President, Kamala Harris, is in the state today, arriving hot on the heels of a decision by the Supreme Court there to hold up a Civil War era law banning nearly all abortions. A law Republican legislators then fought to protect. She is also going to send a clear message that a second term for Donald Trump means more bans, more suffering."     After blaming Trump for the ruling “by installing several conservative justices on the federal Supreme Court bench during his term” Golodryga introduced her guest, law professor Mary Ziegler, and emotionally commiserated with her: As an expert on the history of the law, I would imagine you yourself were equally shocked to hear the ruling announced this week in Arizona. I mean, just the draconian measures that it takes, bringing us back to literally a judge who wrote it, having been appointed by President Abraham Lincoln at the time. After citing Trump’s own criticism of the Arizona decision, she noted: “it really puts Republicans in a bind in a sense all of these years with their attempts to overturn Roe finally happening. It's as if the dog finally caught the car and the consequences are quite significant.” But the host dismissed America’s federalist system of state law when she said that Trump’s rational view that abortion restrictions “should be done piecemeal up to the states is creating a lot of havoc. And obviously, at the end of the day it's women and their families and their doctors who are paying the ultimate price.” She wasn’t finished, continuing her pro-choice monologue in the guise of an interview: We know, obviously, that there are real-life consequences and impacts from these laws, primarily women and families who don't have the resources to travel to another state. The fact that they even have to speaks volumes. But let's just give one example. There's Katie Cox. She sued in Texas for the right to obtain an abortion after she learned that her fetus had a rare genetic disorder. She eventually had to leave the state for care. Listen to what she told NBC News about the impact of that. Cox was also President Biden’s guest at this year’s State of the Union address, a political aspect Golodryga skipped.  The host prodded Ziegler to respond: Can you talk about the emotional trauma and toll that this is having on women, on families? And it's very simple to just say this is people who are looking for an abortion, full stop. I mean, a lot of these women have suffered unimaginably. They may want to continue to have children in the future and now can't because of the risks that they take by leaving, by seeking care elsewhere, just give us some of that. Ziegler is author of the 2022 book Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment, described by publisher Yale University Press as “A new understanding of the slow drift to extremes in American politics that shows how the antiabortion movement remade the Republican Party.” But on this segment at least, Ziegler's understated advocacy came off less liberal than the “journalist” interviewing her. A transcript is available, click "Expand." Amanpour & Co. 4/13/24 1:32:32 a.m. (ET) Bianna Golodryga: Welcome to the program, everyone. I'm Bianna Golodryga in New York, sitting in for Christiane Amanpour. Arizona has become ground zero for America's battle on reproductive rights. The U.S. vice president, Kamala Harris, is in the state today, arriving hot on the heels of a decision by the Supreme Court there to hold up a civil war era law banning nearly all abortions. A law Republican legislators then fought to protect. She is also going to send a clear message that a second term for Donald Trump means more bans, more suffering. A line we can probably expect to hear more of as an election season heats up. For his own part, the former president said that the Arizona ruling goes too far. But that's a stark contrast to Trump's previous campaign for the presidency, where he repeatedly promised to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision, which made abortion legal across the country. Something he made good on by installing several conservative justices on the federal Supreme Court bench during his term. So, what happens now, and how will this development impact women in Arizona and across America? Joining me now on this is law professor and author Mary Ziegler. She's an expert on the history and politics of abortion. Mary, you're the perfect person to have on for this discussion. As an expert on the history of the law, I would imagine you yourself were equally shocked to hear the ruling announced this week in Arizona. I mean, just the draconian measures that it takes, bringing us back to literally a judge who wrote it, having been appointed by President Abraham Lincoln at the time. Just first, your professional reaction to that news. MARY ZIEGLER, PROFESSOR, U.C. DAVIS SCHOOL OF LAW AND AUTHOR, "ABORTION AND THE LAW IN AMERICA": I think it both was and wasn't surprising. I mean, I think once Roe v. Wade was overturned, we knew that a lot of these zombie laws were on the books, and it was just a matter of time before a state Supreme Court let one of them go into effect. So, I think it's both hard to believe that Arizona, which is obviously a divided kind of purple swing state, is being governed by a law from before the Civil War, that, you know, by its terms, for example, says you cannot perform an abortion if a woman is going to suffer permanent impairment of a major bodily function or infertility, by its terms you're not allowed to intervene in those cases. That is shocking to me as a person, but as someone who studies this it seemed kind of inevitable after it was overturned. GOLODRYGA: Yes, the only exceptions are the life of the mother, rape and incest are not included here and the decision the thought behind this decision by this very conservative Supreme Court is that with Roe no longer the law of the land that the statute is now enforceable, the statute, from the 1800s. What do you make -- I mean, is that too cute by half, given the concern -- despite the conservative nature of this court, for a State Supreme Court to come to that conclusion? ZIEGLER: Well, and the argument in the case legally was actually pretty narrow. Planned Parenthood was arguing essentially that the state legislature, which had passed a 15-week ban, wanted 15 weeks to be the policy and that they had sort of intended to override this 1864 law, and the State Supreme Court didn't buy that argument. There could be other arguments you could make. For example, we've seen litigators across the United States arguing that an abortion ban like this would violate a state guarantee of equality or privacy or a right to life, and we may see additional challenges to the law in the Arizona Supreme Court. But I think that the problem for us, as far as the Arizona Supreme Court is concerned, is that these are justices who are subject to re-election. These are unlike the U.S. Supreme Court justices who have lifetime appointments. And if one of these justices were to lose their attention election, they would be replaced by from a list of nominees by the governor who in the case of Arizona is a Democrat. So, whatever the legal rationale for this ruling, the justices who joined the majority, I think, put themselves in the political crosshairs come November. GOLODRYGA: Yes, and the court put this ruling on hold and then sent it down to the lower court for additional arguments on the law's constitutionality. So, this case has not ended as of yet. That having been said, I mean, it came 24 hours after the former president finally issued his policy and took a stance on his views on abortion by saying that it's up to the states and that that should be the end of the discussion. Here's what he said. DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (R) AND CURRENT U.S. PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE (R): Again, fighting Roe v. Wade was right from the beginning all about bringing the issue back to the states pursuant to the 10th Amendment and states' rights. It wasn't about anything else. That's what it was. We brought it back to the states and now lots of things are happening and lots of good things are happening. GOLODRYGA: So, then, after this decision in Arizona, he went out and said that it was too far. Kari Lake who had supported this law beforehand then once it actually was handed down said that she didn't support it. I mean, this really puts Republicans in a bind in a sense all of these years with their attempts to overturn Roe finally happening. It's as if the dog finally caught the car and the consequences are quite significant. And the fact that, in his view, it should be done piecemeal up to the states is creating a lot of havoc. And obviously, at the end of the day it's women and their families and their doctors who are paying the ultimate price. ZIEGLER: Yes, I mean, I think one of the things Former President Trump has done, too, is he's had former Trump campaign officials making promises, essentially, that Trump is going to revive another zombie law called the Comstock Act from 1873, just a little after this Arizona law, and use it as a nationwide ban on abortion. When you ask the Trump campaign about whether they're going to do that, the Trump campaign doesn't answer the question, and says that president -- Former President Trump is a supporter of states' rights. So, we're kind of in a scenario where patients and doctors don't know how these laws are going to be interpreted. And we don't know what Former President Trump would do if he's given a second term, because his former officials are saying he actually has this backdoor ban that doesn't require Congress. His campaign isn't weighing in one way or another. So, we're kind of all in the dark about what a second Trump administration would mean, whether it would mean more of the status quo, which has been kind of this state-by-state chaos, or if it would mean some kind of effort to have a nationwide zombie law like Arizona's imposed on states with protections for abortion rights and states that don't have protection for abortion rights. Because, you know, the Trump campaign just isn't explaining which of those positions is right, right, won't answer these questions directly. GOLODRYGA: There are some Republicans like Lindsey Graham that say that the president -- the former president is just wrong on this, there should be a federal law with a 15-week ban. From your perspective, just the likelihood that you think something like that could actually happen. ZIEGLER: Well, I think the likelihood of Congress passing anything like a 15-week ban is pretty much zero, which is why in part I don't think it made sense politically from Trump's standpoint to endorse a ban that's never going to pass.I think that's why you've seen the sort of smarter conservatives like the groups in the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 saying the only way we're going to get a nationwide ban is through a law that's already on the books that we're reinterpreting or reinventing as a ban. The odds of congressional action I think are very low. GOLODRYGA: And what about Alabama? Because we see the tentacles of this extending far beyond just abortion, it's even into IVF and areas where now an embryo is viewed as a live person. And we saw the chaos that ensued following that. Republicans and Democrats have really benefited over the years from IVF. There was an attempt perhaps to codify that in Congress. That didn't happen. I mean, that's just one example. Do you expect more in other states, if not IVF, than other unintended consequences from the overturning of Roe? ZIEGLER: Yes, absolutely. So, the U.S. anti-abortion movement was not focused on taking down Roe. It was focused in a bigger picture way on the recognition of the idea that embryos and fetuses are persons with constitutional rights. And that was kind of the thrust of the Alabama ruling. It was a little narrower, it was that embryos had rights just under the context of wrongful death. But the court's reasoning was much broader and suggested that embryos and fetuses just had rights across the board full stop. If that's right, that raises lots of other questions, not just about IVF. So, for example, if many conservatives believe that common contraceptives like the birth control pill or the morning after pill are abortifacients, that would violate fetal rights. If fetuses and embryos have rights, we've seen some in the anti-abortion movement asking why they can't punish women and other abortion seekers, because of course, women and other abortion seekers are punished for other homicide offenses. There are a lot of other possibilities here because if an embryo or a fetus is a person, they're a person for all purposes, like all contexts, all the time, not just the context of abortion. So, I think we'll have to stay tuned, but this is sort of a Pandora's box in many ways. GOLODRYGA: A Pandora box has created a patchwork of different scenarios and laws in various states. If we can put up a graphic of the United States just in terms of what we've seen following the overturning of Roe, you have 21 states that ban abortion or restrict the procedure earlier in pregnancies now than the standard that had been set and had the law of land by Roe, 14 states have full bans in almost all circumstances, two have bans after six weeks. We know on Monday, Florida's Supreme Court allowed a six-week ban to go soon into effect, but voters will get to weigh in on that issue in the fall, and there is hope that the same will be the case in Arizona. With abortion on the ballot now, do you see this as a potential game changer and solution? ZIEGLER: Potentially, right? So, ballot initiatives have been significant so far, all of them that have on ballot since Dobbs have passed. We've seen several in places like Michigan and Ohio create pretty broad reproductive rights that trumped some laws on the books. Michigan too had an older law that was undone potentially by this ballot initiative. The reason it isn't a perfect fix necessarily is, one, not every state has a mechanism for voters to initiate this kind of measure. And two, conservatives are already aware of this and are trying to find backdoor ways to get a federal ban that would override any state protections, which is where this Comstock Act idea comes in. Essentially, Jonathan Mitchell, who represented Former President Trump in his disqualification case before the Supreme Court, said to "The New York Times," you know, we don't need a ban because we have the Comstock Act. The Comstock Act can be interpreted as a ban, that overrides whatever protection voters put in place in their own states. So, I think the ballot initiatives are incredibly important, definitely a possible game changer, but not without potential pitfalls. GOLODRYGA: We know, obviously, that there are real-life consequences and impacts from these laws, primarily women and families who don't have the resources to travel to another state. The fact that they even have to speaks volumes. But let's just give one example. There's Kate Cox. She sued in Texas for the right to obtain an abortion after she learned that her fetus had a rare genetic disorder. She eventually had to leave the state for care. Listen to what she told NBC News about the impact of that. KATE COX, SUED TEXAS FOR THE RIGHT TO AN ABORTION: There's still -- we're going through the loss of a child. There is no outcome here that I take home my healthy baby girl, you know. So, it's hard, you know. GOLODRYGA: Can you talk about the emotional trauma and toll that this is having on women, on families? And it's very simple to just say this is people who are looking for an abortion full stop. I mean, a lot of these women have suffered unimaginably. They may want to continue to have children in the future and now can't because of the risks that they take by leaving, by seeking care elsewhere. Just give us some of that. ZIEGLER: Yes. I mean, I think one of things we've seen is that when you have an abortion ban in place, the meaning of abortion isn't clear. States are not using medical definitions. And in part, what that means is that people with wanted pregnancies who are experiencing pregnancy complications or stillbirth or miscarriage are finding themselves unable to get treatment too because physicians don't want to lose their medical licenses, they don't want to go to prison for anywhere between, you know, five years up to life in prison in states like Texas where Kate Cox was located. And the upshot of that is people are being turned away and experiencing complications that, you know, affect their health, their future fertility in their lives. The other upshot is that physicians don't want to deal with these scenarios, right? They don t want to be faced with patients like Kate Cox, where they're being forced to choose between their liberty or their medical license on the one hand and denying needed care on other. So, we began to see a flight of physicians, especially obstetricians and gynecologists from states with these kinds of prohibitions, particularly in rural areas that were already underserved. And that too has these knock-on effects for people seeking obstetric and gynecological care because they're having a harder time finding a position to treat them at all, even when they're not experiencing these pregnancy complications. So, one of the things we've seen is that these bans affect people who are seeking abortions, to be sure, but also people who aren't, right? People who may be experiencing anything else related to pregnancy. GOLODRYGA: Mary Ziegler, we appreciate the time and your expertise. Thank you. ZIEGLER: Thanks for having me.  

PBS Objectivity? AZ Abortion Ban Cuts off ‘Critical Release Valve,’ No More ‘Fleeing’

The PBS NewsHour led its Tuesday evening newscast with the week’s big issue: abortion, an issue of such apparent import (and perceived advantage to the Democratic Party in November) that both anchors took a biased crack at it before the segment itself. Co-anchor Geoff Bennett: Arizona will soon be the latest state with a near-total abortion ban after the state's Supreme Court revived a 160-year-old law. The law provides no exceptions for rape or incest. And, in its 4-2 opinion, the conservative majority wrote -- quote -- "Physicians are now on notice that all abortions, except those necessary to save a woman's life, are illegal." Co-anchor Amna Nawaz: Doctors who perform abortions could face criminal prosecution and prison time, though the Democratic attorney general says she will not prosecute. It's the latest test of the limits on abortion since the Supreme Court ended federal abortion protections from the decades-old Roe v. Wade decision…. After a soundbite from Arizona’s Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs saying the “abortion ban is extreme and hurts women,” Bennett introduced journalist Carter Sherman, who writes from the United States for the left-wing UK paper The Guardian about (ahem) “reproductive health.” The outlet in question -- and that euphemism for abortion -- were two hints that what’s about to unfold won't hew to PBS’s congressional mandate for "strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.” Bennett: What's the expected impact on women's health care in Arizona and in the surrounding region? Sherman: Arizona has been a critical release valve for places like Texas, which have a total abortion ban on the books right now. So, if we ban abortion totally, or almost totally, in Arizona, there's going to be plenty of people throughout the Southwest who previously might have fled to Arizona for abortions who will now have to travel even farther out. Abortion rights supporters also say that this could have massive impacts on things like maternal mortality. So there's going to be really wide-ranging effects, really across the region in a variety of health areas. They pivoted to the political repercussions. The takeaway: Good for Democrats. Carter Sherman: I think that this decision today is going to make Arizona one of the biggest battlefields, particularly in abortion, but also in the presidential race, also in the Senate race, in the 2024 elections. What we're looking at here is a potentially very galvanized population outraged by the overturning of Roe, outraged by a near-total abortion ban, and those people might decide to go to the polls en masse and vote not just for abortion rights, but also for Democrats…. Sherman, who previously wrote for the former left-wing outlet Vice, appeared on the NewsHour last month to disdain pro-life “crisis pregnancy centers” where women sometimes walked out of with their fetuses intact. This pro-abortion segment was brought to you in part by American Cruise Lines. A transcript is available, click “Expand.” PBS NewsHour April 9, 2024 7:03:19 p.m. (ET) Geoff Bennett: Arizona will soon be the latest state with a near-total abortion ban after the state's Supreme Court revived a 160-year-old law. The law provides no exceptions for rape or incest. And, in its 4-2 opinion, the conservative majority wrote — quote — "Physicians are now on notice that all abortions, except those necessary to save a woman's life, are illegal." Amna Nawaz: Doctors who perform abortions could face criminal prosecution and prison time, though the Democratic attorney general says she will not prosecute. It's the latest test of the limits on abortion since the Supreme Court ended federal abortion protections from the decades-old Roe v. Wade decision. And in this election year, there is already an effort under way to get a pro-abortion rights amendment on Arizona's ballot in November. Arizona's Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs responded to today's court decision. Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-AZ): Arizona's 2022 abortion ban is extreme and hurts women. And the near-total Civil War era ban that continues to hang over our heads only serves to create more chaos for women and doctors in our state. As governor, I promise I will do everything in my power to protect our reproductive freedoms. Geoff Bennett: Carter Sherman covers reproductive health for The Guardian and joins me now. Thanks so much for being with us. Carter Sherman, The Guardian: Thank you for having me. Geoff Bennett: So, the Arizona State Supreme Court lifted a stay on this 1864 law that was passed before Arizona was a state. Help us understand how they arrived at this decision. Carter Sherman: So this ban has been the source of court battles and chaos since the overturning of Roe almost two years ago. What happened is, after a very long period of litigation, the Supreme Court of Arizona decided today that, since there is no more Roe v. Wade, there is no reason why this 1864 ban should not go into effect. Now, what's unclear at this point is when exactly that ban will fully take effect and be enforceable, in the words of the court. Abortion providers and their supporters are at this time really trying to figure out what this decision means for all the people on the ground in Arizona. Geoff Bennett: How is it that the Civil War era law supersedes the previous law that the legislature passed and the previous governor signed in 2022 that made abortion accessible up to 15 weeks? Carter Sherman: When the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide in Roe v. Wade in 1973, that meant that there were several laws across the country that dated back decades that were no longer going to be in effect. And many of these laws were never really, truly dealt with. They just went dormant. And so, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022, suddenly, all of these states, including Arizona, had to deal with these so-called zombie laws that they had not ever really fully reckoned with. Arizona had also in 2022 passed a separate 15-week abortion ban. But what happened was that 15-week abortion ban and this near-total abortion ban from 1864 just sort of coexisted, and they weren't really harmonized in any kind of way. In this case, in particular, Planned Parenthood has argued that these laws needed to be harmonized, and that's why that the 15-week ban should be allowed to stand over the 1864 ban. That's not the argument that the Arizona Supreme Court accepted today. Geoff Bennett: Well, in the meantime, Arizona's attorney general, Kris Mayes, says she will not prosecute any doctor who performs abortion procedures. Mayes says that this is a collective effort with the state's governor. How is that being received by county prosecutors, who could potentially use their own discretion? Carter Sherman: I think that there are many, many questions about what it really means for an official like Mayes to say that she will try to hold off on any kind of prosecutions of abortion providers. The providers that I have talked to and I have heard from don't necessarily feel like they are totally in the clear at this point, and they are confused about what it means moving forward if they were to provide abortions. Geoff Bennett: What's the expected impact on women's health care in Arizona and in the surrounding region? Carter Sherman: Arizona has been a critical release valve for places like Texas, which have a total abortion ban on the books right now. So, if we ban abortion totally, or almost totally, in Arizona, there's going to be plenty of people throughout the Southwest who previously might have fled to Arizona for abortions who will now have to travel even farther out. Abortion rights supporters also say that this could have massive impacts on things like maternal mortality. So there's going to be really wide-ranging effects really across the region in a variety of health areas. Geoff Bennett: And there's also the political impact. Arizona, as you well know, is among a handful of key battleground states. An effort is already under way right now to put a measure on the 2024 ballot that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. How might this affect not just the presidential election, but that key Senate race, that hotly contested Senate race in Arizona? Carter Sherman: I think that this decision today is going to make Arizona one of the biggest battlefields, particularly in abortion, but also in the presidential race, also in the Senate race, in the 2024 elections. What we're looking at here is a potentially very galvanized population outraged by the overturning of Roe, outraged by a near-total abortion ban, and those people might decide to go to the polls en masse and vote not just for abortion rights, but also for Democrats. There's actually been, since the decision came out today, many Republicans in the state saying: This was a bad idea. I don't support this decision. And some of them had said that they will work to try to figure out a way back to this 15-week abortion limit and not a near-total abortion ban. I have covered this issue for many years. I have covered it long before Roe was overturned. And I have never really seen this sort of immediate 180 from Republicans in this way on this issue. Geoff Bennett: That is Carter Sherman with The Guardian. Thanks so much for sharing your reporting and your insights with us. Carter Sherman: Thank you for having me.

PBS Panel Sees Peril for GOP on Abortion, Touts 'Powerful' Biden Ad on 'Trump Did This'

Abortion is back in the news with a vengeance, after the Arizona Supreme Court reinstated a Civil War era ban on abortion and candidate Donald Trump reacted with a moderate, federalist stance on abortion, disappointing some in the pro-life movement and making him an unfair figure of mockery in the mainstream press. Friday’s episode of public television’s weekly roundtable panel Washington Week with The Atlantic was dominated by abortion politics as a lifesaver for the Democrats (if not for the victims of abortion). Guest moderator Franklin Foer of The Atlantic set the table: FRANKLIN FOER: Arizona’s Supreme Court reinstates a 160-year-old abortion ban, and as a spate of states rush to restrict reproductive rights, Republicans, including Donald Trump, scramble to insulate themselves from a potential political backlash….the Arizona Supreme Court has ruled in favor of reviving a Civil War-era law that prohibits nearly all abortions. Republicans are running to distance themselves from the surprise decision while Democrats seize the opportunity to make gains in the battleground state. The ruling came just a day after former President Trump said he opposes a national abortion ban following months of mixed signals. How will Republican candidates navigate the post-Roe landscape now confronting them? As usual, the journalists were unanimously liberal. National Public Radio political editor Domenico Montanaro touted Republicans had lost "special election after special election" on abortion and lamented “the chaos that has ensued with women not having access to reproductive rights in -- millions of women across the South in particular, this chaotic sort of patchwork of abortion laws across the country, that’s made it really, really difficult.”   PBS NewsHour political reporter Lisa Desjardins said Trump showed he wasn't worried about his base, "he's not worried about all of those hard-right evangelicals." Susan Glasser of The New Yorker said Trump can't deny he was responsible for all this, "he has taken credit so many times for dismantling Roe." GLASSER: What I found interesting is immediately have the Biden campaign in the immediate aftermath of Trump's video, they put out a new advertisement I found particularly powerful of a Texas couple that wanted to have a baby. The woman experienced a miscarriage and she was denied necessary medical care in Texas, sent home, developed an infection, got sepsis, nearly died and she probably can't have a kid now. It is intimate and powerful and there's nothing about politics until the end, and the tagline is just "Trump did this." I think those words will haunt him. She took a maximalist ideological stance, expressed via obscurantist pro-choice labeling, telling tax-paying viewers that abortion was a “human right,” and thus all talk of states’ rights was irrelevant. (At least there was no dithering about whether men could get pregnant.) Glasser: If this is a human right for women, to have access to health care, to have access to their reproductive rights, your rights shouldn’t depend on what state you live in. If it’s a right, it’s a right, and it shouldn't matter that in Texas you have no access to something that you have in California. She played Democratic political strategist and moral arbiter and assumed the audience was on her side, even if she admitted that it was rather “ghoulish” to cheer for Democrats while supposedly extremist abortion policies were becoming law in various states. Glasser: ….I saw the Biden campaign estimates that already one in three women in America has lost access to reproductive health care as a result of the Supreme Court`s decision. And so there’s this almost ghoulish phenomenon, right? Like we’re like, well, it's a great issue for the Democrats or, you know, that it’s really good news. But, of course, in a real sense, these laws are actually going into effect….So, it’s a weird situation where we’re talking about the political advantage that might come to abortion rights supporters at a time when millions of women are actually losing their rights. This pro-abortion segment was brought to you in part by Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards.

PBS Rejoicing: Biden 'Came Out Swinging' Against GOP's 'False Advertising' on Age

The tax-funded PBS weekly political roundtable Washington Week with The Atlantic continued to provide support for the Democratic candidate during the runup to the November election, tempting fate and more after-the-fact embarrassment by again defending Joe Biden’s mental acuity and vigor, even attacking Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report again. Host and Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was joined by his Atlantic colleagues Adam Harris and Mark Leibovich, along with CNN senior political analyst Nia Malika Henderson and Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason. Jeffrey Goldberg: Let's go to the finances, and Jeff, you have been traveling all week with Joe Biden. He’s -- you just got here, actually, from endless flying around the country with Joe Biden. He’s doing very well in the fundraising. And it’s a superficial contrast, but $26 million and Radio City Music Hall with Presidents Obama and Clinton versus selling sneakers and the Bible. Is Trump in trouble on the fundraising compared to Joe Biden? No more liberal media qualms about bigtime fundraising or calls for campaign finance reform (remember campaign finance reform?) Jeff Mason was perhaps most enthusiastic for Biden, rejecting host Goldberg's relatively hesitant take on Biden's new vigor. Jeff Mason: Well, [Trump]’s certainly struggling compared to Joe Biden when it comes to fundraising, and it is a measure of your campaign`s health. And I think that sign of fundraising strength was something that Obama wanted to help Biden with and Clinton wanted to help Biden with. But, in general, the Biden campaign wanted to say, we have enthusiasm and look, here it is in the numbers. And President Biden is saying a lot in some of his fundraisers now that he’s seeing a turn in polling. He walks out and says, I feel the enthusiasm, and this is Exhibit A. The enthusiasm is manifesting and having a pretty strong set of numbers. Goldberg: It’s a little bit too early to talk about a turn in polling, no? Mason: Well, I mean, it`s post-State of the Union, right? So, the State of the Union -- I think the campaign will probably go back and look at his fiery State of the Union Address as being a turning point. And we’ll see how long that lasts. Goldberg: Fiery as a relative concept. Mason: Yes, but robust, right? I mean, he came out swinging, and it came after a period of time when he had been taking a lot of hits for his age. The special counsel report came out, and he, I think, tried to put some of that to bed with that speech. And he`s seeing, at least the way they describe it, an enthusiasm-sort-of-upturn as a result. Nia-Malika Henderson saw “a bit of momentum in some of these swing states, particularly Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.” Or, perhaps not? The New York Times political analyst Nate Cohn summarized recent polling data under the subhead “No shift after State of the Union.” After Mark Leibovich and his colleague Goldberg mocked Dean Phillips, Biden’s would-be Democratic primary rival, and suggested he wasn’t worthy of news coverage, Goldberg switched to defending Biden. Goldberg: …And then he comes out at the State of the Union and is peppy. Mason: And in addition to that State of the Union, there was also the transcript of the interview with the special counsel, which turned out not to be as damning in terms of his memory as the report suggested that it was. And so I think there`s that and there’s the perhaps false advertising that you’re referring to by some Republicans that is just not entirely bearing out. That doesn`t mean age isn`t still going to be a weakness for President Biden…. Goldberg: So, you’ve been following him all week on the trail. Give us your firsthand impressions of his energy level, cogency, enthusiasm. Mason went on an extended gush (click “Expand.”) Mason: Enthusiasm, very high, energy, very high, cogency, pretty good. I mean, he’s -- the truth is Joe Biden has good days and bad days. We all do, right? But his -- at his fundraisers, he’s trying out some new lines. One of the recent ones that I was at, one of his aides came up to me and a couple other traveling reporters right before he started speaking and said, pay attention. He’s got a new riff tonight. And his new riff, ladies and gentlemen at the table, was to talk about President Trump saying, are you better off than you were four years ago? And Biden says, “I’m glad you asked that, man,” and then starts going into a comparison of how things are now compared to March of 2020, when COVID was in full swing and hospitals were struggling and the economy was cratering. So, that was the new riff, but it is sort of a sign that they’re pumping up his campaign speeches. And he seems energetic and he seems enthused. This segment was brought to you in part by CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER.

PBS Sees Trump Ending CRT, Trans Ideology in School as McCarthyite Anti-LGBTQ ‘Purge’

The Wednesday edition of the PBS NewsHour featured perhaps the outlet's most radical member, White House correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez, launching a paranoid broadside against the Trump campaign and the Heritage Foundation’s collection of presidential policy proposals known as “Project 2025.” Guest anchor William Brangham set up Barron-Lopez’s radical take, conflating privileges that fly in the face of biology and common sense (boys on girls’ sports teams, genital surgery for minors) under the misleading banner of “civil rights”: BRANGHAM: On the campaign trail, Trump has been talking about what he plans to do if elected in November, and that includes rolling back the rights of millions of LGBTQ people. It's part of a wider playbook to undo many modern civil rights advances for minority groups. White House correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez has been following this, and she joins us now. So, on LGBTQ rights, what has Trump said he wants to do? BARRON-LOPEZ: Since launching his campaign, former President Donald Trump has targeted LGBTQ people, transgender people. He's attacked gender-affirming care for minors, as well as their ability to play in sports. And he says that he plans quick action if elected.     Barron-Lopez explained that Trump’s “allies have drafted a sweeping document titled Project 2025...by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation" and stoked fear that the plan acknowledged biological science: Specifically on restricting LGBTQ rights, what that details is reinstating a transgender military ban, limiting LGBTQ workplace discrimination protections. Currently, under the law, sexual orientation, and gender identity are protected. It would rescind health-care protections for transgender people and urge Congress to define gender as male and female, fixed at birth….this plan also is trying to stop any and all acknowledgement of an acceptance of gender identity and LGBTQ people, period…. Also on Trump’s “chopping block”: eliminating DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) from government mandates and banning federal funding for teaching Critical Race Theory. It sounds like a mainstream backlash to recent radical overstepping by the identity-obsessed left, but one which tax-funded PBS greeted with alarm.  Barron-Lopez described the authors as “roughly 100 right-wing organizations led by the Heritage Foundation,” including some former Trump administration officials" BARRON-LOPEZ: Professor Thomas Zimmer at Georgetown, who studies authoritarian regimes…explained that Trump wasn't necessarily able to institute this in 2017, when he first took office, because he didn't have the amount of loyalists that he plans on having across the board. And with these new loyalists, Zimmer said, he can advance a white Christian evangelical ideal of American society. (...) THOMAS ZIMMER (Georgetown University): It is opposed to egalitarian democracy because it fundamentally does not agree that all people are equal or deserve to be treated as equal citizens. Only those who belong to the "true people," to real America, deserve that. And so everyone else needs to either be purged from the nation or, at the very least, accept their sort of lesser place in society. Barron-Lopez didn’t blink at that hysterical take but simply forwarded that apocalyptic spin: Professor Zimmer added that that type of purging he's talking about takes roots in the McCarthyism of the early 1950s, where they essentially tried to sweep away anyone across American society that would deviate from perceived norms. Truly bizarre. This segment of left-wing paranoia was brought to you in part by Raymond James. A transcript is available, click “Expand.” PBS NewsHour 3/27/24 7:17:09 p.m. (ET) William Brangham: On the campaign trail, Trump has been talking about what he plans to do if elected in November, and that includes rolling back the rights of millions of LGBTQ people. It's part of a wider playbook to undo many modern civil rights advances for minority groups. White House correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez has been following this, and she joins us now. Hi. Laura Barron-Lopez: Hi. William Brangham: So, on LGBTQ rights, what has Trump said he wants to do? Laura Barron-Lopez: Since launching his campaign, former President Donald Trump has targeted LGBTQ people, transgender people. He's attacked gender-affirming care for minors, as well as their ability to play in sports. And he says that he plans quick action if elected. Donald Trump, Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. Presidential Candidate: On day one, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing Critical Race Theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children Laura Barron-Lopez: That promise you just heard, William, has become a staple of former President Donald Trump 's campaign rallies. William Brangham: How much of that, though, is just campaign rally rhetoric? I mean, we know that kind of language excites a certain slice of his base. How much of that is just him talking versus what he actually plans to do? Laura Barron-Lopez: Well, it's not just campaign rhetoric. And his allies have drafted a sweeping document titled Project 2025. It's led by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, and it details a blueprint for a second term for Trump. Specifically on restricting LGBTQ rights, what that details is reinstating a transgender military ban, limiting LGBTQ workplace discrimination protections. Currently, under the law, sexual orientation, and gender identity are protected. It would rescind health care protections for transgender people and urge Congress to define gender as male and female, fixed at birth. Trump has repeatedly said, also, William, that he would ban gender-affirming care for minors. And this playbook makes pretty clear that his plan — this plan also is trying to stop any and all acknowledgement of an acceptance of gender identity and LGBTQ people, period. And so, throughout this blueprint, there's some pretty striking language where government — saying that government officials should only recognize marriages between a man and a woman and that a man and a woman are the ideal natural family structure. Also, in addition to that, William, Trump has outlined a number of policies that essentially help minority groups and that they would be on the chopping block. So, when it comes to Project 2025 cuts to diversity, what the plan would do is delete diversity, equity and inclusion from every piece of legislation, remove diversity, equity, inclusion offices from federal agencies, curtail the teaching of race and racism, and urge Congress to ban federal funds for Critical Race Theory training. Essentially, William, Trump has vowed on the campaign trail to terminate all DEI programs. William Brangham: Are all of those things that you listed, are those within the purview of the president? Can he legally just go ahead and do those things? Laura Barron-Lopez: So, technically, this relies on Trump, if he is reelected, enacting a legal concept known as the unitary executive theory, and that's outlined in Project 2025. And it essentially suggests that Trump could basically just work around or ignore congressional oversight. And we spoke to Kim Wehle — she's the professor — a law professor at the University of Baltimore — about Trump's ability to carry out Project 2025. Kimberly Wehle, Former U.S. Associate Independent Counsel: With Donald Trump , the question isn't so much what the law authorizes. It's that if he has an army of employees that are willing to be loyal to whatever he wants and they implement what he directs, then the question is, is there going to be pushback through Congress, through the courts, through the voters? If there's no accountability and pushback, then the answer to your question is, yes, then these things can happen, because there's nothing to stop him. Laura Barron-Lopez: As you heard Professor Wehle say there, this plan really relies on loyalists being installed across the board in government for him to be able to carry this out. William Brangham: I mean, as you and others have reported, I mean, this — these LGBTQ changes, proposed changes, are pretty sweeping. But Project 2025 has a lot of other things. Who is it — you mentioned it's Heritage, but who else is behind this project? Laura Barron-Lopez: So this draft blueprint playbook was created by roughly 100 right-wing organizations led by the Heritage Foundation. And a number of these authors are actually people that worked in Trump's administration when he was president, including Peter Navarro, a former White House official, Roger Severino of the Health and Human Services department, and Ken Cuccinelli at the Homeland Security Department. They have all contributed to drafting this. They're contenders for a future Cabinet if Trump were to win reelection. This is a 180-day manual of sorts, William, that outlines the ability for former President Trump to consolidate power under the presidency. And I spoke to Professor Thomas Zimmer at Georgetown, who studies authoritarian regimes, and he explained that Trump wasn't necessarily able to institute this in 2017, when he first took office, because he didn't have the amount of loyalists that he plans on having across the board. And with these new loyalists, Zimmer said, he can advance a white Christian evangelical ideal of American society. Thomas Zimmer, Georgetown University: This is not going to beat Trump presidency part two, just more of the same. This is qualitatively something very, very different. It is opposed to egalitarian democracy because it fundamentally does not agree that all people are equal or deserve to be treated as equal citizens. Only those who belong to the — quote, unquote — "true people," to real America, deserve that. And so everyone else needs to either be purged from the nation or, at the very least, accept their sort of lesser place in society. Laura Barron-Lopez: Professor Zimmer added that that type of purging he's talking about takes roots in the McCarthyism of the early 1950s, where they essentially tried to sweep away anyone across American society that would deviate from perceived norms.

NY Times Reporter Carl Hulse Lards His 'News' Report with 'Ultraright' Labels

There was some impressively dense anti-Republican labeling in the lead of veteran congressional reporter Carl Hulse’s Sunday New York Times story. The online headline certainly delivered the flavor – not just “right,” but “far right,” not just “conservative,” but “ultraconservative”! "Revenge” isn’t exactly neutral either. The Far Right Lost Badly and Wants Its Revenge Bipartisan spending legislation approved by Congress represented a major defeat for ultraconservatives, who immediately turned on Speaker Mike Johnson.” The labeling and tone got no less biased as it went. The story fits Hulse’s pattern of painting Republicans as extremists -- a tactic he eagerly employed long before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015. In other words, one can’t blame it on Trump. As 2023 opened with Republicans newly in control of the House, the far-right members of the party considered themselves empowered when it came to federal spending, with increased muscle to achieve the budget cuts of their dreams. Today’s GOP rarely proposes actual “budget cuts,” making that a red herring. But it turned out that many of their Republican colleagues did not share their vision of stark fiscal restraint. Or at least not fervently enough to go up against a Democratic Senate and White House to try to bring it into fruition. Instead, Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday pushed through a $1.2 trillion bipartisan package to fund the government for the rest of the year, with none of the deep cuts or policy changes that ultraconservatives had demanded. Those on the right fringe have been left boiling mad and threatening to make him the second Republican speaker to be deposed this term. “The speaker failed us today,” declared Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, after one of his ultraright colleagues, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, filed a measure to potentially force a vote to remove Mr. Johnson, over a spending plan she called “atrocious” and “a betrayal.” In all, Hulse made five repetitions of the “far right” insult, including the online headline, three “ultraconservatives” and one “ultraright” to spice things up. Hulse nodded approval at the final, Democrat-pleasing spending bill, saying it “represented fairly traditional compromise measures. They gave each party some wins, some losses and some election-year talking points….” But the legislation was assailed by members of the House Freedom Caucus, the far-right bloc that has bedeviled its own party’s speakers for years, as a betrayal by Mr. Johnson, for both its content and the way it was handled. One “far-right” wasn’t enough. The very next paragraph began: Not only did members of the far right not get the steep cuts and severe border restrictions they had envisioned, they were also unable to secure the conservative policy riders they had sought to stop the “weaponization” of the Justice Department, with most of the truly contentious proposals stripped out because Democrats would not accept them. Hulse pulled the same thing in a March 8 "news analysis," with six uses of "far right" and an "ultraconservative" to boot. Nobody in Hulse's House is on the "far left."

PBS Roundtable: Just How 'Authoritarian' Is Trump, Anyway? Let's Ask Jonathan Karl

Jonathan Karl is chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and author of Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party. It’s his third expose of Trump’s one-term presidency, and he even admitted to writing this one as a warning to voters. Naturally, on Friday, PBS’s tax-supported political roundtable Washington Week with The Atlantic invited Karl on to plug his book. Host Jeffrey Goldberg praised the “extraordinary book” and with snide help from his panelists, Atlantic journalist Franklin Foer and Washington Post journalist Anne Applebaum, throwing around “authoritarian” accusations, Karl made his case for the prosecution against Trump’s re-election in November.     The insults begin with Karl chuckling that Trump suffered from “straight-up admiration for Vladimir Putin.” Whatever odd fondness Trump may have expressed toward Russia’s dictator, his administration was pretty tough on Russia. Goldberg insulted Israeli’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an existential war with Hamas terrorists, before moving on to Netanyahu’s fellow “autocrat” Trump: "Both men, Trump and Netanyahu, have autocratic tendencies. You`ve written about this. It`s somewhat surprising that they don`t get along better." Goldberg encouraged Karl to tell “the Merkel story” from the book, a third-hand account of a weird comment about Adolf Hitler’s rallies purportedly made by Trump (Click "expand): KARL: Yes. This is a story that he told one very senior member of Congress told me this, that it happened twice with Trump. There was a lot of stories that Merkel had nothing but contempt for Trump. So, Trump told this member of Congress, you know, she actually -- she can't believe the size of the crowds I get. She says, in fact, there's been only one leader in history that's ever got crowds as big as mine. And the leader is thinking, you know who she's talking about, right? You know the chancellor of Germany is talking about. Goldberg: Did he understand, based on your reporting? KARL: I mean, that is the great -- I think he understood. GOLDBERG: You think he understood? KARL: I think he understood exactly. GOLDBERG: You think he understood. I mean, based on your own reporting, do you feel that we’re talking about a true authoritarian? KARL: I mean look, he is campaigning right now on the idea that literally the president United States is above the law. He is talking about undermining the Constitution, suspending certain provisions of the Constitution if necessary. I think. it’s not necessarily in the pursuit of any grander ideology or any policy proposal. It’s in pursuit of his own elevation and is exalting himself, proving that he never lost. But I think he’s got all of those authoritarian tendencies. Karl had made similar claims about Trump’s authoritarian instincts and lack of any political agenda before. So, why did Karl feel the need to write a third anti-Trump tome? As he explained on CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in November: There’s discontent with Joe Biden and I think there’s some superficially a sense like ‘Look, if we could only go back to four years ago, the world was relatively at peace, inflation was low, everything was --’ I think there is some of that and that’s why I wrote this book because if people are going to go into this next election thinking about that, they also need to be thinking, not just about what Trump was, but what he is now and what he is proposing and planning to do, what a second Trump administration would look like. And I don’t think people have come to terms with that at all. This segment was brought to you in part by Consumer Cellular. A transcript is below. Click “expand” to read: PBS Washington Week with The Atlantic 3/22/24 Jeffrey Goldberg: Ukraine. Since you brought up Ukraine, let me bring in the world's leading expert on Ukraine, Anne Applebaum. But is this -- you're not only an expert on Ukraine, you actually understand Republican and conservative politics very, very well. What portion of the Republican Party does Marjorie Taylor Greene represent in her position on Ukraine? Anne Applebaum, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: It's very hard to tell, because some of the people who are opposed to aid for Ukraine seem to have real motives. I mean, it's too much money or America first or something like that, and that might be genuine. Some of them seem to be acting performatively on behalf of Donald Trump. And I think Mike Johnson might be one of those. Trump has decided that he doesn't want money to go to Ukraine, and he wants Ukraine to be weaker. There's a lot of different speculation about why that would be. Maybe he has some deal in his head that he's going to do if he wins. Maybe he imagines some kind of partition. I mean, there's a lot of -- I don't want to scare everybody with the details, but he's been very, very clear that he doesn't want the House to pass this money. And there are enough people in the House who either support him or are afraid for their own seats, they're afraid of being primaried, that they have gone along with it. And I think that, more than anything else, explains where we are. I mean, it's really an extraordinary moment. And we have an out-of-power ex-president who is, in effect, dictating American foreign policy on behalf of a foreign dictator or with the interests of a foreign dictator in mind. And I don't think we've been through this before. Jonathan Karl: And I have to say, I mean, I think that it's getting close to half of the House Republicans that are actually in this America first quasi-isolationist camp of not wanting to give any more money to Ukraine. Mike Johnson is not in that camp. Mike Johnson tells people that Vladimir Putin must be stopped or he'll move through Europe. He sounds a lot like Lindsey Graham, who is also in this position of trying to find a way to placate the real leader of the Republican Party, who wants to pull the plug entirely and turn Ukraine over to Putin. So, that's why you have them with some of these ideas like we're going to do it as a loan. We're going to try to do it in some way. But, I mean, the real problem here is exactly what Anne said, it's Donald Trump. Nikole Killion: And he did put out a statement today saying, you know, going into the recesses, you know, Congress will be out for the next two weeks, that he will move forward with a supplemental. But to Jon's point, it may look a little different than what we saw on the Senate side. Jeffrey Goldberg: Frank, what do you think is Trump's ultimate motivation on Ukraine? Franklin Foer, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: I think that there's so many grudges, so many layers of grudges that are left over from his first impeachment trial. I think he's always had this innate sympathy to Vladimir Putin, who he's admired as a strong man. And then I think there are things that go back to his commercial history in Russia, that he always was attracted to Russians. He was always enticed by the idea of doing business in Russia. Michael Cohen in the middle of -- Jeffrey Goldberg: His former lawyer. Franklin Foer: He had talked about how -- even during the first campaign in 2016, they were they were trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. And so in Trump's mind, all of these things, the grudges, the commercial interests, the political interests, they all get the narcissism and the ego all swirled together into this motivation that is sometimes quite obtuse to those of us on the outside. Jonathan Karl: And straight up admiration for Vladimir Putin. Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes. Well, this is about -- this is a broader issue about an attraction to authoritarians, and we're going to get to that when I pivot elegantly to the Middle East in a minute. But I just want to stay with this Ukraine question just for one more second with Anne, because you alluded to a kind of bargain possibly that Trump and Trumpists have imagined that if Trump comes back to power, obviously, we understand that China and Russia would prefer Trump as president to Biden, I mean, I think that's a fair statement, that somehow Trump will force a settlement that looks good from Putin's perspective. Anne Applebaum: He said that in this somewhat incoherent way, right? He said, when I take power, the war will be over in one day. You know, there will be a deal. And people around him have talked a little bit more in detail about a deal. And, of course, I don't want to speculate about things that we don't really know and might never happen, but, you know, there is some idea that we would have like a new Yalta. We would divide Europe, maybe. I mean, there is something like that that's in the air. He has some idea about it affecting oil prices and you get oil prices going down. I mean, I don't -- you know, I can't prove that. But I mean, it's certainly not that farfetched. I mean, he is someone who thinks like that. He thinks transactionally. He doesn't think in terms of what's good for Europe or what's good for America. I mean, the loss of Ukraine, for Ukraine to have been seen as a failure, if we give away Ukraine, if Kyiv becomes a Russian satrapy, you know, the United States will be seen as a receding power and that will have all kinds of economic and political consequences that we haven't even imagined yet in terms of arms sales and energy supply sales and an America's position in trade talks and all kinds of -- the idea that America is the security guarantor for Europe is very, very important and fundamental to how America is perceived in Europe and around the world. Trump is not interested in that at all. He doesn't care. He doesn't know why it matters. Franklin Foer: Meanwhile, this is not just a Washington story. This is a Ukraine story, and I think Anne could speak to this better. But each delay that we go through has real consequences for the Ukrainian army and for the Ukrainian society, which is thoroughly demoralized by the way that Washington has treated the cause, our ally. Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Let me turn to the Middle East, stay with you, Frank, for one second. You know, we -- all of us around this table have covered the relationship since Benjamin Netanyahu has been prime minister of Israel longer than anybody in Israeli history. We've seen him with different presidents at different times. I'll start by making this observation. It's very hard for an Israeli prime minister to anger Joe Biden, who loves Israel, and yet it seems as if we're there that somehow Netanyahu and Biden are so crossways right now, that the relationship is almost ruptured. Put this in context, and I'll ask other people to jump in as well. Put this in historic context. We all remember the Obama-Netanyahu relationship. Is this gotten worse? Franklin Foer: Yes, of course it has. And if you flash back to the rupture during the Obama administration, Joe Biden was always the person who stepped in and tried to find a way to make it better. Biden's relationship with the state of Israel and his telling goes back to his father. And he's been a million times. When the war started, he wrapped his arms around Israel. When Benjamin Netanyahu was missing on the scene, he stepped in. It was essentially prime minister of Israel, so much so that when he went to visit, I think, 10 or 11 days after October 7th, he sat in the Israeli war cabinet, asking them the questions that a prime minister should be asking about strategic objectives. And the questions that he’s asking of Benjamin Netanyahu are actually reasonable questions. What is your long-term plan? What is going to happen on the day after the war? If you go into Rafah, which, by the way, I don't think is imminent for many reasons, including the fact that Israel would need to call up and re-mobilize a good number of its troops in order to invade Rafah in a way, but these are questions that are reasonable to ask about what would happen to the million people who live in Rafah. Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. So, Jon, we were just talking about Ukraine being a domestic political issue. Israel is the ultimate example, often, of a foreign country becoming a domestic, political hot potato. Is Israel becoming a partisan issue in a way that has never been before? Jonathan Karl: I mean, look, you've just had the Republican presumptive nominee say that if you vote Democratic and you're Jewish, it means you hate your religion. I mean, he's doing everything in his power to make it a partisan issue, and it's becoming a partisan issue. You look at the response when Chuck Schumer came on the Senate floor and effectively called for new elections in Israel, effectively called for a regime change in Israel, new elections in Israel. And the way it was denounced by Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader and Republicans across the board, I mean, it is becoming more of a partisan issue. And let's face it, you have a growing group within the Democratic Party that is emphatically not pro-Israel. And so this is definitely contributing to it. Jeffrey Goldberg: So, I want to -- you mentioned this extraordinary statement that Donald Trump made about American Jews. I want you to listen to that for a minute, and I want to get Frank's comment on it after we listen. Donald Trump (R), Former U.S. President, 2024 Presidential Candidate: Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion. They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves. Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, Frank, I'm not going to ask you to speak on behalf of the Jews, and please don't ask me to speak on the behalf of the Jews, but that's a fairly extraordinary statement. It's not extraordinary in the context of Trump's discourse, but it's an extraordinary thing to put out there. I mean, what is the reaction, I mean, to the extent that you've gauged it among American Jews, the majority of whom traditionally vote Democratic, the vast majority of them? Franklin Foer: First, it should be said that there is a long tradition of leaders, especially authoritarian-minded leaders, of dividing Jews into good Jews who are loyal to state and bad Jews are not loyal to the state. And, historically, when those distinctions get made, the Jews were deemed to be the not good Jews end up being targeted in some sort of way. And it's somewhat scary, I think, for American Jewry, because of the way in which Trump tends to talk about the people he demonizes, and it comes in this larger context where we're seeing an incredible surge of anti-Semitism, not just from the right, but also from the left. And to hear a potential president of the United States talk in a sort of way, even if he's talked in a way before, is very triggering. Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Nikole, there -- I don't know the degree to which this is going to become a reality. Maybe you could enlighten us. But Speaker Johnson is thinking about bringing Netanyahu to the Hill. What would that look like? You know, we remember years ago a number of Democrats sat out, boycotted when Netanyahu came and spoke the last time, mainly around the subject of Iran. I'm feeling like this is going to be a whole other level of carnival. Nikole Killion: Yes. Well, you're already seeing a pretty significant divide, not only between Republicans and Democrats on this, but within the Democratic Party itself, where many Democrats have suggested they may boycott, others say they may go. You know, we have leader Hakeem Jeffries, who tried to put some distance there, saying, look, Speaker Johnson hasn't even asked me about this. So, until he does, I am not going comment. I mean, we did also hear from Leader Schumer this week on the issue, saying, you know, despite his comments last week, that he would welcome the opportunity so long as it's done in a bipartisan fashion. And we did see some Democrats boycott when President Herzog addressed a joint session of Congress about a year or so ago. But that being said, it is. It's starting to become a wedge issue, the political hot potato, and I think one that could potentially be inflamed if the prime minister does come to visit. But the speaker has made clear this is something that he would like to do. He would like to extend that invitation, so I think we'll have to see how it plays out. Jonathan Karl: I don't think it's actually going to happen. It may -- I mean, Netanyahu did this exact same playbook with Obama when he came in 2015, and the issue there was the Iran nuclear program. He wanted to go over Obama's head effectively and make the case to Congress against the deal. I don't anticipate it playing out this time. But it's remarkable that Netanyahu wants to effectively play to Trump because he's hit a wall with Biden. But, I mean, Trump hates Netanyahu. He's toyed with him. He resented the fact that Netanyahu came out and congratulated Biden just days after the 2020 election. Jeffrey Goldberg: It was kind of a pro forma congratulations. Jonathan Karl: It was, but he absolutely resented it. And it wasn't just that. If you remember, Netanyahu visited Washington, came to the White House while he was campaigning for his own re-election, and Trump saw him as a showboat. And, you know, that's a terrible thing in Trump world. Jeffrey Goldberg: When Trump thinks you're a showboat. Jonathan Karl: Yes, yes. I mean, because he came in and he was using Trump's stage to make the case. He spoke longer than Trump. He's spoke more emphatically than Trump and he also blindsided the Trump administration with a new announcement on settlements. So, it's risky strategy, but Netanyahu needs to stay in power to stay -- Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. One thing they have in common, they're both under indictment in their own countries, Trump and Netanyahu. Jonathan Karl: They both want to be in power to avoid potentially going to jail. Jeffrey Goldberg: Right, which, bottom line, might be what's going on here at the deepest level. I want to get to the -- Frank, I'll come back to you in a second, but I want to get to something else that might be operating at the deepest level. Both men, Trump and Netanyahu, have autocratic tendencies. You've written about this. It's somewhat surprising that they don't get along better. Anne Applebaum: I mean, they're very similar in some ways. I think some of the root of the discomfort with Netanyahu in the Democratic Party, and maybe even more broadly, there was a sense that we support Israel because it's a little democracy in a region where there aren't a lot of democracies. And we have something in common with them, that means we have a special bond, and so on. I think a lot of Democrats, I'm sure that's what Joe Biden thinks about Israel. He remembers its founding and the role that we played. Jeffrey Goldberg: The older the Democrat, the more likely they are -- Anne Applebaum: The more likely they are to think that. Netanyahu has systematically chipped away at that image, both by putting extremists into his government, by using kind of authoritarian propaganda to run election campaigns, most recently, over the last year, before the war, by passing or trying to pass a series of judicial reforms that would have politicized the judiciary in Israel, much very following a similar pattern that's been used elsewhere in Hungary and Turkey. So, he lost the image of the Democrat, and he therefore won a lot of enmity in the Democratic Party and actually won a lot of admirers on the right, including in the anti-Semitic right. I mean, Viktor Orban, who made George Soros as a kind of Jewish billionaire into a hate figure in Hungarian politics, feels very close to Netanyahu. They seem very similar. They have similar ideas about how to undermine institutions. So, I mean, maybe Trump doesn't like him personally, but the Republican Party likes him a lot. Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. That's right. Jon, let me ask you, in the couple of minutes that we have left, to talk about your extraordinary book. There's one story I need you to tell everyone, which is the Merkel story, which relates directly to this. Can you give us the 20 second version of that? Jonathan Karl: Yes. This is a story that he told one very senior member of Congress told me this, that it happened twice with Trump. There was a lot of stories that Merkel had nothing but contempt for Trump. So, Trump told this member of Congress, you know, she actually -- she can't believe the size of the crowds I get. She says, in fact, there's been only one leader in history that's ever got crowds as big as mine. And the leader is thinking, you know who she's talking about, right? You know the chancellor of Germany is talking. Jeffrey Goldberg: Did he understand, based on your reporting? Jonathan Karl: I mean, that is the great -- I think he understood. Jeffrey Goldberg: You think he understood? Jonathan Karl: I think he understood exactly. Jeffrey Goldberg: You think he understood. I mean, based on your own reporting, do you feel that we're talking about a true authoritarian? Jonathan Karl: I mean look, he is campaigning right now on the idea that literally the president United States is above the law. He is talking about undermining the Constitution, suspending certain provisions of the Constitution if necessary. I think it's not necessarily in the pursuit of any grander ideology or any policy proposal. It's in pursuit of his own elevation and is exalting himself, proving that he never lost. But I think he's got all of those authoritarian tendencies. Jeffrey Goldberg: So, Nikole, I will give you the last word on this. I have been in a search for an understanding of Republican foreign policy. But is Republican foreign policy just whatever -- at this point, whatever Trump feels at a given moment, even though he isn’t even in office right now? Nikole Killion: Well, certainly we've seen many take that America first isolationist approach, and we know that the former president continues to have a lot of sway over congressional Republicans. But at the end of the day, you know, they also have their own minds, too. So, again, I think, as we move forward with some of these key issues, it continues to be something to watch. And these very issues that we're talking about that were once bipartisan, you know, is there the prospect for that to be the case again or will we see that further partisan divide, particularly as this election cycle goes on? So, to be continued.

STUDY: PBS 'Washington Week' Journalist Roundtable Routinely Hates Republicans

Washington Week with The Atlantic, public television’s taxpayer-funded weekly political roundtable analyzing the major news stories of the week, is brazen enough to tout itself as "objective….known for its depth, balance, and civil discourse.”  But a review of six months of episodes after the launch of Washington Week’s partnership with The Atlantic magazine (August 11, 2023 -- February 9, 2024) proved liberalism still reigns over the public airwaves. Key Findings: More than half (88) of the 157 topics addressed focused on Republicans, over twice as many as those focused on Democrats (38). The panelists spent 149 minutes opining about Republicans, nearly 90% in negative fashion. The Democrats received just 66 minutes of opinionated commentary, split much more evenly (57% negative vs. 43% positive). Republicans were branded as “extreme” 11 times over the study period, Democrats none. Meanwhile, Joe Biden was praised for being “mentally…quite acute.” One reason for the ideological imbalance: The exclusion from these weekly discussions of journalists from any conservative media outlet, such as Fox News, The Washington Times, New York Post, Washington Examiner, Washington Free Beacon, or Daily Caller.   What Topics Were Covered? A related way liberal slant revealed itself was topic choice. 157 separate topics were covered within the 27 episodes comprising the study period (average episode length 23 minutes). Of those, 88 were focused on Republicans, compared to just 38 for Democrats (21 featured both parties, while 10 dealt with non-partisan subjects like the fighting in Ukraine). That’s a ratio of 2.3 to 1 of Republican-focused stories compared to Democrat-focused stories during the six months we examined.  At first glance those numbers may sound favorable for Republicans. But Washington Week is a political roundtable, not a straight newscast, and emphasizes topical controversies, concerns, and scandals involving political personalities, not in-depth examinations of issues, meaning the one-sided GOP numbers were the opposite of a campaign favor to the Republican Party. When the show did touch on issues such as abortion, immigration, Israel, or Ukraine, it was often focused on how those issues could affect the 2024 elections.  Bias By Omission: Democratic Scandals Ignored Democratic Party scandals and problems, when not being downplayed, were often omitted entirely. There was no scrutiny of the progressive-activist “Squad” members recently elected to Congress, though several added fascinating scandals to their names during the period under study:  Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) was convicted of pulling a House fire alarm to delay a vote. Later, old blog posts from Bowman resurfaced, promoting 9-11 conspiracy theories he wrote before taking office. Rep. Cori Bush’s (D-MO) allegedly committed campaign finance violations involving security payments to her then-boyfriend. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) spouted anti-Semitic comments in the wake of the October 7 Hamas invasion of Israel, for which she was censured by Congress. Topics devoted to those Democratic scandals on Washington Week? Zero. Not a single mention. Even when a scandal involving a Democrat did break through, coverage was sparse. Sen. Bob Menendez’s (D-N.J.) corruption scandal, involving media-friendly details like gold bars, was relegated to a single brief segment on December 1, 2023, and a three-second reference on January 5, 2024, for a total of 34 seconds. Yet viewers heard more about kerfuffles involving Republican officials, like Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) threatening to go mano-a-mano with a Teamsters union president during hostile testimony (1 minute 44 seconds) and accusations by Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) that former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had sucker-punched him in the back (46 seconds). Partisan Spin The numbers reveal the show’s strikingly negative treatment of Republican figures and entities, coupled with a marked disinterest in stories involving Democrats besides President Biden. Comments about Republicans, of which there were 149 minutes worth, tilted strongly negative, with evaluative statements nearly 90% negative versus just 10% positive for the GOP. Panelists described Republicans as “extreme” or “extremist” 11 times over the study period, often in reference to the right flank of House Republicans. There were zero references to Democratic extremism. Within the smaller universe of Democratic-focused topics, scandals involving Democratic politicians were mostly ignored. Coverage of President Biden himself, while not wholly positive when it came to voters’ concerns about his age, or ideological challenges from his left flank on immigration or Israel, often either criticized his Republican opponents or rallied to his defense. Worth noting: Retired Utah Sen. Mitt Romney comprised over a quarter of the GOP’s positive coverage (4 minutes), portrayed as a moderate hero for blasting his Trump-loving party’s alleged slide into “authoritarianism.” If one removes Romney’s coverage from the count, the anti-GOP slant was further strengthened to 92.4% negative versus 7.6% positive. While Donald Trump’s legal woes and courtroom controversies garnered the most opinionated airtime, Republicans in Congress also received plenty of coverage, and near-universal condemnation, with a staggering 99% of commentary skewing negative, whether it was criticism of the dysfunctional House of Representatives or Sen. Tommy Tuberville (AL) holding up military promotions to protest abortion-related expenses for servicewomen.  Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was the beneficiary of some positive coverage, especially as a potential moderate competitor to Trump in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries. Democrats fared far better with the panelists, covered less often (66 minutes) and far more positively, with only 57.2% negative commentary and 42.8% positive commentary -- close to an even balance.  Here’s how Washington Week panelists treated the top five most-discussed Republican political personalities/groups over the six-month study period: Donald Trump: 72 total minutes, 67 minutes negative, 5 minutes positive: 92.6% negative coverage  Republicans in Congress: 46 total minutes, 45 minutes negative, 28 seconds positive: 99% negative coverage  House Speaker Mike Johnson: 492 total seconds, 472 seconds negative, 20 seconds positive, 96% negative coverage Nikki Haley: 370 total seconds, 88 seconds negative, 282 seconds positive, 23.8% negative coverage Sen. Tommy Tuberville: 276 total seconds, 276 seconds negative, 100% negative coverage The chatter on the Democratic side was far less robust. After President Joe Biden, who received relatively generous coverage (39% positive) compared to his once and likely future Republican opponent Donald Trump (7.4% positive), comments on Democratic politicians and controversies were hard to come by. The show even managed to spin up some sympathy for Hunter Biden, cast as a victim of a “political hit job” in its sparse coverage of his scandals. President Joe Biden: 57 total minutes, 22 minutes positive, 35 minutes negative, 61% negative Democrats in Congress: 253 total seconds, 208 seconds positive, 45 seconds negative, 17.8% negative Hunter Biden: 104 total seconds, 75 seconds positive, 29 seconds negative, 27.9% negative Gen. Lloyd Austin: 50 total seconds, 18 seconds positive, 32 seconds negative, 64% negative Sen. Bob Menendez: 34 total seconds, 34 seconds negative, 100% negative   What They Said: ‘Extremist’ Republicans, ‘Mentally, He’s Quite Acute’ Biden The Washington Week-Atlantic partnership got off to a biased start on August 11, 2023, with Goldberg and company casting Florida governor and then-GOP candidate Ron DeSantis as an extremist autocrat.  Following a clip of DeSantis saying that when he became president, “We’re going to have all these Deep State people, we’re going to start slitting throats on Day One,” Moderator Goldberg asked PBS NewsHour reporter Laura Barron-Lopez: “Laura, let me turn to you, because you’ve covered extremism. Talk about the relationship between rhetoric like that and the threat of violence in our society.” The NewsHour’s White House correspondent did not disappoint: “…when you talk to historians, especially those who study authoritarianism, they will tell you that that is a classic tactic used by authoritarian figures, autocratic figures, to try to rally their base around them and they know exactly who they’re speaking to.” On the August 25 edition, Barron-Lopez, serving as guest host, made it clear her preferred Republican candidate in the then-crowded field, the “rational” Nikki Haley, who was “trying to get Republicans to contend with reality” on liberal issues like climate change and abortion, while bluntly saying of conservatives, “They're feeling more emboldened to say racist things in some cases.”  In a segment that didn’t, ahem, age well after Biden’s disastrous classified document-related press conference in February, Mark Leibovich of The Atlantic came huffily to the defense of the octogenarian president in this now-notorious exchange on September 1, 2023:  Leibovich: Can I just actually just point out, though, that, I mean, it’s not just making an issue of Biden’s age, it’s lying, it’s saying he’s senile, saying he’s demented, saying he’s out of it. I mean, I think it’s important to sort of state for a fact that a lot of these are just -- Goldberg: Right. Mentally, he’s quite acute. Leibovich: It seems like it. In contrast, the November 24, 2023 edition treated taxpaying viewers to how the Republican “anger caucus” was “willing to blow things up” in Washington, while new House Speaker Mike Johnson was a “deeply, deeply religious conservative” who had, according to NewsHour’s congressional reporter Lisa Desjardins, “dehumanized the LGBTQ population in this country.” Perhaps most revealing was the December 29, 2023 episode dedicated to the latest issue of The Atlantic, wholly devoted to the dangers of Donald Trump, with a roundtable of Atlantic-only magazine staff taking over the taxpayer-supported airwaves to fret over a second-term Trump administration that threatened to usher in “authoritarianism.”  Who’s Talking? Besides chief moderator (and Atlantic editor-in-chief) Jeffrey Goldberg, who mediated 24 of the 27 episodes, the show features a rotating panel of journalists from various outlets. New York Times’ White House correspondent Peter Baker, National Public Radio White House correspondent Asma Khalid, and PBS NewsHour White House correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez each appeared around the table five times, the most of any journalist. Liberal and even left-wing outlets dominated, making for a plethora of agreed-upon liberal-leaning opinions and interpretations of fact with no conservative rebuttals. Staff from The Atlantic itself were the most frequent guests, with 22 total appearances (Goldberg counting as a single appearance). The public airwaves were also well represented, with reporters from NPR and the PBS NewsHour appearing frequently alongside liberal media stalwarts like the Washington Post and Politico. In all, eighteen separate media outlets were represented by a total of 57 individual panelists, some of whom made multiple appearances.  By contrast, there was not a single appearance made by a member of a conservative media outlet: Not a single staffer for Fox News, Washington Times, New York Post, Washington Examiner, Washington Free Beacon, or Daily Caller appeared. (Note: Similar taxpayer-funded slant involving the PBS NewsHour program’s choice of guests was documented in 2023.) CONCLUSION: The publicly funded Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) that airs Washington Week was launched in 1969 by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was born with a congressional mandate to maintain "strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.” Yet judging by our findings -- an unbroken line of liberal-leaning panelists providing blatant anti-Republican spin on anti-Republican topics -- the tax-funded Washington Week with the Atlantic is a gross failure on the fairness front. METHODOLOGY: We tallied all explicitly evaluative comments from Washington Week panelists (e.g., colorful, mocking, or ideologically loaded descriptions, either critical or supportive) regarding Democrats or Republicans. Straightforward descriptions of the issue at hand were not included. We also counted the topics covered and assigned them a value based on partisan emphasis, if any (Democrat/Republican/both/neither). We also counted and sorted the media affiliation of the panelists. The top five topics involving each party were then ranked based on the total amount of time in which they were evaluated, along with a percentage figure documenting the resulting spin, positive or negative. Note that the study period encompassed the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, and thus includes evaluations of the state of the presidential “horse race.”

NYT Scribe Loathes Righty Activists: Don't Edit Clips and Badger People, That's Our Job!

New York Times reporter Ken Bensinger covers “right-wing media and national campaigns,” and the hostility and clear revulsion he felt toward right-wing figures, and credulity toward the story of every single migrant he encountered, is evident in every word of “How the Right Shapes the Immigration Debate from Panama,” his long expose that led Thursday’s paper.  Online, the headline was "Chasing Clicks in the Jungle: Right-Wing Influencers Descend on the Darién Gap" Descend! Bensinger's story began: Ayub Ibrahim had just walked out of the jungle. His feet still ached. A month earlier, he had left his home in Somalia, fleeing a civil war, he said, traveling first to Turkey, then Brazil and finally crossing on foot through a 66-mile expanse of wilderness known as the Darién Gap. Resting in the sweltering San Vicente migrant camp in Panama with hundreds of other recent arrivals, he suddenly found himself surrounded by a half-dozen Americans with video cameras. “Do you guys like Ilhan Omar?” one person asked. “What do you think about Joe Biden?” Mr. Ibrahim, 20, answered the questions. He said he liked and admired Ms. Omar, the first Somali-American to serve in Congress. He doesn’t follow American politics, he added, but thinks Mr. Biden is a good president. When asked if Mr. Biden or former President Donald J. Trump would be better for immigrants, he chose Mr. Biden. Bensinger would never dare suggest the anti-Semitic Omar actually deserved any criticism. Later, Mr. Ibrahim would say he had felt ambushed and confused by the questions. He hadn’t intended to make a political statement. But by then, it was too late. Too late for what? Anyway, it's good to see the Times come out against ambush journalism, which the mainstream media has practiced for years. But this time, it's a MAGA influencer: One of his questioners, Laura Loomer, a right-wing activist and former Republican candidate for Congress, had already posted an edited video of the conversation online. It had rocketed around the internet, amassing nearly two million views on X. As if the news networks (and the Times itself) have never edited a video in a way that alters the meaning of what was said. As immigration becomes a dominant issue in the 2024 presidential race, right-wing media has been awash in gritty and often deceptive videos of migrants emerging from the Darién Gap, a roadless stretch of Panamanian jungle that has become a bottleneck for thousands of people on their way to the United States. The clips are presented as proof of what Republicans often describe as an “invasion” of Muslim terrorists, Chinese spies and Latin American criminals. Posted widely on social media, the videos blame President Biden for the migration and suggest, falsely, that Democrats are encouraging it to create new, illegal voters. International aid organizations are cast as profiteers making money off human misery. The New York Times traced much of that content to the work of Michael Yon, a former Green Beret who over the past three years has become the go-to tour guide for right-wing journalists, politicians and social-media influencers wanting to see the Darién Gap firsthand. The Times did its own sneaky investigative reporting on rival border influencers. The Times followed one group as it toured camps on the edge of the Darién Gap, observing and recording as participants, interviewed migrants and shot video. The reporters, producers and influencers gravitated toward migrants from Africa, China and the Middle East, barraging them with politically loaded questions. Again, this all sounds like standard operating procedure by the media. They just don’t like it when it's done by non-liberals. When asked whether he had been given money by the United Nations or humanitarian groups, Mr. Ibrahim said he had not. He also said that as a Muslim he supported equal rights for women and was opposed to discrimination against gay people. Those portions of the interview were cut from the version posted online and missing from Ms. Loomer’s later accounts. The reporter tried to quell U.S. security fears: Hey, Panama is screening migrants for criminal or terrorist connections! The reporter stacked the deck against his subjects, tarring them as dangerous in his readership's eyes, noting the presence of Yon (“A swaggering Special Forces veteran”) outside the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

PBS Blows ‘Bloodbath’: ‘Latest Example of Donald Trump Using Violent Rhetoric’

By now everyone has heard that former President Donald Trump threatened U.S. democracy or something by predicting a “bloodbath” if he didn’t win re-election in November. Trump didn’t actually do that, as we know: His “bloodbath” comment, delivered at a campaign rally in Ohio, referred to tariffs on Chinese electric cars potentially being made in Mexico, as a brief perusal of what Trump actually said at the rally in Ohio will confirm. But that didn’t stop PBS NewsHour co-anchor Amna Nawaz from stating Monday evening: “A look at former President Donald Trump’s violent language on the campaign trail.” PBS thought the fake “bloodbath” worthy of two segments, both taking Trump far out of context, just like the Biden campaign wanted. Co-anchor Geoff Bennett launched his own segment thusly: Former President Donald Trump is under fire again for comments made during a controversial speech at a campaign event for a Republican Ohio Senate candidate. Extremism experts say it's the latest example of Donald Trump using violent rhetoric to appeal to his supporters. Bennett, who worked the Monday-Friday evening shift, wasn’t available to comment on Trump’s remarks on Saturday evening, which was for the best, as the truth of what Trump said slowly seeped into the mainstream press coverage, so that by Monday night Bennett was obliged to hedge, at least in comparison to the insanity on the networks’ newscasts. But even in playing Trump's comments in full context, Bennett still clung to narrative: BENNETT: As his use of the word bloodbath during an extended riff on the auto industry and Chinese automakers sparked fresh controversy and criticism. TRUMP: We're going to put a 100 percent tariff on every single car that comes across the line. And you're not going to be able to sell those cars -- if I get elected. Now, if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole -- that's going to be the least of it, It's going to be a bloodbath for the country. That will be the least of it. BENNETT: In a social media post today, Mr. Trump said his threat had been taken out of context and turned the defense of his comments into a fund-raising appeal. Former President Trump also facing criticism for his dehumanizing anti-immigrant rhetoric at that same rally. TRUMP: If I had prisons that were teeming with MS-13 and all sorts of people that they have got to take care of for the next 50 years, right, young people, they're in jail for years and, if you call them people. I don't know if you call them people. In some cases, they're not people, in my opinion. Does Bennett really want to defend the humanity of murderous MS-13 gang members? Bennett even used a professor’s comment that admitted Trump was using a metaphor into a danger. BRENDAN NYHAN (Dartmouth College): In this case, it may have been a metaphor. It's hard to tell, with him. He was using that language in the context of a discussion of the auto industry, but his meaning was ambiguous. Given the way he so frequently calls for or endorses violence, I think it's appropriate to be concerned when he invokes it even in a seemingly metaphorical way. It's with noting that PBS’s own reporter Paul Solman referred to “a bloodbath for the economy” in a May 2020 story on the collapse of U.S. retail due to COVID edicts. PBS NewsHour co-anchor Amna Nawaz piled on during the “Politics Monday” segment that followed, taking another tack: Republicans who defend Trump’s statement are as awful as Trump himself.     She spoke to Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report, and was even more aggressive than her co-host Bennett. NAWAZ: So, you saw Geoff's report earlier on that violent rhetoric we're hearing from former President Trump. Even after Mr. Trump is confronted about the fact that some of his language echoes, the language of Hitler, in an interview, he doubles down. This weekend, he said there would be a bloodbath if he didn't win….Speaker Mike Johnson said that Mr. Trump was just referring to the auto industry, and that he's 100 percent correct and Americans agree with him. The decision by fellow Republicans to not unequivocally call out violent rhetoric, what does that say to you? These grossly misleading anti-Trump segments were brought to you in part by BDO.

PBS Fangirls for Biden's TikTok Tactic: 'Unvarnished, Relatable, and Genuine'

On the PBS NewsHour Tuesday evening, White House reporter Laura Barron-Lopez gushed over the Biden 2024 campaign’s social media push on TikTok and YouTube, a desperate attempt to get hip with the kids, in “How social media influencers are playing a role in the presidential election.” The headline aside, the segment itself was almost completely dedicated to gushing over Biden's social media strategy, with pro-Trump efforts tacked on as a throwaway at the end. (Annoying young influencer Harry Sisson was a particular focus.) Anchor Geoff Bennett: Social media influencers are playing a key role in President Biden's reelection campaign. It's a way of connecting to younger voters who are harder to reach through traditional advertising. Here's Laura Barron-Lopez. [Harry Sisson, Digital Content Creator, on TikTok clip: All right, everybody. Joe Biden's about to pull up in the motorcade, so I'm going to get a clip for you guys.] Laura Barron-Lopez: Twenty-one-year-old Harry Sisson had a special view of President Biden on the night of the State of the Union address, up close and personal from the White House. [Sisson on TikTok clip: President Biden needs four more years in that house.] Barron-Lopez: And his videos capturing behind-the-scenes moments were broadcast to more than 830,000 followers. Harry is just one of dozens of social media personalities and influencers that the Biden administration and, more importantly, the Biden campaign is courting, from special invites to White House briefings to State of the Union watch parties, all to get out their message and the vote on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Oh, joy. Barron-Lopez couldn't bring herself to note the hypocrisy that the Biden campaign is actively posting on TikTok after Biden promised he would sign a bill requiring the Chinese owners divest their stake. Barron-Lopez: TikTok and YouTube are the two most popular digital platforms among young people. Almost a third of young people under the age of 30 get their news regularly from TikTok. Recent polling shows Biden is struggling with young voters, a key part of the Democratic base, his approval with voters under 30 sitting at 30 percent. Now they're trying to meet young voters where they are, on the grid. [Guy in TikTok clip: But you know who's having a bad day? Mike Johnson and his House Republican Caucus. I will tell you why.] …. Barron-Lopez: Despite the ongoing scrutiny around TikTok, including legislation that could ban the app if it fails to separate from its Chinese parent company, the Biden campaign is cranking out viral content. But do the Biden clips really qualify as “viral content” the way influencers use the term? PBS doesn’t provide any viewing figures. After speaking over a few brief clips from Biden’s TikTok campaign, including one of Biden shaking hands with a black family, the PBS reporter played nauseating fangirl for the Biden campaign. Yuck! Barron-Lopez: Since their TikTok launch on Super Bowl Sunday, the campaign has been leaning in….Capitalizing on pop culture moments and filming with regular people are all part of the strategy, unvarnished, relatable, and genuine. [Male voice-over on TikTok clip: The president came to my house to have dinner.] Barron-Lopez talked to former Obama campaign digital director Terry Goff, who more or less admitted TikTok’s leftist tilt, even if PBS itself won’t. Goff: ….especially for young people, but for an increasing number of old people, their perception of the war in Gaza, their perception of LGBTQ rights and all these other issues are being shaped by the experience that they're having on TikTok…. Barron-Lopez made a vague feint toward the perils of “disinformation,” far from the alarmism the NewsHour usually spreads about social media, while letting Goff neutralize the concern. Barron-Lopez: As long as campaigns remain on social media, there is a lurking threat of disinformation. But it's a threat that Goff says is best confronted head on. The Donald Trump campaign was an afterthought. Barron-Lopez: ….his campaign points to what they call an organic ecosystem of social media loyalists like Joe Rogan, Libs of TikTok, and Diamond and Silk that have grown over the years, especially on YouTube. This partisan segment was brought to you in part by Raymond James Financial Inc. A transcript is available, click “Expand.” PBS NewsHour 3/19/24 7:22:40 p.m. (ET) Geoff Bennett: Social media influencers are playing a key role in President Biden's reelection campaign. It's a way of connecting to younger voters who are harder to reach through traditional advertising. Here's Laura Barron-Lopez. Harry Sisson, Digital Content Creator: All right, everybody. Joe Biden's about to pull up in the motorcade, so I'm going to get a clip for you guys. Laura Barron-Lopez: Twenty-one-year-old Harry Sisson had a special view of President Biden on the night of the State of the Union address, up close and personal from the White House. Harry Sisson: President Biden needs four more years in that house. Laura Barron-Lopez: And his videos capturing behind-the-scenes moments were broadcast to more than 830,000 followers. Harry is just one of dozens of social media personalities and influencers that the Biden administration and, more importantly, the Biden campaign is courting, from special invites to White House briefings to State of the Union watch parties, all to get out their message and the vote on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Harry Sisson: I know, in my circle, even just friends, a lot of people are persuaded daily by stuff on TikTok. They will see a clip of Biden or Trump saying something, and that will change their minds. Laura Barron-Lopez: The Biden campaign told "NewsHour" that they aren't currently paying influencers for their content. Harry Sisson: I don't think that young people are picking up the phone when a campaign person is making a call. I don't think the young persons are really going to political rallies unless they're really interested in politics. Hearing from the candidate in a digital space, not a physical space — and the reach on TikTok is just remarkable. It is the best way for candidates to get in touch with young people. Laura Barron-Lopez: TikTok and YouTube are the two most popular digital platforms among young people. Almost a third of young people under the age of 30 get their news regularly from TikTok. Recent polling shows Biden is struggling with young voters, a key part of the Democratic base, his approval with voters under 30 sitting at 30 percent. Now they're trying to meet young voters where they are, on the grid. Man: But you know who's having a bad day? Mike Johnson and his House Republican Caucus. I will tell you why. Laura Barron-Lopez: They're hoping that, by partnering with beloved online personalities, the algorithm might work in their favor. Hannah Murphy, Financial Times: They are on social media. Laura Barron-Lopez: Hannah Murphy is a reporter at Financial Times covering technology and social media. Hannah Murphy: There's a general wariness, a distrust of traditional media, of politicians themselves. And this is a way of really reaching out to the people that young people relate to, who look like them, who they trust above all, so finding sort of trusted messengers to speak on your behalf. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): Mr. Speaker, I think… Laura Barron-Lopez: Despite the ongoing scrutiny around TikTok, including legislation that could ban the app if it fails to separate from its Chinese parent company, the Biden campaign is cranking out viral content. Man: Trump or Biden? Joe Biden, President of the United States: Are you kidding? Joe Biden: Biden. Laura Barron-Lopez: Since their TikTok launch on Super Bowl Sunday, the campaign has been leaning in. Man: Look over here. Woman: Joe. Laura Barron-Lopez: Capitalizing on pop culture moments and filming with regular people are all part of the strategy, unvarnished, relatable and genuine. Man: The president came to my House to have dinner. Laura Barron-Lopez: In 2024, celebrities with millions of followers have arguably less sway than the micro-influencer who has earned the trust of their smaller base. Hannah Murphy: Working with micro- and nano-influencers — these are folks with thousands of followers, tens of thousands, rather than the millions. You can really target a particular demographic. You can geotarget in the battleground state whether the race is really tight. You could say, I want to find farmers in Wisconsin to put out a particular message. Laura Barron-Lopez: Former President Obama revolutionized how once-nascent social media platforms could turn out the vote. Now there are communications agencies dedicated to partnering campaigns and politicians with influencers as an integral part of their digital strategy. Veteran Democratic operatives like Teddy Goff see this move as a natural next step. Teddy Goff, Former Obama Campaign Digital Director: You know, I think, especially for young people, but for an increasing number of old people, their perception of the war in Gaza, their perception of LGBTQ rights and all these other issues are being shaped by the experience that they're having on having on TikTok. And I think it behooves politicians to be there if they want to have a voice in that conversation. Woman: President Joe Biden! Laura Barron-Lopez: As long as campaigns remain on social media, there is a lurking threat of disinformation. But it's a threat that Goff says is best confronted head on. Teddy Goff: I think there's even more danger in not being on it. I mean, if you're President Biden, disinformation about you can be spreading on TikTok whether you're on it or not. And so you're going to stand a better chance of combating that disinformation if you're on it. Laura Barron-Lopez: I mean, how do you know that what you are putting out there on social media is actually persuading voters or is influencing any voters at all? Teddy Goff: It's really tough to know that. I think, for that matter, it's really tough to know that with television ads too and with speeches. You can measure whether people are getting to the end of your video, let's say, or dropping off halfway through your video. So there are all these proxy metrics for efficacy. But I think, ultimately, what you — you can't know that each individual post is effective. Laura Barron-Lopez: Former President Trump isn't on some mainstream platforms like TikTok, instead using his own social media platform, TRUTH Social, which he founded after getting kicked off X, formerly known as Twitter, in the aftermath of January 6. And his campaign points to what they call an organic ecosystem of social media loyalists like Joe Rogan, Libs of TikTok, and Diamond and Silk that have grown over the years, especially on YouTube. Woman: These people are so scared of President Trump. First off, they know they can't beat him. Laura Barron-Lopez: Only the November result will reveal whether the investment in influencers translates to votes. For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Laura Barron-Lopez.

PBS Panics Over Dip in LGBTQ Support As 'Queers' 'Assert Their Rights'

PBS again went to bat for the “LGBTQ-Plus” warriors on the PBS News Weekend Sunday, lamenting a slight dip in America’s gushing over the alphabet folks in “U.S. support for LGBTQ+ rights is declining after decades of support. Here’s why.” In the show introduction, anchor John Yang fretted over “declining support for LGBTQ-plus rights, reversing years of increasing support,” then cut to pollster Melissa Deckmant to blame (who else?) Republicans: "And I think what`s happening is that you see many Republican leaders and red states really trying to amp up the volume, so to speak, on LGBTQ rights, and really trying to claw back some of those rights across the country."     Already the scene had been set -- you know which side to take and who to boo and hiss at, courtesy of your tax dollars. Yang had the new alphabet down pat in this story, which overhyped a downward wiggle in polling data (based on new research from a left-wing polling firm, the Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, of which Deckman was the CEO). Reporter William Brangham boasted about the question they used to measure “gender identity”: “What sex were you assigned at birth on your original birth certificate?” Adding: "The survey showed for the first time support fell for key policies regarding LGBTQ rights, backing for same sex marriage dropped two percentage points, support for non-discrimination protections dropped four points and opposition to people refusing services based on religious grounds dropped five points." Brangham talked to Deckman about the results, “the first time you`ve seen it a downward tick in those numbers. What how do you explain that?” Acceptance of LGBTQ was not enough -- unanimous approval was required by the gender-obsessed left and Republicans were the problem: DECKMAN: We saw much deeper declines, for example, among Republicans in terms of their support for these issues, whereas Democrats tended to stay relatively stable. And I think what’s happening is that you see many Republican leaders in red states, really trying to amp up the volume, so to speak, on LGBTQ rights, and really trying to claw back some of those rights across the country. And I think that`s had a spillover effect nationally in terms of the attitudes of Republicans, especially on issues with respect to LGBTQ rights. Brangham’s suggested explanation for the decline – of persecuted LGBTQ people merely beginning to “assert their rights” -- was a pretty benign description of the media-supported revolution that’s taken place the last several years, including “Bake the cake, bigot!” extremists on the gay-marriage front, and successfully pressuring social media outlets and real-life institutions to deplatform users and fire employees for the crime of “misgendering” biological men. (And threatening Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling with arrest under new “hate crimes” law in Scotland.) "I mean, is it perhaps also possible that as people start to identify more publicly and assert their rights and take a more prominent place in society, that we could be seeing the traces of a backlash here?," Branham wondered. Deckman blamed Christians: "As you might imagine, Americans who have a tendency to support Christian nationalism are far less likely to support the rights of LGBTQ Americans, in part because of the theological opposition to the idea of really homosexuality and being queer to begin with…" And since it was a presidential election year, a call to activism was proclaimed: BRANHAM: For people who are LGBTQ or work to help solidify their rights, what does this survey data tell you about what work lies ahead for them? DECKMAN: ….There's now a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. And there's indication that the rights of same-sex marriage are going to be on the line you're going to have legal challenges from conservative groups are going to be fighting to rollback those rights. And I think that this is just a good reminder that those rights shouldn't be taken for granted that it's going to take political organizing, and that elections have consequences. And so the word went out over the tax-funded airwaves: Vote Biden! This segment was brought to you in part by BNSF Railway. A transcript is available, click “Expand.” PBS News Weekend 3/17/24 7:12:50 p.m. (ET) JOHN YANG: For the last few decades, the story of LGBTQ plus rights in America has been one of increasing public support. But now a new survey finds that for the first time in years, there`s a slight decline in that support. William Brangham takes a closer look. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Throughout 2023, the Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, interviewed over 22,000 adults for what it calls its American Values Atlas. Last week, the Organization released its findings on views about LGBTQ rights in the US. The survey showed for the first time support fell for key policies regarding LGBTQ rights, backing for same sex marriage dropped two percentage points, support for non-discrimination protections dropped four points and opposition to people refusing services based on religious grounds dropped five points. To help us understand this data, we are joined by CEO of PRRI Melissa Deckman. You`ve been doing this survey for years. And this being the first time you`ve seen it a downward tick in those numbers. What how do you explain that? MELISSA DECKMAN, CEO, Public Religion Research Institute: Yeah, we were somewhat surprised to see after several years of increasing support among Americans for LGBTQ rights, that we saw a decline. But I think if you look under the hood, so to speak, and look at the data more closely, it`s really largely driven by party polarization. And so we saw much deeper declines, for example, among Republicans in terms of their support for these issues, whereas Democrats tended to stay relatively stable. And I think what`s happening is that you see many Republican leaders in red states, really trying to amp up the volume, so to speak on LGBTQ rights, and really trying to claw back some of those rights across the country. And I think that`s had a spillover effect nationally in terms of the attitudes of Republicans, especially on issues with respect to LGBT rights. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: In your survey, you`re talking to people who both affiliate with a particular religion and also non-religious people as well, correct? MELISSA DECKMAN: That`s right. So our surveys are done among Americans nationally. One great thing about the ABA is we also have enough data to look at opinions in all 50 states. But essentially, we get a snapshot of all Americans, including people of faith and people who are unaffiliated. I think it`s also important to bear in mind that despite these declines that we`ve seen, the vast majority of people of faith continue to support the rights of LGBTQ Americans, especially with respect to same sex marriage and non-discrimination laws. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So for someone who might look at this and think, Oh, what a 2 percent decline or a 5 percent decline is not that substantial. What Why does this really stand out to you? MELISSA DECKMAN: I think it stands out. Because with respect to LGBT rights, we`re generally there has been a growing increase in support among Americans. And part of that is a reflection of the fact that more Americans, especially younger Americans, are identifying as LGBTQ. So younger Americans, more Americans have friends who are LGBTQ, they themselves are LGBTQ, they have colleagues. So there has been this assumption that as we become more, I think, accepting of LGBT Americans in our daily lives, that it would just naturally lend itself to people being more supportive of protecting the rights of LGBTQ Americans. But I think this data shows you that that`s not necessarily an assumption that is true. And so it`s something important to monitor and keep aware of. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I mean, is it perhaps also possible that as people start to identify more publicly and assert their rights and take a more prominent place in society, that we could be seeing the traces of a backlash year? MELISSA DECKMAN: I think that`s exactly what you`re seeing. One of the things that we analyze in the report is we look at the relationship between Christian nationalist views and support for LGBTQ rights. As you might imagine, Americans who have a tendency to support Christian nationalism are far less likely to support the rights of LGBTQ Americans, in part because of the theological opposition to the idea of really homosexuality and being queer to begin with. And so I think that there`s that important relationship there that we have to really keep in mind. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: You`re talking about are there other below the top lines here other data points that really that were of interest to you? MELISSA DECKMAN: We were really surprised in our findings that younger Americans have trended downward with respect to support for LGBTQ rights. If you look at our data, we find that roughly one in five Americans aged 18 to 29 identify as LGBTQ. But yet what`s happened over the past couple of years is that there`s been a slight decline among younger Americans. I think the assumption was that because younger Americans are more likely to identify as queer that we`d always have younger Americans being more supportive. Again, though, you have to look under the hood. It`s really party polarization that is driving down support among younger Americans for same sex marriage, for example. So one number really stands out to us. If you look at young Americans attitudes about same sex marriage, and 2020 among Republicans, two thirds supported same sex marriage rights. But in last year`s data among young Republicans aged 18 to 29, it`s less than half, that`s a really big cratering of support. I think there was often an assumption among many political analysts that younger Republicans would moderate the party with respect to things like LGBTQ rights, or even abortion rights or climate change, et cetera. But what we`re finding in this data is that younger Republicans are very conservative socially. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So interesting. For people who are LGBTQ or work to help solidify their rights, what does this survey data tell you about what work lies ahead for them? MELISSA DECKMAN: Well, I think there`s the survey data, it really points, as we like to say, the canary in the coal mine idea that you can assume that such rights are going to be held in perpetuity or will increase. And you can also assume just because the vast majority of Americans support these rights, that those rights are going to be legally protected, especially in wake of the Dobbs decision.

PBS ‘Pregnant People’ Propaganda: Catholic Hospitals ‘Restrict Reproductive Health Care’

Sunday’s edition of PBS News Weekend ran yet another propagandistic take on how the lack of access to abortions and treatment of related pregnancy complications was the fault of Catholic hospitals: “Investigation finds policies at Catholic-run hospitals restrict reproductive health care.” (That’s progressive-speak for “abortion.”) From the introduction by weekend anchor John Yang: Tonight on PBS News Weekend, with hundreds of thousands of Americans relying on Catholic hospitals, why some people are facing barriers to reproductive health care…." Aren’t “people” who get pregnant generally referred to as women? Yang later got specific with the silly woke terminology, a religious bow to the trans movement as well as denial of 5th-grade biology: “Pregnant people.” (And Yang has done it before.) Yang: Every year, more than 3.6 million babies are born in the United States. And according to KFF Health News, more than a half million of them are about 16 percent are delivered in Catholic run hospitals. In most cases there no complications and the birth is much like one in any hospital. But if there's an emergency, pregnant people can find themselves caught between accepted medical standards and the religious-based policies of Catholic-run facilities. KFF Health News found that for nearly 800,000 Americans, there’s little choice. They have only Catholic or Catholic-affiliated birth hospitals within an hour’s drive. KFF Health News reporter Rachana Pradhan is one of the writers of the story…. (Would PBS prefer no Catholic hospitals – i.e. no care -- at all?) Pradhan, a reporter for KFF Health News, relayed a hard case from her reporting. Rachana Pradhan: ….One in particular involves a nurse midwife who spoke with me who used to work, do deliveries at a Catholic hospital in Maryland .She encountered a woman who showed up at this hospital because her water had broken before her fetus was viable, so the baby would not survive outside of the womb. And what she told us was, this patient expressed a desire to terminate the pregnancy because she knew that there was little chance of survival. And what happened was, as this nurse midwife told us, the doctor said that they couldn't do anything, because there were still detectable fetal-heart tones. And so their hands were totally tied. That is not often what would happen in a non-Catholic hospital, and goes against accepted medical standards for treating that kind of pregnancy complication. Yang: What are some of the sort of the range of medical choices that clinicians and healthcare providers would want to make or have wanted to make at a Catholic-run hospital but have not been allowed to because of the hospital’s policies? Pradhan: ….what we found based on talking to clinicians, reading research, and also talking to patients are that these very fraught and difficult situations in which someone's pregnancy goes awry, in which a complication happens that’s quite serious and could obviously threaten the viability of that baby. In situations like that, these ethical and religious directives that apply to Catholic health-care facilities, essentially, what they say is that these hospitals are prohibited or limited in doing certain procedures that the Catholic Church finds to be immoral….Because these Catholic health-care standards, the baby is still alive. And so that would constitute an abortion and they are obviously opposed to abortions. Prodded by Yang, Pradhan noted the Catholic Health Association “took issue with our story. After it came out, they released a statement that said that it perpetuates myths about Catholic health care.” Pradhan “stood by her reporting.” Yang forgot the required LGBTQ recitation for a second. Yang: For women who feel that they were not treated properly or didn’t receive the proper medical treatment at these hospitals, is there any legal recourse for them? What ever happened to “pregnant people”? This segment was brought to you in part by BDO. A transcript is available, click “Expand.” PBS News Weekend 3/17/24 7:05:36 p.m. (ET) JOHN YANG: Every year, more than 3.6 million babies are born in the United States. And according to KFF Health News, more than a half million of them are about 16 percent are delivered in Catholic run hospitals. In most cases there no complications and the birth is much like one in any hospital. But if there`s an emergency pregnant people can find themselves caught between accepted medical standards and the religious base policies of Catholic run facilities. KFF Health News found that for nearly 800,000 Americans, there`s little choice. They have only Catholic or Catholic affiliated birth hospitals within an hour`s drive. KFF Health News reporter Rachana Pradhan is one of the writers of the story, which is the product of almost two years of reporting. Rachana, you talked to a lot of women who had complications while being treated in Catholic run hospitals. What did they tell you? What is there a story, one particular story that sort of emblematic to you? RACHANA PRADHAN, Reporter, KFF Health News: Absolutely, John. And I will say that, in particular, talking to clinicians, like physicians and nurse practitioners and other medical clinicians that treat patients in these hospitals, really were the ones that shared incredible stories with us. One in particular involves a nurse midwife who spoke with me who used to work, do deliveries at a Catholic hospital in Maryland, she encountered a woman who showed up at this hospital because her water had broken before her fetus was viable, so the baby would not survive outside of the womb. And what she told us was, this patient expressed a desire to terminate the pregnancy because she knew that there was little chance of survival. And what happened was, as this nurse midwife told us, the doctor said that they couldn`t do anything, because there were still detectable fetal heart tones. And so their hands were totally tied. That is not often what would happen in a non-Catholic hospital, and goes against accepted medical standards for treating that kind of pregnancy complication. JOHN YANG: What are some of the sort of the range of medical choices that clinicians and healthcare providers would want to make or have wanted to make at a Catholic general hospital but have not been allowed to because the hospitals policies? RACHANA PRADHAN: I think, in particular, what we found based on talking to clinicians, reading research, and also talking to patients are that these very fraught and difficult situations in which someone`s pregnancy goes awry, in which a complication happens that`s quite serious and could obviously threaten the viability of that baby. In situations like that, these ethical and religious directives that apply to Catholic health care facilities, essentially, what they say is that these hospitals are prohibited or limited in doing certain procedures that the Catholic Church finds to be immoral. So overarchingly what this can affect is care during pregnancy complications, it can affect birth control the availability of birth control at these facilities. And in situations like the one I just talked about, it means that the pregnancy terminations may not be offered. Because these Catholic healthcare standards, the baby is still alive. And so that would constitute an abortion and they are obviously opposed to abortions. JOHN YANG: Do these hospitals have any policies on referrals, referrals to other facilities that might be able to do those things? RACHANA PRADHAN: Yes. So the Catholic health directives do address referrals. And this doesn`t only apply to pregnancy terminations, but other types of care too, namely, procedures that can prevent pregnancy. So both men and women, frankly, vasectomies, or let`s say, a woman who wants to get her fallopian tubes removed because she does not want to have any more children. They`re also restricted from making referrals. Because in the eyes of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is the organization that crafts these directives, and the church, a physician referring for a procedure or care that they have deemed immoral, that also goes too far. And so it can limit the ability for a patient to receive care at another facility, or at the very least, they have to take it much more upon themselves to figure out where they might be able to go because the Catholic health care facility cannot get so involved. JOHN YANG: to the church leaders like the diocesan Archbishop`s, did they have a role in the medical policies of hospitals? RACHANA PRADHAN: So the ethical and religious directives are really broad guidelines. And what we learned is that, depending on a particular Bishop of a particular diocese, sometimes policies will apply more strictly in certain places than others. And so I think that`s actually, at least based on the conversations we have with clinicians, I think that`s actually part of the frustration is that these things are not black and white. And they can change depending on who essentially is in charge. And the bishops obviously have a role in this. They`re not based on what we learned. They`re not the ones who are making these difficult calls in certain situations to provide health care, but they are responsible for overseeing enforcement of the directives broadly. JOHN YANG: What do Catholic hospitals say? Or how did they they responded or reacted to your reporting? RACHANA PRADHAN: Well, the Catholic Health Association, who we spoke with for our story before it published, they say that the ERDs, as they are known, do not prevent physicians from providing medically indicated care, especially in these situations involving very serious potentially life threatening pregnancy complications. And they also took issue with our story. After it came out, they released a statement that said that it perpetuates myths about Catholic health care. I will say that we stand by our reporting, as you noted, we worked on this for nearly two years and talk to many, many, many people, including patients, doctors, nurse practitioners, midwives, and others who have really studied this field a lot, and could very clearly state what the impacts are on patients. JOHN YANG: For women who feel that they were not treated properly or didn`t receive the proper medical treatment at these hospitals. Is there any legal recourse for them? RACHANA PRADHAN: So broadly speaking, most of the states in the country, we found have liability shields for hospitals, when they refuse to perform certain types of care because of moral or religious objection. And those laws exist all over the US. And they apply to at least some hospitals in every not every state, but really the vast majority. For other types of medicine for a whole host of procedures, you could potentially take up a medical malpractice case against an individual provider or a hospital. But in these situations, basically what state law says in the states is that the hospitals are shielded from being held liable in these types of situations. JOHN YANG: Rachana Pradhan of KFF Health News, thank you very much. RACHANA PRADHAN: Thank you, John, for having me.

NY Times Tech Guy Sees ‘Bigots’ on Social Media, Gets Touchy When He’s Smeared Too

New York Times tech reporter/columnist Kevin Roose is notorious here at NewsBusters for hailing a gay-Marxist activist who successfully “demonetized” a conservative comedian’s YouTube account, and for nudging social media platforms toward anti-conservative censorship. While Roose surely surprised readers with his reluctant approval of a TikTok ban in his Friday piece, “TikTok Is Its Own Worst Enemy,” his reasoning was unintentionally amusing and revealing of hypocrisy. I was really rooting for TikTok. In 2020, when the Trump administration first tried to force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app or risk having it shut down, I argued that banning TikTok in the United States would do more harm than good. Why? Partly because TikTok seemed like a convenient scapegoat for problems -- invasive data collection, opaque content policies, addictive recommendation algorithms -- that plagued all the big social media apps, and partly because I never bought the argument that the app was a Chinese spying tool hiding in plain sight. …. But over the past few weeks, as a bipartisan bill that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok hurtled toward passage in Congress, I’ve warmed up to the idea that banning TikTok, or forcing its sale, is probably a good idea. What changed his mind? For one, a TikTok executive suggested Roose was an anti-Chinese “bigot.” Mostly, TikTok tried to keep its head down, while privately suggesting that anyone who dared to question the company’s ties to the Chinese government was engaging in paranoid, and perhaps racist, fear mongering….the company also wielded accusations of xenophobia against good-faith skeptics who simply wanted to know how an app owned by a Chinese tech conglomerate could be free of Chinese influence, given Beijing’s track record of meddling with its tech companies. (I’ll never forget the time a few years ago when a TikTok executive suggested that I was a bigot for raising questions about whether Mr. Chew -- who, importantly, was also serving as ByteDance’s chief financial officer at the time -- felt pressure to adhere to Chinese censorship laws.) Yet this same reporter has filed some dozen stories referencing the need to crack down on the “bigots and trolls” infesting social media platforms. A small sampling: From July 2020’s “Goodbye to the Wild Wild Web.” The internet giants’ unwillingness to make rules (and then, later, their inability to enforce them) empowered a generation of bigots and media manipulators who are now among our most influential public figures. From a June 2020 story: Twitter has been a supporter of Black Lives Matter for years -- remember Mr. Dorsey’s trip to Ferguson? -- but it, too, has a problem with racists and bigots using its platform to stir up unrest….these companies’ own products -- Facebook, Twitter and YouTube -- have been successfully weaponized by racists and partisan provocateurs, and are being used to undermine Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements. From October 2022: It’s possible that, as Mr. Musk suggests, relaxing Twitter’s rules could revitalize it, or bring lapsed users back to the platform. It’s also possible that it could empower bigots and trolls, and undo years of work that made the platform safer for users and more attractive to advertisers…. Perhaps Roose’s most obnoxious report was his unswerving February 2020 hagiography of gay Marxist activist Carlos Maza for demonetizing conservative comedian Stephen Crowder: Carlos Maza believes that YouTube is a destructive, unethical, reckless company that amplifies bigots and profits off fascism. Now it’s also his meal ticket.

PBS: Blame Conservative Crackdown on DEI for ‘Chilling Effect’ on Black Female Professors

Thursday’s edition of the PBS NewsHour featured another way for the taxpayer-supported news outlet to section off certain subjects from balanced discussion -- a “Race Matters” segment on the alleged struggles black women face in academia had no dissenting voices, just the host and the guest agonizing over the purported problem. The story was driven by the suicide of a college administrator in Missouri and also, more puzzlingly, by the travails of black academic Claudine Gay, who resigned as president of Harvard after her offensive performance failing to condemn anti-Semitism on her campus, followed by proven instances of plagiarism in her academic work. Was it because she was black? That’s what PBS wants you to consider. Anchor Geoff Bennett: The death of an administrator at Lincoln University in Missouri earlier this year has sparked outrage and broader concern about the treatment of black women in higher education. Antoinette Candia-Bailey died by suicide in January and left scathing letters where she alleged a pattern of bullying and harassment at the hands of the university's president, John B. Moseley. He is now on paid administrative leave pending an investigation. That came just weeks after Harvard's former president, Claudine Gay, resigned under pressure, all of it leading to a dialogue in academia about the particular challenges and pressures that black women face. We spoke to a few women about this as part of our ongoing coverage of Race Matters, and here's part of what they told us. Three black female academics appeared as talking heads to make rote complaints about “microaggressions” and lack of institutional support, though frankly it’s hard to believe liberal academia wouldn’t bend over backward to help black professors succeed. Bennett: Let's talk more about the particular stresses that black women in academia face. Dr. Bridget Goosby is professor of sociology and co-director of the LifeHD Health Disparities Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin….Two consistent themes we heard from the professors who spoke with us, the sense of isolation and a lack of support. How does that square with what you found in your own research? Goosby: That is definitely commiserate with what we're finding in the work that we're doing right now, collecting data on black women faculty on the tenure track, that they do experience forms of isolation, feeling like they are left out. Networks are not available to them. They're available to their colleagues…. Bennett: And we should say that academia can be a high-pressure, high-stress, intense, some might say toxic environment no matter one's background. What are some of the particular pressures that black women face in higher education? Academia is especially toxic for political conservatives, but don’t expect that to make the NewsHour anytime soon. The stilted segment format allowed Bennett to suggest conservatives were hurting black female academics without being challenged. Bennett: How has the conservative crackdown on DEI initiatives, diversity, equity, and inclusion, how has that affected the effort to attract and retain black women in higher education? Dr. Bridget Goosby: So, this is, we're still in the nascent stages of this, but I will say that it is definitely something that's going to continue to have a chilling effect on the ability to recruit and retain black women in academia. As was mentioned, can you really advise women to go into -- black women to go into these spaces, when we're being publicly kind of singled out and discredited, and now without the kind of protections of DEI, which was -- as a system, was there to kind of help with increasing diversity and inclusion overall being gone? This means that this could be a complicated situation for black women to be in, without having the kinds of protections that might have been put forward by DEI previously. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives have recently demonstrated their uselessness in actually protecting minorities who are truly disadvantaged on college campuses -- Jewish faculty and students. That's another topic that won’t make tax-funded PBS. This segment was brought to you in part by BNSF Railway. A transcript is available, click “Expand.” PBS NewsHour 3/14/24 7:31:07 p.m. (ET) Geoff Bennett: The death of an administrator at Lincoln University in Missouri earlier this year has sparked outrage and broader concern about the treatment of black women in higher education. Antoinette Candia-Bailey died by suicide in January and left scathing letters where she alleged a pattern of bullying and harassment at the hands of the university's president, John B. Moseley. He is now on paid administrative leave pending an investigation. That came just weeks after Harvard's former president, Claudine Gay, resigned under pressure, all of it leading to a dialogue in academia about the particular challenges and pressures that black women face. We spoke to a few women about this as part of our ongoing coverage of Race Matters, and here's part of what they told us. Kecia Thomas, University of Alabama at Birmingham: I'm Kecia Thomas. I'm at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Candace Parrish, University of North Carolina, Wilmington: My name is Dr. Candace Parrish, and I am currently a visiting assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Chaya Crowder, Loyola Marymount University: My name is Chaya Crowder and I am an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Kecia Thomas: I certainly had not been exposed to a case as tragic as Dr. Bailey's, although, for those of us in higher ed, especially those of us who are in senior positions or leadership positions, it is often a conversation around the chronic stress that we experience, the burnout that is experienced, but also the isolation that has followed us for our entire careers. Candace Parrish: I was very sad that it had gone so far and that she felt like she did not have the resources or what she needed to overcome this sort of situation. And it just got me thinking about how many more people like myself actually experience the sort of travesties in academia. Chaya Crowder: I have absolutely experienced microaggressions with regard to the intersection of both my race and gender. In my entire time in my Ph.D. program, there was never another black person above me or below me in American Politics. And so it was a very isolating experience. Kecia Thomas: I have had those experiences, as have my colleagues, and it's not simply within our career. It starts in college and graduate school, and some of us even earlier. And so many of us see our education as an investment in our future and the futures of our families. Candace Parrish: In my Ph.D. Program, it was a very, very tough experience in which there were several periods where I almost quit. There was a lack of support and there were people who are in charge of my academic destiny as a Ph.D. student who were manipulating things to go against my favor. Chaya Crowder: With everything happening in the world right now, when there are coordinated efforts on the part of individuals and institutions to attack the credibility of your academic work, and that's already something that brings anxieties, it can be particularly distressing. Kecia Thomas: Some of what we have talked about today, I have heard similar complaints from colleagues in law, in medicine, industries across the board. I think higher ed is different because oftentimes we are so severely underrepresented. Candace Parrish: I have actually stopped recommending academia as a valid job and community position to young people who want to pursue Ph.D.s in teaching. I cannot vouch for their experiences, knowing the horrible things that I have gone through and how much emotional time and space it has taken. Geoff Bennett: Let's talk more about the particular stresses that black women in academia face. Dr. Bridget Goosby is professor of sociology and co-director of the LifeHD Health Disparities Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. Thanks so much for being with us. Dr. Bridget Goosby, The University of Texas at Austin: Thank you so much for having me, Geoff. Geoff Bennett: Two consistent themes we heard from the professors who spoke with us, the sense of isolation and a lack of support. How does that square with what you found in your own research? Dr. Bridget Goosby: That is definitely commiserate with what we're finding in the work that we're doing right now, collecting data on Black women faculty on the tenure track, that they do experience forms of isolation, feeling like they are left out. Networks are not available to them. They're available to their colleagues. And the experiences of this lack of support that they have is definitely something that we're seeing in the work that we're doing. Geoff Bennett: And we should say that academia can be a high-pressure, high-stress, intense, some might say toxic environment no matter one's background. What are some of the particular pressures that Black women face in higher education? Dr. Bridget Goosby: This speaks to what the women in the interviews were already saying, which is that we tend to be underrepresented. We make up 3.7 percent of overall of tenure track faculty in the United States. And so, when we think about the high pressure of the positions of being faculty members, this means that, on top of the stress and demand of being researchers, productive researchers, successful teachers, we also are in a space where people may not even recognize that we are the onlys, and that our experience is unique, and that we are more likely to experience racism and sexism, the intersections of those things in those spaces. We're also more likely to be cut out of networks because we don't fit necessarily because we are so underrepresented. So, there are a litany of different situations that make our experience as Black women unique in the stressful conditions that we face as tenure track faculty or faculty in higher education. Geoff Bennett: What do viable solutions look like at this point? Dr. Bridget Goosby: Well, viable solutions would be, one, identifying the stressors that Black women are facing and trying to mitigate the situations that they're in, protections for women who are experiencing racism, harassment, discrimination in these spaces, recognizing the fact that we come from a historically disadvantaged group and are underrepresented, which means that, in these spaces, we are experiencing a lot of these kinds of stressors without the kinds now — increasingly, possibly without the kinds of protections that we would like to see more of moving forward. Geoff Bennett: How has the conservative crackdown on DEI initiatives, diversity, equity, and inclusion, how has that affected the effort to attract and retain Black women in higher education? Dr. Bridget Goosby: So, this is — we're still in the nascent stages of this, but I will say that it is definitely something that's going to continue to have a chilling effect on the ability to recruit and retain Black women in academia. As was mentioned, can you really advise women to go into — Black women to go into these spaces, when we're being publicly kind of singled out and discredited, and now without the kind of protections of DEI, which was — as a system, was there to kind of help with increasing diversity and inclusion overall being gone? This means that this could be complicated situation for Black women to be in, without having the kinds of protections that might have been put forward by DEI previously. Geoff Bennett: Dr. Bridget Goosby, we appreciate your insights and your time this evening. Thank you. Dr. Bridget Goosby: Thank you.