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MAGA Pundits: Trump Can Resolve Iran War Divide By Mass Deporting Muslims

MAGA Pundits: Trump Can Resolve Iran War Divide By Mass Deporting Muslims

Influential right-wing voices are seeking to bridge the divide in MAGA media over Donald Trump's war in Iran by urging the president to launch a new phase of mass deportations targeting American Muslims for denaturalization and removal.

Trump’s deployment of the U.S. military alongside Israeli forces in a massive series of strikes on Iranian targets is fracturing his MAGA media machine as commentators scramble to stake out opposing positions, bash those on the other side (if generally not the president himself), and seize audience share.

Fox’s Sean Hannity and Mark Levin and The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro are among the most outspoken supporters of the war, while Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Steve Bannon are some of its most vocal critics. The feud has become heated: On Tuesday, Kelly called Hannity a “supplicant to Donald Trump” (true) while Shapiro denounced Kelly as an “unbelievable coward” and Carlson as a conspiracy-obsessed antisemite (also true).

These splits in the MAGAsphere have become a frequent feature of the second Trump administration, with the coalition of right-wing extremists that supported his election fracturing over his handling of issues like the Russia-Ukraine war, tariffs, U.S. strikes on Iran, immigration enforcement and reforms, and, most of all, the Jeffrey Epstein case.

The right-wing media ecosystem is at its most politically potent when it is united, and Trump often tries to respond to these divisions by giving the feuding pundits a common enemy to attack instead. When portions of his base revolted over the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files last year, for example, he went so far as to dangle the arrest and imprisonment of former President Barack Obama over a nonsensical conspiracy theory.

Benny Johnson and Matt Walsh, both popular podcasters who are skeptical of the Iran war but support the president, are urging Trump to deploy a similar strategy now. They want the president to reunite his supporters by proposing something they can all agree with: The brutal use of state power to punish Muslim Americans, particularly those with left-wing views. Johnson and Walsh argue that such individuals must be repressed because they constitute “the enemy” and “a clear and present danger to the lives of American citizens.”

Benny Johnson: “It’s time for “mass deportations” and “mass denaturalizations” of Muslims

“Whatever you think about the Iran war, this moment should be the absolute and total initiation point for mass deportations, grand and mass deportations of every criminal alien, mass denaturalizations of everyone who gives aid and comfort to the enemy,” Johnson said on Tuesday.

“There is an enemy,” he continued. “There are ideologies that are incompatible with Western civilization. That is a matter of fact, and we should not want them inside of our lands. It doesn't mean that we need to go kill them in their lands, but we shouldn't want them in our lands.”

Johnson went on to describe Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) as “a walking billboard for what happens when you allow this to fester,” saying that her presence at the State of the Union as a Muslim immigrant from Somalia who criticizes the president was an “insult” that “should make all Americans demand mass deportations, and immediately.”


Matt Walsh: “You should be on board” with mass deportations and denaturalizations of Muslims

Walsh warned on his podcast the same day — which was titled “The Biggest Threat To Our Country Is Inside Our Border” — that “we can’t end up with a situation where we’re fighting Muslim terrorists overseas while hordes of anti-American Muslims continue to stream into the United States.”

“If you look at the history of Muslim migration to the United States and how quickly our demographics changed, you begin to realize how dire this problem is,” he explained. After highlighting the growth of the Muslim immigrant population alongside atrocities committed by individual foreign Muslims, Walsh concluded that “this is the culture that we’ve been importing.”

Walsh went on to suggest that “more likely, all of this migration is part of the larger effort to dilute the votes of American citizens by replacing us with foreigners who despise the United States,” adding, “The top priority of this administration should be to reverse this catastrophic and deliberate effort to fundamentally alter the demographics of this country.”

“This is the top national security threat we face, and it’s not even close,” Walsh said. “So even if you support the current war in Iran, you should be on board with this — every single one of these Third World foreigners is a clear and present danger to the lives of American citizens.”

Walsh went on to say that while mass deportations and denaturalizations could prove politically unpopular, ruinously expensive, or risky, such policies are no more so than the war Trump started in Iran.

Addressing Trump directly, he continued, “If we’re going to do something drastic and explosive and unpopular thousands of miles from home, why not do it here too? That’s the question that the base is asking. If we’re going to give a major prize to the donors and pundit class — people who have tried to undermine you every step of the way, people who oppose your domestic agenda, people who, many of them, want you to be impeached and in prison — if we’re going to reward them, then will we also reward your America First base?”

The pundit then laid out a series of steps to curtail legal immigration and deport immigrants, including urging the president to “strip citizenship from paper Americans who use the word ‘they’ when they describe our country.”

“Will you finish the thing you set out to achieve?” Walsh concluded. “Will you make America America great again?”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Behind War On Iran: The Fox News-White House Feedback Loop

Behind War On Iran: The Fox News-White House Feedback Loop

President Donald Trump, across both of his terms, has regularly shaped federal policy in response to the propaganda he hears from his sycophants at Fox News. But his decision over the weekend to launch a war of choice against Iran without a clear goal may prove to be the most consequential example of this feedback loop to date.

Trump is deeply immersed in the Fox universe. He famously consumes the network’s content; highlights particular segments that strike his fancy on social media; hires its employees to run his administration; consults its personalities for advice on domestic and foreign policy; and doles out contracts and pardons alike based on what he sees on its airwaves.

And for decades, the Fox stars Trump trusts most have consistently called for military strikes and regime change in Iran.

That campaign took on new urgency when Trump returned to the White House.

Last June, Fox personalities — particularly Trump loyalists Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Brian Kilmeade — used their programs to urge Trump to follow up on Israeli attacks on Iran by launching strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. They warned that Iran is, as Kilmeade put it, “our enemy,” that it posed an imminent threat to American citizens and that, in Levin’s words, “force” is the “only thing to stop” Iran.

Other MAGA media figures from non-Fox outlets opposed U.S. involvement in the conflict. But the overwhelmingly pro-war Fox coverage — and a White House meeting Levin had with the president — were apparently dispositive.

And after Trump ordered the U.S. military to attack three Iranian nuclear sites, Fox’s war hawks rewarded the president by showering him with praise for what Hannity said would “go down in history as one of the greatest military victories.”

The same pattern appears to be playing out eight months later, albeit on a much larger scale.

A Fox-fueled push for war with Iran

Over the past weeks, as U.S. military forces converged in the Middle East, the same Fox figures again urged Trump to attack. Notably, their argument was noticeably light on defining a goal for U.S. military operations after the bombs began to fall.

Instead, they argued that because Iran could, at some point in the future, pose a threat, Trump should act now while he is empowered to do so — and that the result would be an easy U.S. victory. “I cannot think of any reason not to take this regime out,” Levin argued. The U.S. would “lose credibility forever” without a strike, Kilmeade claimed. For Hannity, “The world is going to be better and safer.”

While some on the network seemed to shy away from the topic, criticism of potential strikes largely took place elsewhere in the MAGA media — outside of the Fox programming the president himself watches.

On Friday, hours before the attack began, the trio made their final pitch.

“I hope the president chooses to go at it,” Kilmeade said Friday morning. “We have been looking at these headlines for 47 years, and we have an opportunity to end it. And this president likes to make history.”

“This president knows right from wrong,” Levin told Hannity that night. “He knows good from evil. He knows that this regime is a death cult. And he knows that there's only really two countries that are prepared and willing to put an end to this.”

“We don't need to put up with their crap,” he concluded, as Hannity nodded along. “It's time to put it to an end.”

They got what they wanted: The U.S. and Israeli militaries began attacking Iranian targets that night. Since then, hundreds of Iranians have reportedly been killed, including Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the Pentagon has reported the first U.S. casualties in the conflict. There is no end currently in sight — the Iranian government remains defiant, while the U.S. is sending more troops to the region.

The propaganda war has an aim. The real one doesn’t.

Trump, meanwhile, has had trouble articulating what he’s trying to accomplish.

He first suggested his aim was regime change when he urged the Iranian people to “take over” the government in his first public statement after the attack, but in interviews since then, he just seems to be riffing. He told The Washington Post he is seeking “freedom for the people” of Iran, but he bemoaned to ABC News that regime figures he expected to take over the country had also been killed in the initial strikes. Trump also stressed to The New York Times that his model was the U.S. attack on Venezuela, where the dictatorial regime remained in place after U.S. forces seized its leader. But he also suggested that the Iranian military could turn over its arms to its public. “They would really surrender to the people, if you think about it,” he explained.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Fox & Friends host, added to the incoherence of the administration’s message when he said at a Monday morning press conference, “This is not a so-called 'regime change war,' but the regime sure did change.” But the Iranian regime currently remains in place, and according to at least some of his statements, Trump may prefer it that way.

Perhaps the reason there doesn’t seem to be a clear goal for the U.S. bombing of Iran is because the goal, as laid out by Trump’s Fox propagandists, was for the U.S. to bomb Iran. That is the aim the likes of Kilmeade, Hannity, and Levin had in mind, and now that they’ve goaded Trump into following through, they are cheering him on.

“Donald Trump did what nobody else could do for half a century,” Levin marveled on Saturday. “How do you like that? And you know why he did it? Because he loves his country.”

So what happens next in Iran? That’s beyond the remit of Trump’s Fox Cabinet. Instead, they are gearing up for a propaganda war in which they declare Trump a world-historic victor and paint his critics as terrorists and traitors. For them, the details of what happens to the Iranians is for someone else to handle.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like anyone within the official Trump administration has answers either.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

How Fox's Mark Levin And Sean Hannity Promoted Case For War On Iran

How Fox's Mark Levin And Sean Hannity Promoted Case For War On Iran

Hours before the United States and Israeli militaries began bombing Iranian targets in an open-ended conflict with no clear goal, Fox News’ two biggest advocates for such strikes made the case for war.

Fox’s Sean Hannity and Mark Levin share close ties to President Donald Trump and a decades–old desire for regime change in Iran. Both encouraged the president to launch strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last year, and, as U.S. forces amassed in the Middle East in recent weeks, used their programs once again to urge him to attack. By contrast, others on the right are bitterly opposed to U.S. strikes on Iran, and several of their Fox colleagues have avoided talking about the prospect of war.

On Friday night, Levin went on Hannity’s program to weigh in on what was, at the time, an impending U.S. strike.

The Trump administration has largely avoided giving a detailed rationale for war, and Levin and Hannity sought to fill that void. The Fox hosts did not argue that Iran was an imminent threat to the United States or declare that the U.S. would bring freedom, democracy, and human rights to the Iranian people. Instead, they said that Iran’s government is evil; that it could, at some point decades from now, pose a threat; that the United States is capable of destroying that government at little cost; and thus, that it should do so.

Hannity began their discussion by mocking those who prefer negotiations to military strikes as “isolationists” who are “so naive and on a level so ignorant about the history of evil in the world."

The host then turned to Levin, who began by praising Trump as someone who “believes in peace” before warning: “If this Islamic Nazi terrorist mass killing regime gets a nuclear weapon, will they use it? The answer is yes."

The New York Times noted Thursday that the administration’s claims “that Iran has restarted its nuclear program, has enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days, and is developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States” are “false or unproven.” But Levin argued that the lack of an imminent threat should not stay the president’s hand, because future U.S. generations could be endangered if Iran were to obtain a nuclear weapon.

“This president knows right from wrong,” Levin claimed. “He knows good from evil. He knows that this regime is a death cult. And he knows that there's only really two countries that are prepared and willing to put an end to this. That's the United States of America and the state of Israel. And if we don't do it, it's not going to be done. And if we don't do it, our children and grandchildren are going to face thousands of ballistic missiles that can reach the continental United States, scores of nuclear warheads, chemical warheads, biological warheads."

“We don't need to put up with their crap,” he concluded. “It's time to put it to an end.”

Hannity replied by stressing that a U.S. war with Iran would be easy, with little threat to American service members.

“I think the Trump doctrine is perfect, especially in light of the next-generation weaponry that has evolved,” he said. “And I've always said that I think future wars are not going to be fought on a battlefield. They'll be fought from air-conditioned offices somewhere, you know, in a room."

“And what is so amazing about the Trump doctrine — no forever wars, no boots on the ground, we’ll have the latest, greatest, best technology available, military technology available,” Hannity added.

Hannity went on to suggest that Americans who oppose striking Iran are “ignorant” and would have allowed Adolf Hitler to seize Europe, claiming that “that's the same radical mindset that's in Iran."

“The isolationists brought us Hitler,” Levin agreed, concluding, “When you have a seventh-century barbaric, primitive terrorist mass murdering regime with 21st century technology and they're unwilling to get rid of it, you better take them out because they're going to take you out."

“Well said,” Hannity replied.

During a Fox & Friends victory lap this morning after the strikes started, Levin lauded Trump as a “great president” and a “great leader” who will be talked about “for decades and decades, if not centuries.”

Addressing critics of the war, Levin said, “The president did this for several reasons, and you have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to understand what they are. In other words, you have to be intentionally trying to undermine our troops and him."

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters


David Ellison

Turning America Into Hungary, Trump Forces Netflix To Drop Warner Bid

Another major media conglomerate teeters on the precipice of being absorbed by a deep-pocketed ally of President Donald Trump and his administration.

At the end of last week, Netflix had a signed deal to purchase the theatrical and streaming divisions of Warner Bros., with the company’s cable division — including CNN — set to be spun off into a separate company. Netflix had previously defeated a rival offer for all of Warner Bros. from Paramount, the media conglomerate owned by David Ellison, a Trump favorite and the son of the president’s buddy Larry Ellison, the billionaire.

Since then:

  • On Saturday, Trump demanded that Netflix fire board member Susan Rice or face “consequences” while promoting an ally’s statement that he should “kill” the Netflix-Warner Bros. deal. (The president’s propagandists on Fox News had spent the previous days trying to turn Rice’s involvement with the company into a scandal.)
  • On Monday, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos refused Trump’s demand, saying, “This is a business deal. It's not a political deal."
  • On Tuesday, Warner Bros. announced it was considering a new bid from Paramount, putting the Netflix deal in doubt.
  • On Wednesday, Politico reported that Sarandos had a White House meeting the next day to discuss Netflix’s bid.
  • On Thursday, Warner Bros. said that it now viewed the Paramount bid as superior; soon after, Netflix said it would not raise its bid, effectively ceding to Paramount.

The rival bids provide the shape of what Sarandos described as “a business deal,” and surely all parties will present it as such. But no one else needs to pretend to be so gullible.

Trump wanted Warner Bros. assets — particularly CNN, whose reporters he loathes — in the hands of an ally. His public statements and White House leaks made it crystal clear both that he preferred that Paramount purchase Warner Bros., and that his administration would corruptly wield its regulatory power to thwart rival bidders. And the strategy seems to have succeeded.

The result reeks of a “political deal” in which the president steered the ownership of a major news outlet to his crony. That’s unconscionable in a free society — but a familiar tactic of authoritarian leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who dismantled his country’s independent news media through such methods in service of his vision of “illiberal democracy,” which Trump seeks to emulate.

It’s working. In less than a year, CBS News and the massive social media platform TikTok, along with Paramount’s movie studios, have come under the thumb of a single family of pro-Trump billionaires. If the Warner Bros. purchase goes through, CNN, along with HBO and Warner’s movie business, will join them.

For CBS News, the Ellison takeover has involved new right-wing newsroom leaders who impose onerous reviews of critical reporting, veteran journalists leaving for greener pastures, layoffs, and an influx of MAGA-friendly hires. CNN can expect the same treatment — indeed, the White House and Larry Ellison have reportedly already discussed the potential firing of particular CNN hosts “whom Donald Trump is said to loathe, including Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar.”

The owners of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, seem to have been suborned and are disemboweling their institutions, while ABC News’ corporate owners have repeatedly capitulated to the administration.

We’ve warned for years that Trump intended to employ an authoritarian’s playbook against the media. That’s exactly what he’s done since returning to office. And now that he’s learned how easy it is to get corporate media owners to dance to his tune, it seems certain that he’ll soon find another target.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Trump and Ellison

Trump Escalates His Corrupt Scheme To Deliver CNN To Billionaire Ellison

President Donald Trump’s second term has been characterized thus far by America’s corporate leaders, including the owners of major media outlets, caving to his authoritarian threats of corrupt state retaliation. But with Trump’s public support cratering to levels not seen since he encouraged a mob of his supporters to sack the U.S. Capitol in 2021, the tide may be starting to turn.

Trump demanded in a Saturday social media post that Netflix “IMMEDIATELY” fire Susan Rice, who served in senior posts in the Obama and Biden administrations, from its board of directors — or face unnamed “consequences.” At issue were comments Rice made on a podcast last week about future accountability for corporations that violate the law on Trump’s behalf, which MAGA media figures denounced as a sign that “Democrats are out for blood” and plotting “retribution.”

Though the president did not detail the “consequences” Netflix would suffer for failing to bow to his whim, he was responding to an ally who urged him to “kill the Netflix-Warner Bros. merger now.” Trump actually cannot unilaterally cancel Netflix’s bid to take over Warner’s theatrical and streaming assets — but his administration can force it into expensive regulatory and court battles.

And Warner Bros. could, in turn, decide to pull out of their deal rather than face that scrutiny, leaving a potential acquisition open to rival bidder Paramount. That would surely be the preferred result for Trump, and could place Warner Bros.’ CNN subsidiary in the hands of Paramount’s owner David Ellison, a Trump supporter whose right-skewed stewardship of CBS News has drawn praise from the president. Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, a megabillionaire and Trump ally, has reportedly already discussed with the White House which CNN hosts could be fired under their leadership.

But Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, thus far, has refused to cave to Trump’s pressure. “This is a business deal. It's not a political deal," he told the BBC on Monday. “This deal is run by the Department of Justice in the U.S. and regulators throughout Europe and around the world.”

Sarandos defended the merger on its merits and minimized the import of the president’s comments, saying, “He likes to do a lot of things on social media.”

While Sarandos could still reverse himself and capitulate to Trump — or Warner Bros. could fold and switch to Paramount’s bid — the Netflix head’s public comments nonetheless stand out when compared to the behavior of media moguls like Jeff Bezos or Bob Iger. As we learned in Trump’s first term, corporate media leaders can defeat Trump’s authoritarian tactics — but only if they are willing to stand up to him.

How the right-wing freakout over Susan Rice’s remarks reached Trump

Rice, in a Thursday interview, pilloried law firms, media outlets, corporations, and others that have decided to act “in their perceived very narrow self-interest” to “take a knee” for Trump during his second term. She repeatedly warned that if those entities violated the law, they would be “held accountable” when Democrats come back into power.

“If these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to, you know, play by the old rules, and say, ‘Oh, never mind, we’ll forgive you for all the people you fired, all the policies and principles you’ve violated, all, you know, the laws you’ve skirted,’ I think they’ve got another thing coming,” she told former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.

“You know, companies already are starting to hear they better preserve their documents,” she added. “They better be ready for subpoenas. If they’ve done something wrong, they’ll be held accountable, and if they haven’t broken the law, good for them.”

Right-wing media figures quickly seized on Rice’s comments, downplaying or ignoring the portions of her remarks in which she made clear that she was referring to entities that had broken the law in order to portray her as committing the Democrats to a campaign of retribution.

“Democrats are out for blood,” Fox News host Jesse Watters said Friday on The Five. “Former Obama lackey, Susan Rice, making it clear they want scalps if the Democrats take back power in the Midterms.

His co-host, Greg Gutfeld, added that what Rice was “saying is we'll destroy you when we come back unless you are obedient to us and do not play along,” adding that her remarks were “very anti-American.”

Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy, the wife of Transportation Secretary and former Fox host Sean Duffy, interviewed Fox host Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, about Rice’s comments Saturday morning.

“Lara, I mean, they are vindictive,” Campos-Duffy began. “They are mad that anyone would dare to work with President Trump in his administration, and basically they're saying paybacks are a you-know-what.”

Lara Trump, with a smirk, described Rice’s comments as “straight out of the authoritarian playbook” to “intimidate and threaten your political opponents.”

“It’s just so amazing to see that these people are the ones who call President Trump a fascist. That is the behavior they’re displaying with this sort of thing,” she later added. “And don’t forget, President Trump always said, he said during the campaign and you’ve seen it as proof when he’s now been back in office, ‘My revenge will be success, success for this country.’ What a great statement, and maybe the Democrats want to pay attention to that.”

In reality, Reuters documented “at least 470 targets of retribution under Trump’s leadership – from federal employees and prosecutors to universities and media outlets” in a November report. More than a dozen of Trump’s political adversaries have faced criminal investigations, with prosecutors seeking federal charges in many of those cases. Trump himself has personally ordered such prosecutions, and has replaced prosecutors who refused to file the charges he has demanded.

Later on Saturday, Laura Loomer, a deranged bigot who wields a disturbing amount of influence over the president and his administration, weighed in — and tied Rice’s remarks back to Netflix and its bid for Warner Bros.

“Does Netflix stand by their Board Member threatening half of the country with weaponized government and political retribution for choosing who they wanted to vote for as President?” she asked. “This is as anti-American as it gets, and Netflix is proving everyday they are an anti-American, WOKE company.”

Loomer added that Rice’s remarks are “more horrifying” because “if the Netflix-Warner Bros. merger is approved, positive messaging of the Democrats' upcoming witch hunts against Trump … would likely be blasted across all streaming services.”

“President Trump @POTUS must kill the Netflix-Warner Bros. merger now,” she concluded, adding the handle of Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr.

Loomer’s diatribe drew support from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which oversees the FCC. He wrote of Rice’s comments: “Does @netflix stand by their board member threatening punishment & persecution for half of America that dares to disagree with her?”

By the evening, Trump had signed on to Loomer’s rant.

Truth Social post

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters


Corrupted By Trump Allies, Paramount Is Mangling CBS-- And CNN May Be Next

Corrupted By Trump Allies, Paramount Is Mangling CBS-- And CNN May Be Next

The Tuesday announcement by Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN, that it is reopening deal talks with Paramount marks the latest example of President Donald Trump’s corrupt effort to quell dissent by pushing media companies into the hands of his supporters.

Warner Bros. agreed in December to sell its movie and streaming assets to Netflix and spin off its cable networks, including CNN, into a new entity. But Paramount, owned by David Ellison, the son of megabillionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison, is mounting a hostile bid to take over the entire company — and the Ellisons have a powerful ally in the White House.

Trump has spent the last decade waging war on the free press, which he regularly denounces for providing coverage he finds insufficiently sycophantic. He relies on state power to either cudgel media oligarchs into line or force them to sell to others who will, aping the authoritarian tactics of autocrats like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. This corrupt influence is particularly effective during media mergers — Netflix’s deal for Warner Bros. is facing a gauntlet of federal antitrust regulators, while a Paramount deal backed by Trump could sail through.

The Ellison takeover of Paramount subsidiary CBS demonstrates proof of concept for what CNN could look like under Paramount's auspices. Network employees have repeatedly warned in recent weeks that CBS is coming under the administration’s thumb. For those who appreciate the free press, these are worrisome signs that media independence is crumbling under Trump. To those within the administration, however, these warnings likely function as signals that the Ellisons are willing to carry out the president’s agenda — and that if Trump likes what the Ellisons are doing at CBS, he should help them buy Warner Bros. so they can do the same to CNN.

Stephen Colbert blows whistle on CBS bowing to Trumpist pressure

On Monday night, The Late Show host Stephen Colbert told his viewers that his interview with James Talarico, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, had been spiked by the network.

“He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast,” Colbert explained.

The lawyers, Colbert said, were worried about Brendan Carr, the Trumpy Federal Communications Commission chairman famous for briefly driving Jimmy Kimmel off the air last year by threatening ABC and network affiliates with regulatory retaliation because he disapproved of one of Kimmel’s jokes. In January, Carr issued a letter in which he warned that an exemption commonly applied to network interviews with politicians would not apply to late-night shows if the interviews were deemed to be “motivated by partisan purposes,” and thus such shows would need to provide equal time to every candidate.

CBS could try to defend the news value of Colbert’s interviews and fight Carr in court — but instead the network did what Carr apparently wanted, obeying in advance and keeping a critic of the Trump administration off its airwaves.

“Let’s just call this what it is,” Colbert concluded. “Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV, OK?”

CBS News journalists are leaving the network due to its right-wing takeover

Such capitulations are becoming more common at CBS News, where David Ellison installed anti-”woke” pundit Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief last year, according to a farewell note from longtime producer Alicia Hastey, who accepted a buyout from the network last week.

“There has been a sweeping new vision prioritizing a break from traditional broadcast norms to embrace what has been described as ‘heterodox’ journalism,” Hastey wrote. She warned that the network’s stories are now being “evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations — a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.”

Hastey did not give specific examples of this political skewing of the network’s journalism, and internal debates over stories are typically a black box to those of us watching from home. But the same week, Media Matters found that CBS Evening News — the network flagship news program helmed by Tony Dokoupil, a CBS veteran Weiss selected for the high-profile post — had effectively inverted a data analysis of immigration detentions published by the network’s website in order to hew closer to the Trump administration’s narratives.

The dynamics Hastey highlighted have other longtime CBS reporters looking for the exits. She was one of 11 Evening News production staff out of a total of roughly 40 to take buyouts. Turnover is also ongoing at 60 Minutes; news broke on Monday that Anderson Cooper is leaving his post as a correspondent for the program after two decades. Status’ Oliver Darcy reported that Cooper “had grown increasingly uneasy with the rightward direction the network has charted under Weiss’s leadership and David Ellison’s ownership of parent company Paramount,” and pointed to an “intense level of editorial scrutiny” given to a piece Cooper was reporting out on the Trump administration’s acceptance of white South African refugees.

Darcy also pointed to three other correspondents for the show who could also leave the network, including Sharyn Alfonsi, who had fought with Weiss over her delayed airing of a segment on the Trump administration’s rendition of immigrants to a Central American torture prison, as well as Scott Pelley and Lesley Stahl, who he noted “have been outspoken over the last year about the alarming state of affairs at CBS News.”

When reporters leave shows like 60 Minutes and CBS Evening News, they create openings for Weiss to fill, speeding up the timeline for her to mold the staff to her preferences. And her hiring preferences to date have included veterans of her right-wing Free Press outlet, as well as Mark Hyman, a physician and close ally of anti-vax House and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Peter Attia, a celebrity wellness influencer whose extensive communications with Jeffrey Epstein were revealed in a trove of files released by the Justice Department shortly after CBS announced his hiring.

CNN’s journalists can expect to be put through the same wringer if the Ellisons’ bid for Warner Bros. succeeds. For the Trump administration, that’s a reason to support it. In the current media environment, submission is a business model.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Fox News Raged Over Biden 'Corruption' -- And Now Covers Up For Trump

Fox News Raged Over Biden 'Corruption' -- And Now Covers Up For Trump

“We have a president of the United States who was potentially involved in all of those entanglements with foreign entities,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “which could lead to complications or compromise as the president now.”

Hegeth’s comment serves as a searing indictment of his current boss, President Donald Trump, whose “entanglements with foreign entities" deepen with each new investigative report on his family’s sprawling business interests and attempts to cash in on the presidency.

But of course, Hegseth wasn’t talking about the recent Wall Street Journal investigation revealing an apparent quid pro quo in which a Trump family company received a half-billion dollar investment from an Emirati prince days before the president took office, then the Trump administration funneled AI chips to the prince’s firm. The quote is actually from July 2023, and it shows Hegseth using his prior role as Fox News host to denounce then-President Joe Biden.

It is not an overstatement to say that arguing against foreign money influence on the White House was a defining principle for right-wing media during the Biden years. But their arguments were based in fantasy, and the Trump family’s corruption is both much more straightforward and involves sums of money that are larger by orders of magnitude.

Thanks to Trump’s propensity to hire the people he saw on his television, many of those who loudly complained about the purported corruption of the Biden family — and even called for the criminal prosecution of President Biden — are now working within the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the Fox smear machine that once went into overdrive promoting conspiracy theories about presidential corruption has gone quiet.

The Trump family’s corruption is orders of magnitude worse than the Biden allegations

Fox’s effort to turn Hunter Biden’s foreign business interests into a political liability for his father dates to Trump’s first administration, but became an obsession once Joe Biden took office in 2021. While the network’s narratives were never credible — and some even appeared to be the result of a Russian disinformation campaign — the pressure of its all-consuming coverage and its media power within the GOP eventually goaded congressional Republicans into an ill-fated impeachment effort, at which point the whole edifice collapsed.

But the Fox conspiracy-mongering takes on a new light given that some of the people who pushed it now work for a president who embarked on self-enrichment schemes of staggering scale and eye-popping corruption in his first year back in office.

While feverish claims of a “Biden Crime Family” involved a total of less than $7.5 million paid to Biden family members over the years — and nothing to Joe Biden — Trump had already “used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion,” the editorial board of The New York Times reported on the anniversary of his second inauguration.

Trump and his adult children oversee a sprawling business empire that has grown dramatically since he launched his reelection campaign and includes international real estate deals through the Trump Organization; his social media company and its parent, “which trades like a meme stock”; immense holdings in cryptocurrency; and an array of consulting and venture capital positions held by his sons that have the aroma of influence peddling. These businesses benefit from Trump’s presidency even as they frequently conflict with U.S. policy (by contrast, the right’s core allegation of Joe Biden aiding his son’s foreign business interests involved him carrying out U.S. policy as vice president).

Reporters and researchers who examine the various Trump tentacles are constantly uncovering new scandals and conflicts of interest. But perhaps the most nakedly corrupt involve the Trump family’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial, which was founded shortly before his 2024 election and has since driven a huge increase in his personal wealth. The Wall Street Journal reported last month:

  • Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, an Abu Dhabi prince known as the “spy sheikh” for his leadership of the United Arab Emirates’ intelligence service, secretly agreed to purchase 49% of WLF just days before Trump’s January 2025 inauguration for $500 million, in a “hugely profitable” deal for its founders.
  • In May, WLF’s CEO “announced that the sheikh’s investment firm, MGX, would use World Liberty’s stablecoin, USD1, to complete its $2 billion investment in [the crypto exchange] Binance,” a move that “rocketed USD1 up the rankings of largest stablecoins, enhancing its financial credibility.”
  • Weeks later, the Trump administration approved sales of “around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year” to the UAE, one-fifth of which would go to Tahnoon’s company. Such sales had been sought by Tahnoon but blocked by the Biden administration out of concern that China might acquire the chips, with Tahnoon’s company “of particular concern” due to its “close ties to the sanctioned tech giant Huawei and other Chinese firms.”
  • Trump also pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of Binance, following “months of efforts by Zhao to boost” WLF. (Trump has denied even knowing who Zhao is.)
  • Tying it all together, Zhao is an Emirati citizen who is “close” to Tahnoon, Binance is based in the UAE and counts Tahnoon as a major investor, and “people close to the royal family urged the Trump administration to pardon Zhao.”

Fox contributor Andrew McCarthy, while accusing the Bidens of “corruptly profiteering off Joe Biden’s political power and influence,” nonetheless noted that the Trumps’ actions were worse by orders of magnitude.

“You know what the difference is between the Biden family business and the Trump family business?” he asked in a Saturday piece for National Review. “You’d have to add two digits to the sum of Biden abuses of power, foreign entanglements, and corruption alleged in the report to get near what Trump has raked in just from the UAE.”

Fox News rants about the “Biden crime family” perfectly describe Trumpian corruption

Hegseth is just one of several top Trump administration officials who participated in Fox’s yearslong campaign to turn conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings into a political corruption scandal for his father.

“The real story here though is all of the nasty work that he [Hunter Biden] has done across the world, how much money he has made, and the fact that he was able to make, what, $80,000 a month from Burisma in Ukraine because his dad was the vice president — it calls into question Joe Biden's motives,” Treasury Secretary Sean Duffy said back in 2022, when he was a Fox Business host. “Is Joe Biden looking out for the American people or is Joe Biden looking out for Hunter Biden's interests?”

As a Fox host, Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro railed against “the corruption that was going on in the Biden crime family” and Joe Biden’s purported efforts to “enrich his family.” And when she was asked about whether there was any “comparison” between what the Bidens did and Donald Trump’s businesses receiving millions of dollars from China while he was serving as president, Pirro stressed that there was not.

“Donald Trump wasn't involved in the business once he became president,” she explained. “The bottom line is he had properties. He was entitled to have someone else monitor those properties and make money from those properties.”

For then-Fox contributor Leo Terrell, now a top Justice Department official, Joe Biden was “the meal ticket for the family” who “makes the money for the Biden family,” and the lack of DOJ attention to Hunter Biden’s purported crimes indicated “favorable treatment because his father is in the White House.”

And when Pam Bondi was merely a lawyer and lobbyist who frequently appeared on Fox instead of an attorney general who frequently appeared on Fox, she argued that the foreign business dealings of the president’s son were “a matter of national security” that was “so important” that it required the appointment of a special prosecutor to ensure the Justice Department acted properly in the case.

They called for Biden’s prosecution; now they run the DOJ under Trump

Several Fox pundits who joined the Trump administration — including some who now serve in senior Justice Department posts — even argued at the time that Joe Biden’s actions warranted a criminal probe.

Fox host Sean Hannity asked Bondi — then a frequent Fox guest and now Trump’s attorney general — during an August 2023 segment whether anything would “ultimately happen to Joe and Hunter Biden.” Bondi replied that “when we have a new administration, absolutely Sean, it has to,” adding that a criminal investigation “must be opened” and that the Bidens would be “prosecuted” under a future Trump presidency.

Bondi also stressed in 2022 that if Trump had been president under the same circumstances, he would have “right away, recused himself” and had “a special prosecutor take over.”

Duffy argued that the FBI and Justice Department should be investigating the “shady” dealings to determine whether Joe Biden is “corrupt” and has “made money off of this.” But he claimed that “they won't do a forensic audit because they know that the money goes from foreign countries to Hunter Biden into Joe Biden's pocket.”

“There was a major scandal with this administration and it starts of course with Joe Biden and his involvement with Hunter,” Pirro said in 2023. Citing what she claimed was a ream of evidence that “just goes on and on,” she concluded, “You don't need any more than what we have now to convict them.”

And Terrell claimed in 2023 that an aspect of the pseudo-scandal was “sinister and criminal,” adding that the “totality of all the evidence” showed that “the walls have fallen on Joe Biden.” He added that prosecutors were ignoring Hunter Biden’s crimes because if “you prosecute Hunter Biden, you prosecute Joe Biden,” and “everyone knows that the Department of Justice, the FBI is in bed with the Democratic Party and they have weaponized the departments.”

When media ignoring alleged presidential corruption was a sign of “propaganda”

In his piece for National Review, McCarthy wrote, “Now that self-dealing has achieved heights so astronomical that $27 million would barely be a rounding error, Republicans have lost interest.” The same is true of his colleagues at Fox, who barely discussed Trump pardoning Zhao and still have yet to provide substantive coverage of the UAE’s “spy sheikh” purchasing a huge stake in the president’s company.

Why might that be? Hannity asked Pirro a similar question about coverage of the Bidens back in 2023. After she claimed that the Bidens were running an “organized criminal enterprise” in which “Joe Biden is the front man, Hunter Biden is the bag man,” he asked her why “the media” wouldn’t follow up on the story.

“Because they are Democrats,” she replied at the time. “We are now living in a country that is changed. These are crimes not just by the Bidens, these are crimes against America. This is what is going on in this country — and the truth is that they don't care anymore.”

Pirro is now the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

Some of her colleagues in the Trump administration offered similar critiques of coverage of the Biden family back when they worked at Fox.

“When will the media ramp up their scrutiny of Joe, of Hunter, of these payments, of these associations, of the whistleblowers, of the 1023s, of the WhatsApp messages, of the bank exchanges?” Hegseth asked in 2023. “We only know of this because of the House Republicans for a year and a half. What if the media actually examined it, too?”

The Bidens, Hegseth told Hannity, “are counting on a complicit press, which we’ve almost seen universal besides your show and this channel and a few others willing to dig into all the smoke that’s there.”

That purported lack of coverage, Duffy claimed, ensures that “people don’t look to mainstream media as a news source — they’re a propaganda source.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Fox News Ignores Bombshell Reports Of $500M Emirati Payoff To Trump Family

Fox News Ignores Bombshell Reports Of $500M Emirati Payoff To Trump Family

Fox News has not covered bombshell reports revealing that an Emirati royal known as the “spy sheikh” secretly purchased a major stake in a company controlled by President Donald Trump’s family for $500 million just four days before Trump’s inauguration, according to a Media Matters review through Monday night.

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times both reported over the weekend on what the Journal described as a deal “unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.” Such deals are unprecedented because they open up obvious channels for presidential corruption, and that seems to be what happened here.

The foreign government official, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, reportedly sought “access to tightly guarded artificial intelligence chips,” though the previous administration had blocked such access due to “fears that the sensitive technology could be diverted to China.” But after Tahnoon lined the Trump family pockets by purchasing 49 percent of their nascent cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial — which “had no products” at the time of the investment — the Trump administration “committed to give the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year.”

But the president’s apparent participation in a quid pro scheme scheme in which U.S. national security interests were sold out in return for a sizable payment to his family has not been mentioned a single time on Fox News, the Journal’s corporate cousin. The pro-Trump network’s propagandists were instead fixated Monday night on criticism of Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown by attendees at Sunday’s Grammy Awards.

You may recall that Fox's stars spent years claiming to be very disturbed by the foreign business dealings of members of former President Joe Biden’s family. Those dealings, which involved comically tiny amounts of money compared to the Tahnoon payoff and no compelling nexus to any policy decision by Biden or his administration, were the subject of endless coverage and commentary dating back to before Biden launched his 2020 presidential campaign, and deemed so serious as to require Biden’s impeachment.

Fox host Sean Hannity alone devoted hundreds of segments to the president’s son Hunter in 2023 as he argued that the president had been “very credibly accused of public corruption on a scale this country has never seen before.”

But after the right-wing propaganda machine helped Trump back into office, he promptly began cashing in. And in turn, we've seen Fox stars seem to have developed a strange new respect for obvious malfeasance.

Bill Melugin Fox

After 36 Hours Spent Excusing Alex Pretti Killing, Fox News Suddenly Spins Around

On Sunday evening, Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin published a lengthy report detailing internal dissent among his federal immigration enforcement sources regarding the narrative pushed by Department of Homeland Security leaders after Border Patrol officers gunned down Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who had been videotaping their activities, in Minneapolis on Saturday morning.

Amid the several hundred words describing an internal schism over how DHS is messaging masked agents of the state opening fire on a man who had already been restrained, Melugin slipped in the following statement: “There is no indication Pretti was there to murder law enforcement, as videos appear to show he never drew his holstered firearm.”

Melugin’s stark acknowledgement was whiplash-inducing for anyone who had been following Fox’s on-air coverage of Pretti’s killing up to that point, and it marked the start of a dramatic shift in the network’s treatment of the case.

Fox spent Saturday and much of Sunday blaming the victim and local Democrats for his death while excusing and even valorizing his executioners. In doing so the network was following in the footsteps of the high-ranking administration officials who baselessly argued that Pretti was a “would-be assassin” engaged in “domestic terrorism.” Melugin himself was the vehicle DHS used to launder its excuse that Pretti “was armed.”

And notably, some Fox contributors repeatedly justified Pretti’s killing by going beyond the official comment to allege that he had drawn the gun he was reportedly legally carrying and that he even pointed it at the Border Patrol officers — the very claim Melugin said Sunday night had been disproved by videos.

The fallacy of the DHS smear of Pretti had long been clear to anyone who had reviewed videos of the shooting, triggering widespread outrage over his killing. But Melugin’s admission — and his reporting on a schism within immigration enforcement over the case — apparently provided his colleagues the permission structure they needed to abandon their narrative.

“Tomi, speak plainly with the audience right now,” Fox host Johnny Joey Jones told his co-host Tomi Lahren on Sunday night. “What we're getting from Bill — and as he cited, many of his sources are pro-what's happening as far as enforcing immigration and mass deportation — but what they're concerned with is every video we've seen so far doesn’t show him brandishing a gun, it doesn’t show him — it doesn’t substantiate the idea that he was there to commit a massacre or that he was a domestic terrorist.”

“Usually, when those words are used you usually have more than the fact that he had a gun on him as evidence, and that is what at least some officials are taking issue with,” he added.

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade on Monday morning followed the editorial boards of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and Wall Street Journal in urging President Donald Trump to change course.

“I would love to see Tom Homan just be asked to go in there and settle things down,” Kilmeade said, referencing his former Fox colleague turned White House border czar, who has stressed the need for “collateral arrests” of immigrants without criminal backgrounds.

“He understands the president’s objective. He could come in with a fresh set of eyes,” Kilmeade added. “For some reason he’s been sidelined of late, and I think we could use someone to come in there and settle everything down from the Trump perspective.”

And Dana Perino, who served as press secretary to President George W. Bush and now anchors Fox’s morning “straight news” hours, stressed the need for the White House to get its facts in order and find a way to make adjustments.

She said that current White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt needed to be “very clear to the officials that we have a gigantic problem and, yes, we can say that the media is biased, and we can say that the Democrats are crazy and that they're radical and that they're ginning everything up, but we have a problem and I need better answers for you before we go to the briefing room at 1 o’clock.”

Perino added that Trump should take credit for having “arrested a lot of illegal immigrants” in Minneapolis and then send presidential envoy Steve Witkoff to the city “because I believe they need somebody that can be trusted on both sides to say, I hear you, I hear you, and here's where we're going.”

Co-host Griff Jenkins noted in response that Trump, who regularly watches Fox & Friends and often implements ideas he sees on it, had just announced that he was sending Homan to Minneapolis that night.

Perino praised Trump’s “good decision,” adding that the president understood “it’s unsustainable.” Apparently, he wasn’t the only one who came to that conclusion.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters


Far-Right Influencers Promote 'Great White Hope' In Florida GOP Primary

Far-Right Influencers Promote 'Great White Hope' In Florida GOP Primary

Far-right media figures including Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes are rallying around the Florida gubernatorial campaign of James Fishback, a hedge fund manager who rails against “white genocide,” praises the extremist “groyper” movement, and is currently polling at about five percent in the GOP primary.

Fox News has been the key media venue for would-be GOP candidates seeking to reach right-wing voters and attract support over several election cycles. Current Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis broke through in the 2018 primary by making himself a Fox fixture, and the front-runner to succeed him, network favorite and GOP Rep. Byron Donalds, has adopted the same political strategy, with at least 40 weekday appearances last year.

Fishback, the 31-year old CEO of the anti-“woke” investment firm he co-founded, has been on a tour of the right-wing political factions in recent years, from writing pieces for Bari Weiss’ site The Free Press to backing Vivek Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign before trying to get himself named to a seat on the Federal Reserve Board by promising to be President Donald Trump’s “bulldog.” After launching his gubernatorial campaign in November by painting himself as aligned with DeSantis, Fishback subsequently positioned himself as what The Bulwark’s Will Sommer described as “the first groyper candidate” — with a media profile to match.

Fishback worked his way up through interviews with “white nationalist influencer Ella Maulding,” “groyper leader Beardson Beardly,” “a Youtube show run by white nationalists in northern Idaho,” and “former Infowars host Owen Shroyer,” before breaking through with a fawning treatment from Carlson, as right-wing extremism expert Ben Lorber documented for The Nation.

Lorber reported that Fishback — along with groyper leader Fuentes — represents “an ascendant, Gen-Z America First wing of MAGA openly suspicious of Israel, economically populist and steeped in a white Christian nationalist worldview that scorns Jews, women, and nonwhite immigrants.”

Far-right media figures host, endorse Fishback

Carlson, a GOP power broker and White House regular who once used his Fox show to lift up Republican candidates like Vice President JD Vance, is currently focused on promoting such ideas and the noxious pundits and would-be GOP officeholders who espouse them on his streaming program. His hourlong interview with Fishback was published January 9.

“James Fishback is running for governor in Florida,” Carlson said as he promoted the interview. “Pretty soon, all winning Republican politicians will talk like this.” The landing image for the interview’s YouTube video featured text reading “WHO REALLY RUNS FLORIDA?” over photos of DeSantis — and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Discussing why he is running for governor as Carlson nodded along, Fishback railed against foreign students taking university slots from Floridians, “white guilt lessons” in schools, and H-1B “slave labor,” declaring that “the only systemic racism in America is against white Christian men.”

“I’m aware,” Carlson replied.

Fishback won Carlson’s support by promising that Florida would divest from Israeli government bonds and use the funds to help provide down payment assistance to married first-time homebuyers.

“You’ve got my vote,” he responded after Fishback laid out the proposal. “That’s all I needed to hear. Amen. Amen.”

Fishback’s turn on Carlson’s podcast spurred an outpouring of interest from higher-profile far-right media figures.

The following week, Fishback did a joint interview with antisemitic misogynist streamer “Sneako” (real name: Nico Kenn De Balinthazy) and “looksmaxxing” influencer “Clavicular” (real name: Braden Peters).

Fishback discussed his proposal to, as he put it, implement a 50 percent tax on women who “hoe out on OnlyFans” to disincentivize them from doing so. (“Say what you want about Saudi Arabia — there are no women hoeing out on the internet in Saudi Arabia,” Fishback said). He also alluded to an antisemitic conspiracy theory, saying of OnlyFans, “Let’s not get in trouble talking about who owns that platform.” Sneako endorsed Fishback later in the interview, while Clavicular praised his “insane reaction-baiting” but repeatedly poked holes in his policy proposals.

On Wednesday, Fishback appeared on the podcast of Patrick Bet-David, who often provides a friendly platform for far-right extremists like white nationalist streamer Fuentes to spread their messages unimpeded. Bet-David praised Fishback for his “bold ideas.”

Fuentes himself has also taken notice of the campaign, praising Fishback on his show while stressing that he didn’t want to damage the candidate’s chances with an endorsement.

“I really like what I've seen from Fishback,” he said on his January 12 stream in response to a question from “FloridaGroyper” about the candidate’s Carlson interview. “I have to say I'm a bit conflicted still for a few reasons. I don't want to hurt him. That's kind of my first thing is I don't want to speak out of turn and hurt a politician by association if they're an ally. And the other thing is I didn't vet him myself.”

Fuentes commented that Fishback “seems really smart,” and said he was “really impressed” with the interview as well as with Fishback’s social media presence, adding that it had been “hilarious” when Fishback said that Donalds, who is Black, wanted to “turn Florida into a Section 8 ghetto.”

He later told Sneako and Clavicular that Fishback is “solid on the issues,” adding, “I watched him on Tucker — I don't think I disagreed with anything he said.”

And even before his appearance with Carlson, Fishback counted in his corner the gaming streamer Zack Hoyt, better known as Asmongold, who had more than 2 billion views on YouTube alone last year. In December, Hoyt endorsed Fishback as “my guy,” cheering along with one of the candidate’s videos, praising his proposals as “based,” and urging his fans to “vote for people like this.”

Is this actually going anywhere?

Each of these far-right media figures have large followings — but trying to elect Fishback governor of Florida will put their influence to the test. The candidate is polling at or below 5% in recent surveys and had raised “just under $19,000” according to his most recent campaign filing.

While Fuentes is reportedly seeking to build a political movement — and recent reports suggest that his message is resonating with younger Republicans — this election cycle may be too soon for such candidates to succeed.

But for his part, Fishback says that his alternative media play will pay dividends.

“Ultimately, we are in an attention economy,” he told Carlson near the end of their interview. “And the attention is going to go to the person who is going to connect and show up and earn the trust of voters.”

“You don’t get to earn the trust of voters in that Fox News studio in Washington, D.C.,” he added.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

State-Run Media Or Media-Run State? On Fox & Friends, The Answer Is Yes

State-Run Media Or Media-Run State? On Fox & Friends, The Answer Is Yes

A year into President Donald Trump’s second turn in the Oval Office, it has become virtually impossible to tell where his administration ends and Fox News begins.

Trump arrived for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday morning amid alarm from U.S. allies over his manic, unhinged, and unnerving demands for NATO member Denmark to hand over Greenland. At a Davos speech the day before, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned of a “rupture” in the world order, in which international rules are being replaced by the mantra that “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

Here’s how Fox & Friends co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy put it as a helicopter bearing the president touched down in Davos: “It feels like even though this meeting has been going on for a couple days and speeches have been made and interviews have been done, it feels like nothing starts until President Trump arrives — until daddy's home, as so many people say.”

“Just think about the anticipation, the stakes that are going to be made here, just with the presence of President Trump,” she glowed, adding: “Here you have this global conference where President Trump is about to blow it up in terms of his negotiations and stands, and yet nothing starts until he arrives.”

“It is a new day,” she concluded. “America is the center of everything. President Trump is the leader that everything hinges on.”

Campos-Duffy isn’t just a typically sycophantic Fox host with a penchant for conspiracy theories. Her husband, former Fox contributor and Fox Business host Sean Duffy, is one of 24 former network employees who went through the revolving door between the network and the second Trump administration, and he is now the secretary of transportation (Fox & Friends’ former weekend co-host Pete Hegseth is Duffy’s Cabinet colleague as secretary of defense).

At a normal news outlet, employing the wife of a Cabinet secretary for a role which allowed her to shower the president with praise would be an unheard-of ethical disaster. But at Fox, it may not have even been the biggest such calamity of the day.

Less than 15 minutes before Campos-Duffy proclaimed Trump the world’s “daddy,” Fox & Friends brought on the president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump. The network hired Lara Trump as a commentator after the president took office last year in an absurdly corrupt deal which put a lantern on Fox’s reemergence as a Trump propaganda outlet.

Lara Trump, who Fox employs as the host of a weekly program which she uses to give top Trump officials like Campos-Duffy’s husband soft-focus interviews about the great jobs they are doing for the American people, was there to take issue with the tenor of The View’s Tuesday sitdown with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

“Lara, listen, obviously they’re going to like Zohran Mamdani, that’s The View,” said Fox & Friends guest co-host Johnny “Joey” Jones. “But when you see them just gushing over him like that — I mean, he’s been in office for a couple of days, but still.”

“Yeah, well, this is surprising to absolutely nobody,” Lara Trump replied, mocking the “hard-hitting hosts there” for being “obsessed with people like” Mamdani. Because if there’s one thing they won’t stand for on Fox & Friends, it’s shoddy journalism and hosts gushing over their favorite politicians.

All of this happened on the program where Donald Trump built his political following with regular appearances, then watched obsessively throughout his first term for tips on how to govern the country while posting hundreds of times on social media about what he saw on the show.

Is it state-run media, or a media-run state? Yes.

By Targeting Powell, Pirro Didn't 'Go Rogue' -- She's The Tip Of Trump Spear

By Targeting Powell, Pirro Didn't 'Go Rogue' -- She's The Tip Of Trump Spear

White House officials are reportedly experiencing “significant frustration” and “heaping blame” on U.S. attorney and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro over the firestorm surrounding her office’s criminal probe of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, which drew severe backlash this week from Republican members of Congress and a broad spectrum of right-wing media. But it would be a mistake to treat Pirro’s nakedly pretextual bid to punish Powell and curtail the Fed’s independence as the actions of a rogue actor — she is a committed Trumpist operative carrying out President Donald Trump’s instructions to use state power to punish his enemies.

Trump has made clear that he wants federal prosecutors and investigators (and indeed, all administration officials) to forcefully wield their authority against people and entities who defy him. Pirro’s actions against Powell — whether she acted on orders from above or her own initiative — are fully in keeping with that assignment. Indeed, she has the job in the first place in no small part because she was in the vanguard of Trumpist media figures calling for criminal charges against Trump’s foes during her Fox tenure.

Trump reportedly “criticized a group of U.S. attorneys at a White House event last week, calling them weak and complaining they weren’t moving fast enough to prosecute his favored targets.” Pirro, who was present at the event, is surely doing whatever she can to remain on his good list.

Pirro’s Powell probe followed years of Trump invective targeting the Fed chair and came amid his threats of legal action, and the president has repeatedly defended the probe this week. Pirro’s office is also reportedly investigating Democratic legislators who released a video urging service members and intelligence officers not to follow illegal orders, which Trump characterized as “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

And she does not shrink from critics who say she is overseeing politicized investigations. On Tuesday night, Pirro went on Fox host and chief Trump propagandist Sean Hannity’s show (one of the president’s favorite watches) to not only defend her pursuit of Powell but to blast Republican legislators who have taken issue with it.

..These actions are exactly what the president wants to see from his underlings.

Trump ran on “retribution” and assembled a team eager to protect his interests and target his political foes, including loyalists like Pirro, Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, and FBI Director Kash Patel. Less than a year into his tenure, the Justice Department has pursued cases at the president’s behest against a litany of Trump foils, including former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA).

Trump wants these cases brought, so more are coming. There’s a Trumpist U.S. attorney in Miami reportedly pursuing an absurd but sprawling investigation into the right-wing fantasy that former President Barack Obama led a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump; a newly-announced assistant attorney general post slated to purportedly target fraud under the president’s direct oversight, which could be a vehicle to go after Democratic governors like Minnesota’s Tim Walz and California’s Gavin Newsom; and a broad, all-of-government effort to criminalize progressive groups and their funders by smearing them as domestic terrorists.

But Trump needs prosecutors willing to do his dirty work; several have preferred to resign or be fired rather than pursue such weak and pretextual efforts. He surely knows from watching her on television over the years that in Pirro, he has a loyalist who won’t say no.

Pirro, a former judge and prosecutor who joined Fox after a failed 2006 U.S. Senate bid, emerged during the 2016 campaign as one of the most abjectly sycophantic Trump fanatics on TV — which made the president a regular viewer of her Saturday evening show. She spent much of his first presidency as a key cog in the right-wing media machine that encouraged the president to target his political foes through authoritarian tactics.

Pirro made headlines by demanding a “cleansing” of the FBI and DOJ, with the purportedly disloyal to be “taken out in handcuffs,” and spuriously accused Democrats like Hillary Clinton of various crimes. She lobbied for the ouster of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, calling for his dismissal on Fox and lashing out at his tenure to Trump in the White House, over Sessions’ unwillingness to turn Foxy fantasies into criminal indictments. Her support of Trumpian voter fraud conspiracy theories following the 2020 election led to her brief removal from Fox’s airwaves — and to her executive producer describing her as a “reckless maniac.”

The Fox host did show some concern about the prospect of prosecutorial overreach — when she perceived it as harming Trump’s interests. Pirro described Trump’s conviction by a New York jury as the result of “warfare” (because “lawfare is far too soft” a term) and suggested it could spark “a revolution” because it “was not a case that should've been brought.” She also suggested that the FBI agents searching Mar-A-Lago may have “wanted” to “engage in deadly physical force,” and said that the lack of media coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop meant that “we are living in a fascist state.”

Pirro’s “blind obedience to President Trump,” as Schiff put it, was readily observable when her nomination came up for a Senate vote in August — but Republicans voted in lockstep for her confirmation. Now Republican senators like Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) are saying that the Powell probe goes too far — but as with Sen. Bill Cassidy’s (R-LA) criticism of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s antivax moves, they’ve already yielded their strongest card by supporting the nomination in the first place.

The probes of Powell and Democratic legislators won’t be Pirro’s last investigations into the president’s foes. She seems more likely to end up a special counsel focused solely on such cases than drummed out of government for excessive partisanship. Her Fox catalog may hint at future targets, from Democratic governors who won’t comply with ICE to FBI and DOJ officials purportedly engaged in “election interference” against the president to the undocumented immigrants she says should be “presum[ed]” as violent criminals.

None of this is to say that Pirro’s authoritarian pursuit of the president’s critics will succeed — her relevant legal experience is decades old, and cases brought by her office have sputtered before D.C. juries at an historic rate. But she has the job because Trump knows that unlike more honorable federal prosecutors, she will keep trying.

Even Fox's Maria Bartiromo Is Troubled By Trump Bullying Of Fed Chair

Even Fox's Maria Bartiromo Is Troubled By Trump Bullying Of Fed Chair

Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo is among President Donald Trump’s most zealous propagandists, so much so that he reportedly considered making her his 2024 running mate. But even she seems hesitant to fall in line with the Trump administration’s apparent effort to strong-arm Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Powell, in an extraordinary video message released on Sunday night, said that the Fed had received Justice Department subpoenas on Friday which threatened a criminal indictment over his congressional testimony regarding ongoing renovations of its headquarters. He portrayed the move as pretextual, part of Trump’s long-running effort to pressure Powell to drastically lower interest rates and diminish the Fed’s independence.

Trump and his appointees have spent the last year refashioning the Justice Department into an institution that punishes his enemies and protects his friends, demolishing safeguards and purging dissidents along the way. The Powell investigation is in keeping with that trend, reportedly overseen by Jeanine Pirro, the longtime Fox host and fervent Trump ally whom he appointed as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

Bartiromo, who typically demonstrates lockstep support for the president’s initiatives, seemed unusually skeptical of the Powell probe in a Monday morning discussion on her Fox Business show.

“It just feels like most on Wall Street do not want to see this kind of fight,” Bartiromo said. “I mean, you know, you’ve got a chairman who is at odds with the president of the United States. The president has very good points, certainly. But Wall Street doesn’t want to see this kind of investigation because it looks like the president is actually, you know, shoehorning rates, and now doing it through the DOJ.”

Bartiromo’s panelists were even more open in decrying the move.

Fox contributor Liz Peek said of the probe, “I don't like it. I think it's a unforced error by the Trump administration,” She explained that she agreed with the president on the cost of the Fed renovations and Powell’s performance, but added, “I don't really know what this is supposed to accomplish.”

“The president needs to kind of step back, quite honestly,” offered financial services consultant Kenny Polcari. “It's not in his job description to control interest rates. The Fed is an independent agency. We understand that. We know that. And I think that's what's causing a little bit of nervousness in the markets this morning, just about the fact that what could he really do, how could he really push this? I think he needs to back off and leave the Fed alone.”

Bartiromo then hedged, saying, “I know, but if he lied, he lied,” and suggesting it was important to get to the bottom of Powell’s comments to Congress.

Ken Mahoney, a financial asset manager, replied that while the cost of the renovations is sizable, this is “bad timing” given “the president’s other priorities,” noting that “most people probably wake up hoping that [Minnesota Gov.] Tim Walz was the one that was being indicted, not Jerome Powell.”

While Bartiromo’s willingness to use her Fox News and Fox Business shows to peddle insane conspiracy theories on Trump’s behalf has cost her network dearly, the president has rewarded her with multiple interviews and personal access, including an invitation to a splashy White House banquet honoring Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in November.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters


Who's Afraid Of Antisemitic Conspiracist Candace Owens? It's A Long List

Who's Afraid Of Antisemitic Conspiracist Candace Owens? It's A Long List

Long-simmering feuds among right-wing influencers reached a boiling point this week when Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika used an appearance on Fox News to denounce people she said were “making hundreds of thousands of dollars” by pushing conspiracy theories about her husband’s killing. Her plea for those individuals “to stop,” obviously intended for her husband's former colleague, the popular streamer Candace Owens, triggered an outpouring of criticism on the right against “extremists” promoting “hateful conspiracy theories” who had somehow been allowed into the movement.

But in a sign of the durable position such conspiracy theorists hold within the movement — and the immense demand for their work — many of the high-level pundits trying to lay down guardrails did not mention by name either Owens or her primary ally in the MAGA schism, Tucker Carlson.

“The Right’s media apparatus is how the Right teaches its followers how to think, and it’s currently getting consumed by conspiracy, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts,” The Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo said in one such salvo. “If left unchecked, it will turn the audience into the equivalent of a Third World click farm.”

Can you imagine?

It is patently absurd to claim that right-wing media figures injecting deranged lies into their audience is somehow a new phenomenon. The right is dominated by President Donald Trump, the poster child for “conspiracy, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts.” And Rufo’s ilk were happy to foster such insanity as long as it was pointed at the left in the service of electing Republicans.

But now the same tools are being turned inward, against other right-wingers, and while they’re furious that this is happening, the apparatus they helped build is so powerful that they are unable to name their foes.

A fight over Charlie Kirk’s legacy — and the Jews

Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel caused a split in a right-wing commentariat otherwise united around Trump. One side includes conservative Jews like Ben Shapiro and Laura Loomer, who supported Israel’s subsequent brutal campaign in Gaza and traffic in anti-Muslim invective. On the other side are “America First” figures like Owens and Carlson who both opposed the campaign and used it as an opportunity to revive noxious antisemitic conspiracism. The divide has repeatedly made headlines, particularly in November when Carlson gave a friendly interview to Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist streamer who regularly rails against “the Jews,” who he has claimed “are destroying this country.”

Owens has been claiming since Charlie Kirk’s tragic killing in September that at the time of his death, he was coming around to her view of Israel. Based on that premise (which Kirk allies deny), she has speculated that Kirk may have been assassinated by pro-Israel henchmen worried that he was turning on them, perhaps with help from elements within TPUSA and the U.S. military. These sorts of wild claims are typical of Owens’ oeuvre: She is currently being sued for claiming that the first lady of France is secretly a transgender woman, and has told her followers that she has been targeted for death by an assassination squad composed of French law enforcement and “at least one Israeli.” Her claims have been denounced by the likes of Shapiro and Loomer, but cheered on by Carlson and fellow traveler Alex Jones.

Erika Kirk appeared on Fox’s Outnumbered on Wednesday to address in part what host Harris Faulker described as “hate” and “conspiracies” in the wake of her husband’s death.

“Come after me, call me names, I don't care,” she said. “Call me what you want, go down that rabbit hole, whatever. But…when you go after the people that I love and you're making hundreds of thousands of dollars every single episode going after the people that I love because somehow they're in on this? No.”

“My message to them is to stop — to stop,” she concluded.

Neither Erika Kirk nor Faulkner mentioned Owens’ name. But Owens immediately recognized that the segment had been “about me.” And rather than stopping at the widow’s request, she doubled down.

The Fox segment encouraged other right-wing pundits who typically avoid weighing in on intramovement controversies to speak out — albeit without mentioning who they were talking about.

Fox star Sean Hannity used his radio show on Wednesday to call out online commentators for “saying the most incendiary, outrageous, bizarre, conspiratorial, in some cases, outright racist, white nationalist, virulent antisemitism, and they make money off the, quote, clicks that they can then monetize because, you know, people like the shock value of it.” After praising Erika Kirk’s Fox appearance, he lashed out at “people with no evidence spreading the most vile, hateful conspiracy theories about Charlie's assassination,” calling them “grifters” who are “not MAGA.”

The hosts of Fox & Friends likewise aired Erika Kirk’s remarks and criticized unnamed persons pushing conspiracy theories about her husband’s death on Thursday. “People are making money. They have unsubstantiated theories and are running with it,” Brian Kilmeade said.

MAGA slop king Benny Johnson also posted the video of Erika Kirk going “absolutely SCORCHED EARTH against evil people monetizing Charlie Kirk's death and attacking her family and the families of those close to Charlie and TPUSA,” adding: “Thank God we are finally here. The Demons are Screaming.” He has not mentioned Owens by name on X since posting in April 2024 about a potential Owens/Shapiro debate over antisemitism.

For Fox contributor Hugh Hewitt, meanwhile, this is a tempest in a teapot. Responding to a discussion started by Rufo’s post on Wednesday, he claimed that such (unnamed, of course) “grifters” only have the “illusion of influence,” while “center-right to conservative media is flourishing.” Citing podcasts with relatively small audiences and Fox’s Special Report, “the most watched news show by serious people in the country,” he commented, “A handful of extremists cannot pollute the sea of offerings but it’s still best just to ignore them.”

It is certainly possible in a fractured media environment for a Republican apparatchik with intellectual pretensions to find some voices who will make him feel good about the choices he’s made. But Owens and Carlson both host podcasts on Spotify’s top-10 list, and the latter spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention after shepherding the selection of JD Vance as the next vice president.

The guardrails are gone and all the conspiracy theorists are here

The MAGA movement that everyone on both sides of the divide supported during the 2024 presidential election worships a notorious fabulist who emerged in GOP politics thanks to his role as the nation’s chief birther, reshaped his party around the twin lies that he actually won the 2020 election and that the ensuing January 6 riots by his supporters were righteous, and is constantly lifting up the most noxious online slop imaginable.

Trump’s emergence speaks to both the willingness of mainstream right-wing institutions to accept a conspiracy theorist at the highest level of power, and the eagerness of the right-wing audience to buy the sort of lies he was selling. And his ascension has made it virtually impossible for the resulting movement to draw lines and fully cut loose people who promote deranged falsehoods and bigotries.

Owens and Carlson became right-wing stars by promoting the same types of feverish claims while climbing established institutional pathways. New York magazine detailed Owens’ conspiratorial habits of thinking all the way back in 2016, before her tenure at TPUSA, her nearly 200 appearances on Fox weekday shows over a five year span, or her time as Shapiro’s colleague at The Daily Wire. And Carlson had spent years mainstreaming white nationalist talking points as a Fox host before the network finally showed him the door. The pair assembled loyal audiences thanks to those right-wing institutions, which have found themselves able to take away their jobs but not able to stop viewers from following them to their new spaces.

And Carlson and Owens profited not in spite of their conspiracy theories, but because they fit neatly within a right-wing echo chamber that seemed purpose-built for their generation and propagation. People like Rufo and Hannity were happy to play along with bullshit about Haitian immigrants eating pets or the Democrats assassinating a party staffer when they could use such claims for the benefit of Trump and the GOP. But now that the same habits of mind that made a swath of the right into QAnon adherents are turned inside the tent, they are deeply concerned.

Meanwhile, neither Trump nor Vance seem at all interested in trying to reestablish guardrails. Indeed, their administration is filled with conspiracy theorists seemingly picked for that very reason, indicative of a political movement that is marbled through with crackpots and extremists. And the worst is surely yet to come.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Blasting Democratic 'Support' For Alleged Smugglers, Fox Ignores Hernandez Pardon

Blasting Democratic 'Support' For Alleged Smugglers, Fox Ignores Hernandez Pardon

How do you spin the president you support pardoning a notorious drug trafficker amid your weekslong campaign to convince viewers that your political enemies are pro-trafficker? For the propagandists at Fox News, the answer is just to pretend it didn't happen.

President Donald Trump announced on November 28 his intention to pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been serving a 45-year sentence in federal prison after a U.S. court convicted him of “helping drug traffickers send tons of cocaine to the United States in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes that fueled his political career.” Trump claimed Hernández had been “treated very harshly and unfairly,” though he later said he knew “very little” beyond what he had been told by “very good people that I know.” (Axios credited, in part, a “persistent lobbying campaign” by former Trump adviser and fellow pardon recipient Roger Stone, who touted his role in securing the pardon.) Hernández was released following the pardon’s issuance on December 1.

Fox has devoted just over six minutes of airtime to the Hernández pardon, according to a Media Matters review of the network’s programming from November 28, when Trump announced his intention to pardon Hernández, through Monday. Special Report, the flagship “straight news” show anchored by Trump golfing buddy Bret Baier, and the weekend daytime shows The Sunday Briefing and Fox News Live provided the bulk of the network’s coverage. Fox & Friends Weekend also ran a headline read.

The only other mentions of the story on Fox came when Democratic co-hosts on the panel show The Five raised the issue during segments about the Trump administration’s purported counternarcotics effort aimed at alleged drug trafficking from Venezuela, which Trump claims is directed by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Since early September, U.S. military strikes undertaken at Trump’s behest, aimed at what the administration claims are boats trafficking drugs in the Caribbean, have killed at least 87 people and destroyed 23 boats.

Co-host Jessica Tarlov pointed out on December 2 that Trump’s pardon of Hernández disproves “the story about this administration being focused on eradicating American society of drugs.” On Monday, co-host Harold Ford Jr. similarly challenged his colleagues to state whether or not they approved of the president granting clemency to a convicted drug trafficker (Fox contributor Tyrus and co-host Dana Perino responded that they did not, while co-host Kayleigh McEnany mocked Ford for landing on a “niche issue” she said she hoped Democrats would “hang on” in the midterm campaigns).

Fox’s chyron as Ford began talking — “Dems stick up for narco terrorists” — speaks to the tenor of Fox’s coverage of the U.S. strikes off Venezuela. While experts have described the U.S. campaign of extrajudicial killings as “patently illegal,” the strikes have been widely praised on Fox, where hosts and anchors regularly accuse Democrats who raise legal questions about them of supporting the traffickers.

“It's either you're pro drug dealers, drugs going throughout Europe and throughout this country, or you're for taking out those boats,” host Brian Kilmeade said on Friday’s Fox & Friends — a program which has so far not covered Trump’s pardon of a man actually convicted of helping traffic drugs “throughout this country.”

Likewise, Fox host Will Cain has said of Democratic criticism of the strikes, “Maybe it’s that they are against law and order,” while anchor Harris Faulkner asked of those questioning the strikes, “Are they working against America and for the drug cartels?” Neither has addressed the Hernández pardon on their program or questioned whether it shows Trump to be “against law and order” or working “for the drug cartels.”

And Fox stars Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, and Sean Hannity have not told their viewers about the pardon, even as all three have praised Trump for authorizing the Caribbean boat strikes.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Bomb Suspect Bust Makes Bongino Squeal On Right-Wing Media Grift

Bomb Suspect Bust Makes Bongino Squeal On Right-Wing Media Grift

Sean Hannity's interview last week with his former Fox News colleague — and now FBI deputy director — Dan Bongino was remarkable, but not for any details Bongino relayed about the arrest of a suspect in the long-simmering January 6 pipe bomb investigation. Instead, the interview hinged on a stunning admission from Bongino that laid bare the core grift at the heart of the right-wing media complex: that people like Bongino — and by extension, Hannity — make their money by tossing off reckless speculations that confirm their right-wing audience’s biases, and face no perceptible consequences if their claims turn out to be false.

Earlier in the day, the Justice Department announced the arrest of the man who allegedly placed pipe bombs outside the offices of the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee on the night of January 5, 2021; the explosive devices were found during the Trumpist revolt at the U.S. Capitol the following day. While the government has publicly revealed little information about the suspect or his alleged motive, it’s clear that he is not, as some right-wing media figures had suggested over the years, part of an inside job perpetrated by the FBI to malign President Donald Trump’s supporters.

Hannity, during his interview with his former colleague, gave Bongino an opportunity to criticize prior iterations of the Justice Department and FBI for failing to arrest anyone in the case, and praise his own colleagues for getting the job done. But then he asked Bongino about the FBI deputy director’s own role in promoting conspiracy theories about the bomber during Bongino’s past career as a right-wing commentator.

“You know, I don't know if you remember this — this is before you became the deputy FBI director,” Hannity said. “You put a post on X right after this happened and you said there's a massive cover-up because the person that planted those pipe bombs, they don't want you to know who it is because it's either a connected anti-Trump insider or an inside job. You said that, you know, long before you were even thought of as deputy FBI director.”

Bongino’s response was astounding. He looked down, as if embarrassed, and replied: “Yeah, that's why I said to you this investigation's just begun.” But after hemming and hawing about the confidence he and FBI Director Kash Patel have that they arrested the right person, he got real.

“Listen, I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions,” he explained. “That's clear. And one day, I'll be back in that space. But that's not what I'm paid for now. I'm paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.”

Bongino then quickly pivoted to attacking reporters at the day’s press conference, suggesting that he and others on the right are willing to “evolve” when they learn contradictory facts, while mainstream journalists probably “still believe in this collusion fairy tale hoax.” He offered some obsequious praise for Trump, and Hannity moved on.

Bongino is offering the most charitable gloss on his past actions possible. Another way to put it is that his job, as a commentator at Fox and elsewhere in the right-wing media, was to provide chum for the viewers. They wanted conspiracy theories, so he gave them conspiracy theories. Now, he claims, he’s at the FBI, and his job is to provide facts instead.

But there’s an entire ecosystem Bongino left behind (but to which he expects to return in the future) that is still filled with conspiracy-mongers who concoct and disseminate lies to keep their audiences content and coming back for more.

And as Bongino suggested, and as we saw in internal documents and testimony that election technology companies filed in lawsuits against Fox, those right-wing media figures don’t necessarily believe what they’re saying. Hannity, for example, said in a deposition that he had not believed “for one second” that the 2020 election had been rigged against Trump, even though he spent weeks publicly promoting that lie to his viewers following the vote.

These lies have consequences. While right-wing commentators may not believe what they're saying, some fraction of viewers believe what they’re told. And sometimes, the people inculcated with conspiracy theories end up taking action — even if that means storming the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn the election they’ve been assured was rigged.

Indeed, on Friday morning, CNN reported that during FBI interviews, the alleged pipe bomber “told investigators that he believed the 2020 election was stolen.” Perhaps he listened to too many people who were paid for their “opinions”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters


Jesse Watters

Pentagon Inspector General Report Demolishes Excuses For Hegseth's 'Signalgate'

A forthcoming report from the Defense Department’s watchdog dismantles the excuses that Pete Hegseth’s former Fox News colleagues offered in March after The Atlantic reported that the secretary of defense had shared plans for an imminent U.S. strike against Houthi targets in Yemen on a Signal chain with other top Trump administration officials — and, inadvertently, Atlantic editor-in-dhief Jeffrey Goldberg.

The Atlantic and CNN reported Wednesday that the DOD inspector general concluded after a monthslong probe into Hegseth’s conduct that the information Hegseth shared had been classified at the time he received it, and that sending the attack plans through unsecured networks had endangered U.S. national security and the lives of the military service members tasked to the mission. An unclassified version of the report is scheduled for release Thursday.

Fox’s right-wing stars scrambled to downplay Hegseth’s actions in the days after The Atlantic first reported on his text messages, denying that the information had been classified or that its transmission through unsecured channels carried risks and generally mocking the notion that anything untoward had occurred beyond Goldberg’s addition to the chain.

“It's abundantly clear that none of this put national security at risk,” Fox host Laura Ingraham claimed of the texts. “And there was no risk to our troops, and the entire world is safer because of the actions that our troops took. Now, some of us are actually happier about that, others are rooting for the United States to fail.”

Sean Hannity insisted to his prime-time viewers that “there was no classified material revealed in those texts,” later adding, “I would spend more time on this Signal issue, but it's such a nonissue, I don't even think it's worth talking about at this point.” On his radio show, Hannity expanded on his argument: “The distinction between sensitive and top secret classification information is very critical because we're dealing with sensitive information. The administration has reiterated no classified material was discussed, and, more importantly, the mission was operationally a complete success.”

Jesse Watters initially treated the story as a joke, asking his viewers: “Did you ever try to start a group text? You’re adding people and you accidentally add the wrong person? All of a sudden your Aunt Mary knows all your raunchy plans for the bachelor party? Well, that kind of happened today with the Trump administration.” After Goldberg released the texts, Watters declared the scandal “dead in 48 hours,” saying that all they showed was that officials “accidentally leaked to a reporter. It was a mistake. Hopefully it doesn’t happen again.”

Will Cain, Hegseth’s former co-host on Fox & Friends’ weekend edition, claimed on his eponymous show that while “it is incredibly concerning that sensitive information would be sent with a journalist included in the thread.” With that out of the way, he explained why this was actually good: “But the bigger takeaway from me is it is an insight, a transparent insight, into the thought process and dialog of our national leaders.”

And for Greg Gutfeld, texting battle plans over unsecured channels is simply “how winners live their lives.”

While Hegseth’s old buddies at Fox News were bloviating on his behalf, legal and military experts were explaining to journalists — including Fox’s own Jennifer Griffin — the grave risks of Hegseth’s actions. As more evidence arose of Hegseth’s malfeasance, including reports that Hegseth’s messages were derived from a classified email labeled “SECRET/NOFORN” and that he had also shared attack plans in a second text chain that included members of his family, they went quiet rather than either admit fault or double down on their support for the defense secretary’s actions.

The IG report’s release comes as Hegseth faces media and congressional scrutiny for reportedly ordering extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean that legal experts argue would constitute “at best, a war crime under federal law.”

It turns out there are downsides to promoting a second-tier Fox pundit best known for his defenses of alleged war criminals to lead the most powerful military in the history of the world and a sprawling bureaucracy with millions of employees.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters