On Sunday, President Trump tweeted a GIF of himself kicking CNN's Brian Stelter. CNN responded with its typical restraint and objectivity, declaring that Trump's tweet didn't merely represent an obvious breach of decency, it promoted violence, and Trump would have blood on his hands if some rogue follower picked up a gun and decided to come after Brian. Trump supporters responded to this outpouring of faux rage by CNN by shouting about Kathy Griffin carrying around a bloodied mock head of Trump, and Democrats from coast-to-coast have proclaimed that Trumpcare would end with grandma being shoved off a cliff by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. In this kabuki theater, both sides are right and wrong. The media are correct that the president is acting out in a fashion that makes my three-year-old s temper tantrum seem mature by comparison. But the question remains: Why does everyone treat this game as if it s being played for high stakes? Well, we know the match isn t real. It s a romance made in hell, but the ratings are stellar. So, why does everyone engage in this particular fake wrestling match at all? And why is it so entertaining? And what s the point of all of this? Well, let s be honest, it s entertaining, isn t it? The halo effect from Stopping the Joker, Hillary, never fades in the eyes of Trump supporters? Meanwhile, the press overlooks its own participation in the corrupted political entertainment complex in order to paint itself as thoroughly painstakingly objective in its work. And both sides must willingly blind themselves to the faults of their favorite characters, so they can paint themselves as warriors for truth in their work. The Fourth Estate never dies from the dark side of Trumpany Hall. This Manichaean dichotomy means that there is no longer any debate to emerge in the light. Instead, there is glee for Trump s base in the dark nook and cranny of the Fourth Estate. Instead, the halo from Trump s coverage . a gleeful glee in watching Trump's base bring justice to the streets of Gotham instead, a glee at the streets of Trump s batarangs of the streets . a real-life Trumpanyway . . . and a real life Trumpany hall the real life Donald Trump and the real Donald J. Trump s real life version of the Joker in Gotham.
00:00:00.000Just when you think things can't get any stupider, they do.
00:00:03.000On Sunday, President Trump tweeted out a GIF of himself clotheslining someone, knocking him to the ground, and then pummeling him at an old WWE event.
00:00:09.000In the GIF, the head of Trump's victim has been replaced with the CNN logo.
00:00:12.000So Trump appears to be tackling then beating the hell out of the network he most despises, the one he has used as a foil in his rise to power.
00:00:19.000Trump's CNN tweet followed on the heels of his tweets from last week, in which he attacked MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough in the most personal terms.
00:00:25.000Trump supporters responded with unrestrained glee to much of this.
00:00:29.000CNN, meanwhile, responded with its typical restraint and objectivity.
00:00:33.000Reporter after reporter declared that Trump's tweet didn't merely represent an obvious breach of decency, an unpresidential and apparently pathological outburst of spontaneous rage, tweeting, it promoted violence, and Trump would have blood on his hands if some rogue follower picked up a gun and decided to come after Brian Stelter.
00:00:49.000Trump supporters responded to this outpouring of faux rage by CNN by shouting about Kathy Griffin carrying around a bloodied mock head of Trump, Julius Caesar presented by Shakespeare in the Park as an assassination of Trump, and Democrats from coast to coast have proclaimed that Trumpcare would end with grandma being shoved off a cliff by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
00:01:06.000In this kabuki theater, both sides are right and both sides are wrong.
00:01:08.000The media are right that the president is acting out in a fashion that makes my three-year-old's temper tantrum seem mature by comparison.
00:01:14.000Trump supporters are right that the media's coverage is so wildly corrupt and hysterical it makes Leo Blum and the producers look like Mother Teresa.
00:01:21.000The media are wrong that their liberties are some sort of existential assault from the president who's merely mouthing off the way he has his entire career.
00:01:28.000Trump supporters are wrong that all evils can be excused by simply pointing at the latest media bad actor and yelling WAR at the top of your lungs.
00:01:36.000A media nobody trusts, school-marming a president who's the class clown.
00:01:40.000Nobody looks really good in this particular fake wrestling match.
00:01:42.000The question is actually why anyone engages in it at all.
00:01:45.000After all, we know the match isn't real.
00:01:47.000Trump so adores the media attention that if CNN and the New York Times were to stop covering him, he'd quickly set himself on fire outside their studios for the cameras.
00:01:54.000Likewise, if Trump were to stop tweeting, CNN would have to go back to covering missing Malaysian airliners.
00:01:59.000It's a romance made in hell, but the ratings are absolutely stellar.
00:02:08.000And entertaining conflicts must have clear good and evil combatants.
00:02:11.000Because the media are corrupt and Trump is immature, both sides must willingly blind themselves to the faults of their favorite characters.
00:02:17.000So, the right says that Trump is a virginal political victim, a neophyte, undeserving of his critics' vitriol.
00:02:23.000Even better, he's held up as an unparalleled political genius, the voice of the people, the populist revolutionary in the guise of the prince of the city, a sort of Bruce Wayne who dons the cape of justice by night and tweets rage at the media by day while the music from The Dark Knight thunders dramatically in the background.
00:02:37.000The halo effect from Stopping the Joker, Hillary, never fades in the eyes of Trump supporters.
00:02:41.000Meanwhile, the press overlooks its own participation in the corrupted political entertainment complex in order to paint itself as thoroughly painstaking and objective in its work.
00:02:50.000Journalists see themselves, and the left flatteringly sees the journalists, as warriors for truth, exposing the light in every dark nook and cranny of the Trump administration.
00:02:58.000They imagine themselves in battered hats and trench coats, walking around in the rain, looking for all of the evidence of the dark deeds, uncovering the seedy side of Trumpany Hall.
00:03:07.000The halo effect from opposing Trump never dies for the fourth estate.
00:03:11.000This Manichaean dichotomy means that there is no way for any reasonable or tempered debate to emerge over proper behavior or coverage.
00:03:18.000Instead, there is glee for Trump's base in watching Trump bring justice to the streets of Media Gotham, flinging batarangs of acerbic nastiness at Mika Brzezinski's bloody face.
00:03:26.000And for the media, there is similar glee in proclaiming Trump an incipient Hitler, a Willy Stark who must be stopped before he can transform into real-life Huey Long.
00:03:34.000All of this makes the political scene a lot more fun and entertaining, but it's not very useful.
00:03:39.000While the drama of Trump vs. the media is amusing, it's not quite WWE quality, because most people actually think that it's real.
00:03:44.000We can find the WWE entertaining and amusing because we know it's scripted, but if we actually thought it was real, and then all of a sudden we were rudely disabused of that notion, it would probably ruin the fun.
00:03:53.000The same is true of our politics right now.
00:03:55.000The realization that Trump vs. the media is just overblown stupidity half-scripted on both sides makes the conflict less compelling.
00:04:01.000The comedy actually becomes kind of tragic.
00:04:03.000After all, it's a lot easier to laugh at the antics of The Undertaker than to laugh as the office of George Washington and the industry of Ernie Pyle both become punchlines.
00:04:19.000Okay, so CNN has completely lit itself on fire.
00:04:21.000So yesterday was July 4th, and in honor of Independence Day, CNN held a fireworks celebration in its own pants.
00:04:27.000It lit all of the TNT that it could find, and then proceeded to blow it up, absolutely destroying itself wholesale.
00:04:33.000We will talk about all of it because it is really amusing.
00:04:35.000I just said we shouldn't talk so much about the WWE stuff, but I'm going to because it's hilarious.
00:04:39.000So we'll talk about all of that stuff in a second.
00:04:41.000But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at blinds.com.
00:04:45.000So I'm sure you don't think too much about your blinds, but let's face it.
00:04:48.000They're really ugly and you need to replace them because they've been there for like 20 years and they're left over from the previous tenant or the previous owner.
00:04:54.000You never bothered because who cares about blinds?
00:04:56.000You should care about blinds because they make your home look so much better when they are bad.
00:05:56.000It's astonishing how, basically, I tweeted last week that Trump destroyed CNN not by actually attacking them, but by trolling them so hard that they destroyed themselves.
00:06:06.000He really gave them enough rope that they decided not just to hang themselves, but to hang themselves by the neck until they were nearly dead, then pull themselves up back onto the platform and jump repeatedly.
00:06:15.000This is basically what CNN is doing now.
00:06:16.000So, here's how this works out over the course of the weekend.
00:06:20.000On Sunday, President Trump tweets something that I assume my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter has the good sense not to tweet, a WWE wrestling graphic of himself tackling a person with a CNN logo for a head, and then jumping on top of them and pummeling them.
00:06:36.000This is the President of the United States.
00:06:37.000Lest we forget, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln once sat
00:06:41.000Well, George Washington didn't, but Abraham Lincoln once sat in the office where Donald Trump is tweeting in the middle of the night from the toilet, presumably, about rage tweets.
00:06:50.000So he tweets this, and here's what it looks like.
00:08:16.000It would also be obvious, and it would be relatively objective.
00:08:19.000Instead, they proceed to spend the next three days talking about how this means that Donald Trump wants to literally go and beat Brian Stelter's face in.
00:08:27.000Really, he's a sick Nazi who wants to murder people, and that's why he's tweeting out wrestling tweets from the WWE.
00:08:34.000First of all, it doesn't make any sense to me.
00:08:36.000They used a CNN logo over Vince McMahon's face.
00:09:11.000Trump has trolled them so hard that they have actually become that which they fear.
00:09:15.000So here is Howard Dean first saying that Trump is evil and violent.
00:09:19.000A lot of the Trump voters are not the far right nutcases with guns who want to, you know, shoot up the place.
00:09:25.000Most of the Trump voters are people- Well, I don't think anyone was defining them that way.
00:09:30.000No, but there certainly are some of them.
00:09:32.000And the NRA put an appalling ad out there, which really basically made the statement... Okay, so the left, Howard Dean, who's a complete moron, is talking about how the right is full of violent people.
00:09:42.000Lest we forget, three weeks ago, a Trump-hating Bernie Sanders supporter tried to assassinate several dozen Republican Congress people, but we're the violent ones, right?
00:09:51.000It's the Trump supporters who are the violent ones.
00:09:53.000Those of us on the right who are the violent ones.
00:11:01.000So, he puts out this meme, right, Han Bleephole Solo puts out this meme, and CNN traces it back to him.
00:11:08.000And then CNN goes and looks at all the other memes that he's put out, and it turns out he's put out a bunch of racist, anti-Semitic memes, because there are a lot of people on Reddit who do this.
00:11:14.000I know, because I was the personal recipient of 40% of all anti-Semitic memes that were tweeted on the internet at Journalist last year.
00:11:21.000I personally was the recipient of, so I'm well aware of this entire crowd.
00:11:25.000I'm well aware of the bleep posters, as they call themselves.
00:11:29.000They decide to dig up all of this ancillary material and then pretend that Trump is somehow linked to that.
00:11:33.000So first of all, this is bad journalism.
00:11:35.000It's bad journalism because it would be one thing if Trump tweeted an anti-Semitic meme and then they said, okay, here is the world of anti-Semitic memes from which he is drawing.
00:11:53.000What is not a fair story is he picks up one piece of material from the rthedonald thread, and now we're gonna find the person who created that, who Trump has never met, probably never seen, and never, and none of this came, like Trump probably had no relationship with this person ever.
00:12:06.000He doesn't know who they are from Adam, and then we're gonna find everything that guy ever did, and then we are going to link all the bad things that guy did with Trump.
00:12:13.000So you can see how far they're stretching.
00:12:18.000Trump didn't tweet anything racist or anti-semitic, he tweeted something dumb.
00:12:21.000And now they're trying to link him with racism and anti-semitism because the original creator of this wrestling gif was some schmuck who tweets out anti-semitic, racist stuff.
00:12:32.000Okay, so that's dumb in and of itself.
00:12:40.000America will disappear because we all go brain dead from loss of IQ points due to following politics too closely, because this is all so stupid.
00:12:46.000So, it goes a level deeper in the stupidity.
00:12:48.000So now, CNN doesn't just track down Han A-hole Solo's name, right?
00:12:56.000They don't just track down what else he's tweeted.
00:12:58.000Now, they go to him, and they reach out to him, and he immediately sees what's happening.
00:13:02.000He sees they're now going to target him.
00:13:04.000And so what he decides to do is apologize, or he puts a big apology,
00:13:08.000He takes down all of the terrible tweets, he takes down all of the terrible memes, and then CNN prints the story.
00:13:13.000And here's what they print, okay, this is from the CNN story, direct quote, quote, CNN is not publishing Han A-hole Solo's name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again.
00:13:30.000In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
00:13:34.000CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
00:13:40.000Okay, so, for those of you who missed what just happened, that's called blackmail.
00:13:44.000Right, what CNN is doing now is they are now saying, he took down all this stuff that we didn't like, he took the racist anti-male, also he took down the CNN stuff, but should he renege?
00:14:12.000So now they have taken what was an obvious and clear win on Sunday, right?
00:14:15.000Trump making fun of them with some stupid meme, and they could make fun of him back, and it's an obvious win.
00:14:19.000And they have destroyed themselves three separate ways.
00:14:21.000First, by claiming that Trump is violent, and this is promoting violence.
00:14:24.000Second, by trying to track down everything possible about this meme guy.
00:14:28.000And third, by then threatening the meme guy that if he doesn't back down from this, they are going to out him.
00:14:34.000CNN has now blown all journalistic credibility out of some pathetic, sick attempt to get Donald Trump and anyone who is remotely linked with Donald Trump.
00:14:50.000But before I tell you the rest of the story, I have to say thank you to our sponsors over at Tracker.
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00:16:41.000The only way to describe this is that they deliberately decided to kick themselves in the groin as hard as humanly possible, and now all of their appendages are out of order, because it just continues.
00:16:51.000Okay, so here's where it goes from here.
00:16:53.000Now, CNN defends itself from the blackmail accusations.
00:16:57.000They say, no, no, no, we never blackmailed anyone.
00:16:59.000They said, we decided not to publish the name of the Reddit user out of concern for his safety.
00:19:11.000And that wasn't, by the way, even that is not the end of the story because yesterday, CNN, two times, two times, apparently, had fake quotes.
00:19:47.000And then everyone wonders why trust in the media may be declining.
00:19:51.000I can't imagine why trust in the media is declining.
00:19:54.000So, when we continue on the other side here, I want to talk about some Republican silliness that happened over the weekend also on the media, because we can't just have... Republicans have gone... We've gotten to the point where there can't just be partisan silliness, there has to be bipartisan silliness.
00:20:08.000Like, everyone has to drink the cuckoo juice, and now everyone has lost their minds.
00:20:12.000So we'll get to more insanity, July 4th insanity, but first, you're gonna have to go over to Daily Wire and subscribe.
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