Just after Trump’s victory and his appointment of former Breitbart News executive chairman Steve Bannon as “Chief Strategist,” Breitbart began to receive scrutiny unlike anything we had ever seen before. We’d certainly seen our share of good news cycles and bad, but we were on a roll of late. I had just gotten back from the United Kingdom, where I had spent much of the summer covering the British referendum to leave the European Union, otherwise known as Brexit. Nigel Farage, then the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and figurehead of the anti–European Union movement, said that “Brexit would not have happened without Breitbart.”1 Reporting on Hillary Clinton by Breitbart staffers, especially Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer, had become imbedded in the consciousness of the American electorate. And of course, Breitbart was the first major American media outlet to take Donald Trump seriously as a presidential contender.
With the elevation of Bannon, the smears were flying at a rate that we hadn’t seen in our history. Here were some of the most common falsehoods that were repeated about our merry band of grassroots journalists:
Breitbart news is anti-Semitic. Perhaps the most oft-repeated smear on us is also the most absurd. Andrew Breitbart and Larry Solov, both Jewish, conceived of the idea for Breitbart.com while on a sojourn in Israel, where they visited holy sites and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The first editor-in-chief of the website and current senior editor-at-large, Joel Pollak, is an orthodox Jew. Many of the top editors past and present are Jews. My mother was raised Jewish. Breitbart News has a Jerusalem bureau where we cover the Jewish state from an overwhelmingly pro-Israel perspective.
The preponderance of evidence against the claim we’re anti-Semitic raises the question, where did the smear come from? Almost certainly it is based on this single headline: “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew.”2
That’s it. Certainly, that’s an intense headline, and one that normally wouldn’t get published on our virtual pages. But the article, a takedown of apostate Republican magazine editor and “Never Trump” pundit Bill Kristol, was written by prominent Jewish intellectual David Horowitz, and this was his preferred headline. What’s more, in the article, Horowitz criticizes Kristol for not being sufficiently pro-Israel. Israel, of course, is the only Jewish state on earth.
Rarely do media hit pieces on Breitbart give any of this context. So, a single opinion headline from a Jewish thought leader is used to cancel out thousands of pro-Jewish articles written by Jewish writers and editors.
This isn’t bias. This is weaponized political media designed to destroy us.
Breitbart news is racist and sexist. This one is nearly as easy to debunk, if you use the traditional definition of racism (discriminating against people based on their skin tone). As it happens, Breitbart News’ entertainment editor is black (Jerome Hudson), our copy chief is a black woman (Adrienne Ross), our world editor is a Latina woman (Frances Martel), our chief defense correspondent is an Asian woman (Kristina Wong), and our top video editor is also a woman (Amand House). Not to mention numerous Jewish staffers including those mentioned above. And those are just examples from middle management. Journalist Wil S. Hylton reported in the New York Times Magazine that I personally have “a pretty good record of promoting women and minorities.”3
Since 2015, Breitbart News has published the Cartel Chronicles. This series is designed to be a channel for citizen journalism and other reporting on cartel activity throughout Mexico, the United States, and beyond. The Cartel Chronicles gives a voice to the Mexican citizens who are the greatest victims of cartel violence, as well as countless Americans who are harmed by the illegal drug and human smuggling trade. We publish the Cartel Chronicles in both English and Spanish.4
For years, publicly traded SiriusXM has given Breitbart News between 23 and 38 hours of live national radio a week. At least 2 of those weekly hours are hosted by a black woman, Sonnie Johnson. It would be quite a feat for a racist network to produce two thousand hours a year of original broadcasting without producing even a single racist sound bite, yet we somehow manage!
As for me, my first job in conservative media was with my first favorite talk show host: a black man named Larry Elder, who now hosts a nationally syndicated show for the Salem Radio Network.
So, Breitbart is a pro-Jewish website with a reputation for treating women and minorities well and publishes many articles in Spanish. Yet we were branded racist. Why? It’s because the Democrat Media Complex, which has been weaponized against the Right and traditional American values, has changed the definition of racism to mean, in essence, anything associated with or supportive of Donald Trump or conservative America. Occasionally, even being insufficiently anti-Trump or politically correct is enough to get you branded with the scarlet “R.”
So, everyone on the right is now “racist” to one degree or another. Thus, the Left has to invent new language to distinguish between the really bad people and your garden-variety rubes. Thus…
Breitbart News is “the platform for the alt-right.” The expression “alt-right” is relatively new and if you asked ten people to define it, those who have even heard of it would likely give you differing answers. That said, they would probably associate the term with racism and Jew-hatred.
Luckily for us, this one might be the easiest to refute of them all: professor and noted Israeli-American author Yochai Benkler, who has studied Breitbart with interdisciplinary colleagues at Harvard and MIT, literally told the New York Times Magazine in 2017 that “Breitbart is not the alt-right.”
Case closed, right?
Well, no, because Steve Bannon once told Mother Jones that we are “the platform for the alt-right.”5 Though Bannon has a genius and a magnetism that is often productive and usually compelling, he is also prone to using declarative language when he is entirely incorrect. Occasionally he’s a visionary; other times he’s a WWE professional wrestler. This was an example of the latter. I wasn’t there for the conversation, nor do I know exactly what Bannon was thinking, but he certainly wasn’t telling a reporter that our pro-Israel outlet, owned and edited by Jews, is also anti-Semitic. Yet, if you read news reports about Breitbart, that’s exactly how the comment is portrayed.
At that point in time, we had published the most thorough reporting on the alt-right and its various factions earlier that year in a piece titled “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.”6 The article was widely read and generally well received; Bloomberg News included it on their 2016 “Jealousy List” of the stories they wished they had written.7
So, Breitbart certainly popularized right-wing ideas that were an alternative to establishment conservatives, and we had written comprehensively about the “alt-right,” so it’s easy to see how Bannon could have made this flub.
But a flub is all it was, as confirmed by Harvard’s Benkler.
Yet, our weaponized media never let the facts get in the way of a favorable narrative. So, they have used that single phrase to define us instead of examining the tens of thousands of pieces of content or the thousands of hours of radio we produce each year.
All’s fair in love and war, as the saying goes.
And this is war.
Breitbart News peddles conspiracies. Of the smears on Breitbart News, this is the one that has gotten the least traction. But still, it merits a quick review.
Wikipedia in their wildly inaccurate entry on Breitbart News (remember, it’s not bias, it’s weaponized media) lists four total conspiracy theories we have allegedly peddled over the years (remember, Breitbart News was founded well over a decade ago and publishes about one hundred original articles each day). Here they are:
So, the establishment media’s narrative about Breitbart has been wrong the entire time. If you’re taking time to read this book (and an organization funded by George Soros isn’t paying you to do so), this probably isn’t a surprise to you. But what might be a surprise is the extent to which the establishment media has so clearly put their agenda ahead of the truth. Breitbart is far from the only group of people smeared by a belligerent media class. Recall some of these classics from my personal Fake News Hall of Shame:
The media insists to this day that President Trump said that neo-Nazis were “very fine people” after the protests and riots that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. The lie stems from a press conference held on infrastructure at Trump Tower on August 15; toward the end of the presser, a reporter questioned Trump as to whom he blamed for the violence that day, considering that neo-Nazis were in attendance. Trump reacted as follows (emphasis mine):
Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group—excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.
This was all the media needed to claim that Trump is literally a Nazi. Conveniently, they left off the rest of the discussion. Full transcript (emphasis mine):
REPORTER: George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same.
TRUMP: Oh no, George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down—excuse me. Are we going to take down, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? Okay, good. Are we going to take down his statue? He was a major slave owner. Are we going to take down his statue? You know what? It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people—and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally—but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats—you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.10
So not only is Trump not literally Hitler, he flat out condemned Nazis a mere minute after his infamous “fine people” comment. In fact, CNN reported the story accurately in August 2017 but went on to become one of the most prominent proponents of the hoax as time went on.11 The establishment media echoed this falsehood for years all because, it appears, it helped frame the president as a racist.
Not only was Trump’s answer to the reporter a good one, but it predicted the eventual cancellation of Washington and Jefferson. (“Cancellation” is the expression for widespread ostracism or even banning of figures, past and present, from polite society and social media.) A short time after Trump’s comments, it became fashionable to rename schools that honored Presidents Washington, Jefferson, and even Lincoln.12 These presidents are simply too controversial for the woke moment in which we find ourselves.
Assemble the renaming committee! We need a few Colin Kaepernick Middle Schools to open up and some Jussie Smollett Highways anyway.
The fake news narrative that Trump said there were “very fine people” on both sides followed him around to the end of his presidency. Joe Biden regularly cited the Charlottesville hoax as part of his inspiration to run for the highest office. Biden, himself a white man with a checkered history when it comes to race, rode this smear all the way to the White House.
Then-judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was never going to be an easy process even though he had virtually a perfect resume. He was squeaky clean. He had a Yale education and a terrific reputation in the community. He coached girls’ youth basketball and served hot food to the homeless in soup kitchens. And he was hardly a right-wing radical. While on the D.C. circuit court, he voted with his liberal colleague Judge Merrick Garland 93 percent of the time. (Garland was Barack Obama’s pick to replace Antonin Scalia after the latter’s death in 2016 and would become Biden’s attorney general.)
But, Kavanaugh was replacing Justice Anthony Kennedy (for whom he had clerked), who was often the court’s swing vote. This meant his confirmation would create perhaps the most conservative Supreme Court in generations.13 Roe v. Wade now in play? The Democrat Media Complex certainly wasn’t going to take that chance. They had to stop the confirmation.
The first tactic from the Democrats (who quickly began hurling invective at Kavanaugh) was a fishing expedition: one million pages of documents would be examined before the Senate would vote, by far a record.14 This was less likely to yield controversial dirt than it would buy time for a strategy to reveal itself. And it did. Brett Kavanaugh was going to be painted as a sexual predator.
In the era of #MeToo (an anti-sex-abuse social movement that led to many high-profile public firings and arrests), men accused of sexual assault were guilty until proven innocent in the court of public opinion, which meant this vector of attack could maybe succeed despite a seeming lack of actual proof. The Democrat Media Complex was certainly determined to find out.
First, the Intercept reported that Senator Dianne Feinstein had obtained a letter alleging a sexual assault by Kavanaugh against a woman (later identified as Christine Blasey Ford) that supposedly took place in 1982.15 Ford’s story was published in the Washington Post. Drama ensued, there were demands the FBI to look into the matter, and the Kavanaugh confirmation vote was delayed.16
NBC published a report from one of Kavanaugh’s former classmates, Christina King Miranda, that supposedly backed up Ford’s story.17 But upon scrutiny, there were significant discrepancies in Miranda’s and Ford’s stories.
Next, the New Yorker ran the story of Deborah Ramirez, who claimed that someone had thrust a penis in her hand while she was at Yale thirty-five years prior; it had recently dawned on her that that person was Brett Kavanaugh. But no credible witnesses could even place Kavanaugh at the party, much less recall the incident. Ramirez also acknowledges that she had been drinking. The New Yorker article indicates that she might have been hesitant to come forward due to her hazy recollection; only after six days of reflecting and discussions with her attorney did she speak to reporter Ronan Farrow.18
The Times tweeted at the time, “Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun.” They deleted the tweet and apologized.19
Ford eventually testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Within the span of a minute or two, questioner Rachel Mitchell, a sex crime expert and Maricopa County, Arizona’s deputy county attorney, got the Democrats’ star witness to say that she had to “get up the gumption with the help of some friends” to fly to Washington for the hearing—but that she also regularly took flights to places like Hawaii, Costa Rica, South Pacific islands, and French Polynesia to surf.
Mitchell remained preternaturally calm through this surreal exchange, so much so that to many in the establishment media, Christine Blasey Ford remains credible to this day. Despite the seemingly contradictory testimony, she received praise from every corner of the media, from Time magazine to Fox News to Marie Claire. She even inspired a book about the #MeToo era, which was endorsed by Publishers Weekly and Ashley Judd.20
There would be at least one more accuser. NBC reported that Julie Swetnick claimed she witnessed the future Supreme Court justice participate in gang rapes when he was about fifteen years old (the network included a disclaimer that her report was contradictory).21 Swetnick was represented by disgraced lawyer and flash-in-the-pan cable news celebrity Michael Avenatti.22 The pair never produced a single witness, but a former boyfriend said he believed Swetnick had psychological problems and was a group-sex enthusiast.23
This was an embarrassing end to one of the media’s most disgraceful sagas.
Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the SCOTUS on October 6, 2018, on a 50–48 vote, the narrowest in U.S. history.24
The story that garnered the most attention from our establishment media during the Trump presidency was a 100 percent bogus one: the story that the president had colluded with the Russian government to rig the 2016 election and that the president of the United States himself is a Russian asset. For conservative audiences, this notion always seemed kind of absurd. After all, we had read how it was Clinton World that was intertwined with the Russians in Peter Schweizer’s 2015 book, Clinton Cash.25 Among the revelations in the book is that while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, the U.S. approved a sale that effectively transferred 20 percent of the United States’ uranium reserves to a Russian government–owned company. The transaction was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a government interagency that includes the State Department. (Clinton has repeatedly denied approving the deal, insisting that the decision was delegated to lower-level officials.)26 Uranium is not only an important strategic metal, but it is nuclear-weapon-usable and naturally radioactive.27 Thus, handing it over to the Russians wasn’t just potentially corrupt, it had serious implications for our national security.
Around the time this deal went down, the Clinton Foundation received $145 million from investors in the uranium deal, according to bombshell reporting by the New York Times. (The Times was trashed for daring to report unflatteringly on the business dealings of the Clintons while Hillary was our nation’s top diplomat.)28 Additionally, a Kremlin-linked bank paid Bill Clinton half a million dollars for a brief speech that took place in Moscow around that time. Putin reportedly thanked Clinton for delivering the speech.29
After quickly brushing over evidence of possible corruption unearthed about the Clintons, our establishment media were attempting to gaslight Americans into believing Trump is Putin’s puppet. It wasn’t going to work unless they delivered the goods, which they never did.
Though Trump has certainly praised Putin, his policy toward Russia was quite tough, much more so than his predecessor’s.
All of this was subtext as the Russian collusion investigation played out—at least for folks who get news from non-establishment sources. While CNN was reporting breathlessly and repeatedly on Trump saying nice things about Putin and other dictators, they apparently did not consider that this was all Trump’s strategy.36 It’s not like he wrote a famous book about negotiations called The Art of the Deal.
When we learned that the entirety of Big Scary Russia’s method for overturning an American presidential election was basically to buy $100,000 of Facebook ads and hack John Podesta’s emails, I knew the witch hunt was doomed to fail.37
I was on Bill Maher’s HBO show Real Time in the summer of 2017 when I predicted that there would ultimately be no evidence the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to rig an election and that no one in the establishment press would get held accountable for misleading the public and wasting our time. “You guys continue to talk about this story in the establishment press instead of talking about the president’s agenda, which is by design. Because you guys won’t apologize if it turns out there’s nothing, no one will come out on MSNBC, they’ll just move on to the next hysteria,” I told Maher.
Sadly, my predictions came true.38
The levels of deception and delusion carried out by our activist press to misinform the public on Trump and Russia were unfathomable. Nearly every single establishment media newsroom got the crux of the story wrong, and they published well over half a million articles on the subject (and that’s counting only from May 2017 to March 2019).39 Here is an extremely truncated list of fake news lowlights among infinite examples:
For years the establishment media falsely insisted the bogus “pee pee” dossier, which had been financed by a law firm that represented Hillary Clinton, had been corroborated at least two times.62 The dossier, according to Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz’s famed report released in December 2019, “played a central and essential role” in the FBI’s decision to seek Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authority to surveil Trump staffer Carter Page.
Alisyn Camerota, former DNI James Clapper, Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA), anchor Jim Sciutto, and many others hyped the credibility of the clearly bogus document on CNN’s air.63
Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, John Harwood, and others on NBC’s cable news properties clung desperately to the notion that none of the dossier had been disproven. (Little in life can be disproven, which is why our legal system relies on “innocent until proven guilty” as opposed to the inverse. I could accuse Rachel Maddow and Nicolle Wallace of murder, animal cruelty, or intentionally lying to moderately large cable news audiences every weekday for years in order to undo the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and it would be impossible to disprove any of it.)
The establishment media seemed to have no introspection about how wrong they were about Donald Trump and Russia. In fact, quite the opposite. The New York Times and the Washington Post won Pulitzer Prizes for Russia panic reporting, even though it ultimately amounted to nothing.64
The award-winning articles have aged very poorly. They rely on vast amounts of speculation, endless cover-your-ass caveats, and an array of wishful thinking that in retrospect looks more like a Hollywood fantasy—or a large-scale hoax to brainwash the public.
During this fake news cycle, literally dozens of celebrities accused the U.S. president of treason, a crime punishable in the United States by death.65
Meanwhile, the Times and much of their establishment media cohorts missed what was a much, much larger and contemporaneous story about U.S. government corruption: the surveillance of the Donald Trump campaign by the Obama administration.66
Perhaps the Pulitzer has become akin to a “participation trophy,” a booby prize for the privileged journalism establishment class to reward to each other, regardless of whether their reporting actually informed the public or misinformed it.
In July 2017, political journalist Joshua Green, who writes primarily at Bloomberg, wrote (fittingly) at the New York Times that “No One Cares About Russia in the World Breitbart Made.” After a dramatic opening that included the claim that “Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign had, at the very least, been eager to collude with Russia to influence the 2016 election,” Green wrote, “You’d have had to travel to the political fringe of right-wing talk radio, the Drudge Report and dissident publications like Breitbart News to find an alternative viewpoint that rejected this basic story line.”
He continued, “The Breitbart mind-set—pugnacious, besieged, paranoid and determined to impose its own framework on current events regardless of facts—has moved from the right-wing fringe to the center of Republican politics.”67
The only problem is that Breitbart had the narrative correct all along. It was an incorrect assumption shared unquestioningly by all of the establishment that Russia would have preferred a Trump presidency to a Hillary Clinton one. It was absurd to believe a germophobe like Trump had a urine fetish, and that he traveled to Moscow to indulge it. And it was, above all, idiotic to believe that Trump was simultaneously the biggest buffoon in the history of American politics but also savvy enough (despite having zero political experience) to rig an American presidential election with the help of a geopolitical adversary and not leave a trace of incontrovertible evidence.
Yet, this is exactly what you were told to believe, and if you dared to question the media’s Russia narrative, you were “besieged, paranoid and determined to impose [your] own framework.” At least according to an author featured in the New York Times.
Green’s article concluded, “If special counsel Robert Mueller finds evidence of Russian collusion, it will be followed by a bigger test measuring just what it takes to snap out of a mass hallucination.”
Perhaps Green hadn’t considered it was the media establishment that was doing the hallucinating.
Or maybe they were simply at war.
Late Saturday night, January 19, 2019, I was rushed back to my desk to watch a viral video from the March for Life (an annual anti-abortion march that takes place in Washington, D.C., each year) that appeared to show white teens in MAGA hats taunting an old American Indian man while he beat a sad little drum.
The man, sixty-four-year-old Nathan Phillips, said that the boys chanted “Build that wall, build that wall,” among other supposedly horrible things.
The public conviction of the pro-life boys from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky—especially then-sixteen-year-old Nicholas Sandmann, who grinned silently at Phillips—was instant.
The New York Times tweeted: “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples March.”68 (Phillips was reportedly participating in a march for American Indians at roughly the same time as the March for Life.)
CNN “conservative” S. E. Cupp lectured the boys, their parents, and the country in general over our collective awfulness.69
Then-congresswoman Deb Haaland (now interior secretary) harshly condemned not only the boys, but President Trump as well, tweeting, “The students’ display of blatant hate, disrespect, and intolerance is a signal of how common decency has decayed under this administration. Heartbreaking.”70
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman (more on her later) expanded the scope, tweeting that “dozens of students” were “laughing and egging on” the behavior and that “officials suggest” there could be expulsions.71
Actor Chris Evans wrote out an eight-sentence tweet that reads like beat poetry but can be summed up as “MAGA boys bad, Native American man good.”72
Rosie O’Donnell called Sandmann a “horrible smug asswipe.”73
Actor, former Screen Actors Guild president, and 9/11 conspiracy nut Ed Asner tweeted, “This is not America.”74
Former CNN talking head Reza Aslan tweeted of Sandmann,75 “Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?” Slate’s Ruth Graham repeated the “punchable” face line.76 CNN’s Bakari Sellers agreed: “[Sandmann] is deplorable. Some ppl can also be punched in the face,” he twittered.77
Actor Tim Robbins mused, “How does this behavior reflect the life and lessons of Jesus Christ?”78
Actor and Dell Technologies spokesman Jeffrey Wright fantasized about the students getting beaten. He rage-tweeted: “Since they’re in DC, they should take the phucking red hats and #MAGA bullshit and get up in some faces over Congress Heights way. The reaction won’t be so dignified. They’ll relocate that smug grin to the back of his pencil-dick neck like he’s asking for.”79
The government-funded news media was typically awful. NPR’s headline read, “Video of Kentucky Students Mocking Native American Man Draws Outcry.”80
Comedian, former CNN personality, and national basket case Kathy Griffin (who is famous for a photo in which she held a bloody severed head of President Trump) called for the children to be publicly named.81
NBC News interviewed another young man from the same region of the country—a gay person who had been valedictorian of another local school—who trashed the Covington Catholic students without evidence that they had done anything wrong.82
The New York Daily News and the British Daily Mail, among others, portrayed Covington High School in an unflattering light with years-old photos of kids at a school basketball game allegedly wearing “blackface.” (They were not in blackface, nor were they making racial taunts.)83
Even the diocese of Covington condemned the kids and apologized to pretty much everyone.84 The Washington Post used the statement to tarnish the entire pro-life movement. They connected the event to President Trump’s “Pocahontas” nickname he uses for Senator Elizabeth Warren, a white woman who identified as an American Indian nearly her entire adult life.85
Also to the WaPo’s delight, the mayor of Covington condemned the boys soon after.86
Even prominent media conservatives piled on. Radio talk show host and NBC News contributor Hugh Hewitt wrote in a tweet that is beyond satire that it would be “great if Covington Catholic invited Philly Archbishop Chaput, a member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, to visit the school for some teaching on respect, forgiveness, courtesy.” Hewitt also signaled his virtue by tweeting “train every high schooler in Proverbs 15:1” (“A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger”).87 Ironically, Sandmann gave the softest answer to Phillips possible: a smile. He used no words at all. If only Hewitt had done the same.
Republican establishment pundit and magazine editor Bill Kristol seemed to imply that President Trump(!) should call Phillips to express regret.88
The most over-the-top, self-righteously irresponsible coverage of the Nicholas Sandmann saga came from the National Review, which published an article literally titled “The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross.” The author, Nicholas Frankovich, savaged the children, repeatedly invoking religious language and principles to do so. Apparently, there was extreme urgency to get the rebuke of the pro-life teens in MAGA hats: the article was published at 2:55 a.m. The hit piece on children was so urgent it couldn’t wait until daybreak.89 NR ultimately retracted the piece and apologized.
The establishment media’s narrative turned out to be pure fake news, of course.
Nathan Phillips, the narrative’s victim/hero, wasn’t simply a kindly old native person: he is a career activist who fights on behalf of left-wing causes. While the March for Life has been an annual event since 1975, the first Indigenous People’s March launched that year (it did not return in 2020). Coincidentally, it was scheduled at the exact same time as the March for Life. This is either a wild coincidence, or Phillips was there that day specifically to stir things up.
Phillips also has a criminal record. He had pled guilty to assault and has several alcohol-related charges, a negligent driving charge, a driving without a license charge, and was charged with trying to escape jail. Phillips also touts his Marine Corps service, claiming he had served “in theatre,” but according to the Washington Examiner, he had never been deployed outside of the United States and his main job was as a refrigerator mechanic.90 The Washington Post had to issue a substantial correction after incorrectly reporting that Phillips fought in the Vietnam War.91
According to retired Navy SEAL Don Shipley, an advocate against stolen valor, Phillips had been AWOL (away without leave) on three occasions.92 Phillips left the military after a series of disciplinary issues.93
He also appeared to be prone to making up stories seemingly out of whole cloth. In one instance, Phillips claimed that he had been “spat on” by a “blonde-haired, blue-eyed hippie girl” who called him a “baby killer”; he then bragged about beating up her boyfriend.94
In other words, the media’s hero, Nathan Phillips, appears to be a bit of a fabulist.
There was a third group also in attendance that day: the Black Hebrew Israelites, a relatively obscure and radical religious sect who believes they are descended from lost tribes of Israel.95 Even the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center has called them “black supremacists” and “militant” and reported that they have a racist and anti-Semitic worldview.96
You wouldn’t know that, though, if you got your news from the New York Times. The Gray Lady published a puff piece titled “Hebrew Israelites See Divine Intervention in Lincoln Memorial Confrontation.”97
Initial reports indicated that the Covington boys had initiated the confrontation, verbally accosting both Phillips and the Black Hebrew Israelites. But it wasn’t the Covington kids who started it, it was the Hebrew Israelites. Extended footage revealed them referring to the students as “school shooters” and “a bunch of incest babies.”98 Video shows the Hebrew Israelites verbally attacking the American Indian marchers and the March for Life participants, hurling an array of racial slurs.
More in-depth footage also makes it clear that Phillips approached the Covington boys, banging his sad little drum. It is also clear he was not cornered, as suggested by our press.
Phillips said repeatedly that the students had chanted “build the wall” or “build that wall,” a favorite chant among Trump devotees. The media found this irony particularly delicious because, as CNN’s Cupp put it, the American Indian population has “literally zero illegal immigrants.” To this day, though, there is no video of the Covington Catholic kids chanting anything remotely close to “build the wall,” despite the fact that there were a number of cameras present filming the confrontation. However, video did emerge that appears to show Black Hebrew Israelites mockingly shouting “build that wall” at the “dirty ass crackas.”
In fact, additional footage provided by Sandmann’s attorney shows an indigenous demonstrator suggesting that the students should go back to Europe because America is “not your land.”99
Soon after, the Covington Catholic students’ bus arrived and they left the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Nathan Phillips did not continue up the steps of the memorial—despite telling multiple national news outlets that the students were blocking his path.
In an incredibly telling moment on ABC’s daytime talk show The View, Whoopi Goldberg lamented how yet again the media had rushed to draw conclusions about a viral Internet video before the facts were in. “Why do we keep making the same mistake?” she asked the panel.100
Joy Behar responded instantly and with certainty: “Because we’re desperate to get Trump out of office. That’s why.”
Precisely. The media and celebrity establishment, even some political conservatives, waged war on minors without the slightest bit of due diligence because they had MAGA hats on.
The character assassination of Nicholas Sandmann was not bias; it was weaponized media.
Sandmann brought lawsuits against many of the responsible parties. In January 2020, he and CNN agreed to settle a $275 million lawsuit.101 Though the terms were not publicized, they are widely believed to represent a clear victory for Sandmann. On July 24, 2020, Sandmann settled a $250 million defamation suit against the Washington Post. The settlements were for undisclosed amounts.102
He has additional suits pending.103
Over the past half century or so, American law enforcement and popular culture have conferred an extra level of seriousness and gravity to “hate crimes” as opposed to regular crimes. The definition of a hate crime, according to the FBI, is a regular crime with an added element of bias. “A ‘criminal’ offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity,” the FBI.gov website states.104
Hate crimes are sure to grab headlines across international news because the victimhood is doubled. The victim was a casualty of whatever crime had been committed, and they’re a victim of racism/sexism/homophobia/bigotry, etc.
This explains why the media instantly was whipped up into a frenzy when a gay, black actor was allegedly attacked in Chicago in late January 2019. Jussie Smollett, an actor on the popular Fox show Empire, had supposedly been attacked by two men while walking home from a Subway sandwich shop at around 2 a.m. on January 29. According to Smollett’s original report, two white men beat him badly,105 fractured one of his ribs, and wrapped a noose around his neck (a symbol for lynching). The assailants also allegedly hurled racial and homophobic slurs, asking him if he was “that f***ot ‘Empire’ n***er?” They even poured bleach on his dark skin, according to Smollett, in what would have been an unspeakable act of abject racism.106
If the attack wasn’t dramatic enough, the two supposedly white attackers were also wearing red “Make America Great Again” hats, the iconic sartorial symbol of Donald Trump supporters. As they left a broken Smollett at the scene, they had supposedly shouted “This is MAGA country,” despite the fact that they supposedly were in Chicago.
This all happened on one of the coldest nights of the year with an overnight windchill well below zero degrees.
Smollett later posted to his Instagram a photo of himself in a hospital bed, scratched and bruised, providing ample evidence for would-be supporters to draw bold conclusions about the veracity of his account.
Smollett’s story was immediately embraced by the media and Hollywood establishments.
A gay black man had been a victim of a racist and homophobic attack by Trump supporters! This was way too good to check!
Or was it? Since, of course, this hate crime turned out to be a giant hoax.
Still, the media was inundated with virtue signaling on behalf of Smollett, accepting his claims wholesale. Some examples out of an infinite list:
If the journalism class was irresponsible, the celebrity establishment was downright reckless. Transgender nonbinary actor Elliot Page (who at the time was a lesbian actress named Ellen Page), Cher, pop star Katy Perry, actress Olivia Munn, actor Billy Eichner, Rosie O’Donnell, Rob Reiner, Moonlight writer/director Barry Jenkins, Frozen actor Josh Gad, Star Trek actor George Takei, and many others rushed to defend Smollett and/or attack MAGA and Trump before the evidence was in.115
Nearly all of these reactions were instantaneous, tweeted or grammed soon after initial details emerged, despite the fact that the story’s main sources were Jussie himself and celebrity gossip blog TMZ.
Meanwhile, local news reporters were left with little concrete evidence to back up Smollett’s wild story. On January 30, about thirty-six hours after the purported attack, reporter Rob Elgas of ABC 7 Chicago reported that “no obvious people that could be assailants” had been discovered by local law enforcement, and that “detectives have poured [sic] over hundreds of hours of surveillance video.”116
But this still didn’t dissuade the media that Jussie had been victimized.
The Chicago Tribune blared a headline that in retrospect looks downright comedic: “Week before reported attack, Jussie Smollett got threatening letter with ‘MAGA’ written for return address.” The article details that Smollett was sent a letter filled with white powder that spelled in “cut-out letters”—so corny! “You will die black f*g,” it allegedly said. The Tribune pointed out that the letter was also stamped with American flags.117
If this hate crime had been real, it would certainly have been the lamest, most ham-fisted, most uncreative hate crime in American history.
As the days wore on and there was still only circumstantial evidence and no credible witnesses to affirm Smollett’s story, he needed to do damage control, so, with (crocodile) tears in his eyes, he sat down with Robin Roberts on ABC’s Good Morning America. The interview is largely incoherent and borderline embarrassing, but he says he is “pissed off” at his doubters for refusing to see the truth.118
Hours later a report emerged that there were two “persons of interest” in the alleged attack. Charlie De Mar of local Chicago CBS sent a tweet that must have given the Jussie fanboys and girls a cold sweat: “Police raided the home of two persons of interest in Jussie Smollett case last night. Both men are of Nigerian decent and have appeared as extras on the show. Police took bleach, shoes, electronics and more.”119
This was the beginning of the end of the latest woke hate hoax.
The two men, brothers who had been background actors on Smollett’s Fox television show, were detained by Chicago police.120 Police suspected Smollett paid them to stage the attack.121
Around this time, social media ramped up its censorship game. Instagram deleted a post by Donald Trump Jr. that was skeptical of Smollett. The Facebook-owned platform later said it was removed “in error.”122
On February 20, 2019, just three weeks after the alleged incident most definitely did not take place, Jussie Smollett was charged with disorderly conduct and became the suspect in an investigation for filing a false police report.
Still, as of February 20, 20th Century Fox TV and Fox Entertainment still backed Smollett, describing him as a “consummate professional.”123
That sentiment didn’t last long, though. Smollett was arrested on February 21. Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson said Jussie falsified the hate crime (and the MAGA letter) because “he was dissatisfied with his salary” he was earning from Empire.124
Fox announced he would no longer appear on the show a day later.
Smollett was eventually indicted for sixteen counts of disorderly conduct by Cook County, all of which were eventually dropped.125 Joe Magats, an assistant state attorney, did state shortly thereafter that it was not “an exoneration.” “We believe he did what he was charged with doing,” Magats told the local ABC affiliate.126
That didn’t stop CNN’s Brian Stelter, host of the ironically named Reliable Sources, from suggesting that Jussie was now in fact the “victim,” concluding that he was “triumphant” and could return to work on Fox television.127 Apparently it was wishful thinking on Stelter’s part, as Smollett never did film any new Empire episodes.128
He was charged for a second time related to the hate crime hoax in February 2020. This time six new charges were brought against him by a special prosecutor. He pleaded not guilty.129
At Breitbart News, we were skeptical of the Jussie Smollett story from the start. This is because we have reported on a number of “very fake noose” hate crime hoaxes throughout the last decade.130
A few examples of many:
The list goes on. And the media breathlessly reported them all as potential hate crimes.
The “very fake noose” stories continue: In June 2020, ropes tied by a black man in an Oakland park were treated as a noose by law enforcement, even though the man said he used them for exercise.135 In an incredibly important moment representative of the national Woke Panic of 2020, Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf whitesplained the non-nooses to black Oaklanders: “Intentions do not matter. We will not tolerate symbols of hate in our city. The nooses found at Lake Merritt will be investigated as hate crimes.”136
Actually, when it comes to ropes tied to trees, intentions are the only thing that matters.
In June 2020, black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace was allegedly targeted with a “noose” placed in his stall of the garage at Talladega Superspeedway for the GEICO 500.137 Wallace has used his NASCAR success to push far-left politics, including racing with “Black Lives Matter” painted on his car, wearing an “I Can’t Breathe” shirt, and lobbying to get the Confederate flag banned from NASCAR (this effort succeeded).138
Unfortunately for Wallace, the “noose” wasn’t a noose (notice the pattern?) but was a garage door-pull that had been in place since October of the previous year.139
It was “unfortunate” for Wallace because he seemed to want to be a victim of a hate crime, as evidenced by an appearance on CNN with Don Lemon. When Lemon asked his thoughts on the FBI’s findings that he was not targeted for his race, Wallace reacted by saying he, like Jussie, was “pissed” and went on to defend his character from attacks.140
Perhaps a more appropriate reaction to the news that you weren’t targeted for a hate crime would be relief, but in 2020 America it means you miss out on savoring the sweetness of public victimhood.
“It was a noose,” Bubba told Lemon. “Whether tied in 2019 or whatever, it was a noose. So, it wasn’t directed at me but somebody tied a noose. That’s what I’m saying.”
No, it wasn’t a noose. It was a rope used to open a garage door.
Hate crime hoaxes—hyped by the media until they unravel, then quickly forgotten—aren’t simply confined to nooses. Breitbart News documented at least a hundred hoaxes in all between 2007 and 2016.141 The College Fix, a right-of-center blog that covers academia, reported on at least fifty pieces of very fake hate crime news between 2012 and 2018.142
“Could Trump Be Impeached Shortly After He Takes Office?” This was a headline published in Politico on April 17, 2016, a full six months before Trump was even elected.143
On January 20, 2017, the Washington Post published a headline “The Campaign to Impeach President Trump Has Begun.” This was on Inauguration Day.144
If there was any doubt in your mind that eventually President Trump would be impeached, impeached again, and if he ever wins another term, impeached a third time, I submit these two headlines as evidence that impeachment was always a goal for the Democrat Media Complex.
Democrats called for impeachment throughout 2017 and 2018. Texas representative Al Green (not the terrific soul singer, the not-so-terrific congressman) came clean about the real reasons behind the impeachment obsession and in a candid moment said, “I’m concerned if we don’t impeach this president, he will get reelected.”145
So, the Democrats knew they would impeach, but for what? In late 2019 we got the very odd answer: Trump was impeached for urging Ukraine to look into whether Joe Biden’s son was actually corrupt.
It has been said that All Roads Lead to Breitbart, and impeachment is no exception. The lineage of the narrative goes back to our own senior contributor Peter Schweizer and his book Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends. In the book, Schweizer uncovered Hunter Biden’s ties to a shady Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. Hunter was hired to Burisma’s board in 2014 despite not having any background in energy and having no known ties to Ukraine. Hunter had some investing background, but it simply didn’t stack up against the other members of the board.146 There was only one reason anyone would hire Hunter Biden into such a role: his dad was vice president of the United States. Hunter was compensated well for the work he was or wasn’t doing for Burisma: $83,000 per month, Schweizer reported. It seemed as though the primary if not sole purpose of having Hunter Biden in this role was his Rolodex: he was likely being paid specifically for being well-connected to political elite. “We now know with emails that have been released that he was working at Burisma’s direction to try to deflect investigations into Burisma,” Schweizer told me in an interview.147
In January 2018, Biden claimed bragging rights for getting top Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired. Shokin was known to be investigating Burisma, and the then vice president threatened the Ukrainian government to “take action” against him or they wouldn’t get a billion dollars in aid. Biden admitted all this on tape at an event at the Council on Foreign Relations.148 The audience of foreign policy sophisticates laughed along with Biden as he regaled them with the story.
This seems to be the definition of quid pro quo: fire the guy investigating my son’s suspicious business deal or you don’t get a billion dollars.
Seems pretty scandalous. Unless, of course, you live in the alternate reality of the Democrat Media Complex.
As they often (always?) do, they figured out a way to make Donald Trump the villain of all this. On July 25, 2019, President Trump had a phone conversation with newly installed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky that would eventually lead to impeachment.
(Zelensky, unbelievably, was formerly a comedic actor who had portrayed the Ukrainian president on the popular satirical television program Servant of the People.)
During the call, President Trump encouraged Zelensky to look into what had actually happened with the Bidens, Burisma, and the fired prosecutor. The key line from the transcript of the call, which was made public by the Trump administration:
The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.149
Zelensky agreed to “look into the situation” with no obvious or explicit tie to military aid. This makes sense since the White House had already decided to review and delay (not withhold) the aid from Ukraine.150
Enter the “whistleblower.” The “whistleblower,” who wasn’t actually a whistleblower since he seemingly heard about the call only secondhand, is almost certainly a CIA analyst named Eric Ciaramella.151 Ciaramella was hired into the Obama administration and had previously worked with Russia-hoaxer John Brennan and anti-Trump DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa, as well as Joe Biden himself. RealClearInvestigations reported that he had been accused of working against Trump from within the government.152 The official intelligence community inspector general even found that the not-really-a-whistleblower had “political bias” against Trump.153
The whistleblower logged a complaint with Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) and his house counterpart, Adam Schiff (D-CA), that the Trump phone call was interfering in the 2020 election, but in the complaint he admits that he was getting at least some of this information secondhand (at best) and from other anonymous officials in the deep state.154 It is unclear from the complaint if he had firsthand knowledge. As it turns out, whistleblowers needed to have firsthand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings to qualify for whistleblower status. That is, until the rules were quietly changed just prior to the Trump impeachment.155 That’s quite a coincidence!
Reading the complaint, I was left with the impression the whistleblower was operating under one of two premises: 1) There is no legitimacy to what Donald Trump suggested to the Ukrainian president, and thus the president of the United States was soliciting a foreign leader to help him rig the 2020 election by investigating an opponent’s family, or 2) Trump might have had legitimate reasons to want the Hunter Biden investigation restarted, but he shouldn’t have even obliquely suggested it to Zelensky on the call, because Joe Biden was a potential political rival.
And it’s possible he was drawing these high-stakes conclusions without having the benefit of having been on the phone call in question.
And we’re to assume it’s merely coincidental that the “whistleblower” previously worked with Joe Biden, a Trump opponent.
If Congress and the political establishment were to accept the whistleblower’s premise—that it is political meddling to investigate the potential corruption of one of America’s most powerful families because it’s too close to election time—the implications are profound. America’s elite would officially be entitled to different rules and laws than ordinary people. This is something you’re only supposed to see in the third world.
Want your family to avoid scrutiny? Just run for office! It’s that easy.
The media and Democrats framed the impeachment around the concept that Trump had made a quid pro quo offer to Ukraine: relaunch the investigation into Hunter Biden or you don’t get your aid. This is absurd for a number of reasons.
First of all, Trump wasn’t exactly insistent that an investigation into Hunter resume. Though reporting on this has been spotty, there is no solid evidence that Ukraine relaunched an investigation into Hunter Biden. Ukraine wasn’t even aware that the aid had been delayed until months after the call.156
Second, a quid pro quo isn’t just legal, it is the standard when it comes to foreign aid. Foreign aid is not a welfare program for sh*thole countries paid for by U.S. taxpayers; the purpose of aid is so that we get cooperation and/or intelligence from the country that receives the aid. If they don’t behave the way we require, they shouldn’t get more aid.
Argubably, quid pro quos are inherently good, or at least a necessary evil. Maybe we should investigate foreign aid that is not offered up as part of a quid pro. If not a quid pro quo, why give out the money?
Zelensky himself said there never was a quid pro quo with Trump anyway.157 What’s more, then–European Union ambassador Gordon Sondland said that Trump had said, “I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. Tell Zelensky to do the right thing.”158
So what were we even impeaching Trump for, anyway?
Perhaps the media saw the writing on the wall, because they eventually ditched the quid pro quo narrative.159
The results of the impeachment ritual were never in doubt. Trump would be impeached and the Senate would acquit him. The Democrat Media Complex was okay with this because it meant that more of Trump’s time was wasted and his administration would have less energy to dedicate toward actually executing an agenda.
Adam “Pencil Neck” Schiff led the impeachment charge.160 Though he was short on substance, he was long on theatrics. His witnesses testified in secret and Republicans weren’t allowed to question them. They weren’t even allowed to question the not-whistleblower; meaning, Team Trump wasn’t allowed to cross-examine his accuser. Hunter Biden, the catalyst of it all, also never testified. The media received selectively leaked information and enthusiastically reported every meaningless detail. The public was never allowed to see the full witness transcripts from the secret testimony, which is remarkable considering the end goal was to remove a duly elected president.
At one point, Pencil Neck performed a dramatization of President Trump’s call with Zelensky with fabricated quotes like, “I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand? Lots of it.”161
Why would he make up quotes if he really had the goods?
Schiff even revived a Russia collusion allegation during the hearings.162
It was a jubilee of fake news. And not only was our media okay with all this, they were participatory, cheering it on every step of the way.
CNN political analyst Joe Lockhart tweeted details of a fake conversation that he had “overheard” between Republican senators on impeachment.163 It was retweeted more than thirteen thousand times.
CNN covered the impeachment obsessively, round the clock, despite the fact that they were hemorrhaging viewers.164
But they had to cover the impeachment obsessively, because it was “historic.”165 The media constantly reminded news consumers that this impeachment was, if nothing else, “historic.” Bloomberg, Politico, Reuters, the New Yorker, the Washington Post… everyone who is anyone described the impeachment as “historic.”166
On December 18, 2019, the inevitable came and President Trump was impeached.167 Article one, which accused the president of abuse of power, passed 230–197; Republicans all voted against the resolution along with two Democrats, Representatives Collin Peterson (D-MN) and Jeff Van Drew (D-NJ), joining them.
(Legal scholars are divided on whether abuse of power is sufficient grounds for impeachment. After all, which president hasn’t abused power? Maybe William Henry Harrison, who was in office for a month. James Madison was obsessed with not abusing power, so he might be off the hook, too. But who else, honestly?)168
The second article of impeachment—essentially that Trump obstructed Congress’s ability to conduct the bogus impeachment process—passed the House with 229–198 votes. Van Drew, Peterson, and Representative Jared Golden (D-ME) voted against it. Justin Amash, now an Independent, voted in favor of article one. Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) voted present for both articles.
Five Washington Post reporters celebrated with a “Merry Impeachmas” dinner.169 Shameless reporter Rachel Bade said her tweet (that literally said “Merry Impeachmas from the WaPo team!”) was misinterpreted. (Fake news about fake news!)170
Many impeachment bombshells led to embarrassing corrections, including one from ABC that claimed a Zelensky adviser was informed that discussing Joe Biden was a “precondition” of a Trump call with Zelensky. Not only did the story turn out to be false, but ABC’s Zelensky adviser wasn’t actually a current Zelensky adviser.171 It was just more blatant fake news weaponized against Trump.172
CNN’s Jake Tapper worked himself into a lather defending Hunter Biden from Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) on his show State of the Union. Tapper accused Jordan of making “wild allegations” against Joe Biden’s son, then the anchor misrepresented the facts around the firing of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin. “Joe Biden was trying to get a prosecutor who was not pursuing corruption fired,” Tapper said.173 However, he testified in a sworn affidavit that he was fired because the vice president was upset he was nosing into the Biden-connected company and that it could cost Ukraine aid.174
Paul Callan, a CNN legal analyst, got even more carried away than Tapper, openly fantasizing about Mike Pence getting removed from office for being a “co-conspirator” who reinforced Trump’s quid pro quo.175 This would clear the way for—President Nancy Pelosi.
Fox News’s Chris Wallace enthusiastically hyped the impeachment news cycle.176
But the real steroid boost for all of these fake news stories came from social media companies. While the impeachment saga allegedly was about Donald Trump trying to manipulate the 2020 election, it ended up being a dry run for the tech establishment to manipulate it on behalf of Joe Biden. New censorship tactics and strategies emerged during the impeachment saga that were later deployed during the 2020 election.
For one, a YouTube “error” took down the livestreams of both Breitbart News and the pro-Trump Right Side Broadcasting Network while we covered the Senate trial.177 Establishment and left-wing channels (redundant?) remained online during that time.
A couple of weeks later, Google, YouTube’s parent company, censored Senator Rand Paul.178 YouTube banned a video in which the Kentucky senator used the name Eric Ciaramella. Anonymous, unelected Google employees flushed thoughtful commentary by an influential U.S. senator down the memory hole. That’s power.
Facebook took its most Orwellian steps to date by removing legitimate and accurate news reports simply for mentioning the alleged “whistleblower’s” name. Facebook censored LaCorte News, a news organization founded by former Fox News executive Ken LaCorte, to protect Ciaramella. LaCorte’s page was erased despite having built up 3.4 million followers.179
Facebook also removed individual Breitbart posts naming Ciaramella.
As outrageous as this seems in a country that prides itself on “freedom of speech,” Washington did nothing. Even though Ciaramella was a semipublic figure (he had served on the National Security Council) and was believed by many to be engaging in a public effort to significantly undermine the legally elected American president, merely uttering his name was a thought crime punishable by cancellation.
This was a preview of things to come.
The impeachment was still doomed in the Senate. Article one on abuse of power failed 52 to 48. All Republicans other than Mitt Romney voted to acquit President Trump. Article two failed 53 to 47 purely along partisan lines.
CNN had reported, “A somber Pelosi wields her impeachment power in ‘sadness,’ ” but the Democrat Media Complex celebrated throughout the impeachment process. On January 15, 2020, a “solemn” Pelosi sent the articles of impeachment to the Senate, but not without a signing ceremony replete with commemorative pens.180
Though impeachment supposedly centered on Trump’s alleged corruption, it became clear as the saga wore on that he was being held to a different set of rules as veterans of the Washington swamp. Even if you disagree with me and believe that Trump’s Zelensky phone call was corrupt, Trump was engaging in a type of behavior that appears to be commonplace in our nation’s capital. I believe the establishment media bears significant responsibility for this reality. For example, the press devoted little coverage to Burisma while Joe Biden was vice president. Searches show that the New York Times and Washington Post published only three articles mentioning Burisma prior to 2019.181 (Recall that Hunter joined the board in 2014 and Schweizer’s Secret Empires was published in March 2018.)
In fact, James Risen, who in 2015 wrote the first article that appeared in the New York Times about Hunter, Joe, Burisma, and Ukraine, penned an essay for the Intercept in 2019, wagging his finger at conservatives’ preoccupation with the story, saying it had been “lost in a swamp of right-wing opposition research, White House lies, and bizarre follow-up stories.”182 It does not appear that Risen wrote about Burisma between that 2015 article and when Trump had landed himself in the impeachment soup. Where was his follow-up in all those years in between?
And why was it that Trump’s supposed quid pro quo was worthy of attention but not Biden’s? Joe’s conflict of interest appeared to be at least as overt. After all, Joe apparently knew that his son was working for Burisma. (The New Yorker reported that Hunter discussed Burisma with Joe: “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do.’ ”)183
Several Obama administration officials raised concerns about Burisma, but it appears that Joe was not receptive.184 Biden reportedly told one State Department official that he didn’t have the “bandwidth” to deal with concerns about Hunter and Ukraine.185 Later, on the campaign trail, a member of the public asked Joe about Burisma; Joe called him “fat,” “a damn liar,” and challenged him to a push-up contest.186 (Biden flack Symone Sanders absurdly said that Biden was saying the word “facts,” not calling the overweight man “fat.”)
The Atlantic’s Sarah Chayes summed up the shady influence-peddling culture that has subsumed Washington, D.C., in a September 27, 2019, article titled “Hunter Biden’s Perfectly Legal, Socially Acceptable Corruption”: “The renewed focus on Ukraine raises jangling questions: How did dealing in influence to burnish the fortunes of repugnant world leaders for large payoffs become a business model? How could America’s leading lights convince themselves—and us—that this is acceptable?”
While Chayes believes that Trump did commit an impeachable offense—she described it as “shockingly corrupt” and “a danger to American democracy”—she laments that the ethical standards for businessman-politicians is too often whatever is legal. “All too often, the scandal isn’t that the conduct in question is forbidden by federal law, but rather, how much scandalous conduct is perfectly legal—and broadly accepted,” she writes.187
The media’s collective hypocrisy of acting like Trump engaged in anything worse than D.C. business as usual is too much to bear.
Actually, maybe the biggest surprise of the whole impeachment ordeal was that for once in Trump’s Washington, things actually were “business as usual.”
Though, in Trump’s Washington, I suppose nothing was ever “business as usual.”
It is believed that on the exact day Speaker Pelosi sent the article of impeachment to the Senate, the first person with the Wuhan coronavirus arrived in the United States from China. The first COVID-19 case was confirmed in Washington State six days later. While America focused almost exclusively on the Senate impeachment trial, the Chinese virus began wreaking havoc. Donald Trump was acquitted on both impeachment articles on February 5, the same day the House Democrats finally took up coronavirus.
The Democrats had always believed that impeachment was a win-win. Best-case scenario, they get lucky and actually throw Trump out of office. Worst-case scenario, they tar a president they loathe, make his life miserable, and stall his agenda.
What happened in actuality was that they had distracted the entire country during the crucial first few weeks of what would become the biggest epidemic in a hundred years.188
Impeachment scholars can differ on whether impeachment is a “political act.” If you were undecided on this issue, I believe you now have your answer.
This particular time-consuming and ultimately insignificant impeachment was nothing more than a political tactic by Pencil Neck and the Resistance. (Could be the name of an eighties cover band.) And it wasn’t a particularly effective one at that. Just a few months later, the Democrats held their virtual Democratic National Convention and didn’t use the “I” word at all.189 In fact, the key players in the impeachment, most notably Adam Schiff, were not given prominence during the convention.190
Ultimately, impeachment was all just for show, and to give Trump a hard time.
Nothing more.