CHAPTER 3

Profiles in Pandering

I hate that what I do is considered part of the media. I hate that I have to share that descriptor with narrative prostitutes who care more about saving the backside of an elected official than about truthfully informing the American public. I was live on air one day for my radio program, and on one of the monitors I saw a bizarre developing story. It was in the aftermath of the San Bernardino terror attack, the one that the media and the Obama administration initially labeled “workplace violence.” Reportedly Inside Edition had paid the landlord a thousand dollars to pry the plywood from the door of the terrorists’ apartment, still apparently an active crime scene, and allow the braying media to stomp and crap all over everything. It was like Black Friday, but with the terrorists’ apartment. I watched as one reporter giddily held up to the camera Rafia Farook’s driver’s license, replete with Social Security number. A member of the San Bernardino Police Department allegedly responded to questioning about the incident by saying that he was “stunned” the media had just done what it did. Between prostitution and reporting, nowadays reporting is the more honorable trade.

Not long before that, during an interview with Anderson Cooper for his Anderson Cooper 360˚ program, Donald Trump told Cooper to his face, “The people do not trust you.” Trump added, “I find that 60 percent, 70 percent of the political media is really, really dishonest.” It was rare for any politician to rebuke a prominent news figure so directly. But on this matter, at least, Trump was right: As a 2014 Gallup poll showed, Americans’ belief that the media reports the news “fully, accurately, and fairly” is at an all-time low.16

Don’t be shocked. This is because much of the news business is really a bunch of multimillionaires faking concern about Middle America while feeding us narratives that suit their political agenda. (Spoiler alert: It’s almost all elitist and liberal.) More on that in a moment.

In the town where I grew up, right smack in the middle of Flyover Nation, you couldn’t find a faster, more accurate source of news than the local grapevine. If I ever got into trouble, I didn’t even bother trying to hide it from my mom—because I knew she would have heard about it long before I got home. She’d be waiting for me with that look on her face that told me she already knew the full story, and I might as well save the explanations. Everyone was a narc.

There were two ways the community kept in touch: the Baptist church’s lit marquee and the grapevine. They told us who was getting married, who had died (both), who was pregnant, who was getting divorced (the grapevine). It’s how we learned about the slap fight in the street in front of the Quik Mart the same day news broke that one of the churches was building a bigger facility. Information would come our way in bits and pieces over the course of the day—in the bleachers at a high school football game, at the gas station, in the dairy aisle at the grocery store. Keeping one another informed helped us come together to mourn tragedies, like the death of a beloved relative, and celebrate triumphs, like someone’s child getting a scholarship to college.

You couldn’t just call it gossip, though there might have been some of that involved. It was so much more than that. News traveled fast in my family’s small town because we cared about our neighbors. Keeping up with one another fostered the sense of community that we know and love in that part of America that takes up the space between the country’s coastlines. More than anything we believed in honesty. When we passed a story up the local grapevine, we did it because it was true and because it brought us closer to the people around us. Also, in my family, because it was highly entertaining to hear my aunts tell it.

Of course, I didn’t grow up in the Dark Ages, and despite what some of our coastal cousins certainly think, my America is not a technological desert. Sure, we have TV, radio, the Internet, and even those relics from a bygone era—newspapers. (Isn’t it interesting how the snobs at the New York Times are clinging to outdated old media with such ferocity? And they call us backward. What Web sites inform your view?) But here’s the difference: Even when it comes to major national and world events, we pay attention, but we don’t live and die by the twenty-four-hour news cycle.

That’s because we have lives.

It’s hard to be glued to the TV or to Twitter when you’re trying to get your kids to soccer practice on time. Pundits on the coasts are constantly filling airtime with their words, and it’s hard to pay attention when you’re working a double shift at a restaurant, a factory, or a hospital. It’s especially hard to perform that Sunday-morning ritual so common in Washington, DC—channel-surfing to catch the highlights from each of the all-important network talk shows—when you’re praying for our nation in church. Half of my family never watches when I’m on television, because either (a) they’re dirty liberals whom I am required by blood to love or (b) they’re working because someone has to pay off entitlements in America.

At best, most of the national media delivering the news to the rest of America experienced our country years ago, so they view us like we view Star Wars—something that happened “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” That’s why I’m often amused—when I’m not ticked off—by multimillionaire anchors and journalists pretending to report on, and care about, the struggles of American families, like the rising prices of gas, groceries, and health insurance. I call them holiday hillbillies. Like those people who go to church only on Christmas, these guys travel out to the heartland only when they need a worn face in a trucker hat to vindicate the opinions they’ve developed on TV. What’s even worse is when they act all high and mighty in reaction to a politician’s failure to know the price of a carton of milk or a gallon of gas. True, the politicians are outrageously out of touch, but so are the reporters who are wagging their fingers at them. Just because your second or third home is deep in Flyover and you own two $2,500 Orvis bamboo fly-fishing rods doesn’t make you an expert on normal life, Mr. Evening News. And both of these groups—along with all the other classes of consultants, bureaucrats, and strategists—contribute to the constant cycle of noise that powers the twenty-four-hour mainstream-media machine.

The media is supposed to function like our national grapevine. We’re supposed to be kept up to speed on the issues of the day, told what’s going on around us. But the national media is devoid of much of the honesty, and all of the good humor, that drives the human pipelines through which local goings-on travel in the small towns and valleys of Flyover Nation. The major media organizations that provide us with our “news” aren’t doing it to help the public become better informed—they’re doing it to sell advertising and keep themselves in business. Somebody has to pay for all those anchors’ haircuts, after all.

News Anchor Salaries

Chris Cuomo: $2.5 million

Ann Curry: $5 million

Scott Pelley: $5 million

Megyn Kelly: $6 million

Rachel Maddow: $7 million

Shepard Smith: $7–8 million

Brian Williams: $10 million

Anderson Cooper: $11 million

Diane Sawyer: $12 million

Bill O’Reilly: $20 million

Matt Lauer: $25 million17

I always wanted to work in media because I liked telling the stories of my community; I was a storyteller. Also, lit majors earn crap, and I wanted to be able to feed myself at some point, so media it was. I always loved to write. It came easily to me. I earned scholarships with it and helped pay for college by writing. I enjoyed knitting together sentences, finding the rhythm in a story, really finding the story. Every story can resonate with someone if told simply and honestly. I studied print media in the very early aughts because blogging was still so brand-new. With the help of friends I created a pop-culture Web site titled Anti-Radar, and with a ragtag group of passionate yet unpaid contributors, we covered politics and pop culture with zeal. You could literally watch my growth into a full-fledged conservative on those pages. It was successful enough that I got on promo lists and received tickets to concerts and screenings and access to musicians and actors. One of my favorite interviews was one with the lead singer of VAST in which I learned he had been homeschooled, something I eventually did with my sons. Eventually, as paid freelance writing projects took more and more of my time, I disbanded the Web site. I wrote for various magazines until returning to blogging, this time as a “mom blogger” before the genre became embarrassingly, grotesquely overcommercialized and trite. I called (and trademarked) the site Mamalogues, and on it I came to terms with being a young mother in the city. I was eventually offered a weekly column in the daily paper and did radio hits with various stations across the country. I taped an episode for a travel show on the Style channel and appeared on Wendy Williams’s NYC-based television program several times. During my transformation from a liberal into a conservative, I didn’t write much about politics.

Slowly, as I became more involved, I began a second blog, anonymously, titled Keyboard Pundit. I wrote for myself and opined on political issues of the day. I knew that my Mamalogues audience—which included both conservatives and progressives (like the mayor of St. Louis, Francis Slay)—would not respond well to my personal political revolution. It was a good gig. I received accolades for the site, I was called a “new Erma Bombeck,” and my column won awards, including a best of from the alternative weekly. It was harder to hide what was taking place personally, however. I was, and am to this day, honest and accessible in my writing. It was becoming more difficult to hide my political conversion, especially as we were in the waning years of the Bush era. I began crashing progressive protests. I went alone to one protest where progressives had assembled outside across from the convention center where the American Legion was having its annual event. I watched as elderly vets exited the building and saw protesters yelling at them, holding vile anti-Bush placards, and burning American flags. It made me think of my grandfather, a navy vet. My cousin, an army vet who served in Iraq. One protester tried to set fire to an American flag next to me; I grabbed it and stomped out the flame. Cops intervened. One handed me a bottle of water. I thanked him for his service. And that was it.

One of my columns in the daily paper addressed guns in the home. I wrote a focused piece on firearm ownership and how it was something in which we believed, hardly controversial. It was the first and last time that I underestimated the antigun outrage brigade. They lost their ever-loving minds and demanded that the paper drop me. I was told by my editor that I was “too forward,” but really the objection was that my column articulated a conservative viewpoint that was foreign to the newspaper and its heavily progressive blue-haired subscribers. We parted ways and for a time it was a local-media bonanza, with the alternative weekly, the daily’s archenemy, gleefully mocking the newspaper for its actions. Later the alternative weekly put me on its cover for a fair and well-written story authored by Kristen Hinman. At this time, shortly before the 2008 elections, I had been offered a radio program with the powerhouse talk station in St. Louis. On air I cofounded the Tea Party movement in my town. During this time my disdain for media grew.

The Tea Party’s treatment at the hands of the so-called fair and impartial media was abhorrent. For a long time they ignored us. Then they mocked us. Then they called us fascists and racists and homophobes. They called us angry and stupid. Then they wrote our obituary the minute any Tea Party candidate lost any election anywhere. They made up stories (remember the fabricated John Lewis slur?). MSNBC once cropped out a gun-toting tea partier at a rally because said gun-toting tea partier was black. They said that the Tea Party was nothing but a weak flash in the pan while simultaneously blaming our massive influence for wrecking their agenda. They couldn’t pick a narrative. They were just as petty covering Republican candidates during the election. Once, in a sign of its total arrogance, the liberal Huffington Post huffily announced that Donald Trump—who at the time had the support of as many as 30 percent of Republicans—would be covered only on the entertainment pages. Think what you will of Trump, but it’s not up to the Huffington Post, which hasn’t the first clue about the conservative movement, to dictate to Republicans which candidates they should and should not take seriously. It would be like the New York Times deciding that Hillary Clinton should be discussed only in the metro crime section of the paper. (Actually, that’s not a bad idea.)

Not all networks are as contemptuous of Americans, of course. For instance, at the Blaze, where I work, we do things a little bit differently. Glenn Beck calls it “The Network YOU Are Building” for a reason. Our individual subscribers are not only the backbone of our support; they are our very reason for existence. Maybe you’re one of them. Maybe you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of supporters who make getting up and doing what I do every day worthwhile. And wouldn’t you know it—most of our subscribers live in Flyover Nation.

But let’s talk about the other folks. Let’s talk about the folks in the mainstream media who are supposed to be the opinion makers and influencers that the rest of us slack-jawed yokels must listen to with rapt attention as they tell us what to think. At least, that’s what they think of us. That’s because “they”—reporters, commentators, and other “media personalities,” especially at the big cable news stations—live in a different world from the rest of us. Some of them were virtually born into this rarefied sphere, and others found their way from humbler beginnings. But they’re all firmly on the same team now—and it’s not yours and mine.

These titans of media have very little use for the average American, except as a support system for a pair of eyeballs that can watch TV, thereby leading to higher ratings and purchases of advertisers’ products (not to mention feeding the ego engines that drive these so-called journalists). They prefer to live and work only in one another’s company. They cluster together in enclaves in New York City, where the media is a $19.7 billion business and set to jump to $23.6 billion by 2018.18 They even vacation together in tony resort communities like Martha’s Vineyard, where the average house on the market fetches more than $2.1 million.19

If your job is to report the news for all Americans, how can you understand your audience if your entire existence is confined to this rarefied world? If the realities of daily life in most of this country—whether to buy hot dogs or frozen pizza at the grocery store, or how much longer your tank of gas will really last when it says it’s on empty—are so foreign to you after decades of life at the top, should you really be the one to interpret world events for the rest of us? And more important, why should anyone listen to you?

The elite journalists love to grill other people, like members of Congress and political candidates, about how well they understand Americans. If I were running a major media company, I’d ask anyone who wanted to be on TV or have a byline in a publication the same questions. Here are just a few I think Flyover Americans would love to hear Chris Cuomo or Katie Couric’s answers to:

Questions for the Media Elite

1. When was the last time you dined by choice at Country Buffet? Or IHOP?

2. Name a country music song.

3. When did you last drive an American-made car?

4. How do you clean a whitetail?

5. How much does an average American pay for a mortgage? And how much do you pay? (Please include all homes.)

6. When did you have to buy your own health insurance?

7. What goes on a Big Mac?

8. Do you take vacations in any of the following: Martha’s Vineyard, the Hamptons, Nantucket?

9. Do your children attend public school?

10. Name six products you can buy at Walmart and estimate the prices.

11. Who is Hank Hill?

12. Identify Indiana on a map.

13. Name a current NASCAR driver.

14. Have you ever entered a Men’s Wearhouse or Dress Barn (other than for a feature story)?

15. What is your pastor’s name?

16. Name a Republican presidential candidate for whom you ever voted.

17. How do you take your grits?

18. Bonus: What is a grit?

19. Have you ever worn bags over socks in regular shoes because you didn’t have snow boots?

20. Why are you such a douche bag?

It’s not just that the media elites are out of touch. They are also contemptuous of the very Americans they pretend to report the news to, be accountable to, and champion. Some examples:

Exhibit 1: NBC, the Network for Nitwits, Brats, and Clueless Trust-Fund Babies

Say you need a job and, like most millennials, aren’t qualified to do anything. You could look for a low-paying entry-level job. However, if you’re an overeducated rich kid with no real-world experience who’s lived off your family’s name and money all your life, the answer is easy: Go to work for NBC “News.” It pays the entitled and well connected a small fortune every year to put on makeup and pretend to be hard-hitting journalists.

How pathetic it must be to be a reporter or producer at NBC News these days. You studied journalism in college, worked a string of crappy jobs just to make it to New York or DC, get paid a terrible salary to be in the presence of journalistic titans—and then you have to sit there while Luke Russert or Chelsea Clinton wanders in, sits in front of a camera, and earns ten times your salary because of who their daddy was.

There’s a lot of nepotism in journalism and NBC is not the only offender. So maybe it’s a little unfair to single out Chelsea Clinton for criticism. But let’s do it anyway. She deserves it.

Here’s the thing about Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of two of the biggest money-grubbing con artists in American history. She was a total disaster as an NBC employee—and everyone knows it. The former first daughter—dubbed “the royal child” by those with the misfortune of “working” with her—earned hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to do basically nothing. Don’t take my word for it. In 2014 New York magazine called Chelsea’s NBC deal “an unbelievably cushy fake job” and reported she’d earned $600,000 per year, or $27,272 for every minute she was on the air (a total of twenty-two minutes all year long).

“Chelsea’s storytelling inspired people across the country and showcased the real power we have as individuals to make a difference in our communities,” said NBC News senior vice president Alex Wallace, who, if there’s any justice in this world, is out of a job by now.20

Maybe NBC hired Chelsea for all of her real-world experience, said no one. Like her days hanging around Oxford. Or her make-work job at her daddy’s foundation, where she can pretend to save the world while making everyone else’s life there a living hell.21

Chelsea once told a British newspaper she didn’t care about money.22 She has the luxury of saying that, since her parents paid for her $3 million wedding and $10 million apartment in New York City. And NBC paid her to—well, whatever it is that she actually did all day. Unfortunately, Chelsea departed NBC in the fall of 2014 so she could run her mother’s campaign for president into the ground. Keep up the good work, Chelsea!

NBC should be ashamed of itself. But it isn’t. It does this all the time. NBC hired Jenna Bush for such hard-hitting segments as interviewing her grandmother, Barbara, on her ninetieth birthday. And it brought on Luke Russert, twenty-three years old at the time, because it felt bad for him after his dad, actual journalist Tim Russert, died.

“I know what kids are going through, and I try to bring that perspective,” said Russert, the millionaire heir of two wealthy journalists, who attended the elite St. Albans School in Washington, DC (tuition: $33,000 per year). Yes, Russert knows about the hard choices America’s young people face these days—like whether to take tennis or yachting lessons and how to properly address one of your fellow classmates, Sabah al-Sabah, a member of the Kuwaiti royal family.

And it won’t be long before Malia or Sasha Obama shows up to provide “exclusive” interviews with her dad once he’s out of the White House. I can’t wait.

Exhibit 2: Diane Sawyer, Liberalism’s Go-To Girl

While she no longer has a show of her own, Diane Sawyer remains one of the most recognizable faces on television. The former anchor of the ABC World News evening broadcast is still regularly called upon to conduct big-name interviews, such as her blockbuster April 2015 sit-down with the Celebrity Formerly Known as Bruce Jenner. I once joined her for the night to cover the 2010 midterm elections. With her serious but personable demeanor, Sawyer has been a presence on network news for decades. It seems to have worked out for her: Sawyer reportedly now has a net worth of approximately $80 million.23

That amount of money is almost inconceivable to most Americans, but believe it or not, Diane Sawyer’s origins lie squarely within the borders of Flyover Nation. She was born in Glasgow, Kentucky, and raised in Louisville; her mother was a teacher, and her father was a World War II veteran who was active in local politics—as a Republican.

The ambitious seventeen-year-old made her way to Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Wellesley may be better known today as an incubator of surly, shower-averse radical feminists—and, of course, Hillary Clinton—but it has long enjoyed a reputation for educating the daughters of the East Coast elite. Diane Sawyer felt a little out of place in these august surroundings. She felt different from her more sophisticated classmates, but she was determined to remain true to her roots. “When the other girls were getting packages of Krön chocolates,” she recounted in a 1984 interview, “I was sent turnips and tomatoes from home—beautifully wrapped.”24

After graduation in 1967, she went home to try her hand at journalism. Her first job was as the weather girl at a local Louisville TV station. She eventually became a reporter but didn’t stick around for long. In 1970 she went east to Washington, DC, to work as a press aide in Richard Nixon’s White House. Perhaps not surprising for the daughter of a local Republican politician, but still eyebrow raising given the slant of Sawyer’s later reporting, this move was her first foray into the world of the coastal elites. After all, working in the White House can lead to many lucrative career options later on. Washington is full of “former administration officials” who trade on their former titles and contact lists and never seem to run out of cocktail parties.

If Nixon’s had been a typical administration, the future might have turned out quite differently for the young press aide from Louisville whom the president called the “smart girl.”25 Of course, the Nixon White House was anything but typical. Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, and retreated to California. Among the former White House staff who followed him to the other coast was Diane Sawyer, who spent the next four years helping the disgraced former president write his memoirs. Why did she stick by him? Sawyer later said: “I stayed from a sense of duty and obligation and concern for a human being who was in a crisis.”26

In 1978 she left Nixonland and returned to TV journalism, taking a job as a reporter for CBS News. This was where her ascent really began. She rose rapidly at CBS and in 1984 became the first female reporter ever to join the venerable 60 Minutes program. She moved to ABC in 1989 and spent twenty years hosting such shows as 20/20 and Good Morning America before taking over the World News anchor desk in 2009. She stepped down from that position in 2014.

Especially since her move to ABC, the former Republican White House staffer—who stayed with her Republican boss even after he resigned from office—appears to have given more of her favor to Democrats. As the Media Research Center notes:

At ABC, Sawyer has repeatedly lauded high-profile liberals, including Nancy Pelosi (“galvanized steel with a smile”) and Hillary Clinton (“political mastery,” “dazzling”). She even admitted to co-host Charlie Gibson that she dreamed about Bill Clinton one night after then eating a pepperoni pizza . . . She derided the Bush administration’s “massive tax cuts,” championed campaign finance “reform,” and even asked then-candidate Barack Obama to judge whether America is “more racist or more sexist.”27

She also referred to a speech by Senator Ted Kennedy at the 2008 Democratic National Convention as “an incredible night . . . a return and a roar from the lion of the Democrats.”28

Whatever her own political preferences, Sawyer portrayed herself as a reporter who cared, one who was fearlessly rooting for you, the underdog of the Flyover Nation. This was on view, for instance, in her Hidden America special, which sought to spotlight, among other groups of noncoastal Americans, female prison inmates and poor children in Appalachia. Sawyer claimed that she “and her crew” traveled fourteen thousand miles over two years to do the report. Care to guess how many of those miles were actually experienced by Sawyer and how many by “her crew”? All in all, Sawyer’s foray into Appalachia was a farce. It was impossible for her to conceal her bewilderment and contempt for the state she once called home. She portrayed the citizens of eastern Kentucky as if they were joyless, drug-addled fools and toothless moms who used trash cans as toilets, never washed their children, and danced for rain. She pranced around towns as if she expected zombies to jump out of the windows. The mayor of the town of Hazard called the documentary “the same load of crap they’ve been doing for 40 years.”29

Maybe the fact that Sawyer and her team referred to the citizens of Appalachia as “hidden” suggests the distance that had developed between her and the people she intended to cover. Poverty and prison can be unfortunate facts of life and wreak havoc on communities all across America. Diane Sawyer might briefly explore that world, but her own was very different.

When Sawyer left ABC World News in August 2014, she was reportedly earning $20 million per year.30 In 1988 she had married successful movie director Mike Nichols, whose total net worth was estimated at about $20 million upon his death.31 Sawyer and Nichols had what can only be described as a fairy-tale romance for the coastal elite—they met in Paris as they were preparing to board the Concorde, the supersonic jet that ferried high rollers across the Atlantic Ocean in about three hours.32 Sawyer and Nichols were married in her native Kentucky—just kidding! Actually the festivities took place on Martha’s Vineyard, a favorite retreat of the eastern establishment and entertainment. The Obamas and Clintons are frequent Vineyard visitors, as are singers James Taylor and Carly Simon and former late-night host David Letterman.33 Sawyer’s onetime 60 Minutes colleague Mike Wallace put his Vineyard house on the market for $7.8 million in 2011—for that price he offered a six-bedroom home on 1.4 acres, including a private beach.34 The bicoastal couple also maintained a home in Santa Barbara, along with residences in Connecticut and Manhattan—where, according to a People magazine profile, they were known as “one of New York’s reigning power couples.”35 But the exclusive Martha’s Vineyard appears to have held special significance for them. When Nichols died in 2014, the local paper recounted their ties to the place:

Mr. Nichols, with his wife, Diane Sawyer, former anchor of ABC News, were longtime seasonal residents of Martha’s Vineyard. The couple were married on the Island in 1988, and in 1995 purchased Chip Chop, the former home of actress Katharine Cornell, located overlooking Vineyard Sound on the west side of the entrance to Lake Tashmoo.36

Chip Chop and Lake Tashmoo are a world away from Louisville, Kentucky. But on the Vineyard maybe the Kentucky girl who got vegetables delivered to Wellesley while her classmates got gourmet chocolates finally feels like she belongs. After all, you can’t get much farther from Flyover Nation.

Exhibit 3: George Stephanopoulos, the Clintons’ Media Apologist

Did you hear that George Stephanopoulos just signed a new deal with ABC? He’ll remain the host of Good Morning America until 2021, for the princely fee of $105 million. His cohost on the set, Robin Roberts, makes $14 million a year, just so they can read words that other far less well-paid people have written down for them about things most of us don’t really care about.

Just the other week, for example, the program offered not one, not two, but three different segments on Kermit the Frog’s breakup with Miss Piggy. This, of course, provided millions in free advertising for the upcoming Muppets TV series debuting on . . . surprise, surprise . . . ABC. Promoting The Muppets not only helps ABC’s ratings but also gives big bucks to the Walt Disney Company, which owns The Muppets, the ABC network, and thus Good Morning America. Frankly, if some company wants to pay two Democrats millions of dollars to pretend to report the news without bias or to care about the average American while flacking for the corporation that owns them, well, that’s capitalism for you. But I don’t think the rest of us should be fooled. These people know little about the concerns of average Americans and, what’s more, look down on most of us anyway from the safety of their high-rise apartments in Manhattan or their summer homes in the Hamptons.

Stephanopoulos served as a loyal Democrat operative for many years on Capitol Hill, in the campaign world, and eventually in the Clinton White House. It was his work on the 1992 Clinton campaign and in the White House that made Stephanopoulos’s name, and it appears he has been only too eager to look out for his friends the Clintons in return.

But before all of that, Stephanopoulos was a kid growing up in a Greek American family in the suburbs of Cleveland. His father was a Greek Orthodox priest, and both of his parents were themselves first-generation American citizens.37 Young George had ambitions beyond the suburbs. He went to New York City for college and studied political science at Columbia, after which he received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. When he got back from England, Stephanopoulos headed where lots of undergraduate political science majors go to make names for themselves—Washington, DC, specifically Capitol Hill. Stephanopoulos joined the staff of Cleveland-area Democratic congressman Ed Feighan. He eventually became chief of staff, Feighan’s top aide, in charge of the rest of the office.

By 1988 his ambition had grown beyond the Hill. He left Feighan’s office to work on Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign. Like Stephanopoulos, Dukakis was both a Greek American and a committed liberal. Dukakis lost the 1988 election to then–vice president George H. W. Bush, but the experience gave Stephanopoulos a taste for campaign work.

He returned to Capitol Hill in 1989 and served as a floor assistant in the office of House majority leader Dick Gephardt. Floor assistants are a rare breed—a small handful of staffers with House leadership offices are permitted on the floor of the House chamber along with members in order to help the processes run smoothly. Considering the state of Washington, DC, over the last several years, maybe the floor assistants should be doing some things differently.

Perhaps the life of a floor assistant was not all that glamorous—George Stephanopoulos did not remain one for very long. In 1991 he jumped to another campaign, this one for the governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. Stephanopoulos headed up the campaign’s communications efforts, and this time his team won. And the victor got the spoils: After Clinton’s 1992 win, George Stephanopoulos walked into the White House as senior adviser to the president on policy and strategy and continued to deal with the press extensively. While he was in the White House, a film was released that helped solidify an image of Stephanopoulos as one of the bright young political minds that were taking over Washington along with their charismatic new president. The War Room, a documentary filmed at Clinton headquarters and at various campaign stops, was released in 1993, and the elites fawned over the two staffers who received the most screen time—Stephanopoulos and strategist James Carville. The New York Times called Stephanopoulos “the brilliant, handsome Rhodes Scholar who . . . calmly but surely mobilizes his staff to take the presidency.”38 The film was hailed as “a compelling and enlightening adventure story about two remarkable men [Stephanopoulos and Carville], and about the monumental effort, determination and chutzpah that is required to conduct and win a political campaign in the modern age.”39

But even the George Stephanopouloses of the world run out of “determination and chutzpah” at times. In 1996, just after President Clinton was reelected to another term, Stephanopoulos left the White House. A 1999 report following the publication of Stephanopoulos’s book All Too Human described the cause of his departure as “‘burnout’ so draining he sought psychiatric help.” A therapist prescribed him antidepressant medication in 1995, but he was able to stop taking the drugs upon leaving DC for a “less pressured” life in New York.40

It was here that Stephanopoulos started working as a political analyst for ABC News in 1997. He provided commentary on its This Week program, and in 2002 he took over as host of the show himself. With a brief interruption between 2010 and 2012, Stephanopoulos has been at This Week ever since. He also cohosts Good Morning America and holds the title of “Chief Anchor” at ABC.41 By 2014, Stephanopoulos had amassed a net worth of $18 million.42 But money, it seems, can’t buy journalistic integrity.

In the spring of 2015, controversy raged around the shady donors and fund-raising practices of the Clinton Foundation, as Hillary Clinton, seeking the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, tried to defend her group’s acceptance of foreign donations while she was the sitting secretary of state. There’s nothing new about politicians taking money from anyone and everyone, but seeing as how the nation’s top diplomat was involved with another group that took millions from foreign governments, this was big news. George Stephanopoulos put on his journalist hat and earnestly reported on the allegations.

As it turned out, he wasn’t exactly giving the full story to the American people—or even to his own network. Stephanopoulos neglected to share that he himself was in fact a substantial donor to the Clinton Foundation, having forked over $75,000 between 2012 and 2014.43 He did not disclose this to ABC, nor did he think it necessary to mention it directly to his viewers as he reported on the foundation’s difficulties. There was certainly no mention of Stephanopoulos’s own donation history when he sat down for an interview with Peter Schweizer, author of the book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, in April 2015. Stephanopoulos got feisty in defense of his old friends the Clintons, telling Schweizer, “We’ve done investigative work here at ABC News [and] found no proof of any kind of direct action” by the then secretary of state. “I still haven’t heard any direct evidence,” the former Clinton spokesman continued, “and you just said you had no evidence that she intervened here.”44

Just two days after his combative interview with Schweizer, Stephanopoulos discussed the controversy in friendly territory in an appearance on The Daily Show, the liberal Mt. Sinai from which the elites’ preferred prophet, Jon Stewart, dished out his sanctimonious—allegedly funny—commentary until recently. A triumphant Stephanopoulos told Stewart:

I read the book that this is based on, Clinton Cash, and I actually interviewed the author on Sunday. This is a tough one. Because when you actually look at, look closely at it, he even says there is no evidence of any direct action taken on behalf of the donors.45

He did allow for the possibility that maybe the donors had some benefits in mind: “Everybody also knows when those donors give that money, President Clinton or someone, they get a picture with him, there is a hope that is going to lead to something.”46 But at no point did he mention his own donations to the foundation (or whether he got a picture with his former boss in return).

Just weeks later, in mid-May, the news of Stephanopoulos’s own donations broke. He defended himself with spin worthy of his days on the campaign trail or at the White House. He said he made the donations “for the best reasons” and hadn’t thought it necessary to tell anyone because he “believed that the donations already were a matter of public record.” In true Beltway insider fashion, he admitted wrongdoing while still maintaining he had done nothing wrong:

At the time I did not perceive the problem, but in retrospect, as much as I support the very good work that’s been done by the foundation, I should have gone above and beyond any guidelines to make sure that there wouldn’t be any appearance of any conflict.47

He ended up making public apologies on both of his shows, Good Morning America and This Week.

It’s hard to figure out which is the most perverse aspect of the whole Stephanopoulos saga. Was it venerating a shameless political hack into a national celebrity? Was it placing him in a position of authority to read the news to the rest of us rubes? Considering all of this, is anyone surprised that he’s still funneling money to his former bosses? In politics, especially in the orbit of cult figures like the Clintons, sycophantic loyalty is valued above all else.

It’s important to remember that not only is our country run by a lot of people who never visit Middle America, but many of them actually grew up in Flyover and couldn’t wait to get away from it. Thankfully, in Flyover Nation we can tell right from wrong. Maybe it’s because we work for our living, unlike Stephanopoulos, who is still trading on his past as a political operative. We know that we can’t show up for work every day and do our job with anything other than absolute honesty. And George Stephanopoulos betrayed the trust the public placed in him as a journalist when he went to bat for the Clintons, just as he made his name doing years ago. Most of us in Flyover Nation can recognize when a leopard’s spots haven’t changed.

 • • • 

I don’t deserve credit for saying Oprah Winfrey thinks she’s Jesus. That honor goes to comedian and notorious but-her-face Kathy Griffin, who poked fun at the former talk show host’s self-appointment as America’s self-help guru. There’s plenty of evidence that Kathy Griffin is right. Admirers have discussed whether Oprah is a messiah.48 Oprah’s mission statement, she pompously announced, is “to be a teacher.”49 Oprah even nicknamed her $52 million estate in California—complete with its own contemplative teahouse—“the Promised Land.”50 Now that I think about it, Oprah really is a lot like Jesus. That is, if Christ had built a following among people searching for a better life and then financed a billion-dollar empire off their misery and loneliness while politically supporting things Scripture opposed.

In truth, the religion she’s starting is very close to what Christianity would look like if you removed every reference to the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit.

Here’s the thing about Oprah. She is a true Flyover native; she was born poor in Mississippi and experienced a rough upbringing. She was raised by a single mom, was raped at age nine, and gave birth to a baby when she was fourteen years old. (Sadly, the baby later died.)

It makes perfect sense that Oprah would want to leave all that far, far behind. Who wouldn’t want to wipe the slate? The problem is she keeps coming back and making everyone else’s life a mess. Beneath her optimism-filled self-help mumbo jumbo lurks a real contempt for Flyover country. We’re the ones who make her famous and rich—and she can’t get enough of it. For what other reason does one of the world’s richest women—a billionaire three times over—charge regular Joes anywhere from $99 to $999 just to get a ticket to one of her silly self-help tours that massage her ego? Why else does she encourage people to waste their hard-earned money on her latest “favorite thing,” such as headphones that cost $700 (pennies to her), foot cream, a giant box of flowers for $189, or a custom dog bed with your animal’s face printed on it?51 Does she actually think anyone in the real world needs to spend $250 for a box to hold their glasses? How many glasses does she think a person owns? She once even listed one of her own books as a favorite thing—so more people would buy it.52

Why else would she fill people’s heads with a bunch of kooky, new age blatherings that she thinks are profound? “I know now that I must validate myself before I want others to validate me.” “I know that it’s okay to have my own opinions and tell the truth.” “I know I am a product of what I believe to be true.” These are the kinds of things homeless people mutter on street corners—we don’t pay them a hundred bucks to hear it. Oprah’s “The Life You Want” tour is from start to finish a cruel hoax. Its very name suggests that listening to Oprah can bring you her success. Let me save you some money. Here’s how you can be like Oprah: Build a time machine, become a fat black woman on Chicago television doing shows about Siamese twins and people finding out their sister is their mother, and then wait. Listening to her tell others how to be successful is like listening to a lottery winner tell people how they made a fortune. She had some talent and she got lucky. End of lesson.

Maybe because she’s feeling guilty that she’s made it so big, Oprah is in constant search of a reason for her luxurious life. Surely it’s happened so that she can save the world?

She hasn’t.

For one thing, she inflicted Dr. Phil on the rest of America—a modern-day huckster who has been sued multiple times for bizarre behavior and reckless endangerment of his foolish flock of Flyover followers.53 His insurance company agreed to pay $10 million after a group of devotees said he misled them about his diet shakes and bars—called “Shape Up!”—another Oprah-style effort to fleece regular people under the guise of improving their lives.54

Prominent physicians demanded the dismissal of another of Oprah’s discoveries, Mehmet Oz, for misleading and endangering the public with what they said were false statements about genetically modified foods.55 Oprah herself started a “leadership academy” in South Africa, to much media praise, even though the $40 million she supposedly spent on things like high-thread-count sheets, theaters, and a beauty parlor so she could show off to her friends might actually have been used to, oh, I don’t know, save entire villages? The worst part about it is that Oprah, in the slimy tradition of snake oil salesmen and televangelists everywhere, is still ripping her followers off to this very day. Why does a billionaire need an online merch division? A magazine with her name on it? An entire cable channel? Don’t misunderstand me, I love capitalism as much as the next person, but dang. There is a line between capitalism and worship. She sells DVDs of her films online. She sells mugs with the obnoxious, Jesus-like phrase “Peace. Love. Oprah”—for $22. And for $38 you can buy a cheesy shirt with the same slogan, “oversized.” Ahem. She charges money for “courses” with famous friends like ultrarich Arianna Huffington, who for $49.99 does a pretaped lecture on how regular Americans can “thrive.” Thrive also happens to be the name of Huffington’s book, which you can also purchase. Arianna doesn’t have time for an entire “course” with you Flyover fools, so she contracts out her advice with videotaped segments from other rich people like Kobe Bryant and “happiness expert” Shawn Achor, who offers his own class for $99.

Still think Oprah cares about you? Well, she is leaving her dogs—her dogs—$30 million in her will. I have dogs. I love my dogs. I would not leave my dogs $30 million because they are dogs.

Oprah thinks we’re idiots. And judging by all the people still flocking to Her Greatness for a morsel of nonsense pie, she’s right.