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Fox Host Confronted: "Say Trump Lost!"
Fox News has tried to play coy ever since Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. On the one hand, the network finds itself needing to have a modicum of journalistic responsibility to its audience and recognizes that it has to live in the reality that Trump isn’t president anymore because he lost. On the other hand, Fox has to placate to its right-wing audience who largely believe Trump when he insists he won and was the victim of widespread voter fraud. This tightrope walking was on full display on Tuesday when Texas State Representative James Talarico went on Fox News for an interview with Pete Hegseth. The two debated Texas’s new voter suppression bill that some Democratic lawmakers fled the state over in order to avoid a quorum and prevent the bill from being voted on. It’s obvious that this bill in Texas, along with the many others working their ways into law in red and purple states around the country, would not exist if Trump never told his “big lie” about there being rampant voter fraud in the 2020 election. These bills are truly solutions in search of problems and that’s exactly what Representative Talarico was trying to argue to the Fox audience.
Talarico pressed Hegseth on a topic that’s really at the heart of the matter with these voter suppression bills. He said, “you have made a lot of money personally and you have enriched a lot of corporations with advertising by getting on here and spewing lies and conspiracy theories to folks who trust you. . . . So what I’m asking you to do is to tell your voters that Donald Trump lost the election.” When Hegseth pretended not to hear his guest at first, Talarico reiterated: “did Donald Trump lose the election in 2020?” Hegesth stumbled around and looked uncomfortable, which Talarico capitalized on. The truth is that the Fox host would have looked silly answering yes or no to Talarico’s question, because either he’d be transparently lying or admitting that Donald Trump, who’s beloved by the Fox audience, is transparently lying. Every left-leaning guest on Fox News should be asking this question because it really highlights how absurd the network and the right-wing position is on this topic.
SHOCK: Kremlin Papers Show Putin's Plan to Put Trump in White House
Many years after the 2016 election, we are still learning about Russia’s effort to assist Donald Trump in defeating Hillary Clinton and taking the White House. According to leaked Kremlin documents, a meeting took place in January of 2016 wherein Russian officials agreed that Trump winning the presidency would create “social turmoil” in the United States which would help accomplish Russia’s political objectives. We know the meeting happened in part because an official photo from the occasion has come out showing Putin with then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov along with other military intelligence officials. The three major intelligence agencies in Russia were ordered to come up with practical ways to interfere in the American election in an operation that ultimately ended up being successful. The spokesperson for Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Peskov, has denied the report that the meeting ever took place. It is possible that Joe Biden spoke with Putin last month about the leak, in addition to discussing the hack on Colonial Pipeline and other geopolitical matters of the day. We’re likely not going to know about that anytime soon, as unlike Trump, Biden knows how to negotiate with world leaders and keep himself from making everything public, stomping around, and screaming like a child.
From yesterday’s show:
Black Fox Guest: Slavery Wasn't Racist
Ty Smith is a podcaster and activist who has burst onto the right-wing scene over the past few weeks for his commentary criticizing critical race theory. Even though CRT is a rather niche topic relegated mostly to law school classrooms, the right has been acting as though it’s being taught to young school children and that it’s an existential threat to the nation. Smith spoke on Martha MacCallum’s Fox News show this week about why he’s opposed to teaching critical race theory, but really took it to the next level. He said, “America was not founded on racism. Don’t get me wrong, yeah there was slavery going on but slavery was not initially a racist thing.” He went on to argue that because slavery existed all over the world for millennia, it therefore could not have had racist connotations here in the United States. It’s hard to imagine this even having to be brought up, but yes, slavery in America was a “racist thing.” Enslaved people were brought over from West Africa in the Atlantic slave trade over a period of three centuries. Black Americans at the founding of the country were considered three-fifths of a person and treated as second-class citizens (or worse). But certain people will hear Smith say this on Fox News and think he must have a point because he sounds like he knows what he’s talking about.
--More on the show:
--Robert Kuttner, Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect magazine and chair at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, joins David to discuss economic nationalism
--COVID cases surge 122% in barely three weeks in the US, with COVID deaths now up nearly 20% as the Delta variant spreads, mostly among the unvaccinated population
--Senate Democrats will propose full federal cannabis decriminalization
--Notable discussions from the David Pakman Show subreddit, including about an anti-vaccine nurse who died of COVID, the CPAC crowd cheering low vaccination rates, and David's pen and Sharpie use
--Donald Trump reportedly called German Chancellor Angela Merkel a "bitch" and a "kraut," according to the forthcoming book "I Alone Can Fix It" by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker
--A voicemail caller is not happy about our criticism of the Castro regime in Cuba, and defends the regime while blaming the United States
--On the Bonus Show: CEOs made 299 times more than average workers in 2020, the billionaire space race, every hospitalized COVID patient in LA county is not vaccinated, much more...
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