As this week comes to a close, we’ve seen the Democratic-media industrial complex undermine itself at least four times. Each revelatory moment illustrates different parts of the Left’s threat to America and illuminates the various ways in which legacy media coverage insults the American people’s collective intelligence.
Kamala Harris blows the Lester Holt interview.
Vice President Kamala Harris got her close-up this week, and she wasn’t ready for it. “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt asked her if she planned to visit the U.S. border with Mexico — a question that some officials told CNN “they had assumed she would be able to easily address and move on from when it was inevitably raised.”
Instead, she responded with a mix of expiration and aggressive mendacity, smothered beneath nervous laughter.
Given the opportunity to reflect on her answer, Harris offered up even more laughter and equivocation later in the day.
Friendly advisers inside the White House told CNN they were “perplexed” by her performance. “Several sources say there was a real hope inside the White House that Harris’ first trip abroad would be a success, and worry that what looked like ill-prepared answers to that inevitable question would overshadow it,” reported five CNN reporters on Tuesday afternoon.
“We have to deal with what's happening at the border.”@VP Kamala Harris spoke exclusively with @LesterHoltNBC on her first trip overseas, how the administration is addressing the immigration crisis, and if she plans to visit the southern border herself. pic.twitter.com/sA4We7peeR
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) June 8, 2021
To deflect from her poor media performance(s), Harris has tried to advance the contorted view that when President Biden appointed her to begin “stemming the [illegal im]migration to our southern border,” that somehow included no oversight of the border itself. She’s only looking at “root causes,” which she has yet to locate in her administration’s promises to shower every illegal immigrant with a panoply of taxpayer-funded goods and services.
Harris claims she’s there to negotiate with foreign leaders as their co-equal, not to worry about the problems facing petty Border Patrol agents. “One of the officials said Harris appears eager for a portfolio that will allow her to achieve political victories, especially in foreign policy,” CNN reported earlier this month.
Her media performance set back the liberal agenda, because it shows the administration alternately dismissing and lying about Americans’ real concerns. This is the woman in charge of virtually every major portfolio in the Biden-Harris administration?
Her response to her poor performance hurts worse. Isn’t the fact that she’s only willing to handle issues that work to her benefit, while ignoring an issue Americans consider a pressing concern, indictment enough that she’s a shallow, self-centered, elitist?
Mara Gay calls American flags “disturbing.”
On Tuesday, a member of The New York Times editorial board gave “Morning Joe” viewers the ultimate confirmation that many reporters are reflexively anti-patriotic. Mara Gay told MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski that the mere sight of American flags is “just disturbing.” Her comments came in the midst of a rambling jeremiad that leftists somehow focus too little on the incipient terrorist threat posed by Republican voters driving pickup trucks:
It’s really concerning to me that’s the Democrats having just gone ahead at this point and said we’re doing this on our own in terms of getting commission together as to explaining to be American people will be allowed the interaction to take place in the capital. I think that really needs to move forward swiftly.
The reality is here that we have a large percentage of the American population — I don’t know how big it is, but we have tons of millions of Trump voters — who continue to believe that their rights as citizens are under threat by simple virtue of having to share a democracy with others. I think as long as they see Americanness as the same, as one, with whiteness, this is going to continue. We have to figure out how to get every American a place at the table in this democracy, but how to separate Americanness, America, from whiteness. Until we can confront that and talk about that, this is really going to continue. I was on Long Island this weekend visiting a really dear friend, and I was really disturbed. I saw dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with, you know, explicatives [sic] against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases just dozens of American flags — which is also just disturbing, because essentially the message was clear. It was, ‘This is my country. This is not your country. I own this.’”
“Yes!” Mika Brzezinski affirmed as Gay said the phrase, “This is not your country.” Gay then continued:
So, until we’re ready to have that conversation, this is going to continue. What really is concerning to me, as well, is it’s not just Democrats in Congress. I think there’s a large percentage of Americans, even some of my colleagues in journalism, who are invested in some way in pretending that this is not the threat that it is. That is the real concern. Because the Trump voters who are not going to get on board with democracy, they’re a minority. You can marginalize them long-term. But if we don’t take the threat seriously, then I think we’re in really bad shape.
She (and Mika Brzezinski) believe that the American flag is a “disturbing” sign that rightly triggers vague, unspecified feelings of dread in reporters spanning the gamut from The New York Times to MSNBC.
At a minimum, the segment showed representatives of The New York Times and MSNBC promoting the most baseless and uncharitable interpretation of American patriotism, then extrapolating from the most paranoid extrapolations of their animus. The same politically charged strawmen populate every discussion on left-wing cable news: Every Republican is a closet insurrectionist motivated by an ill-defined but still fully deplorable (and indictable) white supremacy.
To reverse this revelation, The New York Times tried to gaslight its readers by turning this into a “conservatives pounce” story. Its public relations team rushed out a comment claiming that Gay’s comments had been “irresponsibly taken out of context”:
New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay’s comments on MSNBC have been irresponsibly taken out of context. Her argument was that Trump and many of his supporters have politicized the American flag. The attacks on her today are ill-informed and grounded in bad-faith [sic].
New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay's comments on MSNBC have been irresponsibly taken out of context. Her argument was that Trump and many of his supporters have politicized the American flag. The attacks on her today are ill-informed and grounded in bad-faith.
— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) June 8, 2021
But the first person to post that footage online, Tom Elliott of Grabien, originally posted the full clip. It’s clear that Gay sprinted down the bizarre rabbit trail of her intolerance of American flags on Long Island pickup trucks on her own.
NYT/MSNBC’s @MaraGay: In Long Island last weekend, I saw “dozens of American flags,” which was “just disturbing” pic.twitter.com/RhGdqqJope
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 8, 2021
“Spin away — we heard her loud and clear,” said Megyn Kelly.
This is not the first time Gay embarrassed the Times by association. She and MSNBC’s Brian Williams went viral when they insisted that 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg could have taken the $500 million he spent on ads and given all 328 million Americans a million dollars each.
MSNBC’s Brian Williams reads a tweet: "Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. U.S. Population, 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million"
NYT Editorial Board Member Mara Gay: “It’s an incredible way of putting it. It’s true. It’s disturbing”
It's $1.53 per person pic.twitter.com/dIiwCESgh8
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) March 6, 2020
Gay calling American flags “disturbing” reveals the legacy media for what they are: unimpressive, out-of-touch, incoherent, and ineducable in their conceit.
A woman posing as a Univision reporter tells Harris, “I voted for you.”
As Kamala Harris continued her border-dodging immigration tour on Tuesday, she paused for a press conference in Mexico City Tuesday, where she received much-needed positive reinforcement. At the presser, a Univision reporter named “Maria Fernanda” gushed that interviewing Madam Vice President is “an honor, because I actually got to vote for the first time as a naturalized citizen, and I voted for you.”
The plot thickened, when the network revealed the woman, Maria Fernanda Reyes, is not actually employed by Univision. “In Mexico an individual which has no association with @Univision claimed to be a reporter for @UniNoticias in order to ask the @VP a question and to compliment @KamalaHarris; Let it be clear to everyone that Ms. Maria Fernanda Reyes is not part of this media organization,” tweeted Univision president of news Daniel Coronell.
In Mexico an individual which has no association with @Univision claimed to be a reporter for @UniNoticias in order to ask the @VP a question and to compliment @KamalaHarris. Let it be clear to everyone that Ms. Maria Fernanda Reyes is not part of this media organization https://t.co/edxyzRVlt8
— Daniel Coronell (@DCoronell) June 9, 2021
The impostor’s inquiry hurt the media because her comments sounded so believable. While 23% of Americans identify as Republican, only 7% of the media did, according to Politico — and that was in 2013, before the Trump administration. Not only that, but “U.S. political journalists are overwhelmingly liberal,” according to the authors of a 2020 study on the political views of reporters. “Of those who did say they identified with a political party, 8 in 10 said they were liberal/Democrats.” That filters into every aspect of their coverage, from featuring shirtless photos of Barack Obama as they described his glistening pecs to cover photoshoots that launched fawning media coverage of Harris’ footwear. A reporter admitting this bias would be exceptionally unremarkable.
Brian Stelter asks Jen Psaki how CNN how the media can promote Democratic talking points
On Sunday Brian Stelter, the host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” asked White House spin doctor Jen Psaki how she wished the media would cover her administration. “What does the press get wrong when covering Biden’s agenda? When you watch the news, when you read the news, what do you think we get wrong?” he asked her.
That question hurt the liberal agenda because it exposed the underlying motivation of the legacy media: They’re here to serve Democratic administrations (and, by extension, to oppose Republican ones). Here, he asks openly how he can help promote left-wing talking points.
That brings us round-circle to the first point: Incompetent and venial Democrats filter their views through a reflexively anti-patriotic media that supports them so much it openly asks them how the press can help them do a better job of explaining Democratic positions than the Democrats are capable of doing themselves. It’s a master-servant relationship of unequaled importance, openness, and subservience.
And that’s just in the first half of the week. Who knows what will happen by Friday?
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.