You know who’s telling on themselves? The American conservatives cheering about Putin pal and proto-fascist Viktor Orban’s big re-election win in Hungary, that’s who.
“It’s a pretty good litmus test,” says The New Abnormal co-host Molly Jong. “If you are celebrating that, you’re probably a bad guy, like the people who are still supporting Putin.”
And those people are doing so, says co-host Andy Levy, even though “Russia doesn’t seem to be working even all that hard at” winning people over. “And it’s because they don’t really have to. They can just play clips of Tucker Carlson Tonight and their job is done for the most part. They're basically Alex Jones-level right now with talking about crisis actors and all that stuff. And then they have like different stories: The bombing never happened. And then it’s ‘No, well the bombing happened, but it’s a false flag. The Ukrainians did it.’ Right. And there's like three or four more stories down the road and they don’t settle on any one thing. This is the same thing we see from the Q people… It’s every end-of-the-world, Armageddon cult when the world doesn’t end on that day. And then you would think they would just say, ‘Hey, we were wrong,’ but they don’t.”
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Speaking of people telling on themselves, Washington Post investigative reporter Michael Kranish joins the pod to run down his reporting on MAGA mutts Madison Cawthorn, Mo Brooks, and the inimitably awful Ted Cruz, who somehow managed to escape much scrutiny for months into his pivotal role in pushing Trump’s big lie, and doing everything he could to stop Joe Biden from taking office.
“The bottom line of my story,” says Kranish, “is that I’d document how Trump and Cruz worked directly together. I’d document phone calls that they had together. Cruz’s various efforts to try to basically keep Trump in power” and how those cost the Texas senator the respect of people who’d previously seen him as a principled conservative legal scholar and were “dismayed” as he promised to represent Trump in a case those conservatives saw as “exactly the opposite of what Cruz stood for regarding federalism and the Constitution” in a plan that came dangerously close to toppling our constitutional order.
“I think that Senator Cruz knew exactly what he was doing,” says Kranish. “I think that Senator Cruz is somebody who knows what the Constitution calls for, knows what his duties and obligations are, and was willing, frankly, to set that aside.”
Plus, Press Run founder and editor Eric Boehlert explains to Molly why “the coverage of the Biden economy is unlike anything I’ve ever seen” as the press coverage “reeks of both sides.”
“For the most part, this is atrocious coverage, completely manufactured by the press itself” as the president keeps getting slammed even after he’s presided over 7 million new jobs in two years, says Boehlert.
Yet somehow, all the coverage is about “how this blockbuster jobs report might be bad news for Biden. It’s literally a parody at this point, as they’ve convinced themselves that the entire economy is about inflation and that these huge job gains either aren't a big deal or they might be a problem for Biden because there aren’t enough workers. It’s totally bizarre. And, again, we’ve never seen anything like it. The weirdest part is this isn’t the fault of Fox News or Republicans. This is a thing the Beltway media took on by itself and decided to run with this and they’re just gonna keep running with it.”
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