CNN's Kasie Hunt: "Scott is our colleague"

What about the truth?

I had a powerful “fly on the wall” fantasy that took me into the decrepit holding room inside the dank Manhattan courthouse, where convicted felon Donald Trump seethed in the moments after he lost his right to carry a weapon, vote and enter Canada, Australia, UK and New Zealand. The mood was filled with rage and more rage, but I broke the tension when I looked the worst president in American history in the eye and said, “Cheer up, Donald. After today you only have 57 felony counts pending.”

Alas, I suspect my imagined advice went unsaid because, in the end, whatever else one might say about MAGA extremism, it seems allergic towards looking on the bright side of life. 

It is hard to understand what is happening in this moment of American weakness, but my friend Congressman

Adam Kinzinger

has brilliantly hit the nail on the head, describing the insanity of the Republican reaction as a form of “mass psychosis.”

The Republican Party establishment erupted into a frenzy of threats against individuals, institutions and the nation because 12 jurors — acting under oath — rendered a guilty verdict in a criminal trial against Donald Trump that lays bare the depth of their commitment to tearing down the foundations of American civilization for the purposes of power — now.

A few days ago, an explosive confrontation took place on a CNN panel when George Conway accused CNN GOP/MAGA pundit Scott Jennings of deliberately lying about the details of Trump’s criminal trial:

The climactic moment occurs when Conway broadens his indictment and says:

Scott’s lying, and that’s the problem with the Republican Party. It is continually addicted to lies…You’re lying. You’re lying about the law. You’re lying about what the jury was charged to find. That is the problem with the Republican Party, and they are suffused with lies. I don’t know why this network is paying Scott to say those lies.

Kasie Hunt, the CNN anchor, shuts Conway down immediately and rebukes him:

Whoa, whoa, ok. Let’s not go there, please, George, let’s not go there. Scott is our colleague, and we’re going to treat him respectfully as such. Continue.

Conway responds:

Well, he shouldn’t lie.

Wherever and however the conversation started is besides the point. All that matters is where it ended, which was with an extemporaneous declaration by Hunt that speaks volumes about this moment and the danger at hand. 

“SCOTT IS OUR COLLEAGUE.”

I was struck by the fact that when Hunt intervened against Conway, it was not as an arbiter of fact, but rather as community leader. 

She was speaking for an “US” that YOU are not part of. The audience is relegated to a status below “COLLEAGUE,” into a subordinate rank that falls outside the club boundary, where colleagues are inside a circle and everyone else outside. With membership comes certain privileges and entitlements, which apparently includes a license to practice sophistry in the name of balance — regardless of whether “balance” is maintained by perverting reality and bending the truth to fit a structure that is extinct in a politics permanently lost. 

Jennings was wrong because he was contorting himself into a pretzel trying to defend the proposition that up is down and red is blue. In fact, he proclaimed that Trump was not in fact guilty of anything, despite a guilty verdict being returned by a lawfully empaneled jury on 34 counts because that is what CNN expects and pays him to do. It is all part of the vast kabuki that calls itself journalism, but is indistinguishable from purposeful misinformation. Jennings is a sanitized version of Corey Lewandowski, a MAGA Sugar Baby who earns his keep playing a role and singing a tune. Jennings‘ primary role on CNN appears to be reversing reality by pretending what happened didn’t, or by erasing Trump’s spoken words by proclaiming they mean the opposite of what they mean. 

Jennings is CNN’s Baghdad Bob. He serves as an interpreter of sorts, who says what the Washington, DC, media establishment whispers to itself in the shower before another day of green room chatter, performative ‘bullshittery,’ and curated lies shared across the world. It is some banal version of: “Trump doesn’t mean it, right?”

There is another thing that must be said with regard to Jennings’ protestations around Conway incorrectly asserting he had been a candidate, as opposed to a White House staffer and GOP campaign adviser. Jennings was a special assistant to the president and deputy WH political director during the Bush Administration, which shared something in common with the Obama administration when it came to the practice of politics. It was buttoned up. When it comes to understanding the complexities of campaign finance law, Jennings has an expertise equivalent to a top neurosurgeon’s familiarity with the brain.

The main point should not be lost in a fog of extraneous and irrelevant nonsense when discussing an issue of such importance for the nation. 

Yet, I am uncomfortable with Conway describing Jennings as a liar because I don’t believe Jennings is lying as much as he is utterly lost and talking about something he isn’t expert about. The man I remember was a completely normal person, and I tend to think about him charitably in this moment like a boy on a raft, pulled out to sea by the tide before he could get his head around what was happening. 

Jennings has amiably tried to reconcile two halves that cannot be fit together — ever — over many years of growing extremism. The Republican Party is like a massive glacier that has moved dramatically in nine short years leaving a vast crevice — an abyss between what was and is. The crevice cannot be bridged or tightened. The fracture is permanent because, in the end, fascism always devours conservatism. Jennings isn’t a fascist, but he speaks for them and seeks to impose his delusions and justifications about their menace, threats, corruption, violence and lawlessness on CNN’s audience because CNN executives have determined that delusion, which obscures reality, is good for business. If it were to be considered a medical syndrome it might be known as RMNBC, or Ronna McDaniel’s disease. 

Conway’s eruption, moral pomposity and performative theatrics were curated by Hunt, who smiled, joked, stoked and curated the conflict between the two performers until the contrivance shattered. What the viewer witnessed was the equivalent of a Starbucks on the edge of the deserted island in the latest “Survivor” knock-off that promises authentic hardship and remote wilderness. 

Had Jennings been quicker on his feet, he would have laughed out loud at Conway and said something that reminded CNN’s audience that, while Conway called Trump a life-long criminal, he was living in Trump Tower and dancing beside Jared and Ivanka at the inaugural. Whether it be Michael Cohen being treated as a hero, or Michael Avenatti calling into cable news shows to opine from federal prison, the schtick is as obvious as the varmint scam from Wild Wild West. 

Though most of us tired of it all long ago — and the decimated ratings show the American people find the coverage torturous, irrelevant, cheap, shabby, shambolic, sometimes corrupt, often arrogant, condescending, nonsensical and performative — it wasn’t until very recently that it turned unmistakably dangerous. 

Understanding something about astronomy and political physics helps explicate the complexities of the moment. Think about your old science class where you learned about a giant star collapsing into a black hole. When the star collapses, it gets smaller, but denser and heavier. 

Political parties function in exactly the same manner.  Shrinking parties are always cauldrons of intensifying extremism, which are fueled by dogmas that demand purity, obedience and conformity. The smaller they become, the more extreme they become. Pure parties are always small, but then again, it isn’t necessarily the size of a political party that determines their capacity to take power. What matters most is intensity and commitment. Trump has simultaneously stoked devotion and apathy. The two opposing forces can be a potent combination in a political campaign. The fundamental and substantive difference between the Biden and Trump campaigns is one believes in elections, reality and juries, while the other stands opposed to all three. 

Politically, the difference is more complicated. President Biden stirs all of the contempt and indifference that Trump does, without any capacity to create a reciprocal intensity. This fact exposes the fundamental design flaw of the Biden campaign, which is that the plan to remind Americans of what Trump was, as opposed to what he will be, will never work. There has never been a backward-facing presidential campaign that seeks to elicit the past that has ever won. Ever. The Biden campaign is being suckered by the MAGA party into a debate about the past, at the expense of one about the future. The price will be Trump’s election, which is why what Kasie Hunt said must be talked about in the open. 

The conversation about the verdict was framed as the leading event of the hour, but it wasn’t. The “news” was the explosion of threats against everyone by someone affiliated with Trump, MAGA, or the conservative media. In an instant, a nine year-long debate about who Trump is and what MAGA is was decisively ended forever. The mask was dropped. What is perfectly clear from a vast volume of TV clips, statements, tweets, TikToks, and everything else, is that there is a vast population of unhinged Americans who are preaching arson as a faith, and destruction as a cause. Many of them are elected officials who have breached their oath and the public’s trust for power. Collectively, the actions of the Republican governors, senators and members of Congress, state legislators, a few thousand party officials and a few thousand more in the conservative entertainment complex have yoked the third oldest political party in the world to a man above the country, fulfilling the darkest warnings from the founding fathers. 

Whatever happens today will bleed into tomorrow and the day after that. Each day is connected to the last and the next in an infinite continuum that can be separated ultimately into eras and epochs. This era of American history has been unfolding for nine long years and its commencement was part of a drama that has played out since 9/11/01. The threats of violence cannot be wished away or indulged. Tim Scott isn’t a foil, he’s a threat. He shouldn’t be part of a toxic variety show for performative liars and aspiring autocrats who test their demagogic aptitudes during appearances on CNN because there is a thin line between reality and performance. When the reality side of the line is forced into the abyss of the absurd and pretend, it isn’t journalism or news anymore. It’s just another version of “Bravo” with a different cast. 

What George Conway and Scott Jennings said is beside the point and doesn’t particularly matter, but the same can’t be said for what Kasie Hunt said. There is a higher value than the truth at CNN and a chalk line on the studio floor that denotes boundaries. When extremism deserves confrontation there can be none because the definition of journalism at CNN imposes a requirement that plain words be interpreted by a translator from the very cause that spoke them to balance their plain meaning with denials that proclaim A means B and B really means A. 

Like a drunken diplomat who runs over a child but is protected from accountability by diplomatic immunity, a “colleague” designation at CNN gives propagandists spinning nonsense a license to deceive on the backs of actual journalists, who are some of the best in the world. Their credibility doesn’t deserve to be tainted, much less assaulted, by the ethical conundrums that arise from play acting around deadly serious events because some relic of a formula demands it. 

The problem at CNN is the world they are covering isn’t the ocean, but rather the aquarium, which they insist is the sea. The events transpiring demand clear and objective reporting, which doesn’t nullify the possibilities of sinister motives behind criminal conspiracies to seize political power from the ashes of defeat and conviction that are malignant and potentially deadly. 

The debate occurring in America is not proximate to a disagreement about whether the top marginal tax rate should be 39 or 35 per cent. The issues at hand are existential. They shouldn’t be trivialized and sanitized to sustain a business model that requires allegiance to a fantasy that two good faith philosophies — conservative vs. liberal, both committed to the preservation of American democracy — are in perpetual competition and partnership with one another. 

Kasie Hunt and CNN are supposed to be on your side, permanently and unambiguously, but they are not. The moment demonstrated that “colleagues” stand up for each other — even when one is a spokesperson for the cause of revenge, retribution and the imprisonment of political prisoners. What is so offensive is not the advocacy of fascism, but rather the constant denial of the advocacy, which is perfectly clear. When nothing can mean anything and everything nothing, when up can be down and down can be up, we are all in trouble. How has it come to be that the lie and truth are locked in a death struggle in a twilight haze of indifference and apathy where most people can’t tell one from the other? 

A few months back I wrote about a recent trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and shared a story about the sewage treatment facility that remains intact near the ruins of Gas Chamber and Crematoria number 5. What I was trying to share with the story is the point of today’s essay. I hope it lands.

Auschwitz was a place where humanity was stripped from every inmate. Most existed in a state between life and death, and were the daily witnesses to a killing frenzy all around them.

The box cars of human beings, loaded like mistreated cattle, passed under the entrance arch into Birkenau. They ended up on a selection platform, where SS physicians waited to point right or left towards gas or slavery.

Jews were not alone in Auschwitz. The first prisoners of the concentration camp were Polish men, and among the groups incarcerated were also Soviet POWs, Roma people, and many others. But, when the second function of Auschwitz developed — the function of mass extermination of Jewish people — the Jews were the only ones who went through a selection process established by SS officers. 

Most of the Jews deported to Auschwitz never became prisoners of the camp. They were murdered in gas chambers immediately upon arrival. Young mothers and children were killed together. The old were killed, along with the small, infant, or handicapped. Everyone who wasn’t useful economically was killed immediately.

Pawel, my guide, and I walked around the camp for many hours, and we came to a quiet spot in the woods, nestled against some barbed wire and a guard tower about 15 minutes away. The trees were filled with birds and their songs.

Pawel pointed out a stork taking off from one of the ponds off in the distance. It was flying low over towards gas chamber number 5 and the mass graves at the edge of a wooded area.

He said that visitors sometimes ask him if it is true that even the birds won’t fly over Auschwitz. He laughed and said, “I always tell them that, of course, that isn’t true. The birds don’t know what happened in Auschwitz.”

We sat on a bench, and Pawel told me a story.

He said that the SS wasn’t omnipotent. The German government functioned like any other government, at some level, when it came to the bureaucracy of administration.

Auschwitz didn’t just drop from the sky. It had to be built, and therefore it required building permits. The initial plans of the second part of the Auschwitz camp, known as Auschwitz II or Birkenau, called for a camp of 100,000 people. The plans were brought before some person, some cog in the vast apparatus of the Reich, for approval.

There was a deficiency noticed right away. It was over the fact that the SS had no plans for either water treatment or disposal. The plan had been to simply dump the waste in the nearby Vistula River, which would have poisoned the drinking water supply down river for millions of Germans. Before the camp could be built, this engineering and design element had to be satisfied. It was.

The waste water treatment facilities were built to last. Here they stand 80 years later. The SS got its stamp.

This story says a great deal about something important, doesn’t it?

The bureaucrat didn’t object to the madness of the prison carved out of the Polish woods for 100,000 people. He objected to where their fecal matter would be disposed.

The banality of evil, indeed.

America needs informed citizens. When Donald Trump was indicted I said this: while Trump is presumed innocent until proven guilty, his indictment creates a dangerous hour for the Republican Party, and our nation as a whole.

When he was convicted, Scott Jennings said he was innocent, which is why it was fair and necessary for George Conway to ask why he is paid to be on CNN. Scott Jennings sought to confuse and muddle matters of plain fact on a news show that left the audience misinformed and uninformed, and one of CNN’s anchors squandering her integrity for an errant shill who claims expertise, but demonstrated none besides the capacity to do with words what Mikey did with cereal. Either way, it was a bad look for everyone involved, with the exception of the always brilliant David Frum, who made the obvious point correcting Scott Jennings: no, Alvin Bragg didn’t say he was out to get Trump, and being a felon isn’t good for your campaign. 

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