CLAY: We have seen this week alone a woman fired by New York City for questioning why kids have to wear masks at the ages of 2 to 4 — mother of three, phenomenal question, way better than most of the, quote-unquote, “professional journalists” can ask — and then I saw this yesterday. The University of Chicago was having a symposium on disinformation in media.
I’m not sure what this kid’s name is, but he is a student, I believe, at the University of Chicago, and he stood up and asked a writer at The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum, about the media cover-up for Hunter Biden’s laptop. And, if you haven’t heard this, props to this college kid for asking a better question than you almost ever see inside of the White House press corps, than you almost ever seen in part of the press corps anywhere. And then I want you to listen to the dismissive and the arrogant response of this reporter and Applebaum because I think it perfectly epitomizes the era that we’re living in right now. Play cut 2.
BUCK: “I don’t find it to be interesting.” Well, that’s interesting, ’cause everybody else pretty much does, Clay. And there’s a few things at work here — and, by the way, Applebaum is a Russia-collusion truther and you go back; she’s one of these libs who everything about Trump is awful and worse than Hitler and everything else. But they would rather…
If you’re going to be invited to the Vanity Fair cocktail parties, if you’re somebody who’s going to be treated well by the editorial board of the New York Times, it is better to sound stupid on these things than it is to be truthful. She’s making a conscious decision. That’s a moronic statement, but it’s actually better for her brand to say, “I don’t even think that the Hunter Biden thing is a story” than to admit publicly:
“We suppressed truth before an election as the corporate Democrat-aligned media to throw an election to a guy who now wanders around and looks confused constantly and ancient and everybody knows it and it’s absurd.” But to pretend to be dumb and look dumb than to actually admit the truth. This is on a number of issues, by the way. This is why when they White House gets asked about the transgender swimmer in the NCAA, they go, “Oh, you know, we celebrate all…” It’s like, “Well, no. Do you oppose this or not?” Better to go along with the narrative than to speak the truth.
CLAY: There are 500,000 people who follow this woman on Twitter, and there are collections now of old tweets of her. So, Buck, she said that she found the Hunter Biden laptop to be totally irrelevant and — as you just said — in a really dismissive and arrogant way, she said, “I don’t find it to be interesting.” Well, here’s what she’s tweeted about the Trump children during the tenure of Donald Trump.
CLAY: That is talking about Donald Trump and his family, which is the exact opposite of what she said in response to that kid’s questions. “This is why the president’s son-in-law should be nowhere near the White House,” she said, in relation meetings that Jared Kushner had with other members of the international community. “What is this puff piece about Ivanka Trump doing on the cover of this magazine with zero investigation of her conflicts of interest?”
The Atlantic… So those three things: She went after Ivanka Trump, she went after the Trump children in general and Jared Kushner in specificity, yet she is saying that Hunter Biden laptop is totally irrelevant and “I don’t find it to be interesting.” And, Buck, I’ll just say this:
What would her response have been if one of the Trump sons had been on the laptop doing everything that Hunter Biden has done? It would be a media feeding frenzy, it would have been the number one story out there anywhere, and she would have been covering it to the Nth agree. I don’t know this Anne Applebaum lady at all.
BUCK: I’m familiar.
CLAY: You’re familiar. I don’t know her at all. Okay. So she is to me just emblematic of a larger cadre of journalists that would all respond the same way. And if it were “totally irrelevant,” by the way, why was the immediate response, “This is Russian disinformation!” If it’s totally irrelevant, you don’t need to worry about coming up with a fake lie which is what pretty much are everybody said.
And then the standard is, “I don’t find it to be interesting,” her standard for what stories should be covered in the political sphere? The kid points out 16% of Biden voters, according to at least one poll, did find it to be extremely interesting and relevant to their vote. That is the standard that should apply for journalism, if it’s actually journalism, not whether you’re interested in it but whether the general public would be interested in it.
BUCK: They threw an election, folks. They actually… The problem here, unfortunately, is that they got what they wanted, and so now everything else becomes far less relevant. In the moment that they had to lie to the American people, the journalistic establishment in this country and many of the most well-known names from the intelligence community — which I used to work in.
It’d be one thing like if it’d been a great year. But at this point, these people lied to stop Donald Trump from being the president for four more years to put in place a catastrophic puppet of a president, which is what you have with Joe Biden, and so unfortunately — and I’ve had to tell people this about Russia collusion as well — the dishonesty works at a certain level, right? We have to talk about it, fight back against it, and at least tell people what’s true.
But they got away with this one and really, we have to focus on is making sure they can never get away with this kind of maneuver again. They talk about election integrity. If you can effectively have — all acting as one voice — people whose jobs were told is to “speak truth to power” and “just the facts” and “democracy dies in darkness” and all that other crap — if they can all lie as if they’d been given the same sheet of music, right?
If they can all lie in the same tone, the same tune, then what’s the point, right? You and I can’t be everywhere. People can’t be everywhere. They have to rely on some level, on some level for there to be a baseline foundation of truth and honesty in our national news media, and it’s just not there. This is what everyone, I think, is recognizing. There are no ethics whatsoever in modern American journalism when Democrats see power at stake, none whatsoever.
CLAY: It’s an arrogant and it’s a dismissive response. I do want to give a lot of credit — and I want to find out who the kid is so we can give him credit by name. That’s a fabulous question, Buck. I mean, it is a well-researched question. It’s a well-asked question. It is something that the vast majority of journalists in their career won’t ask a question that is that well written, that well phrased, that well backed up, and that significant.
So for a college kid to stand up in what I presume to be a crowded auditorium and deliver that question as well as he did, particularly, Buck, because it probably goes against whatever the mainstream ethos is on campus; so he’s asking a question which is not going to be wildly popular, necessarily, with his cohorts, with his classmates.
I think that kid deserves a tremendous amount of credit. That’s why I wanted to start the show with him, because as long as there are people still willing to ask questions like that in college, smart kids like that, I feel better about the future of our ability to hold and speak truth to power.
Trust me. I was an intern at CBS Evening News, everybody. I know of what I speak. They were like, “You are not welcome back here after this,” not ’cause I didn’t do a good job, but because they figured out what my beliefs were when I was there. But, Clay, also I think the laptop issue — and this is what this kid is exposing, too. We just see this time and time again where dishonesty is at the heart of the left-wing argument, dishonesty.
They say it’s Russian disinformation. They say the Hunter Biden laptop isn’t really a story. They say it couldn’t be verified. They say they just verified it now. Lies and lies and lies and more lies all the time. And they would rather tell those lies consistently than ever have a moment of truth and honesty with the American people because they are activists.
Their brand is actually not truth. It’s not fact. It’s getting an outcome politically, culturally, and in terms of power dynamics in this country. So this is what I have to remind everybody of. None of the journalists who lied about the Hunter Biden laptop, none of the intelligence officials — some of who I worked for and know — feel badly about what they did.
CLAY: Fifty-one of them.
BUCK: They were successful in the deception, folks. So you want to do something about this? We fight back, we take the fight to them, we take away their power in the midterms. ‘Cause they’ll just keep doing it. They don’t feel badly about it at all. I they could, they’ll give you a Pulitzer to the people that suppressed this story, Clay, just as a, “Take that!”
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
CLAY: By the way, I want to give credit. We started off the show with the great question being asked at the disinformation conference, ironically enough. Kid who asked the question freshman at the University of Chicago his name is Daniel Schmidt. He’s the senior editor of the University’s conservative-libertarian newspaper, the Chicago Thinker.
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