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CNN is engaged in a systemtic lie to its audience and I’ve got all the evidence to show it. CNN altered its reporting about the Iran bombing and is not just refusing to acknowledge it left out key details, but is doubling down that its original reporting included the key details about the intelligence report being “low confidence.”

CNN did not originally report the intelligence report was “low confidence,” but now its anchors and fact checkers insist that it did.

CNN should apologize for its original reporting. Instead, it has chosen to gaslight its audience.

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Even on Memorial Day, the news waits for no one. But also, I wanted to try a new set up in my home office so I figured I could use the Afternoon Briefing as an excuse to tinker.

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I said something yesterday on my radio show that has stirred the pot and earned me unmitigated hate mail from all corners of the internet.

I made a flipant comment that the coordinated coverup of Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline by Democrats and members of the media was worse than the events of January 6th.

After careful consideration… I stand by…

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For all the hand-wringing over a so-called constitutional crisis, the reality is this: President Trump keeps winning at the Supreme Court. Time and again, progressive judges in the lower courts have tried to block the lawful exercise of presidential power—and time and again, the Supreme Court has struck them down. Whether it’s firing federal employees, deporting violent gang members, or declining to spend appropriated funds, the Court has affirmed the constitutionality of his actions.

When you step back and look at the pattern, it becomes clear we’ve had this story backwards. The real constitutional crisis isn’t the president asserting his authority—it’s the coordinated obstruction by progressive judges who are actively working to undermine a democratically elected president and the constitutional powers entrusted to him.

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis joined me on radio to share that Senator Marco Rubio’s replacement will be named in the coming days. The Governor also commented on the urgency of calling a special session of the Florida legislature to expedite Trump’s deportation plans claiming, "This can't wait… People say it's premature. It's never premature to do the right thing."

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When Rush Limbaugh was guiding me through the early years of my radio career, he often warned that I should rarely have a guest on my show because talk radio is an intimate conversation between me and my audience. I have internalized this advice and, you will notice, rarely have guests on my show.

The lone exception in recent months was today when Meta’s Joel Kaplan joined me. Joel is a former law clerk for Antonin Scalia and is now leading Meta’s efforts to reprioritize free speech on Facebook and Instagram. You need to hear this conversation.

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I don’t know Susie Wiles.  I once blamed her for some of Trump’s bad endorsements and only later learned I was just being used by people who didn’t like her and had an ax to grind.  It was a reminder of just how self-interested some people are.  A lot of people see Donald Trump not so much as an advancement of policy interests, but an advancement of their own bottom line.

To Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita’s credit, they have done a very good job of marginalizing those people and keeping Trump as focused as they can.  Trump, an extrovert, chats with everybody and lots of people get into his head.  Managing that alone can be difficult.  Wiles and LaCivita took things to the next level and not only won, but won the popular vote.  Sure, Trump gets the credit. But as someone who has run campaigns, the staff work magic.

One of the difficulties, worth sharing, is that LaCivita was also the target of a hit job. The publication smeared him as getting rich off Trump.  Lots of others have or have tried to.  As Corey Lewandowski tried to reassert himself back into the campaign, curiously, more rumors about LaCivita spread.  The allegation has been that Lewandowski, who I don’t think is a good person, was trying to undermine LaCivita’s role in the campaign.  That effort ended on Election Night. It was LaCivita on stage, not Lewandowski.  And now, thankfully, the two people who kept the grifters at bay will be there to continue helping Trump focus and keeping his supporters from being taken advantage of.  The details matter, so listen to this from today’s show.

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After nearly a month of the American press corp doggedly covering President Biden, they have dutifully retreated to their partisan posts and resumed parroting Democratic talking points now that Harris has the nomination. When Republicans began pushing the failures of Harris’s time as Border Czar, USA Today, Time Magazine, CBS, and Axios (within hours of each other) quickly buried the story and published “fact checks” claiming that was never the role given to Harris.

Except it was. In fact, Axios was the same outlet in 2021 that explicitly claimed Harris was Biden’s Border Czar and only yesterday corrected the story from three years ago. The blatantly obvious coordination between members of the press and the Democratic Party is a reminder of what Republicans are up against this November. Now that Biden has stepped aside, the American press is quite literally willing to rewrite history to ensure their team wins. As Charles Cooke said in National Review, “It sure was fun having a press corp for a month.” Watch:

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I am old enough to remember the media’s obsessive hatred of George W. Bush. Countless MSNBC hosts opened their nightly shows in the early 2000s with some reference to George W. Bush being Hitler while simultaneously being Dick Cheney’s puppet for Halliburton. While Barack Obama was given a Nobel Peace Prize for simply showing up, Bush was never given an ounce of credit for his PEPFAR program that saved the lives of millions of people from HIV in more than 50 countries around the world.

One of the most interesting and consistent critiques of the GOP by the media was that the Republican Party should have gone with John McCain instead of Bush. They described McCain as a “maverick” Republican who wasn’t afraid of going after the far right and knew when to compromise with the Democrats. The media’s love of McCain abruptly halted in 2008 when McCain won the Republican nomination and faced off against Barack Obama in the general election. Immediately, McCain was deemed to be an aging, racist, war-mongering radical who had Hitler-like tendencies and was unfit to be President of the United States. The unvarnished attacks went so far as to include allegations that he continued to suffer from PTSD from his time as a prisoner of war and could potentially lead the country back into war.

The media immediately went to war with Mitt Romney when he secured the Republican nomination in 2012 claiming he must be a racist homophobe because of his Mormon background. In addition, the media dug up trivial stories from Romney’s time in college and went so far as to claim that Romney put a dog on top of a car.

But then came Donald Trump in 2016. Multiple hosts, including my friend Bill Mahar, admitted that they had sensationalized their attacks on previous Republicans and that this time, they were serious. The racist, sexist, bigoted, and homophobic claims they made against Bush, McCain, and Romney were largely symbolic, but this time they meant it. Donald Trump was a real-life bad guy despite their identical claims over the preceding decade.

The American people heard these claims as the media’s version of the boy who cried wolf. Time after time, we were falsely warned that the Republican was a dictator, and only now does the media claim they are serious. The reality is the left is fine with dictators, so long as they are good progressives who abide by the laws of critical theory. Che Guevara operated as a dictator killing thousands of innocent people but did so in an equitable way through freedom fighting. Hamas waged a ‘freedom fighting” campaign on October 7th by raping women and killing the babies of their oppressors and are therefore heroes to the left.

The critical theory lens that the left views society through complicates their view that democracy is on the ballot this November. Middle-American voters who would rather watch Sportscenter than the evening news see a Democratic Party obsessed with democracy but sympathizing with dictatorial actors around the globe. Meanwhile, their grocery bills are higher, crime is on the rise, and they see a world that is immensely less stable than just four years ago. But the media wants them to know that this time they are serious. This time the Democrats are right and democracy really is on the ballot. I just don’t think that message works.

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It is a remarkable turn of events for Donald Trump.

The former President led the nation and much of the Western World to realize that the Chinese spy app TikTok threatens national security. During his tenure in office, Trump tried to bar TikTok’s operations in the United States because the company is, ultimately, owned by the Chinese Communist Party. There is copious evidence China uses the app to spy.

Unfortunately, Trump left office before ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese-owned parent company, was forced to divest, and Biden walked it all back. But even Biden, despite his campaign embracing TikTok, has continued to prohibit TikTok on government phones and in government facilities. Multiple states now ban TikTok on government property and on government devices.

Many of you believe your phones are listening to you. You have a conversation and suddenly see an ad on social media on your device for precisely what you were talking about. Imagine all those conversations flowing back to China.

You think you don’t have anything to worry about. But get a new phone, not your current phone. Set up a new TikTok account that is unconnected to any information related to you and not on your home wifi. Now, watch how the algorithm starts feeding you anti-American propaganda, transgender propaganda, pro-Hamas propaganda, and anti-Semitic propaganda — TikTok isn’t just spying on you but is indoctrinating your children against American values.

Just the other day, the government arrested 25 year old Sergeant Korbein Schultz from Texas for selling classified military intelligence to China. Schultz worked in Army Intelligence. Now, imagine your kid, ten years from now, getting a job in government. China has ten years’ worth of data on what your kid was secretly watching on the internet and engaging with on TikTok. They won’t need money to blackmail your kid.

TikTok is a national security threat to the United States, and Donald Trump was right to raise the red flag about it and take action. On Thursday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 50-0 to force ByteDance to divest its control of TikTok to continue operating in the United States. When is the last time Congress agreed unanimously to anything other than naming a post office? That’s how big a deal this is.

The bill does not ban TikTok. It has nothing to do with free speech. It has everything to do with China using TikTok as a surveillance tool in the United States and as an app designed to poison our children. TikTok can operate, just not with Chinese control. Contrary to the spin against the legislation, this carefully drafted bipartisan legislation has nothing to do with the First Amendment and everything to do with Chinese communist control of the app.

Sadly, now Donald Trump is calling for Republicans to kill the legislation. In a Truth Social post, he claims it would only help Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Because Trump is still nursing grudges about 2020, he claims killing TikTok (which the legislation does not do) would enrich Meta.

This is not only false, but in taking this stance, Trump is letting his emotional wrath trump national security. It is dangerous immaturity.

And, for the record, Meta refuses to operate in China because it does not want China to have access to its servers. TikTok is controlled by China.

It must also be noted that the members of Congress and conservative groups most vocally opposed to this legislation are all funded by financier Jeff Yass. Yass is a major investor in TikTok and is opposed to the legislation. He also leans Republican in his giving.

Yass’s investment company, Susquehanna International Group, bet big on TikTok in 2012, buying a stake in parent company ByteDance now measured at about 15%. That translates into a personal stake for Yass of 7% in ByteDance. It is worth roughly $21 billion based on the company’s recent valuation, or much of his $28 billion net worth as gauged by Bloomberg.

Whether because of a donor’s interests or his emotional grievances, Donald Trump trying to sabotage his legacy on national security is shameful and dangerous and, if a preview of what will come from a second term, is less than reassuring.

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