WE THE PEOPLE: When we the people began to react...

TUESDAY, APRIL 28, 2026

...a certain problem emerged: We're so old that we can remember when Iran was still in the news.  

That takes us back to last Saturday morning. The war with Iran hadn't yet ended. The Strait of Hormuz was still blocked, upending the global economy.  

Vaguely, we can remember all that! But those news topics disappeared in the wake of Cole Allen's alleged attempt to storm the White House Correspondents Dinner last Saturday night.  

There we the people went again! Our news agenda was hijacked by the latest attempt at a mass shooting. Also, this mass shooting would have been political in nature—and so, we the people began to react.  

We the people began to react at 7 o'clock on Sunday morning with some rather peculiar calls to C-Span's Washington Journal. We'll offer examples of those calls in tomorrow morning's report—but first, we the people began to hear from our major journalists, and it got dumb very fast. 

It got dumb extremely fast—and this is who we are. 

For starters, consider this report from Mediaite. It concerns a comment which was made shortly after midnight on that very Saturday night 

‘Tone Down The Flipping Rhetoric!’ John Roberts Rips Hakeem Jeffries For Comments After WHCD

Fox News anchor John Roberts admonished House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) for comments he made after the shooting incident at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Roberts was at the event at the Washington Hilton when a gunman ran through the magnetometer and fired shots before being tackled by security. One Secret Service agent was saved when his bulletproof vest caught the shooter’s round.

President Donald Trump, Melania Trump, and Trump officials were safely ushered out of the venue.   

Roberts told host Trace Gallagher that future correspondents’ dinners “need to have Trump-level security.” 

That's the way the report begins—and so far, so basically good! 

Many people have voiced concern with the level of security at the dinner. But Roberts didn't leave it at that. Speaking to Gallagher on the Fox News Channel, the Fox News anchor said this:  

[continuing directly]
“And then again, you know, we heard from Hakeem Jeffries just before you and I came on together. And he said, ‘Oh, we are so happy nobody was hurt.’ Well, you know, then to down the flipping rhetoric!

“You might not like the guy,” Roberts said of Trump. “You might not be able to stand him. But you call him Hitler, you call him a fascist, you call him all of these things. You call him a threat to democracy. Some lunatic out there is going to take that language to heart, that rhetoric to heart.”

“And feel emboldened!” Gallagher agreed.  

In our view, Gallagher tends to be a bit of an agitprop machine. Before we consider what Roberts said, let's consider his background, and his deep experience.  

John Roberts is Canadian by birth. Like Gallagher, he's a good and decent person—and he's highly experienced:   

John Roberts (journalist) 

John David Roberts (born November 15, 1956) is a Canadian-American television journalist. He has been working for the Fox News Channel, as the co-anchor of America Reports. Roberts joined Fox News in January 2011 as a national correspondent based in Atlanta. He was the Fox News Chief White House Correspondent from 2017 to 2021, covering the first Donald Trump presidency.   

...Roberts first moved to the States in 1989 to join the Miami CBS affiliate. In 1990, he returned to Canada to host the CTV Canada AM national morning show. Roberts then returned to the States, joining CBS News in 1992 and later moved to CNN in 2006. At CBS, Roberts was an anchor on various national news programs, an anchor at their New York affiliate WCBS-TV, and White House correspondent. At CNN, Roberts was an anchor and Senior National Correspondent. 

[...]  

He had been widely considered a potential replacement for CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather after Rather stepped down from the anchor desk in March 2005, but Bob Schieffer was chosen on an interim basis to be the next CBS Evening News anchor, and in subsequent months, it became clear that Roberts was not under consideration for the job. During his time at CBS, Roberts received three nationals Emmy awards as well as a Gracie award for his coverage of a groundbreaking surgery to repair neural tube defects.  

At CBS, Roberts had been a contender! That said, he has performed at the highest levels in American broadcast news—for CBS, CNN and the Fox News Channel—for more than thirty years. 

He's deeply experienced, and he's a good and decent person. Despite all that, Roberts now blurted this:  

“You might not like the guy. You might not be able to stand him. But you call him Hitler, you call him a fascist, you call him all of these things. You call him a threat to democracy. Some lunatic out there is going to take that language to heart, that rhetoric to heart."  

Speaking with Gallagher just after midnight, Roberts fashioned the assailant as "a lunatic." Presumably, that may mean he thinks the assailant is "mentally ill" in some way. 

We'd be inclined to think that some such mental health problem does obtain.  

Roberts seemed to be angry—upset. Stating the obvious, what happened last Saturday night was upsetting for many people—yes, that does include us. 

That said, Roberts almost seemed to be angry at Hakeem Jeffries for saying he was glad that no one got hurt. And then, the experienced newsman emitted a familiar type of rant, in the course of which he even offered this:  

If you think a president is a threat to democracy, you shouldn't actually say it!   

Roberts emitted a standard Fox News Channel presentation, in which he seemed to suggest—offering no examples—that Jeffries has been calling President Trump "Hitler" and "a fascist."  By now, everyone within the reach of the Fox News Channel has offered some version of that general rant, often accompanied by tightly edited video clips in which no such statement is made.   

We rarely (if ever) see the sitting president referred to as a "Hitler." That said, we hear constant allegations to that effect by stars on the Fox News Channel.

Imagine! According to Roberts, you can think that a president poses some such threat, but you must never say it! A lunatic may hear you say it and decide to show up with a gun!

To some extent, what Roberts said is of course perfectly accurate. In a nation of roughly 340 million people, including more than 200 million people ages 18-65, any criticism of a public figure may inspire some (one) unbalanced person to react in a violent way. 

There's no avoiding that possibility—and a resort to gun violence has become a national norm over the past 27 years, dating to the mass shooting at Colorado's Columbine High.

It's true! If you criticize a sitting president, a disordered person may react in a disordered way. But in that part of Roberts' statement—the part about the threat to democracy—Roberts was basically saying that we the people can't be allowed to criticize a president at all.

That struck us as an extremely strange remark, from a deeply experienced person. Roberts made the comment shortly after midnight. Seven hours later, the calls to C-Span began.

Roberts is a good, decent person. That said, he made a remark that evening which strikes us as very dumb.

As he made that odd remark, then as the calls to C-Span came in, a dirty little secret was put on display:

Even as we seek "a more perfect Union," we the people just aren't extremely sharp—and we never have been!  

Quite often, that's true of us the people in Blue America. It's also true of them the people who tend to align as Red.

Tomorrow: Washington Journal takes phone calls from us the people, Blue as well as Red