ORDINARY PEOPLE: "I believe it was a fake attack!"

FRIDAY, MAY 1, 2026

So said we the people: King Charles and his once unlikely queen have gone back to jolly olde. If we could rent him as a replacement head of state, we'd strongly consider the prospect. 

Despite the absence of a ballroom, a dinner was held in honor of the royal pair. In this morning's New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller reports the current state of our breakaway nation's rapidly failing union:  

What the Royal State Dinner Guest List Says About Trump’s America

Guest lists for White House state dinners have always been political rather than social documents. Avidly chewed over in Washington, they broadcast an administration’s priorities, favored businesses, top donors and media allies. They are supposed to reflect the country being honored.

By those standards, the Trump guest list for the state dinner for King Charles III of Britain and Queen Camilla on Tuesday night was another whack at norms in an administration that likes to shatter them.

Among the more than 100 guests were at least 10 American billionaires, six Fox News hosts, one Fox News executive, six conservative Supreme Court justices, numerous Silicon Valley tech titans and assorted friends of the president’s. There were no British cultural figures and, for that matter, a meager number of British overall. The British Embassy in Washington appears to have had limited input into the guest list.

There were also no Democratic politicians, which has been the case at other Trump state dinners.  

And so on from there—and so it appears to go

The six conservative justices were present at the dinner. The three liberal justices were not. 

There were no Democratic Party politicians. Six Fox News host were numbered among the guests—and that included the 47-year-old "silly boy" who says that he did this:   

‘You Said That? To the QUEEN?!’ Fox’s Jesse Watters Admits to Making Gun Violence Joke to Queen Camilla

Fox News hosts Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld were among the attendees at a White House state dinner with King Charles III and Queen Camilla this week, and they shared some eyebrow-raising comments about the event on Wednesday’s episode of The Five.  

[...]   

According to The New York Times, the king and queen are both “avid supporters of beekeeping.” A new hive on the South Lawn was “crafted to look like the real White House,” the Times noted.

The king “had no idea who I was,” said Watters, continuing:

So I said, “I’m on Fox and I have two shows.” And he goes, “Well, they must really love you here.” And I said, “Yeah.”

So we go down, and there’s the queen. And I said, “Well, how was the beehive?” She goes, “It was very good. No one got stung.”

And then I said, “Well, you know in Washington, D.C., you know, the bees don’t get you, the guns will.”

“You said that? To the queen?!” Perino asked, shock evident in her voice as Watters covered his face with his hands. 

The silly child covered his face with his hands. This is the type of scripted inanity which helps animate the daily agitprop of The Five, this nation's most-watched "cable news" program.    

Corporate tools like Perino and Watters play these roles each day, with Gutfeld called upon to deliver one of his increasingly deranged hyper-partisan topical blasts. 

On Wednesday's edition of this astonishing "cable news" charade, Watters covered his face as he acknowledged his latest very bad conduct. This scripted inanity continues to score with us the American people, as the newest numbers make clear:  

Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters Dominate Cable News Ratings...

Fox News continued its cable news ratings dominance in April with hosts Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters pulling in the biggest numbers, while CNN and MS NOW also notched prime time gains.

In Monday through Sunday prime time total viewers, Fox averaged 2.9 million viewers...April marked Fox’s third-most-watched April in the network’s history, according to Nielsen data.

The biggest numbers came from The Five, which averaged 3.8 million viewers, and Jesse Watters Primetime, which averaged 3.6 million. Those were followed by Sean Hannity’s show at 3.2 million and Gutfeld! with 3 million. Bret Baier over on Special Report also averaged around 3 million viewers overall. 

Those five shows took the top five spots for cable news for the month. Watters and Gutfeld are both co-hosts of The Five as well as hosting their eponymous shows—easily making them the two most-watched personalities in the cable news business.  

Watters and Gutfeld continue to produce the biggest numbers in cable news—and yes, it is a (highly profitable) "business." 

On average, 3.8 million of us the people watch the imitation of life called The Five on a daily basis. The audience for Jesse Watters Primetime isn't far behind.

By way of contrast, the most watched weekly MS NOW show—The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell—averaged 1.6 million viewers for the month. MS NOW shows hosted by Nicolle Wallace, Chris Hayes and Jen Psaki averaged 1.3 or 1.4 million. Gutfeld! more than doubles that.

In fairness, Blue America's cable news is hardly a perfect product—but Red America's counterpart on the Fox News Channel is an imitation of life. The question we'd ask you is this:

Can "we the people" hope to attain "a more perfect union" when this channel continues to roll out clown cars filled with D-list comedians, former professional "wrestlers" and an endless assortment of Unrecognizables, topped by the towel-snapping apparent misogyny of Watters and Gutfeld?  

Can a more perfect union emerge despite that societal stress? Go ahead—take a good look around!

The presence of Watters and Gutfeld on these heavily watched TV shows is the braindead, poisoned fruit of the "democratization of media." 

In fairness, their braindead behavior is matched by that of the New York Times and The Atlantic and of Blue American royalty like Rachel Maddow—by the refusal of these timorous, self-dealing souls to report and discuss the ugly inanity churned by the Fox News Channel for us, the American people.

At one time, we the people split into the Blue and the Gray. Today, we flounder ahead as we're encouraged to align as the Red and the Blue. 

Can a modern nation survive the corporate conduct which hands us this braindead spectacle—this daily assault on the possibility of seeking a more perfect union?   

At this point, a word must be said about us the people—about us the "ordinary" American people:

About the Reds who may not realize the way they're played by the likes of Perino and Watters. About the Blues who may not notice the way their own corporate leaders refuse to report and discuss the terrible plight into which we've been thrown by the spread of corporate entities like Fox, along with the rise of a podcast world built on this basic bromide: 

Every flyweight a king!

"No people are uninteresting," Yevtushenko passionately said. When a person dies, "what has gone is not nothing," this poet was willing to say.

He was thinking of the millions of "ordinary" people who lost their lives in the several madnesses which swept Europe in the middle of the last century.   

For the record, Yevtushenko had his detractors too. Years later, Robert Redford directed a deeply humane film called Ordinary People, followed by a second deeply humane film which further explored the lives of a similar group of such people. 

In that second film, a suffering teenage girl was badly in need of help—and she got it from a deeply humane older person. That Montana resident had special gifts, but he was an ordinary person too. 

There's no such thing as an "ordinary" person, Yevtushenko seemed to say. That said, we the people—ordinary all—are almost always in need of some help.  

We need the help of people with gifts. We need the help of people with insight and wisdom.

We need the help of moral and intellectual leaders. In place of help from people like those, the Fox News Channel—the fruit of a poisoned "democratization"—sends us Perino, Watters and Gutfeld each day, with Kat Timpf and the former "wrestler" dragging us down every night.

Last Saturday morning, at 7 a.m., C-Span's Washinton Journal began taking phone calls from us the American people. The callers are a self-selected group. They aren't a representative sample, extent to the extent that they possibly are.

On this occasion, it largely fell to people who tilted Blue to remind us of the fact that we the people, all of us, are almost always in need of help. We need to be led away from the irrational ideas which sometimes pop into our imperfect heads. 

In the film we've mentioned above, a suffering teenage girl needed the help of an empathic whisperer. On Saturday morning, quite a few callers, apparently from Blue America, were saying the events of the previous night had been staged.

Had someone tried to race past security at the Washington Hilton and stage an assault on President Trump or perhaps on Trump officials?

"I believe it was a fake attack," a caller from South Carolina soon said. Unhelpful, irrational ideas of that type can emerge, with remarkable speed, from us the American people.  

"I believe it was a fake attack?" Quite a few callers made similar comments like that during the program's first hour. Not far into the 8 o'clock hour, a caller from Michigan asked this about the previous night's event:

"Could it be that it was a law enforcement training exercise?"

Well no, it almost certainly wasn't! But ideas like that have a way of popping into our heads!

(Late in the 7 o'clock hour, a caller from Maryland took a different approach. She ridiculed those of us who "still believe that the January 6 thing was real.")

Over at the Fox News Channel, people like Perino help Watters and Gutfeld drive the disunion along. On The Five, Emily Compagno is now telling viewers that any events which may have seemed to feature violence or hatred on the part of MAGA types were really the equivalent of false flag events. They were all produced by the SPLC, Emily Compagno has now told the world, or something dimly like that.

Can anything like a union survive in the face of assaults of that type? Can anything like a union survive in the face of Blue American silence?

Attention, C-Span callers: On Sunday morning, Washington Journal took several hours of phone calls. You can watch and listen here.

"I believe it was a fake attack?" You can hear that call at 7:14. The next caller says she agrees.

Quite a few of us the people thought the attack at the Hilton seemed to be staged or fake. Many of these are good, decent people. That said, we the people can almost always benefit from good, sound people providing good, sound leadership in the form of their badly needed wisdom and general help.

Our broadcasters and presidents have sometimes done that. Other times, not so much!