Kilmeade wants to see everyone's face!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 2024

Please remove their protective gear! Watching cable news was especially painful this morning.

On Morning Joe, the message was gloomy. The messages went like this:

The barricade brigade at UCLA aren't helping anyone in Gaza. In fact, they have the whole American nation talking about what they themselves are doing on their beautiful Tinseltown campus. 

That discussion has replaced the pre-existing conversation about actual events in Gaza, where people have been suffering for a very long time with little interest being displayed by major American news orgs.

The mother of all gloomy messages arrived around 6:25. We still can't link you to videotape. This morning, we recorded the exchange as shown:

PANELIST ONE: This is great for Donald Trump.

PANELIST TWO: He loves this.

Joe Scarborough was one of the two panelists. We're fairly sure that that comes close to being an exact capture of the gloomy exchange.

Could this roiling movement possibly help Donald J. Trump get elected? Presumably yes, it could.

In this morning's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof is extra-nice as he tells a version of that story to the youngsters manning the ramparts. Headline included, the passage in question says this:

How Protesters Can Actually Help Palestinians

[...]

Student protesters: I admire your empathy for Gazans, your concern for the world, your moral ambition to make a difference.

But I worry about how peaceful protests have tipped into occupations of buildings, risks to commencements and what I see as undue tolerance of antisemitism, chaos, vandalism and extremism. I’m afraid the more aggressive actions may be hurting the Gazans you are trying to help.

I’m shaped in my thinking by the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. Students who protested then were right on the merits: The war was unwinnable and conducted in ways that were reckless and immoral.

Yet those students didn’t shorten that terrible war; instead, they probably prolonged it. Leftist activists in 1968 didn’t achieve their goal of electing the peace candidate Gene McCarthy; rather, the turmoil and more violent protests helped elect Richard Nixon, who pledged to restore order—and then dragged the war out and expanded it to Cambodia.

For our money, Kristof may have been overdoing the niceness. More to the point, could these events help Candidate Trump as similar events once helped Nixon?

Everything is possible. This was a gloomy morning, and perhaps especially so for those of a certain age.

On Fox & Friends, Brian Kilmeade finally defined himself for us as cable's number-one red-ass. As barricaders who had been detained waited to be taken away by police, the Fox friend offered this:

KILMEADE (5/2/24): They look so organized. They've got their masks, they've got their glasses.

Why are they allowed to keep their masks and glasses, by the way? If there is something in the air, it's their fault. Their people shot it up in the air.

In fact. both sides had been using chemical irritants, according to reports on the ground. But to Kilmeade, if even one protester had done that, every other protester should be stripped of protective gear and forced to pay the price, even after they were in the custody of police.

A few minutes later, Kilmeade had another complaint. As zip-tied protesters were being taken away, the long-standing Fox friend said this:

KILMEADE: Take the masks down. We want to see all their faces.

This particular friend rarely fails.

Moments later, Steve Doocy offered a comment which struck us as the dumbest, and the most pander-heavy, comment of the morning. He was asking a perfectly sensible journalistic question—Where is the (obvious) money behind these group actions coming from?—when he launched his Storyline-obedient comment, which we won't transcribe.

In fairness, Fox did some decent reporting from L.A. over the course of the past few days. That said, the friends all come from the same part of town, and that's a formula which is destined to produce repetition, recitation, embellishment, dumbness, faux anger, stupidity, sloth.

The friends remain true to Red storyline. It's like that on our Blue channel too.