Here’s a test of the depth of your political knowledge: Do you know who Joe Walsh is? I’ve long imagined myself as reasonably well informed, and until this past weekend, I was unfamiliar with the guy and his past. If you despise Donald Trump, shame on you if you are unaware of Walsh’s efforts championing your cause.
Walsh is a former conservative Republican Congressman from Illinois who possibly hates Trump more than anyone on the planet, even more than those occupying the newsrooms of the corporate media. While quite a body of critical work has been published over the years deriding Trump, I feel safe speculating that Walsh’s tome warning about Trump ranks as the gold standard, despite not having read the book. The title says it all: F*ck Silence: Calling Trump Out for the Cultish, Moronic, Authoritarian Conman He Is.
Walsh is part of a group of vociferous anti-Trump former Republicans known as “Principals First” stumping for Kamala Harris and amplifying her message that Trump is a threat to America’s democracy, no ifs, ands, or buts.
“You either believe, in this moment, that (Trump) is a threat to our democracy or you don’t,” Walsh told a gathering of Milwaukee Republicans last July. “Stop there. There’s nothing else to speak about.”
Despite his unbridled disdain for Trump, even Walsh couldn’t stomach the Harris campaign posting on X/Twitter an image of Trump speaking to Tucker Carlson with this caption: “Let’s put Liz Cheney with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it when guns are trained on her face.” The Harris campaign used the quote to suggest that Trump publicly called for Cheney’s execution, which was a flat out lie.
Trump wasn’t suggesting that Cheney be executed but rather was railing about how she and her father, former vice president Dick Cheney, championed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without having to risk their own lives to fight the battles.
“This is what’s so wrong with our politics today,” Walsh said of the Harris campaign’s dishonest posting. “The truth is that Trump is not calling for Liz Cheney to be executed. But…this 11 second clip will have a gazillion views, and the truth will have just a handful of views.”
Here’s Walsh’s entire post:
The U.S. media is supposed to function as the Fourth Estate, the public’s watchdog always on high alert to call out the lies and deceptions of political figures, particularly those running for the highest office in the land. When it comes to calling out Trump’s incessant dishonesty and falsehoods, the corporate media deserves a gold star for its efforts. But do they apply the same standard and respond with the same outrage when the Harris campaign peddles egregious deceptions?
The Federalist did an admirable job calling out the media outlets and personalities who gleefully picked up and amplified the Harris campaign’s falsehood. I’d also include the interview embedded in this Gateway Pundit article featuring ABC News’s smug anchor Elizabeth Schultze interviewing Trump’s national campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt.
The corporate media, particularly the New York Times, routinely trashes The Federalist and Gateway Pundit for allegedly peddling unfounded conspiracy theories and advocates that their content either be censured or subverted. A less charitable motivation is the Federalist and Gateway Pundit routinely publish articles revealing the undeniable bias and dishonesty of the corporate media.
I’m heartened that Walsh wasn’t the only Trump hater who found the Harris campaign’s dishonesty distasteful. Another was the comedian Bill Maher, who unlike the corporate media, called out the deception.
“I woke up today to the headline that Trump had called for a firing squad for Liz Cheney,” Maher said. “And this is what I really don’t like about the media, no, he didn’t.”
“You don’t have to move me to not like Donald Trump more than I already [do],” Maher said. “Just don’t lie to me. I don’t like Donald Trump. Don’t lie to me and tell me he wants (Liz Cheney) in front of a firing squad.”
Maher is perhaps unaware that Harris, her surrogates, and the Democrat party have been lying to him for quite some time, which is why the Harris campaign was mistakenly confident that it could get away sliming Trump with its deception. It’s also why billionaire tech titan Mark Cuban thought he could get away with his comment that Trump is intimidated by “strong, intelligent women.”
I double dare Cuban to make his disparaging comment about Republican women to Tulsi Gabbard, who Trump has named to his transition team. Gabbard was once a rising star in the Democrat party, having served as vice chair. Gabbard ran for president as a Democrat in 2020, the first female with combat experience to seek election as America’s commander in chief. Gabbard voluntarily served with a medical field unit in Iraq and later was deployed to Kuwait to train counterterrorism units.
If Cuban wants to witness just how strong and intelligent Gabbard is he should watch the clip below of Gabbard eviscerating Harris during the 2020 presidential debate. For that matter, all Harris supporters should watch the clip for a refresher on what Joe Biden said about her career as a prosecutor. Watching Harris’s 2020 debate performance makes clear why she received virtually no voter support even in California and was forced drop her campaign.
After years of trashing Harris for her alarming staff turnover and ineffective leadership, the corporate media a few months suddenly did an about face and began promoting her as a highly capable leader uniquely qualified to bring Americans together and recapture America’s once dominate position in the world order.
The corporate media’s failure to call out Harris for trumpeting the endorsements she received from former vice president Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz, a former Wyoming Congresswoman who voters rejected two years ago in favor of a Trump-backed challenger, was a new low in U.S. journalism.
Dick Cheney, once derided as Darth Vader, played the New York Times for fools and convinced the publication to validate his lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Cheney used the Times’s stories to gain Congressional support to attack Iraq, a conflict where 5,000 U.S. servicemembers were killed and more than 32,000 wounded.
Holcomb Noble, an acclaimed former New York Times reporter from the days when it was still a credible newspaper, published a damning book in 2013 titled, Cheney’s War Crimes: The Reign of a De Facto President chronicling how Cheney was responsible for leading America into two destructive wars in the Middle East.
There is unanimous agreement that the New York Times validated Cheney’s WMD lies. Here’s a damning critique written by the publication’s former public editor, here’s one from PBS, and here’s one from an organization called Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Liz Cheney co-wrote three books with her father, including his autobiography. When she ran for the Senate in 2014, she opposed same sex marriage, despite having a lesbian sister who was married to a woman. Cheney didn’t reverse her stance on same-sex marriages until three years ago.
I’ve yet to come across a story noting that Liz Cheney was once chair of the Republican conference, while Gabbard was co-vice chair of the DNC. Cheney is among Trump’s most vocal and passionate critics, while Gabbard endorsed his candidacy. Notably, Gabbard abandoned the Democrat party in 2022, declaring it “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness.”
The corporate media understandably wants to avoid calling much attention to Gabbard. A whistleblower revealed the Biden administration placed her on a terrorist watch list, despite Gabbard having served in Kuwait training U.S. counterterrorism units. Not a good look for a vice president warning that her opponent is a threat to democracy. Victor Davis Hanson outlined some other Biden/Harris administration actions that makes clear Democrats are as capable of targeting political enemies as they warn Trump will.
It’s also understandable why much of the current crop of supposedly star journalists is unaware that Dick Cheney secured a suite in hell decades ago. When America launched its “shock and awe” attack on Baghdad in 2003, CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, who Trump mercilessly destroyed when she interviewed him in May of last year, was around 11 years old and hadn’t yet joined a University of Alabama sorority tweeting anti-gay slurs.
Olivia Nuzzi, the New York Magazine reporter who had a sexting relationship with Robert Kennedy Jr., was roughly the same age. Elizabeth Schultze, the ABC News anchor who amplified the false claim that Trump wanted Liz Cheney executed, didn’t enter Northwestern’s journalism program until 2008, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Regardless of who wins the presidential race, it will be a dark day in America. Trump and Harris are both divisive figures, and Americans on both sides of the political aisle should be asking themselves how a country that was once the envy of the world ended up having to choose between two nightmare candidates who both possibly pose serious risks to America and the stability of the world order.
Those looking for answers should tune in to the cable news networks or visit the homepages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and other corporate media. Trump and Harris are both products of the undeniable failure of the Fourth Estate to cover U.S. politics honestly and fairly.
Thank you Joe Walsh and Bill Maher for taking notice and calling it out.