As he opened Sunday's Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN, host Zakaria brought up his background as a secular Muslim as he condemned Donald Trump's "bigotry and demagoguery" in the show's regular "Fareed's Take" segment. At one point, he seemed to compare himself to secular German Jews who criticized Adolf Hitler in the 1930s as he referred to the diaries of Victor Klemperer and showed archival footage of Hitler inspiring an audience to chant, "Heil!"
Conservatives & Republicans


On Friday's Andrea Mitchell Reports on MSNBC, as guest and NBC host Chuck Todd attempted to psychoanalyze Donald Trump supporters, host Mitchell compared Trump voters to those who supported segregationist Alabama Democratic Governor George Wallace in the 1968 presidential campaign, as she and Todd both suggested that Trump supporters believe America was "great" when it was more "majority white."

According to David Roberts, activist conservatives are “bending the political system to their will” not by scoring policy victories but by taking their cues from “fever dreams” (i.e., conspiracy theories).
In a Thursday article, Roberts suggested two reasons why conservatives generally are more inclined than liberals to buy into CTs. One is that for conservatives, not trusting “the political system [is] built into the ideology.” The other is that even though right-wingers are “politically engaged and intense,” their sources of information tend to be, in Roberts’s estimation, unreliable.

NBC Nightly News was the sole Big Three network evening newscast on Friday to cover the controversy surrounding Justice Antonin Scalia's comments during oral arguments in an affirmative action case. Both Lester Holt and Pete Williams spotlighted how "gasps were heard inside the Supreme Court this week over something said by Justice Antonin Scalia." Williams zeroed in how "some called the comments racist. Others said, he was just plain wrong."

It's one thing to dump on Trump, as author Rick Perlstein did on today's With All Due Respect, calling The Donald a modern-day George Wallace, and floating "fascism" about him. But Perlstein took things a nasty step further, denigrating Trump supporters in the ugliest terms.
Per Perlstein, Trump has unleashed forces in his supporters "that are more animalistic than human." Perlstein added that spectacle of the US losing to ISIS has filled Trump fans with "childlike, impotent rage."

In his Thursday front-page New York Times profile of "gruff" Sen. Ted Cruz, Matt Flegenheimer took pains to portray the Texas senator and Republican candidate as an unlikeable, socially awkward “bomb-thrower” ideologue (“appraised as grating and pompous as a matter of bipartisan consensus”) in “Cruz the Gruff Taking a Turn At Being Nice.” The online headline was no less hostile: "After Making Enemies, Ted Cruz Tries to Make Friends.” Never mind his surge in Iowa. Flegenheimer’s opinionated profile piece, which characterized Cruz’s demeanor as growling and rhetoric as “apocalyptic,” was more suitable for a guest essay in the magazine than an ostensibly balanced front-page news story from a political reporter.
In a hostile interview with Carly Fiorina on CNN’s New Day on Friday, anchor Chris Cuomo accused the Republican presidential candidate of inciting violence with her criticism of abortion provider Planned Parenthood: “Do you feel any sense of regret about how you characterized what was going on at Planned Parenthood after the attack in Colorado? Because of what the man said, which seems as though he was influenced by some of the rhetoric that was coming out of you and others that painted a very ugly picture, an unfair one, about Planned Parenthood?”
Moments before bringing on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for two casual segments of softball questions, Late Night host Seth Meyers took a shot at Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in his monologue by comparing him to members of the KKK following Scalia’s comments on Wednesday about affirmative action.
The December edition of the CBS News/New York Times poll came out on Thursday and, naturally, the results were covered on the CBS Evening News but, as per the liberal media’s usual pattern, it left out a slew of poll results in which voters gave President Obama poor marks on terrorism, the fight against ISIS, and how the country remains on the wrong track. Instead, CBS chose to devote all of its coverage (two and a half minutes) concerning its own poll to the results pertaining to the 2016 Republican field.

On Thursday's Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield on CNN, host Banfield joined CNN legal analyst Paul Callan and Joey Jackson of HLN -- sister network to CNN -- in deriding conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for recently referencing an argument against affirmative action in higher education admissions.
As HLN legal analyst Jackson called Justice Scalia's remarks "disturbing" and "offensive," Callan asserted that the conservative justice "sounded a little nutty," and Banfield declared that "I cannot believe I'm hearing those words from a Supreme Court justice."
Between Christians and Muslims, which group poses the greater threat to religious liberty in America? To Marcotte, there’s an obvious answer: Christians. In a Wednesday Salon column, the lefty pundit claimed that “the big difference between conservative Muslims and Christians in this country is that only the latter have a massive, organized movement that is backed by an entire political party to force their theocratic views on the non-believers.”
Marcotte’s peg was Sean Hannity’s recent statement on his radio show that we ought to find out whether would-be Muslim immigrants to the U.S. favor sharia. Marcotte deemed Hannity’s remark “breathtaking in its hypocrisy,” given that Hannity, “like nearly all conservatives these days, is a strong believer in the Christian version of ‘sharia law,’ i.e. forcing conservative religious beliefs on the non-believers by law.”

CNN did a 180 in its coverage of Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter attacking Donald Trump as an "asshole" on Tuesday over the presidential candidate's controversial proposal to ban Muslim immigration to the U.S. On Tuesday's OutFront, Erin Burnett spotlighted how the Democratic mayor "spoke out" against Trump with his crass term Burnett's program ran the soundbite of Nutter uncensored, and an on-screen graphic trumpeted, "Philadelphia Mayor: Trump's An 'Asshole'". Just over 24 hours later, Anderson Cooper confronted the outgoing mayor on his CNN program on Wednesday over the crude retort.
