CNN, MSNBC Personalities Invoke David Duke in Recapping the State of the Union

January 31st, 2018 5:19 PM

For all of the talk about collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, there seemed to be a bit of collusion on Wednesday between the cable news channels as they dissected the President’s State of the Union speech.

No liberal media analysis of a President Trump speech would ever be complete without the use of the race card. On MSNBC’s flagship Trump-bashing program Morning Joe, Kasie Hunt mentioned that white nationalist David Duke appreciated President Trump’s comment that “Americans are dreamers too”, suggesting that the comment was racist.  Less than two hours later, on CNN Newsroom, political analyst Kirsten Powers said the exact same thing. 

 


The media loves to mention how Duke and Richard Spencer praise President Trump. If the media had a universal standard for guilt by association, they certainly would have held President Obama accountable for his well-documented relationships with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and controversial anti-American Pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright. They also would have had something to say about Hillary Clinton viewing the late West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, as her mentor. But as usual, the media has one standard for Republican politicians and another standard for the Democrats.

The media, which love to use the “divide and conquer” strategy to accuse President Trump of relying on, reflexively assumes that anyone who wants to reform the country’s immigration policy to a more merit-based system harbors contempt for people of other races. It never occurs to them that there are numerous economic reasons for wanting to reform our immigration policy, especially as automation renders the low-skilled jobs that many of the immigrants who come into the country end up taking obsolete. 

The media will undoubtably continue to worship at the altar of diversity and accuse anyone who doesn’t of being a racist. Check out the transcript of Kasie Hunt’s remarks on Morning Joe:     

KASIE HUNT: I think that is just going to make it really hard to get this deal done. I mean, to a certain extent, the President needed to talk to conservative hard liners in his own party who have kind of decided they think this proposal is amnesty so he needed to lay down some of those markers for them, but you know, it's not lost on Democrats that, you know, David Duke and Richard Spencer are seizing on that line, Americans are dreamers, too and saying thank you. I mean, they are reading, the context, you know, you guys were alluding to at the top of the show, very seriously. And, and, I just, right now, I came away from the speech thinking okay, tonight, a DACA deal is harder than it was when we walked into the chamber.  

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Yeah, David Duke, of course, thanking the President on Twitter. 

Here is the exchange on CNN, which took place less than two hours later:  

POPPY HARLOW: Kirsten, look, I mean he did again push this pathway to citizenship for more than a million dreamers and would-be dreamers in this country and then he followed it by saying “Americans are dreamers too.” So, it was such, I mean that stood out to me one of the most things from last night.

KIRSTEN POWERS: Right. And of course, nobody ever said that Americans aren’t dreamers too. This was something he is definitely doing for his base. 

HARLOW: It was the context and the placement, right?

POWERS: Well, it’s something for his base. It’s something that you hear from white nationalists, David Duke praised him for saying this, thanked him for saying this. This is something that you’re hearing from his base.