Kellyanne Conway declares Sarah Sanders attack on free press 'beautiful'
Sarah Huckabee Sanders shocked a lot of people when she refused to refute that the press is ‘the enemy of the people.’ But Kellyanne Conway thought it was just great.
Trump White House counselor Kellyanne Conway invented “alternative facts.” So of course she loved the Sarah Huckabee Sanders rant that included the false claim that a media figure said Sanders “should be choked.”
At Thursday’s White House daily briefing, Sanders managed to shock nearly everyone when she repeatedly refused to say the press isn’t “the enemy of the people.”
On Thursday night’s edition of “The Ingraham Angle,” Conway praised Sanders’ repeated refusal to say that the media aren’t the “enemy of the people,” telling host Laura Ingraham that Sanders “handled it beautifully.”
“She read a bill of particulars, an entire litany of facts, of things that had been said about her,” Conway continued, “and some violence that has been incited against her.”
The treatment of public officials by individual members of the media is not remotely relevant to the protection of the free press in a democratic society, but facts do matter.
While Sanders was refusing to renounce Trump’s despotic mantra, she told CNN’s Jim Acosta that “The media has attacked me personally on a number of occasions, including your own network, said I should be harassed as a life sentence, that I should be choked.”
But those were, predictably, all lies. In May, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace asked a guest “How do you resist the temptation to run up and wring her neck,” after Sanders refused to denounce a White House staffer who joked about Sen. John McCain’s impending death from terminal cancer. Wallace apologized for the poorly-chosen figure of speech.
And on MSNBC’s “AM Joy,” guest Jennifer Rubin said, of Trump administration officials who are being protested over the administration’s misdeeds, that “these people should be made uncomfortable, and I think that is a life sentence.”
Neither claim was true, and neither of the made-up “attacks” came from CNN, meaning that Sanders somehow managed to lie three times about only two people. Sanders also went on to lie about comedian Michelle Wolf, falsely claiming that Wolf mocked Sanders’ appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Ironically, Trump followed Sanders’ performance with an attempt at a walk-back, tweeting that he wasn’t referring to all of the media as the “enemy of the people,” but rather that “the FAKE NEWS, which is a large percentage of the media, …is the enemy of the people!”
But that’s also a lie. On several occasions, Trump has singled out, by name, every network — except Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting — as members of the group he calls the “enemy of the people.”
Trump’s relentless attacks on the press are inciting hostility that could get someone hurt or killed at home, and are emboldening autocrats around the world to suppress free speech. By defending and projecting those attacks,Trump officials like Conway and Sanders aren’t just liars, they are dangerous liars.
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
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