• Podcaster Benny Johnson: “Poor people pay nothing into the system. Poor people live off the rich people.” 
• The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles: “Statistically, 100% of people who have succeeded in business have been men.”

• Fox’s Jesse Watters fantasized about homeless people being sent to a “mega prison.” 
• Fox host Brian Kilmeade: “It’s not practical to think that we can do due process on 8 million people.” 
• Daily Wire host Andrew Klavan: “Obama-Biden judges are now waging war against the Trump agenda.”

• Fox’s Sean Hannity called on Republicans to abolish U.S. district courts. 
• Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy bemoaned the “hurdle” of having “to somehow prove” those deported to a Salvadoran mega prison were actually gang members.
• Jesse Watters on NPR CEO: “I think she’s an intelligence operative and I have no evidence whatsoever, but I’m going to put it out there.”

On Monday, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported that former Fox News host turned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had divulged “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen” in a Signal group that included other Trump administration officials. Goldberg was, apparently, accidentally invited into the chat by former Fox contributor and national security adviser Mike Waltz. Beyond the obvious threats to national security this story entails, it’s additionally rich that the Trump officials implicated in this compromised Signal chat previously spent years stressing care and caution with classified information. 

Initially, Fox scrambled to explain this shocking revelation. By Tuesday, though, the network had settled on a new strategy — one which amounts to arguing that the nation’s top national security officials are morons. 

As the week wore on, right-wing media personalities began constructing conspiracy theories and conflicting excuses to defend Trump officials. Fox’s Jesse Watters, for example, suggested that Goldberg “sneaked his way in” the Signal chat. Podcaster Benny Johnson suggested that “a backdoor splinter cell group inside the CIA” may have added Goldberg to the chat. And Newsmax’s Greg Kelly claimed the Trump officials in the Signal chat “were kind of the victim of a cyber crime perpetrated by the Biden administration." 

While defense experts say that the information Hegseth shared in the Signal chat was classified, Fox hosts continue to claim the opposite. Laura Ingraham declared, “It’s abundantly clear that none of this put national security at risk.” The general tenor of Fox’s coverage later in the week is to claim there’s nothing to see here, and it’s time to move on.  

Fox's chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin said on Thursday that the negligent group chat put “the lives of U.S. service members and pilots in danger.” That same night, Newsmax attacked Griffen for her reporting. 

Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty offered an insightful comment about the scandal: “No one on the right cares because nothing happened.” Right-wing media spent years beating the drum on Hillary Clinton’s email server, and mainstream media followed suit on the obsession. Now, after all of that, we're seeing how they handle this shocking display of incompetence in handling military attack plans.

Right-wing media figures are escalating a long-running campaign to give the president vast powers to denaturalize and deport naturalized American citizens, a generally rare occurrence that would represent a significant new front in President Donald Trump’s campaign to restrict immigration and limit citizenship in the United States. 

In recent years, conservative pundits and think tanks have sought to drastically increase the number of denaturalized citizens. MAGA media figures have targeted people engaged in pro-Palestinian speech, a high-profile journalist, and, in at least one instance, a sitting member of Congress in their campaigns to denaturalize citizens. These threats are extreme, even by right-wing media standards — and where MAGA punditry often falls light on specifics, white papers from conservative think tanks look to offer a veneer of policy respectability to the calls for ramping up denaturalization. 

Media Matters’ John Knefel wrote this piece detailing this nefarious campaign. I invite you to read it here.

June this year will mark a decade since the Supreme Court codified gay marriage across the nation — a ruling right-wing media said was worth “weep[ing]” over, and lamented at the time as “the greatest, most historic, landmark blunder in the history of the United States Supreme Court.” 

In the interim, right-wing media focused their attacks on transgender people, materializing into a yearslong culture war and now a presidential administration with an unabashed anti-trans agenda. Confident that they have put trans people on their back foot, right-wing media are mobilizing against gay marriage once again, a fight for which they have years of practice. 

Media Matters’ Vesper Henry presents a great overview of the right’s campaign against gay marriage in the years since Obergefell v Hodges. I invite you to read it here.

• Judges who rule against Trump face an onslaught of attacks against their families from right-wing media.
• After warning that former President Joe Biden was creating a “new Gestapo” to hunt conservatives (by hiring people at the IRS to crackdown on wealthy tax cheats), Fox News is cheering the abduction of a Tufts student by officers from the Department of Homeland Security.
• Fox contributor Karl Rove questioned the legality of Trump’s voting executive order.  
• Fox News is cheering a massive rollback of environmental and public health protections. 
• Media Matters President Angelo Carusone discussed how right-wing media asymmetry contributed to Project 2025’s unpopular policies.