THUNDERDOME: Scott Jennings DESTROYS Stelter, Navarro, Woke Priest

Jorge Bonilla
February 13th, 2025 1:43 AM

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CNN’s NewsNight with Abby Phillip, known colloquially as “The Thunderdome”, was particularly lively as conservative commentator Scott Jennings clowned multiple guests across multiple segments. Each own was progressively more brutal than the other.

The show began slowly enough with a segment on the potential end of the war in Ukraine, but business eventually picked up. A segment on the Associated Press’s exclusion from the Oval Office as a result of their guidelines regarding the recently renamed Gulf of America had Jennings shutting Brian Stelter down on the matter of presidential transparency:

SCOTT JENNINGS: The Biden administration treated the press as poorly as any president has ever treated them, gave them less access, answered no questions, no transparency at any given time. Donald Trump has answered more questions in three weeks than Joe Biden answered in four years. Elon Musk answered more than that…

BRIAN STELTER: That’s not true. 

JENNINGS: C’mon, Brian.

STELTER: And also a lot of the answers are not true and accurate.

JENNINGS: This administration is giving the most access they could possibly want.

Stelter went to the “but Trump lies” card after Jennings wrecked him on transparency, and he has a point. President Donald Trump has likely had more Resolute Desk press conferences than Joe Biden has had press conferences. And unlike Biden, Trump does not require cue cards with the journalist’s name, image, outlet, and question.

The following segment was on the FCC’s investigations of DEI programs at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Phillips and The View co host Ana Navarro linked up to try to posit that the “conservative” position is to let DEI run amuck at these institutions. This is not unlike some conservatives opposing statutes keeping boys out of girls’ sports:

ABBY PHILLIP: I mean, are we okay with the government telling corporations how they can govern themselves?

ANA NAVARRO: There's nothing less conservative than that and less of a Republican value than that. I mean, Republicans used to be for small government and for the private sector governing themselves. And we are for less regulation, supposedly. And so I just -I see it such, such an so opposed to all of the things that we grew up believing.

SCOTT JENNINGS: So you're saying we should do away with the FCC?

NAVARRO:  No, I'm not saying we should do away with the FCC.

JENNINGS: Is that- Is that the conservative view?

PHILLIP: Scott, I’m going to- hold on, Ana…

NAVARRO: I'm saying- I'm saying- I'm saying that no government agency should be telling…

PHILLIP: I’m going to stop this conversation right there, because I think it's so…

(CROSSTALK)

PHILLIP: It's in such bad faith for you to take what she just said…

JENNINGS: Well, I’m asking…

PHILLIP:...and then no, and then say, you want to get rid of the FCC.

JENNINGS: No, she said we should have less regulations. This is a regulatory agency, what are they supposed to do?

PHILLIP: No, that’s not at all what she said.

JENNINGS: She said they shouldn’t be so active.

Navarro got so viciously owned here that Phillip had to cut in, accusing Jennings of making bad-faith arguments. 

Here, Phillip is playing the role of fight referee…………………..Finally, there was the entire segment on rebutting Vice President JD Vance’s remarks on immigration and Ordo Amoris, which establishes an order in which we love, beginning with our own family. A woke priest was brought in in order to discuss Pope Francis’s letter, and it did not go well:

PHILLIP: That is, I mean, very powerful for you to say. And I think it is an important point that he is trying to say, well, you're supposed to really only care about your family first, and then maybe later you care about other people. But as father beck is saying, as the pope is saying, the Bible actually teaches otherwise.

JENNINGS:I know, but isn't it kind of irrelevant? We don't live in a theocracy. We live in the United States.

>> Wait a minute. Wait a minute

(OUTRAGED CROSSTALK)

JENNINGS: We have a Constitution.

PHILLIP: I thought we were in a Judeo-christian society…

(CROSSTALK)

JENNINGS: But we but we are, Abby.

PHILLIP: Organized according to Judea and Christian Judeo- judeo-christian values.

JENNINGS: We live in a-

PHILLIP: I thought that the Ten commandments were to be taught to kids in the schools.?

JENNINGS: I mean…

ANA NAVARRO: What about the war on Christmas?

JAMAL SIMMONS: And prayer. So there's prayer.

JENNINGS: We live- we live under a constitution. We live under laws. I was researching this before I came out. I read a headline, Father, from January 15th. Quote: “Vatican cracks down on illegal entry into its territory.” You've had a wall around it since the ninth century, and you have the most draconian immigration laws in Europe. The lectures, I understand, as a matter of…theology? I’m just saying.

FR. EDWARD BECK: The Pope has Invited migrants into the Vatican to sleep and has cared for them within the walls of The Vatican. They live inside the walls of the Vatican.

JENNINGS: Listen. January 15th wasn’t that long ago.

Jennings’s “This isn’t a theocracy” smackdown obliterated the priest’s previous six minutes of lecturing and moral preening. There is this impulse to absorb an unlimited number of migrants in the name of Christian values. 

Jennings’ continued presence on CNN gives one pause to consider the quality of his “heel” work, as mentioned in the recent Daily Caller profile. Final Boss Rock may well be his floor, with Jennings rapidly approaching The Iron Sheik.

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