Having been roundly condemned in the days leading up to its premiere and an excerpt flirting with far-left, pro-murder psychopath Taylor Lorenz, CNN correspondent Donie O’Sullivan’s Whole Story episode aired Sunday on “a new kind of American extremism” declaring “violence in the country today is mostly from right-wing extremism” with “simply no equivalent on the left.”
Unsurprisingly, it was pants-on-fire false as O’Sullivan chose to ignore both assassination attempts on now-President Trump, arson attacks on pro-life groups, the Family Research Council shooting, the rampant anti-Semitism inside college campuses, and the 2017 attempted murder of congressional Republicans by a man who was both a Bernie Sanders supporter and MSNBC viewer.
O’Sullivan instead created a strawman fixating like a crazy ex on January 6 defendants, far right figures with vile views who made a point of threatening O’Sullivan’s life, and a designer of 3D-printed guns. Oh, and the now-viral sit-down smiling and giggling with Lorenz about her support for Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson.
Let’s walk through the highlights (or lowlights).
First, there was this nonsense opening by Anderson Cooper tying January 6 rioters to the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing and painted free speech and the internet as net negatives:
O’Sullivan showed he wasn’t about facts or even showing a level-headed look at extremism. Instead, he took the sensational route from the get-go, focusing on one “far-right extremist” who threatened the CNN reporter with treason charges, punishable by death, and warning “we [will] ruin you.”
This served as a set-up to his thesis, spliced in-between clips of far-right extremists and other radicals:
O’Sullivan unsurprisingly used as his first extended case study the scene outside the D.C. jail on January 20 ahead of commutations and pardons from President Trump for those convicted in relation to their conduct on January 6, 2021.
Following a break, O’Sullivan arrived at the Mangione section, smiling from ear-to-ear as he asked deranged progressive women “what was it like seeing Luigi” at a court appearance and hilariously remarking to one that he had “met” her “before...at protests in Washington, D.C. against Trump.”
After she defended her support for Thompson’s alleged killer by saying America “massacred the indigenous people” and other Americans supporting “the Proud Boys,” O’Sullivan delivered his biggest lie to gloss over any of the far-left acts mentioned above: “And while America’s roots are soaked in bloodshed, violence in the country today is mostly from right-wing extremism. From Oklahoma City to Charlottesville to January 6th. There is simply no equivalent on the left.”
This went into his park bench date with Lorenz, whom he dubbed “an independent journalist who spoke up for people who felt the murder had justification.”
She started with a defense of her infamous comments to Piers Morgan about feeling “joy” in Thompson’s murder and feeling “empathy” for Mangione: “What I said is that I felt joy in the fact that people like Piers Morgan and other privileged millionaires in this country are finally being forced to confront the gross inequalities in our barbaric healthcare system.”
To a bedazzled O’Sullivan, Lorenz continued to fawn over Mangione as “famous,” “handsome,” “morally good,” “revolutionary” and “smart” while O’Sullivan flirtatiously said this proved “women would literally date an assassin before they swipe right on me” (click “expand”):
LORENZ: Thousands of Americans die because CEOs like this one and others deny essential life-saving care to Americans. I think it’s hilarious to see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone standing a murderer when this is the United States of America. As if we don’t lionize criminals, as if we don’t have, you know, we don’t stand murderers of all sorts, and we give them Netflix shows. There’s a huge disconnect between the narratives and angles that mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels. And you see that in moments like this. And I can tell you, I saw the biggest audience growth that I’ve ever seen because people were like, oh, somebody, some journalist is actually speaking to the anger that we feel.
O’SULLIVAN: The women who got her outside court in New York.
LORENZ: So you’re going to see women, especially that feel like, oh, my god, right. Like, here’s this man who’s a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart. He’s a person that seems this like this morally good man, which is hard to find. [LAUGHTER]
O’SULLIVAN: Yes. I just realized women would literally date an assassin before they swipe right on me. That’s where we’re at. I’m sure you wouldn’t like to be compared to a Trump supporter, but some of how people cannot understand why people have sympathies for Mangione strikes me as the same as our media not understanding why people support Trump.
LORENZ: I totally agree.
O’SULLIVAN: It’s because a lot of people are just really, really desperate.
LORENZ: They want somebody to take on the system. They want somebody to tear down these barbaric establishment institutions.
O’Sullivan’s next stop was Austin, Texas to see Cody Wilson, the man he said was “the godfather of 3-D printed guns” and even made a replica gun of the one that killed Thompson. He even tried to make Wilson feel comfortable by telling him he felt like he was “in Martha Stewart’s kitchen here.”
Wilson also happened to have a copy of the anti-Semitic, racist screed Turner Diaries gave O’Sullivan all he needed to connect the American right, Second Amendment supporter to the far-right and then to Oklahoma City (click “expand”):
O’SULLIVAN: What Cody is doing here is about a lot more than guns. He’s got a library. Let’s take a look. He is a collector of all kinds of extreme literature. Oh, wow. You got a copy of the Turner Diaries around here?
WILSON: You know I got a copy of the "Turner Diaries." Did you even have to ask?
O’SULLIVAN: He’s part of an American tradition of deep suspicion and deep distrust of government.
WILSON: For me, this is a positive vision. There’s more to hope for in a world where you know you can download a gun. Everybody knows you can download a gun.
O’SULLIVAN: Families who’ve lost kids in school shootings, who are generally in favor of broader gun control, will look at you and say, oh, my god, here’s yet another way of flooding America with more guns and making the place more dangerous.
WILSON: And I’m sorry. Good that they see it that way, because they’ve been elevated in our national melodrama, as you know, given some kind of political authority for what? The very reason of their victimization? You know, this to me is the illegitimacy. You know, what’s legitimate in this process is the fact that, oops, sorry, it’s been legal the whole time, and now you need to find a constitutional way to make it illegal.
O’SULLIVAN: For personal liberty absolutists like Cody, the threat of a tyrannical government is ever present. April is actually the 30-year anniversary of Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh.
WILSON: What a gift to me you have given.
O’SULLIVAN: Tell me why.
WILSON: Well, I just — I think McVeigh, as you know, was executing or affecting revenge for Waco.
O’SULLIVAN: Timothy McVeigh was a domestic terrorist who killed 168 people. But his actions are still semi-justifiable to some because he claimed he was seeking revenge for the 1993 standoff in Waco, Texas.
WILSON: So for you to put me, at least in a symbolic line of responses to that event is quite a gift that you have given me, and I thank you very much.
O’SULLIVAN: More than 80 people were killed when federal agents sought to execute search and arrest warrants at a compound belonging to a religious cult called the Branch Davidians.
WILSON: Waco represented in the American public consciousness a definitive break, a moment where they knew that the state was more powerful than it should be, more powerful than they had allowed it to become. And so in American gun culture specifically, not just militia culture, there’s an understanding that if you take it upon yourself to live, and teach, and arm yourself and try to separate from the traditional American community it’s been legitimized for them to murder you, so I see Waco as like an important American moment which signaled the relative power of the individual versus the state and not in the individual’s favor.
O’SULLIVAN: It’s events like Waco that for people like Cody underline the need for 3-D printed guns and justify an unshakable suspicion of government.
The stacked deck got even higher with O’Sullivan visiting with former UFC fighter Jake Shields, who turned to podcasting after his fighting days and guests including Nazi sympathizers.
Coincidentally, Shields was in the news just a day earlier as, along with a meltdown over Douglas Murray schooling Dave Smith on Israel, he suffered a blow as his bud Bryce Mitchell was destroyed at UFC 314 by Jean Silva, who celebrated with Trump.
O’Sullivan and Shields went back and forth with the latter firmly entrenched in the just-asking-questions crowd and thus gave O’Sullivan another easy layer of straw (click “expand”):
O’SULLIVAN: Jake’s podcast has picked up tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of listeners....Part of the appeal of podcasters like Jake is that they have long form, unfiltered conversations with controversial or canceled people who’ve been shunned by what they call the mainstream.
SHIELDS: I just don’t like being told you’re not allowed to talk to this person. Like, why can’t I talk to him? I’m not saying I agree with his ideology, but I should hear what he has to say.
(....)
SHIELDS: I really enjoy talking to what are considered extremists because you realize you sit down and talk to these people, a lot of times they’re not near as extreme as you thought, and you have a lot more in common with them than you realize. Let’s go where we disagree a little bit. Let’s hit race because you’re a white only group.
(....)
SHIELDS: Even the white nationalists are so much more reasonable than I thought. They weren’t like, oh, we need to round up these blacks and get them out of here.
RUSSO: Americans, white folks changing fast, are on the verge of being a minority.
SHIELDS: And there’s a lot of hate push being pushed on us.
RUSSO: Exactly. Just being of and who we are, it’s seen as being something which is despicable.
O’SULLIVAN: People will hear the Patriot Front guy say, well, you know, America is a country of white people. To a lot of people, that is hate. That sounds hateful.
SHIELDS: Yes. Good question. I think because I ask him like, well, what are you going to do with these minorities? And he’s not saying like round them up and ship them off. So he’s just saying, like he’d prefer to live in more white areas. He’s being very realistic with it. Created his white organizations. And again, like I let him know I don’t agree with them.
(....)
SHIELDS: You know, I teased you a lot about being seen and coming in. It was half jokes, but half-truth because you guys are on the decline. Because I think you’ve lost the trust. So I think it’s you seem to be pretty honest and stuff. So maybe you can help bring the trust back of CNN. When you first contacted CNN, I’m just like, I don’t think so. I need to record. I don’t trust you guys.
O’SULLIVAN: You know, with that point, I’m not here to lecture you about your job and journalism, but for how journalists would go about the interviews you’re doing, right? So in terms of you having conversations with David Duke or Patriot Front or whoever, do you feel a responsibility when you have them on your show to, you know, push back, to challenge, to fact check them?
SHIELDS: Because we’re having an honest conversation right now, that’s people want to do. They don’t want these like, gotcha questions. It’s just not fun. But I could push back a little more. I could research a little more. And that’s something I’m working on doing.
O’Sullivan closed with more extremist chats, including threatening words from a slew of characters and fella who threatening him at the beginning of the documentary.
This resulted in his closing commentary, again interspersed with loaded language bemoaning the lack of trust in the legacy media and no longer being able to forcibly dictate what Americans can read and think:
