Usually one of the more respectful and good-natured hosts in the liberal media, Kasie Hunt’s The Arena on CNN repeatedly descended Tuesday into a leftist struggle session against senior political commentator Scott Jennings, condescendingly telling him he’s “in pain” over the murder of friend Charlie Kirk but nonetheless engaged in “deeply problematic” rhetoric by (correctly) pointing out the Kirk’s alleged assassin took action against “fascist” Kirk’s “hate.”
It began with former Biden White House communications director Kate Bedingfield asserting the real problem after Kirk’s death is “dangerous” behavior from “President Trump on down…trying to use this moment to suggest that there, you know, there is inherent violence on the left.” Yes, the people being murdered need to...calm down?
Jennings promptly went nuclear amid plenty of cross-talk from Bedingfield:
“Why did I do it? I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” He — he has a flat — that is — that is the message that the shooter Tyler Robinson sent to his roommate. That is what he said. He also engraved the word, “hey, fascist catch” on the bullet. For ten years, we have heard nothing from the left but that Donald Trump is a fascist. Republicans are Nazis. Authoritarians destroy the Constitution. Bloodbath. Dictator for a day. And he wrote it on the bullet. And he’s been obviously marinating in some kind of information that radicalized him based on what he heard in the air in this country.
Predictably, Bedingfield and Hunt admitted to none of that. Instead, the former invoked the talking point of the Minnesota state lawmaker Melissa Hortman being gunned down in June at her home by “a stated Trump supporter,” which Jennings was exasperated she would “equate the two” and not entirely clear.
Bedingfield – wanting to deny reality like she and her colleagues did for years about their boss’s physical and mental state – insisted Jennings and other mourning Kirk not tie the left to the suspect.
Jennings again stuck to the facts from Utah County officials, noting the charging documents cited “very lucid messages from a shooter who was motivated by political hate” against someone “he thought that the world would be better off without.”
Predictably, Bedingfield double down, refusing to do as her party did after mass shootings in, say, El Paso and Pittsburgh (plus bomb threats to the news media).
Jennings lambasted this double standard and reiterated “it’s dangerous and irresponsible for nobody to take responsibility for ten years of the use of the language, fascism, Nazis, authoritarian, so on and so forth” when one of those words (fascist) was “on [a] bullet casing.”
After Bedingfield had the gall to claim she’s only seen Democrats calling the murder “awful” and “horrific” (with Trump being the real problematic figure), the equally hackish Lula Garcia-Navarro of The New York Times condescendingly tried to trap Jennings by reciting his own words from after the El Paso Walmart shooting despite the facts having been far different (click “expand”):
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I just want to read the words of someone who, I think, is very wise. In the wake of 2019 and the killing in El Paso, he wrote: “We have to stop blaming the politicians we loathe for the vile actions of the deranged, evil people who commit mass shootings.” He went on to say: “But here’s the thing. We should not” — “the rush to rage against Trump and the predictive punditry that he will inevitably fail to unite the country seems counterproductive to people who want a meaningful policy outcome. All politicians have a responsibility to ratchet down their rhetoric and to ask their supporters to stand down as well.” And that man was Scott Jennings. And so, what I would say about that is those were wise words then, and they should be wise words now.
JENNINGS: I don’t —
BEDINGFIELD: Agree, agree!
JENNINGS: — I don’t disagree with any of that. What I am not happy about is that we have the shooter’s words. We know what he put on the bullets. It’s very, very, very clear —
HUNT: So, Scott —
JENNINGS: — what happened here —
HUNT: — can I —
JENNINGS: — and there is a movement by some people —
HUNT: — but — but is it, though?
JENNINGS: — to completely say, well, we have no idea.
HUNT: Hold on. Hold on, Scott.
JENNINGS: And we do.
Hunt interjected with this wild assertion that motive remains elusive and the bullet casing scribbles are too esoteric to draw a conclusion:
Garcia-Navarro continued her condescending shtick, attacking Jennings for what she insisted was a double standard of not blaming Trump for El Paso but blaming the left for Wednesday’s killing of the Turning Point USA founder.
Jennings had enough, even as Garcia-Navarro treated Jennings like a child by dismissing his argument since “I understand that you’re in pain”:
Moments after The Times personality defended those who’ve referred to Trump as a Nazi and senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes whined American discourse hasn’t improved (read: because of people like Jennings), Hunt went to break with own weird attempt to emotionally resonate with Jennings:
To close out the show a few blocks later, the chaos again resumed once Hunt asked Jennings to praise Shapiro for his both-sidesing of Kirk’s murder. It did not go well for Hunt.
“I think his point would be strengthened if he were honest today about who burned his house down. You know, it was a Free Palestine leftist who came and burned down the governor’s mansion. He left that out. He left that out of his tweet today and he’s talking about cherry picking political violence. And we’re talking about where there might be political violence. The violence against the governor of Pennsylvania and his family came from the left,” Jennings replied in part.
Hunt stepped in after he argued Shapiro has been given a pass on this because of his 2028 prospects, whining: “We are not doing that sitting here. Okay?”
Bedingfield replied with a straight face that “it doesn’t matter where the violence came from and should be condemned.”
“Should — shouldn’t it matter the motivations of the people,” Jennings countered.
Bedingfield insisted it’s irrelevant: “It should be condemned regardless is the entire point of his speech” and thus “a message that’s badly, badly needed in this country at this moment.”
Jennings didn’t back down, to which Hunt attacked him for not “ris[ing] above” the fray. Our friend and 2025 MRC Bulldog Award winner blasted this demand to choose an either/or because ignoring motives or even details or perpetrators allow for evildoers to be replicated.
It was also here that Bedingfield said it’s been “deeply problematic” Jennings caused the hour to be so tense (click “expand”):
JENNINGS: Look, I think that if we cannot be honest, if I were him and somebody tried to burn my house down, I think I’d be honest about who did it and why they did it. And it would matter for people to know that, would it not?
HUNT: Scott, is this not a let’s rise above? Because anyone that is committing an act of political violence, who is trying to kill someone else for what they believe in. It’s, like, it is inherently wrong and awful. I mean, like —
JENNINGS: Why are your two impulses mutually exclusive? Why can’t we all say all political violence is bad, which I wholeheartedly believe? And also, be honest, when people have clear intentions? I think there’s a difference between people that have clear intentions. And, you know, clearly deranged people. But in the case of Shapiro and I think in the case of Charlie Kirk, we know the intentions, the political intentions of the people at play and when we sort of skirt around it and we’re not honest about it, we let it off the hook. And I don’t think we should let people with clear political intentions to commit violence off the hook. And so, I like what he said about condemning violence. I just would like it a little more if we could just be a little bit honest about what happened at his house.
BEDINGFIELD: You would just like it if a politically critical message was applied to what he was trying to say. I mean, that’s what you’re saying, right? You’re saying you like what he said in condemning political violence across the board, but it didn’t work for you because you didn’t try to get in a dig at whose fault it was. The entire point is that we have to condemn political violence from — from all sides, in all stripes, in whatever form and I think the fact that we are sitting here, even having this conversation is deeply, deeply problematic in terms of where the where the temperature is in the country right now.
JENNINGS: I — I agree.
BEDINGFIELD: I think the fact that you would call him dishonest —
JENNINGS: I agree that it is problematic that a prominent Democrat cannot be honest about who tried to burn his house down. I totally agree with you about that.
BEDINGFIELD: Cannot be honest. As if did he misrepresent it?
JENNINGS: He didn’t mention it and has refused to say it.
BEDINGFIELD: I think the only person misrepresenting what he said today, Scott Jennings, is, you.
JENNINGS: No, I’m reading what he tweeted. I listened to his speech. I’m not misrepresenting anything. I’m just saying that, you know, unless we say it out loud, how will people know?
Unfortunately, things had started off fairly civil. Jennings received wholehearted agreement from Bedingfield on this point about free speech:
For this, Bedingfield then used said olive branch to make the Kirk assassination into a Trump-bashing session and away we went.
As for violent political attacks, Hunt ended up apologizing, but previously at MSNBC giggled about Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) being attacked in 2017 by a far-left neighbor as “one of my favorite stories.”
To see the relevant CNN transcript from September 16, click here.
