On the Easter edition of CNN's State of the Union, host Jake Tapper used the guise of Easter Sunday to present what he called a "special conversation" with the Senior Pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, who turned out to be Democrat Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia. The 11 and a half minute sit-down turned out to be what many will surely consider one of the more disgraceful left wing media spectacles in quite a while.
Tapper promoted it like this at the top of the show: "Easter sermon. In a deeply divided America, one senator shares his faith on Christianity's holiest day."
Tapper started out innocently enough with an actual legitimate question, followed by a righteous sounding answer.
TAPPER: I'm sure you encounter quite a bit, uh, African American members of your church. Baptists who are more socially conservative than you, who say I'm with you on the hunger. I'm with you on the kindness, but Laken Riley was murdered by an undocumented immigrant, and I see nothing compassionate about having him in this country. Or they talk about abortion, or they talk about, other things that maybe are not in line with your politics. How do you confront that?
WARNOCK: Oh, we're Baptists and there's a range of, of beliefs and perspectives, in this house and I welcome them all.... I preach to Democrats, Republicans and Independents, Libertarians every Sunday. And I think that we need to, we could all use a little bit more grace these days. Grace for people who don't share our point of view.
But in his answer to Tapper's next question, it appears that grace went right out the window.
TAPPER: Do you pray for the President?
WARNOCK: Oh, absolutely. He needs a lot of prayer.
TAPPER: What do you pray for? What do you ask God?
WARNOCK: I affirm his humanity as I affirm the humanity of, of, of anybody and everybody. But part of that prayer, is about accountability. I have to be honest about what he's doing. His kind of unabashed, unvarnished bigotry, the cruelty that he is unleashing on American streets through his version of ICE. Those things have to be condemned. And so for me, prayer and prophetic speech, which holds power accountable, those two things go hand in hand. I am not about to be the Chaplain blessing that which is ungodly and unjust.
This returns the subject to Laken Riley, that ICE must be condemned, but somehow illegal immigrants who rape and murder women aren't as immoral as ICE agents. Weren't those crimes "ungodly"?
Tapper then asked about Trump voters who feel the president was chosen by God for a mission. (He left out the whole "survived an assassination by inches" part.) This set Warnock off into a rant about slavery:
TAPPER: There are a lot of religious leaders who go to the White House and not only pray for the President, but make a show of suggesting that that he was chosen by God for this mission.
WARNOCK: Yeah, they're wrong. And there were Christians who thought that slavery was, you know, somehow Godlike, American chattel slavery. And they justified it, and they used scripture to support their position.
Comparing support and admiration for President Trump to supporting and justifying slavery? And Tapper says nothing? Well, not quite nothing. He moved on to a gratuitous charge against three Republicans over Muslims.
TAPPER: We've seen some really ugly expressions of anti-Muslim bigotry from Republican politicians. Randy Fine, Andy Ogles, two members of Congress, Senator Tuberville. Just bigotry outright. Muslims shouldn't be in this country, et cetera.
There was apparently no time for specifics on the conservative criticisms of Islam and whether it's compatible with democracy and religious freedom. The softball had been tossed and the Reverend responded.
WARNOCK: It's hate. I mean, we should we shouldn't play around with this stuff because it's dangerous and it's deadly. This this kind of hate, this kind of bigotry.
Tapper lightly touched on antisemitism, on both sides:
TAPPER: There's also been a real outbreak in anti-Semitism, not just on the right, but also on the left. How concerned are you about that? The anti-Semitism within the Democratic party or the Progressive movement?
WARNOCK: We have to condemn hate, including anti-Semitism, wherever and whenever it rears its ugly head. And I've been clear about this across the years. We have to condemn it.
Tapper did not ask Sen. Warnock about his Georgia colleague Sen. Jon Ossoff being endorsed by Hasan Piker, who's rabidly anti-Israel and thinks America deserved 9/11. Republicans are pushing that, so CNN is allergic to it.
Not quite the whole story. In 2022, Fox News reported that Warnock worked at a church for a decade while it repeatedly hosted former New York City Professor Leonard Jeffries (uncle of Hakeem Jeffries) who was ousted over anti-Semitic and Black supremacist teachings. In 2020, The New York Post reported on a 2018 videotaped sermon where he blasted Israel and moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Also in 2020, The IPT documented the contents of a letter blasting Israel and co-signed by Warnock.
I guess Jake Tapper never heard of any of this. A simply disgraceful display on "unvarnished bigotry" all around.
