• The Super Bowl is often a predictable subject for right-wing media’s faux outrage, but this year's Bad Bunny halftime show took things to a unique level. Benny Johnson said Bad Bunny’s show “looked like a border invasion,” asking, “Has anybody ever deported a whole halftime show?” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh complained about the show and added that “Latin Americans have nothing to do with the NFL.” Fox’s Greg Gutfeld collapsed into incoherent rambling about “men slinging pastrami,” and Fox’s Laura Ingraham said the show “didn’t represent America at all.” Newsmax’s Greg Kelly, meanwhile, kept things succinct when he declared the NFL is “trying to destroy America.” 
• The Super Bowl wasn’t the only athletic event to garner right-wing outrage this week. Some members of the American Olympic team provided mild criticism of U.S. government policy. In typical fashion, several right-wing media personalities melted down. Fox contributor Raymond Arroyo said a U.S. skier had committed “borderline treason” by criticizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles called an athlete “the absolute worst of America.”

On Wednesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared as a witness in front of the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about a number of growing controversies for the Trump administration, including the Department of Justice’s slapdash release of 3 million documents from the Epstein files. A central problem of that release was that the DOJ failed to properly redact victim’s names but managed to redact the names of potential co-conspirators. 

The hearing was, to put it mildly, a disaster for Bondi. The scale of the disaster was evident from the beginning when Fox News chose to not broadcast a single second of the hearing live, instead devoting most of its time to the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie (by contrast, MS NOW devoted 3 hours and 39 minutes to live coverage of the hearing and CNN spent 2 hours and 26 minutes airing live coverage). After the hearing, though, the catastrophe was evident as right-wing hosts piled in condemning Bondi. 

• Newsmax host Carl Higbie called the testimony a “complete disaster,” adding, “After today, I don’t know how her political career survives.” 
• Podcaster Tim Pool, reacting to the hearing, said Bondi has “done a moderately bad job” as attorney general. 
• Newsmax's Greg Kelly said Bondi “is not to be trusted and I hope she leaves soon.” 
• The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro criticized Bondi’s testimony, saying, “The performative nature of it does not make the American people feel as though there is a professional in charge of the Justice Department.” 

Bondi walked into this testimony on thin ice with MAGA media. Last year, many right-leaning media figures and podcasters turned on Bondi and the Trump administration more broadly over their handling of the Epstein case.  

• Newsmax’s Michael Savage said it is “worrisome” that Trump “doesn’t think about the ramifications” of what he does: “Some of these moves are disastrous. It’s too erratic.” 
• There is some ongoing criticism of Trump’s Department of Justice’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. Alex Jones said the DOJ “is officially involved in the cover-up” of the Epstein case, and Benny Johnson said, “The DOJ is handling it horribly. It’s not good. I don’t like it.” 
• Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes: “Pam Bondi has to be impeached. Kash Patel has to be impeached.”

During the Biden administration, arguing against the influence of foreign money on the White House was a defining principle for right-wing media. At the time, their arguments were based in fantasy, but now — as the Trump family’s corruption is both much more straightforward than the supposed Biden pseudoscandals and involves sums of money that are larger by orders of magnitude — the silence of right-wing media hosts is deafening. 

Take one recent example: A Wall Street Journal investigation recently revealed an apparent quid pro quo in which a Trump family company received a half-billion dollar investment from an Emirati prince days before the president took office. Then the Trump administration funneled AI chips to the prince’s firm. 

In 2023, then-Fox News host Pete Hegseth said, “We have a president of the United States who was potentially involved in all of those entanglements with foreign entities,” adding “which could lead to complications or compromise as the president now.” Hegseth is no longer a Fox News host; he’s now Trump’s defense secretary. 

It wasn’t just Hegseth. Current Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro railed against alleged Biden family corruption when she was a Fox host. Likewise Leo Terrell, who was a Fox contributor then and is now a top Justice Department official. When she was a frequent guest on Fox instead of being attorney general, Pam Bondi argued that the foreign business dealings of the president’s son were “a matter of national security.” 

The feverish claims of a “Biden Crime Family” involved a total of less than $7.5 million paid to Biden family members over the years — and nothing to Joe Biden. In contrast Trump has already “used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion,” the editorial board of The New York Times reported on the anniversary of his second inauguration. The Fox personalities who joined the Trump administration are obviously hypocrites, but the levels of alleged corruption between these two administrations are in completely different solar systems.

If you would like to read more about this, I invite you to check out Matt Gertz’s piece which goes into much more detail.

• Nick Fuentes: “The number one political enemy in America is women. ...They have to be imprisoned.” 
• Last week, Trump posted a horrifically racist video on his social media platform Truth Social which contained an image depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys. The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro condemned the video, while fellow Daily Wire hosts Matt Walsh instead condemned those criticizing Trump’s post and Michael Knowles defended the video, saying it is not racist.
• Right-wing media have claimed that ICE agents are in danger of being doxed or murdered if they are unable to conceal their identity. But new reporting shows that working in immigration enforcement is actually safer than being a civilian, and there are no recorded incidents of agents being doxed. 
• Matt Walsh admitted that if the SAVE Act (a Republican election bill that will require voters to display documentary proof of citizenship) becomes law, “fewer actual American citizens will end up voting.” Walsh added, “I see that as a good thing.”

Amid the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive deportation push, the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly misrepresented or lied about multiple events, only to be contradicted by later evidence. Right-wing media, meanwhile, continue to carry water for the agency’s propaganda. 

In reporting following two separate incidents in which U.S. citizens were killed at the hands of immigration agents in Minnesota, Fox News, for instance, cited DHS statements that later proved to be false before further information was available. Many right-wing media figures also amplified DHS claims following an ICE raid in Chicago and a shooting in Portland, Oregon, establishing a pattern in which right-wing media have echoed Trump administration propaganda in order to falsely portray the reality of mass deportations and attempt to justify ICE’s abuses. 

It’s not just traditional right-wing platforms that push Trump administration propaganda. CBS Evening News recently aired a segment that wildly distorted CBS’ own reporting, incorrectly suggesting to viewers that a much higher percentage of people held by ICE have violent criminal histories than is actually the case. On February 9, CBS reported that 14% of people in ICE custody have charges or convictions for violent criminal conduct. By contrast, on February 10, CBS Evening News host Tony Dokoupil said “nearly 60% had criminal histories.” As Media Matters’ John Knefel explains, this is wildly misleading. 

The example at CBS is not an isolated incident. In October, “anti-woke” media figure Bari Weiss was named CBS editor-in-chief by David Ellison, whose Skydance Media had recently purchased Paramount, CBS’ parent company (Ellisons’s father, Larry Ellison, is a close ally of Donald Trump). Weiss has a long history of controversy and her short tenure at CBS’ helm has already produced more — we’re watching in real time one of this country’s most prestigious news broadcasters implode.