CNN, MS NOW and Politico Cry About a White House Ban After Years of Rigging the Briefing Room, Cheering Assaults, and Turning a Beautiful Reflecting Pool Into a Culture-War Prop

Guest post by Lucian Wintrich

The same people who wrote the gotcha questions in advance, turned a fresh coat of paint on the Reflecting Pool into a national emergency, and smiled after stomping on my foot in the briefing room, now want the country to believe a revoked hard pass is the death of the First Amendment.

President Trump banned CNN, MS NOW (the network formerly known as MSNBC, rebranded after the ratings tanked), and Politico from the White House. Effective immediately. Badges confiscated. Turned away at the gate. And the same outlets that spent a decade treating access like a birthright are now screaming “illegal assault on the First Amendment.”

PROPAGANDISTS WITH HARD PASSES

Spare me.

I was in that briefing room. I watched how these people actually operate when they think no one on the right is allowed to look.

They are not journalists. They are bad actors. They are propagandists with hard passes.

When I was credentialed to cover the White House for The Gateway Pundit in 2017, I expected some hostility from the left-wing press. I did not expect the briefing room to function like a gated country club for the lowest-IQ, least attractive, and most malicious middle-aged ‘reporters’ in America, people who spent their mornings assembling question lists designed to turn every innocuous administration move into a five-alarm national emergency.

That was their job. Not reporting. Spinning. Neutral policy became “chaos.” Routine personnel decisions became “purges.” Anything that might look competent or even pleasant had to be recast as something sinister before the cameras rolled.

WATERGATE WITH EXTRA CHLOROPHYLL

Look at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

The administration renovated a decaying national landmark. They fixed the leaks. They gave it a new coat of modern paint. It was meant to look sharp for America 250. Something nice. Something that should have been treated as a civic improvement. Something that should have been completely unobjectionable.

Instead, the usual suspects treated a basic improvement and restoration like Watergate with extra chlorophyll. They drummed up so much performative outrage that activists and gawkers treated the pool like a prop. Fence caps went in the water. The interior, obviously slashed. President Trump rightly said they could catch the culprit. The press called him a liar, then ran photos of the damage as if the damage itself (brought on by their own outrage machine) were the story they invented.

That is the pattern. Take something that should be neutral, or even beautiful, and whip the public into such a froth that someone eventually goes out and wrecks it. Then report on the wreckage as proof you were right all along.

They did the same thing to people.

UGLY, OVERWEIGHT, ROOM-TEMPERATURE-IQ LIFERS

A day after former Fox News Radio’s Jon Decker cornered me by the bathroom, shoved me, grabbed my arm in the briefing room, and bellowed to the entire press corps that I hated blacks, Jews, Hispanics, and women. HE claimed that I was a Nazi writing for a white supremacist site. A fat, middle-aged CNN camera operator waited until I was leaving the room, stomped on my foot, re-iterated those claims, and smiled.

He smiled.

SHE PUT DOWN HER CAMERA

I was in my twenties. These were the ugly, overweight, room-temperature-IQ lifers of the Washington press corps, and they thought attempting to bully and intimidate one of the few conservative writers in the room was a sport. Decker screamed slurs at a gay conservative whose grandfather survived the Nazis and fought in the Polish resistance. April Ryan followed me outside the West Wing with a camera and demanded to know if I was a racist, whether I believed in “integration,” and whether I believed in “race mixing.”

I was dating a brown-skinned Colombian at the time, so I told her I personally race-mix a few times a day. She put down her camera.

Politico’s own reporting said the liberal reporters in the room cheered the attacks.

Decker later put out a statement claiming it was a “straightforward conversation” and that he never accosted anyone. More than a dozen witnesses would attest, he said. The video, the tweets from other witnesses in the room, showed this was an obvious lie.

He was counting on his little club of briefing-room hacks to cover for him.

They did not stop at theatrics. They worked the room. They worked the press office. They relentlessly worked to get me banned. They blocked access whenever they could. The unwritten rule was simple: if you would not disparage the right, prop up the left, treat every Trump sentence as a war crime, then you did not belong in their club.

Now the club is locked.

THEY CAN STILL WRITE THE SAME FICTION FROM A STUDIO IN MIDTOWN

CNN, MS NOW, and Politico spent years using White House access as a weapon against anyone who refused to launder their narrative. They are SHOCKED that a president who has been on the receiving end of that operation finally treated access as what it always was: a privilege, not a constitutional entitlement to a West Wing desk and a live shot.

They can still report. They can still file. They can still write the same fiction from a studio in Midtown. What they lost is the ability to stand three feet from the podium, coordinate the next gotcha in the hallway, and then pretend they are neutral observers of a process they have spent a decade poisoning.

I cannot help but feel a little satisfaction.

Not because I want a press corps of cheerleaders. Because I watched these people work tirelessly to keep the briefing room closed to journalists who would not take a knee. Because I watched them celebrate a physical confrontation in the People’s House. Because I watched a CNN camera operator grin after stomping on a younger reporter’s (very expensive) shoes.

They spent years deciding who was allowed in the People’s House.

Now the People’s House has decided they can wait outside.