CNN's former Chief White House Correspondent Jim Acosta has been trying out for the prime time slot recently vacated by disgraced former host Chris Cuomo. His "special" program has been titled "Democracy in Peril" because Georgia wants people to show an ID when they vote... or something.
Last night, Jim Acosta invited columnist Molly Jong-Fast to discuss Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin's first week in office. During the course of the conversation, Acosta out Acosta-ed himself with this little gem:
Jim Acosta thinks that Virginia has become "a Soviet-style police state" pic.twitter.com/UmgFTyRIgR
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) January 26, 2022
“I seem to remember Glenn Youngkin campaigning in a fleece vest in Virginia. He was running as a different kind of Republican. I was told there was going to be a vest, not a Soviet-style police state across the Potomac from Washington.”
Yes, Jim Acosta compared Glenn Youngkin's governance of Virginia with a Soviet-style police state.
First, let's pause for a moment and appreciate that a member in good standing with the mainstream media actually referenced the Soviet Union in a way that suggests that the totalitarian communist regime was actually not a sunny, rosy land of unicorns and rainbows.
I mean, for decades, journalists were loath to draw any negative judgment against the Soviet Union, lest they give material support to those Reagan-ite neanderthals who actually believed Western culture and free democracies were superior to the communist authoritarians in Moscow who clearly had a superior education and health care system than we in the decadent West.
So, good that Acosta is now officially on the record: Soviets were bad. (Don't worry, we won't tell Bernie Sanders, Jim.)
Next, let's check the record here and see exactly what Acosta objects to in Youngkin's first week in office that would rise to the level of "Soviet-style police state."
Youngkin has signed an executive order allowing parents to have a say in the education, care, and upbringing of their children, including the right to determine whether their children will wear a mask when attending government-run schools. Forcing children to wear a mask for up to seven hours is not a Soviet-police state tactic; giving parents the option to do so or not to do so is.
Youngkin has also directed schools to remove Critical Race Theory elements from their curriculums and re-instate advanced math classes. They had been removed by advocates for "equity" who claimed that the high-level math programs were discriminatory and needed to be abolished so that children who were gifted in math would not advance further than their classmates, thus forcing them to stay in a class below their intellectual abilities.
Knowing that rogue teachers and school boards would ignore the directive and continue their divisive and anti-educational programs, Youngkin has instituted a tip line so students and parents can report if the CRT content remains in their classes.
So, according to Acosta, stifling advancement for gifted individuals and forcing all students to remain in the same class so that equity could prevail is not a Soviet-style concept. And dividing children along racial and "privilege" lines to make students hostile and suspicious toward each other and beholden to the state is also not a Soviet-style tactic. But ensuring that individual citizens can report directly to their elected officials to alert them that state employees are defying the policies set forth by representatives elected in a free democratic process is a Soviet-style police state tactic.
Additionally, let's point out that there are victims of the aforementioned Soviet-style police tactics who fled the tyranny of Moscow and now live in our free nation. Watching petulant, little Jim Acosta compare Glenn Youngkin to Joseph Stalin must boil their blood. How insulting to the brave American immigrants who fled these brutal dictatorships to see this smug jackass attempt to equate their trauma to a governor wanting to ensure he can hear from his constituents.
One final point... The above concern over victims of Soviet authoritarians watching Acosta on CNN the other night might be over-wrought. Because, apparently, hardly anyone is watching Acosta or CNN anymore.
Acosta's show was the least-watched prime time show in all of cable news and the second least-watched show on CNN across the board (behind the network's dismal morning show).
Cable News Rankings Mon Jan 24
— RoadMN ?? (@RoadMN) January 25, 2022
1?@TheFIVE @DanaPERINO @GregGUTFELD @JesseBWATTERS @JUDGEJeanine @HAROLDFordJr
2?@JesseBWATTERS
3?@TUCKERCarlson
4?@BretBAIER
5?@SeanHANNITY
6?@Maddow
7?@INGRAHAMAngle
8?@GUTFELDFox!
9?@OutnumberedFNC
??@AmericaNewsroom @DanaPERINO @BillHEMMER pic.twitter.com/hallFYc5KK
"Democracy in Peril" drew just 511,000 viewers, which, if spread equally across all 50 states, works out to a little over 10,000 viewers per state. Yes, on average, Acosta drew far fewer viewers per state than the capacity of Yankee Stadium.
Of course, the viewership is not spread around in that manner, with states like New York, Illinois, and California over-represented with CNN viewers. This means there were probably states in this country with only a couple of thousand viewers tuning in to Acosta on CNN.
In some states, CNN's viewership during Jim Acosta's show was the equivalent of the capacity of a large cruise ship.
One very bright development in the Jim Acosta "Democracy in Peril" experiment is that it appears that by allowing their "talent" to project this persona and convey these hysterical opinions, CNN has given up any pretense that Acosta is in any way an actual reporter.
He's just a performer and a pathetic one at that. In a year or so, Acosta will have gone the way of David Shuster. Remember him? Exactly.
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