When Democrats switch parties and become Republicans or vote for Republicans, no one expects the liberal media to keep describing them with words like "liberal" or "Democrat." But somehow, after former conservatives and ex-Republicans campaigned for staunchly leftist Kamala Harris for president, journalists just keep calling them "conservatives."
Bill Barrow of the allegedly "fact-based" Associated Press wrote an article headlined "Conservatives who still oppose Trump gather at 'Principles First Summit' in search of a path forward." Barrow's first sentence read: "Conservatives from across the country filled a ballroom a few blocks from the White House and lamented that the United States is abandoning the ideals that forged a great nation."
Then the AP scribe turned to ex-Republican Heath Mayo, "the Yale-educated attorney who founded Principles First five years ago for self-identified politically homeless conservatives." The "PBS News Hour" website published this repetitive falsehood, and its progressive partners at PolitiFact won't object to it.
Obviously, you can be a principled conservative, be critical of President Donald Trump and refuse to vote for him. But it's much more common among the elites to hate Trump so much that you have to back anyone who could stop him. Then you can be seen all over liberal TV bashing Trump as a menace to society.
Naturally, Mayo and many of his fellow "Principles First" people campaigned for Harris last year. The ad for their "summit" was stuffed with ex-conservatives starring on cable news: MSNBC host Michael Steele, MSNBC regulars Charlie Sykes and George Conway, CNN analyst Adam Kinzinger and pollster Sarah Longwell, among others. Longwell sat on stage with Harris and Liz Cheney at campaign events last fall.
You can't be "conservative" and support the woman who would make abortion as available as possible and push "gender-affirming care" for children. You can't be "conservative" and back the team who made a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and whose weakness led to wars in Ukraine and Israel.
But for Democrat journalists, it's just too delicious to be truthful. CNN and MSNBC and PBS and NPR can't get enough of "Republicans" who back Democrats. They line up with Mayo as he tweeted last year, "If Dick Cheney is voting for Kamala Harris, it's safe to say this election is not any kind of referendum on conservatism."
A year ago, National Public Radio "Morning Edition" host Michel Martin supportively interviewed Mayo about his conference and cued him up to trash the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). He claimed it has "evolved into this sort of corrupt and crazy circus that was much more focused, I think, on the personalities that were on the stage and the crazy and crazier things that they would say, as opposed to the ideas and the principles that really should define who we are as conservatives."
Who "we" are? Are "we" suggesting voting for Democrats in 2024 aligned with conservative ideas and principles?
So Martin asked last year who he was endorsing for president. Mayo said, "Trump represents an existential threat not just to the Republican Party, but to the constitutional principles that shape our country. So I personally would be voting for Biden."
Martin concluded the interview: "That is Heath Mayo. He is president and founder of Principles First. That's the conservative group hosting an alternative to the CPAC conference."
These journalists aren't just pretending that Real Republicans oppose Trump. They're hinting that they want Real Republicans who surrender to everything Democrats want to do and create a "uni-party" government and a "uni-party" media elite. These journalists would claim that this suffocating consensus would be the flowering of "democracy."
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.
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