Tipsheet

What Jim Acosta Said at the End of His Lame DC Show Was Peak 'Performative Righteousness'

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  June 06, 2025 1:00 PM

Given the nuclear war that’s broken out between Trump and Elon Musk, this will likely get buried big league, but it doesn’t mean we can’t circle back for a good laugh. How was this even a thing?  

Ex-CNN host Jim Acosta decided to have a sorry s** gathering of anti-Trump resistance losers in the nation’s capital. His show was a live town hall, and he asked people to pay for their attendance. It’s Washington, DC, so there would be enough rich idiots to burn their money for whatever this is, but it’s the ending that’s truly amazing (via Free Beacon) [Warning: Some graphic language]: 

“There are some tickets left," Jim Acosta told his Substack followers a few hours before taking the stage at the Lincoln Theater in Washington, D.C., to host a live town hall version of the online chat show he started after his "voluntary" exit from CNN earlier this year. 

The lineup for the first (and apparently only) stop on the "Fire Within Tour" would struggle to draw a crowd almost anywhere else in the country: Rosie O'Donnell, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D., Texas), and an assortment of professional Trump haters whose names you wouldn't recognize unless you're the sort of mentally deranged liberal who owns an Anthony Fauci prayer candle and refuses to watch CNN because it's right-wing propaganda. Only the most delirious of hyper-online partisans could stomach the pretentious tagline: "Fueling Courage. Defending Freedom. Igniting Truth." 

The Beltway, of course, is teeming with this variety of freak, which is why the lack of turnout on Monday night was so humiliating for everyone involved, not least for the people who actually did show up to have their courage fueled. Venue staff informed a Washington Free Beacon reporter that the upper balcony, comprising nearly half of the venue's 1,200 seats, was closed—for reasons that were soon obvious. Generously estimated, the lower section was roughly three-quarters full—about 500 people. 

Acosta opens the show with his costar Michael Fanone, a former D.C. police officer who became a professional anti-Trump activist after clashing with protesters on Jan. 6. Setting the tone for the show, Fanone laments, "We are in a tough fucking spot." Acosta agrees. "We are. We are." Fanone hates Republicans almost as much as he loves punk rock and tattoos. He hangs out with Sean Penn and Kathy Griffin. He's not afraid to express his feelings with expletives. House Speaker Mike Johnson is a "petty bitch" surrounded by "cock-sucking colleagues." Not to be confused with the unelected Trump supporters, who are "dick-sucking ass clowns." Acosta tries to change the subject by asking his other costar Olivia Troye, a former Republican who spoke at the 2024 Democratic convention, about the tragedy that has befallen her Northern Virginia community of federal bureaucrats since Trump took office. "It's super upsetting," she says. "And I just have to say to you that the American people, they may not realize it right now, but they will realize it in time, the incredible treasure that they've lost." 

[…] 

The night ends, fittingly, with a tremendously lame act of performative righteousness. Like some bizarro secular preacher to his flock of internet-addicted hypochondriacs, Acosta commands what's left of the crowd to turn on their cell phone flashlights and hold them in the air as a reminder that "there's still a lot of light left in all of us." He continued as several attendees gathered their walking canes and made their way to the exits. "It would mean something to me if you carry that message with you as we leave this theater here tonight," he said. "That this is not a country that is being plunged into darkness. This is a country that can find its way back to the light."

People paid money for this, and I almost feel sorry for them. Also, there's nothing lost when federal workers get fired, only the American people not wasting their tax dollars on Democratic Party pencil-pushers. Sorry, no one cares about fired federal workers. No one. People have been fired before, millions have lost their jobs, and they never got a media segment, nor did they crave the attention. Terminations and people losing their jobs did not begin when the second Trump presidency began. That's why no one cares. Everyone has endured these hardships. Federal workers believed that their jobs were recession-proof and guaranteed for life. That's not how any of this works.