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CNN’s Abby Phillip Blasts Scott Jennings for Not Respecting ‘Guard Rails,’ Playing ‘Games’
Appearing Tuesday on her friend and fellow progressive Kara Swisher’s podcast, CNN NewsNight host Abby Phillip — aka Mrs. CNN Thunderdome — knocked CNN senior political commentator Scott Jennings and past panelist Jillian Michaels as examples of people who disrespect her “guard rails” and are “playing...games” with the show.
With Jennings in particular, his prominence on NewsNight and viral social media clips are arguably why she still has a job, given her paltry Nielsen ratings (which Megyn Kelly mocked Wednesday during her SiriusXM show). So, to smear the kind of people who hold you up would be hard to not take the attacks personally.
Phillip brought him up as someone “folks really dislike for his — his views, but — but I would say that, you know, there are views that you don’t like, that you think are unfounded, but that are pretty widely shared and I think Scott falls into that category.”
Which “folks,” Abby? And why are his views “unfounded”?
Phillip continued to take jabs at Jennings: “Now, there are definitely times if you watch the show that we have conversations where I will say to Scott and others, just stop because we’re not playing whatever game it is that you want to play in this moment.”
“I do think that what I — what I try to say is if — if I — if I detect that what you’re doing is playing a game of let me say something that I think is going to go viral, let me misrepresent what’s being said here to try to create a moment, I will stop that when that happens,” she added.
Notice Phillip never said this about friend Tiffany Cross, former CNN analyst Catherine Rampell, former Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), or anyone else who’s surfaced on her show.
Swisher asked about a discussion on Gaza (likely from last month) as an example she had to “stop” discussion, which Phillip said “Scott was involved in that one.”
This turned into the broader point about her disgust with Jennings:
Scott is often involved in those moments when I say no, we’re — we’re stopping — and — and I think that there — there are guard rails, but I also think it’s, you know, this is an imperfect exercise, right? So, what you think is what you think should be a guardrail, I may not think should be a guardrail. I try to give people a decent amount of leeway to express their points of view, liberal and conservative.
Just prior to saying she doesn’t “like the personal attacks” (even though that’s what she spent his interview doing), Phillip cartoonishly claimed “there are times when many times, frankly, when liberals cross a line[.]”
We’re here to tell you that doesn’t happen. If she did, she would have stopped, to name two examples, Tavis Smiley last year when he said now-Vice President JD Vance has “Mommy issues,” or Rampell declared Pete Hegseth had no qualifications to run the Pentagon except being “very articulate and polished” on TV.
Before moving on, Swisher lamented her friend has to put up with such undesirable individuals by joking she often “want[s] to send you a bottle of tequila” after “see[ing] that exasperated look,” to which Phillip agreed because she often hears “absolutely ridiculous” rhetoric.
Rewinding to the beginning, Swisher started with the Michaels exchange last week in which she battled Phillip and liberal panelist Julie Roginsky over wokeness that’s infected American museums and the left’s obsession with slavery as a uniquely American sin:
Phillip said she was “shocked” at Michaels’s “ignorant” conduct, but defended her right to be there because even though “some people question[ed] why was she even there, she’s a fitness guru...she is kind of [a] MAGA influencer....represent[ing] that point of view” encompassing “half the country.”
She then showed her true lack of character, ghoulishly insisting she doesn’t “like to talk about — negatively about guests” to only then chuckle she believes guests have a “right to embarrass themselves on national television” “[e]ven when I disagree[.]”
“[I]t is their right to do that. But I — and I don’t want to — I don’t want to disparage people even when they disparage me to be quite frank online,” she added.
To reiterate, this raging hypocrite said she’s not going to “talk...negatively about guests” while at the same time boasting she believes guests have a “right to embarrass themselves[.]”
Phillip continued to show such condescension and hatred by mocking Michaels and others who don’t share her Joy Reid and Nikole Hannah-Jones-like worldview about race (click “expand”):
I’ll just state as a factual matter what I told her which is that it is nonsensical to suggest that slavery in the United States was something was about something other than race, A. And B, even this idea that two percent of white people own slaves — that — that is such a ridiculous point because you don’t have to own slaves to enforce white supremacy and slavery to benefit from it to gain generational wealth as a result of it and — and the percentage of Americans where slavery was lawful who had slaves or participated in slavery is much larger than two percent.
So, it’s completely disingenuous. This whole thing is ridiculous. I — it’s embarrassing more for her than anything else. But — but look, I — I also, you know, I’m — I’ve been on this earth long enough that I know many people believe this. I have not — that was not the first time that I had heard that argument...So, let’s be honest, like people believe this stuff and don’t be shocked when they come out and say it on national television.
Once they were done impugning Michaels and then Jennings, they moved onto wondering if the depths of partisanship have grown any worse.
Phillip conceded her show is not out to “solv[e] the issue of partisanship...by any stretch of the imagination,” but rather “creating a platform for us to really be honest about what the contours of the debate really are and one thing that...I just find it to be boring, but also a little bit disingenuous, is when we have partisans kind of talking past each other...on parallel roads and they never really intersect.”
She went on by saying Americans “need to better understand where we kind of agree and disagree” and “the only way to do that is to really take that on head on and I like that what we do is actually we get into the nitty-gritty about what it says about us.”
It was here Phillip showed her smug, deep blue partisan stripes in scoffing that “some people...love” “everything that Trump does” while others see “the dawn of fascism.”
She framed her show and the body politic as needing to understand the former because “more of your neighbors than you think — than you think probably voted for or supported Trump and I think we need to understand them a little bit better, but we also need to have a little bit more honesty about what it says about our democracy, our values as individuals and as a community that we want certain things for our country or we don’t.”
In other words, we need to study them like a foreign species and see how ill that bodes for our society.”
Phillip and her show have a long way to go in terms of seeing Trump, his voters, and others not in their camp as human considering it has allowed guests to compare Israelis to Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad, evangelicals who vote Trump to Putin, Daniel Penny to Luigi Mangione, slaves to “immigrants,” and said Trump had it coming with assassination attempts because of his rhetoric.
To see the relevant transcript from the Pivot podcast on August 19, click here.
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