CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter denied the rumors—spread by Don Trump Jr. over the weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference—that he was the alter-ego of the newly androgynous “Potato Head.”
“If Hasbro really wanted a gender-neutral Mr. Potato Head so badly, they should just slap a picture of CNN’s Brian Stelter on the cover of their next potato,” Trump Jr. said during an epic roast on Saturday that also took down Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo.; President Joe Biden; and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-NY, reported the Washington Examiner.
Several left-wing media outlets insisted that Stelter was “unfazed” by the burn.
But clearly, given the amount of airtime he spent carping on it during his Sunday show, Reliable Sources, Don Jr.’s comment hit a little close to home for the portly, partisan pundit.
“I thought of some really cutting responses, some really clever ways to respond, some really clever ways to go viral,” Stelter said. “But then, I stopped. I didn’t post anything.”
He accused Don Jr. of trying to bait him into a Twitter battle.
“It was just another distraction,” Stelter said. “He wanted me to respond. This was just more BS fuel for the culture war, and it does not matter.”
Stelter said that many of the topics that go viral on the internet amounted to little more than “drivel” that divert public attention away from more important stories.
“The best thing we can do for each other in this world of tweetstorms is to refuse to be confused by that noise,” he claimed. “There’s too much real news going on.”
Hasbro’s decision to drop the “Mr.” from the classic children’s toy—the latest among many corporate capitulations to the radical ‘woke’ agenda—was a popular target at CPAC.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., was among those who also criticized the effort to make the children’s toy more LGBT-friendly.
“See, to me the whole concept of the Mr. Potato Head was you could move the parts around,” Gaetz said at CPAC on Saturday. “Mr. Potato Head was America’s first transgender doll, and even he got canceled.”
The growing wave of aggressive cancel culture by the Left has alarmed ordinary Americans who reject the domineering revisionism of political correctness.
However, Stelter sought to trivialize the conservative focus on “Potato Head” and other recent examples, including Disney’s decision to slap warning labels on old episodes of the “Muppet” show.
“There is something wrong when so-called ‘cancel culture’ gets more attention than the struggles that millions of Americans are facing and the importance of a COVID relief deal,” he said.
He suggested that the top priority for the country should be the passage of a new $1.9 trillion COVID relief package—even though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., refused during Trump’s father’s presidency to come to the negotiating table on a deal that, similarly, would have issued $2,000 relief payments to many Americans.
During the final days of his campaign, Biden promised that checks would be “out the door” if he were elected. However, in his first month in office he has prioritized other agenda items, such as signing dozens of executive orders and launching air-strikes on Syria.
“Who would’ve thought that within 33 days, we’d be bombing the Middle East again?” said Don Jr. during his CPAC speech.
Other Democrat priorities that came before the coronavirus relief have included Congress’s impeachment do-over, and Biden’s re-opening the Mexico border to waves of illegal immigrants—as well as housing unaccompanied minors in repurposed shipping containers that strongly resemble the “cages” for which the Trump administration was viciously criticized.
Meanwhile, Republicans have scoffed at the radical stimulus bill, which Democrats are now attempting to shoehorn through the Senate using the budget-reconciliation process to avoid the need for bipartisan consensus.
The bill claims it would deliver $1,400 payments to many Americans, but it also includes massive amounts of funding to support foreign governments including China, which is responsible for the pandemic.
Despite Stelter’s insistence that there were better things to cover, CNN appeared to have spent considerable bandwidth covering the CPAC convention, preoccupied more with former president Donald Trump than with the recent policy failures and scandals facing top Democrats.
On Sunday, the former president reaffirmed his commitment to helping lead the GOP back to victory in coming elections, but he stopped just short of declaring his intention to run again in 2024.
In response, CNN declared at the top of its website, “Trump unleashes new threat to American democracy.”
