Gee, remember when CNN used to care about “dxisinformation”?
Earlier this week, someone assaulted Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) with a syringe loaded with apple cider vinegar. That certainly is a frightening experience for Omar and her supporters, and thankfully, she was not injured. It could have been much worse. To my knowledge, we still do not have any information about the motives behind this attack, but given Omar’s position on the political spectrum, it’s likely safe to assume that any political motives would not be from the radical Left.
Of course, it’s best not to speculate on motive at all before evidence of it emerges. However, when that evidence does emerge, responsible commentators incorporate it into their analyses and conclusions. Tiffany Cross, late of MSNBC/M-SNOW and now a paid CNN contributor, clearly does not qualify as a “responsible commentator.” In an exchange Tuesday night with CNN’s legal analyst Elie Honig, Cross insisted that nearly all political violence comes from the Right, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Honig could not believe his ears:
🚨CNN’s Elie Honig had to fact check Tiffany Cross after she claimed Charlie Kirk was the victim of right wing violence
Honig: “Let’s also not forget Kirk was murdered-“
Cross: “Not by a left-wing extremist! [Robinson] was a right-wing extremist”
Honig: “That’s just not true” pic.twitter.com/B3bQ6dE8xe
— Brianna Lyman (@briannalyman2) January 28, 2026
HONIG: I take your point. And I accept the data. I’m not saying it’s exactly 50-50 equal. But let’s also not forget Charlie Kirk was murdered the President —
CROSS: Not by a left wing extremist. That person espoused very rightly (inaudible).
HONIG: Look, if you look at the targets, if you look at people in office, there’s —
CROSS: The right attacks the — right.
HONIG: There’s people on. But there’s Josh Shapiro, there’s Melissa Horton now there’s Ilhan Omar on this side. There’s Donald Trump on this side. There’s Charlie Kirk on this side.
CROSS: But wait, you’re saying that but don’t know the right wing people.
HONIG: I’m not saying it’s exactly mathematical — mathematically equal.
CROSS: But it’s not even analogous (inaudible). It’s not even (crosstalk).
SCHULTZ: I’m not saying that the rhetoric on both sides —
HONIG: You can (inaudible) the fact that fact that there was an assassination attempt on the — on the republican president.
CROSS: But it’s not ingenious. That is BS. And even the attacks that you’re referencing, Elie, those were right wing people. Like give me the —
HONIG: That’s just the truth. Pardon her. That’s not the right wing person.
At this stage, it’s ludicrous to the point of deranged to push the lie that Tyler Robinson is a right-wing MAGA assassin. Evidence emerged within a few days of Kirk’s murder that his assassin had been motivated by outrage over Kirk’s opposition to transgenders and their agenda, especially in relation to pediatric sex change therapies. Robinson’s love interest is transgender, and their communications made it very clear that Robinson has been motivated by left-wing politics.
Robby Soave at Reason scoffed at Cross’ attempts to paint Robinson as super MAGA:
The notion that Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s alleged killer, had right-wing motivations has apparently remained appealing for leftists, ever since the progressive Substack writer Heather Cox Richardson helped to mainstream this idea in the immediate aftermath of the shocking murder. Nevertheless, it is absolutely false. While Robinson did indeed come from a Republican family, his own motivation for committing the assassination was that he disliked the things Kirk had said about transgender people. We know this because Robinson confessed it in messages to his romantic partner, a transgender individual, writing that he felt compelled to take action to stop Kirk from spreading hate against the transgender community.
This is not really open to debate. Robinson is not a right-wing extremist, and his stated reasons for murdering Kirk were characteristic of left-wing thinking.
Perhaps you can forgive a commentator for getting this wrong if it’s before all the facts come in, but at this point—months after Kirk’s death—Cross is just repeating something that is completely debunked.
Nor is this some esoteric debunking that Cross might have missed in passing. ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel for a week in late September for making this exact claim despite all of the evidence to the contrary. That not only made national news, it also became a cause celebre on the Left as a supposed attack on Kimmel’s First Amendment rights. No one – well, hardly no one – defended Kimmel on the basis that he was correct, but in part on the equally absurd notion that Trump was gagging Kimmel but also on the principle that being wrong was not a firing offense for an entertainer.
And that may well be a valid argument. It convinced Disney to put Kimmel back on the air, where he continues his twenty-year streak of having his head up his nether regions for the entertainment of ever-narrowing audiences. However, CNN does not hold itself out to be entertainment; it poses as a news organization. And they have someone on the air that still hasn’t caught up to widely available evidence in a national story that emerged four months ago.
Is this CNN? Because it certainly appears that CNN sought out Cross for her ill-informed if not entirely delusional point of view.
By the way, Soave also notes that those who jumped to a conclusion about the attack on Omar are likely incorrect as well. The perp is not an undercover lefty, but rather an arguably unhinged Trump supporter with mental and physical issues:
The maniac who allegedly attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar with a mystery liquid at a Minnesota town hall meeting had hinted in a cryptic text to a neighbor that he “might get arrested” at the event.
Anthony Kazmierczak, 55, allegedly charged at the lefty congresswoman Tuesday night as she stood at the podium and sprayed a pungent liquid from a syringe on her. …
Kazmierczak was arrested by Minneapolis Police Department officers and booked into Hennepin County Jail for third-degree assault, according to a department spokesman.
Kelley said his neighbor has been “heavily medicated” due to a car wreck that affected his spine years ago. …
“He’s also been diagnosed with Parkinson’s,” the neighbor said, noting, “He’s only 55.”
Kelley described Kazmierczak, who shared photos supporting President Trump on Facebook, as a “pretty conservative guy” who “doesn’t like Omar.”
The Department of Justice charged Kazmierczak in federal court today, so the hoax speculation is clearly unfounded. This is why it’s best to wait for evidence to emerge and be confirmed before jumping to speculative conclusions. Maybe someone needs to explain that to CNN, especially when their paid analysts disseminate the latter months after evidence to the contrary has already been established, in a month where mob violence on the streets of Minneapolis negates her larger argument as well.
Editor’s Note: We talk about this more often now because the crisis in media isn’t just coming — it has arrived. The mainstream media has transformed itself into the propaganda arm of the Left, and they work hard to intimidate advertisers and pressure Big Tech into choking off access to competing points of view. We hope we can gather as many allies as possible to keep all of these issues in the public square – and indeed to preserve the public square at all.
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