Transcript excerpts from Hannity’s TV show January 7, 2022.
I think the vax, don't vax debate is over. There's nothing that Biden, Fauci, Kamala Harris, Walensky, any of them are going to say that's going to change people's minds. There are people willing to lose their salary, their benefits, even their pensions because they believe so strongly that they don't want it.
You
agree or disagree, that's up to you. It doesn't matter. That's the
reality in my view.
Now,
these mandates will result in more workers quitting. We had four and
a half million in November alone. That means more staff shortages,
skyrocketing costs for businesses, but the liberal justices on the
court predictably, they seem less concerned with the Constitution and
all the negative consequences, more worried about fueling more
never-ending pandemic theater and restrictions and draconian
shutdowns.
…
Will somebody tell Justice Sotomayor that fully vaccinated people are getting omicron just like they got delta, fully vaccinated people with boosters are getting omicron, fully vaccinated people with boosters and natural immunity and previous infections, they're getting it again.
…
All right. Now, also tonight, yet another dismal Biden jobs report as the economy in December, added only new jobs, sharply missing projections and estimates of 400,000 as the Biden agenda now continues to disincentivize work, continues to fail on the COVID response.
And
because the same candidate who said he would shut down the virus is
doing just the opposite, and more people die from COVID in 2021 than
2020, and Joe inherited three vaccines and monoclonal antibodies and
he's run out of tests and he's run out of therapeutics. And there's
no Operation Warp Speed, it's operation -- as Dr. Siegel has said --
snail speed.
Now,
Biden is shutting down jobs. He's shutting down opportunity. And he's
shutting down prosperity in this country and a 40-year high of
inflation.
But
I guess no one thought to tell Joe how bad the numbers were because
he's still out there you know touting historic job growth. Maybe
somebody should bring him up to speed.
…
All right. Joe, build back broke, sorry, is not going to work. Your results are historic. They're historically awful bad. In under a year, we've gone from energy independence and net exporter of energy, now you're begging OPEC over and over and over again and the Russians, you know, to produce more oil and we all see rising prices at the pump and we're all paying the price for your horrific policies.
Now, we've gone from American sovereignty and secure borders to all out an open borders catastrophe that's costing us a fortune. We've gone from safety and security abroad to a complete debacle and disaster and abandonment of fellow Americans in Afghanistan. We've gone from stable prices to, what, nearly a 40-year high in inflation, a supply chain mess that's not getting any better.
On the COVID front, as I said, we had three vaccines, therapeutics handed to you, monoclonal antibodies and you're not producing any of it and even running out of tests at this point. You fail to even get enough tests leading into the Christmas holiday when it was recommended. …
Now, the Trump administration gave all of this to you, three vaccines to market in record time, the ones that you keep pushing every day, and you can't even deliver the basic tests. You know, we're now in the third year of this pandemic.
After bragging about a
foolproof plan, right, Joe? You're going to shut down the virus. I
guess not.
Where's Operation Warp Speed for testing?
Where's Operation Warp Speed for monoclonal antibodies and these
antivirals? Where's warp speed for studies on natural immunity?
Now,
Biden is being forced to face reality and being forced to confront
his failures. …
I'll ask again, tonight, has Joe Biden done a single thing to improve the lives of all of you the American people? Can you name a single thing? If you can, write us.
Anyway, Biden campaign who's going
to shut down the virus, beat COVID, he's done just the opposite. And
now he's saying there's no federal solution. He campaigned on unity,
but yet he demonizes half the country, suggesting there are threats
to democracy. He campaigned on being a moderate yet he continues
to double down on build back Bolshevik socialism, and an
election takeover scheme, and changing the rules in the Senate and a
power grab here, there and everywhere.
There's
nothing moderate about Joe Biden. He's weak. He's frail. And he's not
only cognitively struggling, but deteriorating right before our
eyes cognitively day in and day out, an absolute far left
extremist socialist failure.
…
What I'd like to give you [Rand Paul], I can't deliver. I would like to give you Fauci's resignation or Fauci being fired. That would be the perfect birthday present, because there's nobody that's been more wrong throughout this entire pandemic than him and more importantly, you exposed the great lie of Dr. Fauci and that is the knowledge and the money from the NIH going to fund the Wuhan virology lab.
…
You're also a medical doctor and you refused to get the vaccine because you had a natural immunity. Omicron now, this is what we're seeing as you know -- fully vaccinated people, they're getting omicron. Vaccinated with a booster, they're getting omicron. Vaccinated, booster, previous infections, they're getting re-infected. So nothing is working.
…
So there's no test, there's no monoclonals available apparently around the country, and these antiviral medicines that every doctor that I talk to raves about, I don't know much about them, are not available either from Pfizer and Merck.
...
Now, tonight, the Democrats, they continue to fuel mass hysteria over January the 6th. They don't want to talk about Biden's failed agenda and they push forward with the sham committee they're not interested in finding out what really happened and how to prevent it again. There is a way to do that.
The sole
purpose of this political stunt is to smear slander and purge
Donald Trump from the political world. Now, if this were truly a
fair, bipartisan committee, Nancy Pelosi would not have kicked off
the committee Jim Jordan and Jim Banks from serving on the committee.
Instead now, well, they're left with seven Democrats, including the
pathological liar, the biggest purveyor of election fraud in
the history of this country himself, how ironic, Adam Schiff.
The
last four years, he was pushing election fraud lies about Trump
Russia collusion and conspiracy theories, repeating the lie that
the election was stolen. Why is he on this committee?
And,
of course, you have Trump hating Republicans, Liz Cheney, Adam
Kinzinger, not appointed by Republicans. No, hand-picked by Nancy
Pelosi.
…
Now, if they really wanted to conduct a fair investigation and do it the right way and find out what happened so it would never happen again, there's certain people they need to call. We now had testimony on this program last night. In fact, Donald Trump signed off on 20,000 National Guard troops after the summer of 2020, and 574 riots, knowing big crowds are coming to D.C., knowing there's always usually a bad actor when you have a big crowd.
Anyway, they would call Nancy Pelosi. They would call the D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to testify and ask, why didn't you support Donald Trump's request for the National Guard and put greater security measures in place? …
If you want to prevent this from happening again and I do, you need to bring those people in. Where's the committee to investigate also the 574 riots in the summer of 2020? Those riots left dozens of Americans dead, more than a couple thousand police officers injured, many severely, over 2 billion in property damage, looting and arson.
And meanwhile, amid the left's hysteria yesterday,
the mob, the media actually managed to set a new low for themselves.
Let's see, comparing Biden's hateful divisive speech to the
Gettysburg address, comparing it to the Holocaust. Some people on
MSNBC, comparing it to 9/11, comparing it to Pearl Harbor. …
…
They [the Jan. 6 committee] could write their final report now, but they'll save it to a week before the midterms. I hate Trump, I hate Trump, I blame Trump, I blame Trump.
…
You know, I watch and in my humble opinion just as an observer and I've been very outspoken and polls now show a majority of the American people … agree with me that Joe's in a serious cognitive decline, and we're watching this. We see his failures, we see his slip-ups that are constant seems to be getting worse -- I don't know what's worse, if Joe or Kamala. (Fox 1-15).
Hannity’s Reactions to Criticism
Jon Stewart's return to the world of political commentary—a ten-minute appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Thursday—forced most liberal-minded folks to their knees to laugh uncontrollably, cry tears of joy, pray to the comedy gods for our good fortune, or some combination of the three.
Conservatives, on the other hand, were pissed.
And with good reason: Stewart spent nearly the entire monologue skewering the type of biased and obfuscating reporting tactics that Roger Ailes and his ex-cohort at Fox News spent so many years peddling under the guise of fair-and-balanced journalism. One particular host who caught a fair amount of Stewart's shade: Mr. Sean Patrick Hannity, or as Stewart's called him, Lumpy.
No one—as in, zero humans—were surprised that Hannity felt the urge to strike back. On Friday afternoon on his radio program, The Sean Hannity Show, Lumpy went on a tirade.
He first said, grossly, that "that idiot Jon Stewart" had his "head so far up Obama's ass" and now has his head up [Hillary] Clinton's too. He continued:
"I know you're a rich liberal. Are you donating money to those families, the 46 million American families on food stamps, Jon? Hey, Jon, are you helping out the 50 million Americans in poverty? Hey, Jon, are you going to help use your wealth from all your comedy writers that lay out the material for you, are you going to help pay down the debt that Obama's accumulated" (Sullivan 1)?
Despite his text on Jan. 6, which suggested Trump had influence over the crowd, Hannity has recently floated the conspiracy theory (also pushed by Tucker Carlson on the network’s streaming platform) that parts of Jan. 6 were “staged.” “Do I think there were some people, based on the reports, that there were people that had staged certain things?” Hannity said on his radio show last month. “Yeah, I think that’s true.”
Responding to the news of his text to Meadows, Hannity said on his show: “Surprise, surprise, surprise: I said to Mark Meadows the exact same thing I was saying live on the radio at that time and on TV that night on Jan. 6 and well beyond Jan. 6.”
Here’s part of what Hannity said on his show that night: “I’d like to know who the agitators were,” he told viewers, adding that “those who truly support President Trump … do not support those that commit acts of violence.”
“I don’t care if the radical left, radical right — I don’t know who they are,” Hannity continued. “They’re not people I would support. So how were officials not prepared? We got to answer that question. How did they allow the Capitol building to be breached in what seemed like less than a few minutes” (Wade 2)?
A night after NBC’s Seth Meyers called out Sean Hannity and Fox News for their ongoing opposition to gun law reform, the Fox News Channel personality launched a tirade against the NBC Late Night host, chastising Meyers for name-calling before name-calling him a “limousine liberal, socialist, hypocritical asshole.”
“And you are not funny, ever,” Hannity zinged.
What set off the Donald Trump loyalist was Meyers’ Wednesday night “Closer Look” segment examining gun violence and the recent mass shootings in Boulder and Atlanta. Meyers lambasted “a small minority of sociopaths with outsized power in politics who stand in the way when the rest of us try to do something about it,” and criticized Hannity for only “briefly mentioning” the Boulder shooting during his program.
Hannity took the bait. “You want to call me sociopathic, which you have called many others before, like Trump, like Karl Rove, you use the word a lot, but you’re just another limousine liberal, socialist, hypocritical asshole who does nothing but spew anti-GOP hate and has virtually nothing positive or productive to add to any political dialogue. You have zero credibility, zero integrity, zero interest in what the truth is, especially about complicated issues, and that’s why very few people watch your show. And you’re not funny, ever.”
…
This certainly isn’t the first time Hannity has feuded with a late-night comedian. Last summer he took on John Oliver after the HBO host of Last Week Tonight criticized Fox News for exaggerating the violence of Portland’s Black Lives Matter protests (Evans 1).
On Sunday, [New York Times columnist Ben] Smith published a fairly explosive piece revealing how [Tucker] Carlson—who portrays himself as the sworn enemy of the political and media elite—actually spends much of his time gossiping about Fox News and Donald Trump with Beltway reporters, with whom he has relationships despite publicly calling them “animals.”
As Smith reported, Carlson’s reputation as a frequent and reliable source serves as “a kind of insurance policy” that protects him from the marginalization other provocative right-wing pundits have suffered over the years.
“It’s so unknown in the general public how much he plays both sides,” one reporter told Smith. Another reporter acknowledged that they naturally “go soft” on Carlson because he’s a known resource for stories.
While Hannity’s monologues and a Fox News.com op-ed going after those targets ostensibly centered on his [Hannity’s] complaints that the paper and its reporters are “Trump stalkers” who “kiss the ass” of President Joe Biden, the impetus for the sudden obsession with the Times has been less than subtle.
And by Thursday, any pretense of a facade that this wasn’t retaliation for the Carlson column was all but ditched.
In its Thursday newsletter, [the website] Popbitch included an item about Hannity doing his colleague’s dirty work and attacking the New York Times for outing Carlson as a “massive gossip” on stories about Fox and Trump.
“Keen to protect his colleague’s honour, Sean Hannity rushed to attack the piece on air, trashing the NYT in time-honoured Fox News fashion,” the site said. “But Hannity might not have been quite so quick to jump to his defence if he knew how Tucker spoke about him in those off-the-record gossip sessions.”
Popbitch went on to claim that the “brothers-in-arms” spirit “appears to only flow one way,” adding that one of Carlson favorite topics “to chuckle about with his MSM mates is how much of a cringing Trump sycophant Sean is.”
In the wake of Smith’s juicy exposé, Carlson did not immediately address the revelations and has remained mum on the air. Instead, Hannity has seemingly—and surely without any prompting from Fox executives, of course—taken it upon himself to serve as Fox’s attack dog, devoting much of his primetime show this week to blasting the New York Times, targeting its star reporter Maggie Haberman, and personally insulting Smith (Baragona 1-3).
Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera accused primetime host Sean Hannity of “gaslighting” his viewers on Tuesday night during a discussion of the investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
“I think you’ve been — with all due respect and I love you — gaslighting, changing the subject,” said Rivera after Hannity rattled off a list of things he’d like to see the House Select Committee investigate beyond the scope of the current investigation.
Rivera went on, “The subject is January 6 and what happened to the United States Capitol and why it happened. Those two things: The fact that the Capitol was targeted and that the prime instigator, the one who unleashed the mob, was the President of the United States. For God’s sake, Sean –“
Hannity interrupted him, indignant over the accusation. What followed was a lot of crosstalk.
They continued to argue as Hannity compared the Capitol riot to Black Lives Matter demonstrations from the summer of 2020, insisting he’s been consistent in his condemnation of all riots (Ellefson 1).
Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham blasted Rep. Liz Cheney on Tuesday night for publicizing texts the two sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was unfolding, calling it both a smear attempt and a breach of their privacy.
Cheney (R-Wyo.), vice chair of the Jan. 6 select committee investigating the riot, read out the messages from Hannity and Ingraham on Monday night, shortly before the panel voted unanimously to recommend that Meadows be held in contempt of Congress.
…
“Last night in a weak attempt to smear yours truly — and presumably, I guess, President Trump — Congresswoman Cheney presented one of my text messages from Jan. 6 to Mark Meadows,” Hannity told his viewers.
...
Hannity described himself as an “honest and straightforward person” who tells his viewers the same things he says in private.
“Liz Cheney knows this. She doesn’t seem to care. She’s interested in one thing and one thing only: smearing Trump and purging him from the party,” he said.
“Liz, let’s release your phone records and texts, and your family discussing Donald Trump, considering you’re so free to release everybody else’s,” the host went on. “You’re a rock star now to the media mob, temporarily. They’ll turn on you again” (Moore 1-2).
Works cited:
Baragona, Justin. “Sean Hannity Is Totally Not Mad: ‘I Don’t Give a Shit What Anyone Says about Me’.” Daily Beast, June 24, 2021. Net. https://www.thedailybeast.com/sean-hannity-is-totally-not-mad-rants-i-dont-give-a-shit-what-anyone-says-about-me
Ellefson, Lindsey. “Geraldo Rivera Calls Out Sean Hannity for ‘Gaslighting’ about Capitol Riot – to His Face.” The Wrap, July 28, 2021. Net. https://www.thewrap.com/geraldo-rivera-hannity-gaslighting-january-6/
Evans, Greg. “Sean Hannity Calls Seth Meyers a “Limousine Liberal Socialist Hypocritical A**hole” Who Isn’t Even Funny.’” Deadline, March 26, 2021. Net. https://deadline.com/2021/03/sean-hannity-seth-meyers-limousine-liberal-socialist-hypocritical-asshole-not-funny-1234722560/
Fox News Staff. “Hannity Warns against Vaccine Mandates.” Fox News, updated January 11, 2022. Net. https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/hannity-warns-against-vaccine-mandates
Moore, Mark. “Hannity, Ingraham Slam Cheney for Releasing Jan. 6 Messages to Meadows.” New York Post, December 15, 2021. Net. https://nypost.com/2021/12/15/hannity-ingraham-slam-cheney-for-releasing-jan-6-messages/
Sullivan, Eric. “Sean Hannity Used Potty Language To Retort Jon Stewart's Withering Criticism.” Esquire, July 24, 2016. Net. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a46981/sean-hannity-jon-stewart/
Wade, Peter. “New Texts Show Sean Hannity Panicking about Trump’s State of Mind after Jan. 6.” Rolling Stone, January 4, 2020. Net. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/jan-6-committee-sean-hannity-request-cooperation-1278476/
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