CNN continued to try and tie Donald Trump to a gathering of neo-Nazis that occurred in Washington DC over the weekend, during Tuesday’s edition of The Lead. That’s even after the president-elect denounced to group on the record with The New York Times. “And earlier today Donald Trump disavowed a neo-Nazi hate group in a way that he had until now failed to do,” pooh poohed CNN’s Jim Sciutto, “That is directly and explicitly denouncing a white supremacist organization that spewed anti-Semitic vile and racist vitriol…”

“So Sara, this is a group that went so far in that meeting as to use Nazi salutes to celebrate the president-elect,” hyped Sciutto. “Yes Jim, that’s right they did,” emphasized a very disappointed Sara Ganim, as she seemed to scold Trump, “And critics say that Donald Trump should have disavowed them sooner, given how hateful that speech was and how Donald Trump has never been shy away from speaking or more accurately tweeting his mind.”

Ganim only briefly mentioned that Trump wanted to look into why the group was supporting him, before jumping into playing up the gathering. “Celebrating the Donald Trump victory, the rhetoric and an unmistakable marriage of neo-Nazi hate and Donald Trump's campaign slogan,” she chided. She then playing a clip of Alt-Right founder Richard Spencer remarking, “For us as Europeans, it's only normal again when we are great again.”

And again after briefly noting that Trump had disavowed them, she tried to tie them together saying, “But what used to be a small obscure extremist group operating on the internet now feels emboldened by Trump’s campaign rhetoric.” At the end of her report Ganim reported that, “It's important to remember, these racists factions are small groups, but many of them do feel emboldened now.”

Sciutto ended the report in awe stating, “Yeah, it's credible to the pictures of the Hitler like salute in the year 2016.” But according to Ganim’s own report it occurred at the annual meeting of Spencer’s National Policy Institute, which means it could have been going on for a while now but the main stream media is only searching for it now.

It really did seem to be a pretty small event by some standards, since most reports have the attendance at roughly 200 people. And, as one columnist at The Guardian noted, other bizarre internet fandoms have much greater turnout for their events:

Indeed, the alt-right garnered far fewer people at its post-election conference than BronyCon 2016 did in July. The convention for adult men who like to dress up in My Little Pony costumes attracted well over 7,000 attendees, more than 20 times what the far right was able to manage. That might tell us all we need to know about the power of this insidious white nationalist movement.

CNN’s freak out over such a small number actually helps the group to gain notoriety. And the freak out of the liberal media as a whole stems from an attempt to prove their worst fears about the man none of them thought would be president. Because if they did care about such radicals, then why did they say nothing about the ones that came out of the woodwork when Barack Obama was first elected president?

Transcript below:

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