Jim Antle, executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine, brings to life its pages in the show Inside Scoop. Each episode features exclusive insight from the article authors and expert analysis.
Antle explores how a decade of criticism toward President Donald Trump’s behavior has become the model for the progressive Left. Many progressives now appear to be adopting the very tactics they condemned — harsh rhetoric, online name-calling, and unapologetically defending candidates’ questionable pasts.
“A decade into Trump’s national political career, many liberals are starting to imitate him,” Antle says. “Deciding if you can’t beat him, you might as well join him.”
Antle believes this has led to the rise of Graham Platner, a Democratic Senate candidate in Maine whose old Reddit posts and covered Nazi tattoo mirror the type of candidate internet warriors used to bash.
“Liberals now think that the nice progressives of the past, just like some Republicans when they started signing on with Trump, always finish last,” Antle says. “So you need to kind of get mean, and get in the gutter, and get in the dirt, and fight if you’re ever going to win.”
Next in the show, Kimberly Ross, a mother of two and longtime contributor to the magazine, joins Antle to discuss the challenges of raising children in the internet age. Ross’s article on this week’s cover reflects on discovering some of her 9-year-old’s classmates already have smartphones. Ross explains how constant internet access reshapes children’s lives — blurring the line between school and home, bringing bullying and peer pressure into bedrooms, and exposing children to adult content and social comparison long before they’re ready.
“You want them to experience a childhood where there’s imagination and where boredom is a creative kind of engine to help them learn,” Ross says. “And where they have conflict with their friends, and they can work through it instead of just sitting on their phones and texting each other and having friendships through screens. You want them to have real-life interactions and real-life decision-making.”
Ross argues parents must be intentional about when and how they introduce smartphones and the internet, resisting the temptation to use screens as a “digital pacifier.”
“I want them to honestly learn how to be bored and learn to come up with some sort of way to entertain themselves,” says Ross, who classifies herself as an older millennial. “We did, and we turned out fine, and they can do that as well, and they don’t need to be hooked up to screens 24/7. No one needs to be, and especially when they’re so impressionable, and their minds are forming, and they’re really learning how the world works.”
This week’s in-depth report outlines why Washington Examiner economics reporter Zach Halaschak believes the announcement of a peace deal between the United States and Iran has done little to shift expectations that the Federal Reserve will lower interest rates this year.
“Even though oil prices have dropped in response to the peace agreement announcement, some believe that oil and energy prices will remain elevated for longer,” Halaschak writes. “Essentially, that they will not simply tumble to prewar levels and quickly drive down headline inflation.”
INSIDE SCOOP: IRAN WAR, BYE BYE BERNIE, POOR CANDIDATE QUALITY
There are also concerns the latest ceasefire deal doesn’t hold or is violated, and gas prices shoot back up again.
Tune in each week at washingtonexaminer.com and across all our social media platforms to go behind the headlines in the Washington Examiner’s magazine show, Inside Scoop.