He isn’t relevant anymore, as he’s gone from CNN’s White House correspondent and primetime host to a Substack blogger over the past six months, but Jim Acosta still managed to irritate a large number of Americans by casting folks in rural flyover territory as mindless rubes hoodwinked by the Trumpian far-right:
Former CNN host Jim Acosta claimed on Tuesday that farmers are being “led astray” and voting for “far-right” candidates in U.S. elections.
Acosta stated during a Center For American Progress discussion that the “far-right” has figured out how to “infiltrate the heartland” and get farmers to side with the political right. While name dropping the late conservative host Rush Limbaugh, Acosta argued that many Americans are not getting their information from reliable news.
“The far-right in this country has kind of figured out a way to infiltrate the heartland and to basically to pull Ma and Pa from the farm to their point of view,” Acosta said. “And as it turns out, a lot of these folks vote in these elections and a lot of those folks have been completely led astray. I hate to say it, but they’ve just been completely led astray. And we’ve all just let this happen on our watch with essentially a business model for delivering the news in this country that just does not work anymore.”
If you’re in search of a boost to your blood pressure, here’s video of Acosta’s speech:
The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Nicole Silverio gave a few recent highlights displaying Acosta’s qualifications to complain about the rubes being led astray:
Acosta recently told Democrat Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett on May 29 that he is worried Trump might arrest her. He complained that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were arresting illegal immigrant criminals, and argued that if it can be done to them, then it can happen to a member of Congress.
The former CNN host appeared to agree with former Biden 2020 campaign ad writer Cliff Schechter that the Democrats do not spend enough time calling Trump a “fascist” during an April 25 segment of “The Jim Acosta Show.”
In 2020, Acosta dismissed reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop by calling the story “just more fake news.” He further accused Trump of being “obsessed with Joe Biden’s son.” During his time as CNN’s White House correspondent, Acosta got his hard pass suspended from the White House during Trump’s first term after he refused to give up his microphone to an intern, though a judge later ruled that his pass be returned.
Acosta is the perfect embodiment of Fake News, of course. Here’s someone who was promoted to a position of prominence at CNN, which was in the process of making itself utterly devoid of credibility as a news organ, and Acosta spent several years in that position spewing one sanctimonious idiocy after another.
Remember this?
#BREAKING: Jim Acosta makes it official, rage-quitting CNN after 18 years at the network, telling viewers to not “give into the lies” and “it is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant”….
“And I just wanted to end today’s show by thanking all of the wonderful people who work… pic.twitter.com/7Zlwrrbwwl
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) January 28, 2025
Here’s somebody who equated Donald Trump to Raul Castro, and he thinks it’s terrible that rural America isn’t persuaded by the talking heads on CNN.
Even after he found himself deposed from CNN’s airwaves, Acosta doesn’t seem to have learned much. Here’s what else he said on Tuesday:
“I’ve been sort of trying to shout this from the rooftops or wherever anybody will listen to me,” Acosta said. “At the end of a bar in Kansas City, whatever. The President of the United States is a danger to this country. Full stop.”
“Even people in the Republican Party were afraid to show up at his birthday parade, the dictator Kim Jong Un birthday parade that he tried to have over the weekend where you saw the video of the tank going by the empty stands and you heard the squeaking of the tracks of the tank,” Acosta said. “And it was sort of like, what is this?”
But as obnoxious as that is, it can’t really catch up to this:
Proving CNN was right to fire him, Jim Acosta shamelessly insults Trump’s deceased ex-wife Ivana Trump
“How many immigrants has he married? He’s got one buried at his golf course in New Jersey!”pic.twitter.com/phr3Wuzeu5
— MRC NewsBusters (@newsbusters) June 18, 2025
You’ve probably heard that CNN’s parent company, Time Warner Discovery, is jettisoning the “news” network, along with a collection of other cable channels nobody watches, into a spinoff company they’re calling “Global Networks,” or something. That’s destined to become a penny-stock outfit, and in preparation for the move, there are lots of reports that the higher-priced “talent” still left at CNN — including the $18 million Anderson Cooper, who costs CNN something like $27 per viewer based on his average audience — is getting packed off to the glue factory.
Acosta is right that the mass media business model that made him rich and “elite” is broken. What he doesn’t understand is he’s one of the people who broke it.
Half the country doesn’t like Trump, but the only people in that group becoming emotional wrecks over the president are generally CNN or MSNBC viewers. The vast majority of the country gave up on legacy corporate media outlets who push the narratives Jim Acosta pushes years ago.
And yeah — when nobody cares about your style of news reporting, which pretends to be objective but clearly is not, and even worse tends to be clearly wrong on subject after subject, your ratings eventually collapse and so do the fat contracts for the Jim Acostas of the world.
Boo hoo.
I post all this to gloat over Acosta’s decline, sure, but also to enforce the point that the so-called media elite is finished — and they’re admitting it.
And to bring back up something I’ve been talking about a lot since the election last November — namely, that we have passed from the political era that began with the 1932 elections and the dominant New Deal/Great Society Democrat consensus that mass media relentlessly enforced to something new.
Acosta is part of that era. He claims some 300,000 subscribers to his Substack, which is a series of interminable, droning Zoom-call podcasts — the latest one is a 55-minute gripe-fest about the supposed birthday party Trump threw himself (in Non-Acosta World, it’s described as the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary celebration), starring such luminaries as Keith Ellison and Don Lemon. When I looked at it, the video had all of 1,876 likes, which is a healthy number for a mid-range podcaster.
Probably not the kind of number that pays Acosta’s bills, though.
Good luck with that venture, Jim.
Rural Americans haven’t been persuaded by leftist propaganda from the Jim Acostas of the world in 20 years. It isn’t because they’ve been flim-flammed by the MAGA movement. Most of what MAGA espouses are things rural Americans have demanded for the entirety of this century. Acosta has it backwards.
But of course he does. Of course he does.
And the bitter irrelevance of Acosta and his ilk, the corporate-made famous “news” names who fed off preexisting audiences and now feed off their severance packages, produce little more than smirks from those of us celebrating the end of the corrupt system that produced them.
READ MORE by Scott McKay:
