I Left Scott Jennings SPEECHLESS On CNN

I went on CNN thinking this would be a pretty standard debate. It wasn’t. It turned into something else when the questions stopped getting answered.

The conversation was about extremism inside the Republican Party and how often it gets waved away until it becomes inconvenient. That’s when things got uncomfortable. For as long as I can remember, Republicans have been perfectly fine building power by targeting groups they know can’t fight back. Immigrants. LGBTQ people. Muslims. Women. You can draw a straight line through decades of campaigns that rely on that strategy.

What changed on that panel was who the conversation applied to.

The moment MAGA figures became the subject instead of the audience, suddenly there was concern about rhetoric and tone. Suddenly people were careful with their words. Suddenly everyone wanted to slow things down and ask for grace.

I asked about Paul Ingrassia, a Trump administration official who publicly said he has a “Nazi streak.” Not an anonymous account. Not a fringe YouTuber. Someone inside the administration. I asked whether he had been removed.

No one answered directly.

Instead, there was hedging. “I’m not familiar.” “I don’t know where he is now.” Everyone pretending this was new information, even though it clearly wasn’t. He’s still there. That’s the part no one wanted to say out loud.

The same pattern came up with JD Vance. There’s always a reason he doesn’t have to be clear. Always an explanation for why condemning extremism can wait. Group chats get minimized. Language gets brushed off. The focus shifts to something else entirely.

At a certain point, the conversation just stalled. Not because the issue was complicated, but because there was nowhere left to move without admitting the obvious. You can’t claim to oppose extremism while refusing to deal with it when it’s close to home.

That’s where the answers ran out.

What people see on television is usually the performance. What they don’t see is how fast that performance collapses when the script stops working. That’s what happened here. Once the talking points were gone, there wasn’t much left to say.

If you want more of these moments, the unpolished ones where the conversation goes off-script, that’s what I focus on. Paid subscribers are what allow me to keep doing this and keep showing up in places where these questions usually don’t get asked.

They weren’t ready for that conversation.

You can watch the full video here: