A Republican strategist went on MSNBC this weekend and did something the network's hosts probably didn't expect: he defended Jasmine Crockett.
Matthew Bartlett, appearing on MS NOW's "The Weekend" on Saturday, argued that Democratic staffers and the team behind "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" had "done Jasmine Crockett dirty" in a sequence of events surrounding a Texas Democratic Senate primary that has become a case study in friendly fire.
The controversy centers on state Rep. James Talarico, Crockett's opponent in the primary, who appeared on "The Late Show" on Tuesday. That appearance triggered a mess. Colbert accused CBS of blocking the interview from airing, citing what he described as the FCC's crackdown on the longstanding equal candidate time rule. CBS flatly denied it.
"THE LATE SHOW was not prohibited by CBS from broadcasting the interview with Rep. James Talarico."
So someone wasn't telling the truth. And in the wreckage of that contradiction, Bartlett argued, it was Crockett who got buried.
The story that circulated earlier in the week was simple: Trump was supposedly behind the suppression of Talarico's interview, wielding federal power to silence a Democratic candidate through broadcast regulators. It had all the ingredients the left loves. A villain. A victim. A chilling effect on free speech, as Fox News reports.
Bartlett wasn't buying it. He told Jonathan Capehart on Saturday:
"This notion [that] Trump [was] going to stop Colbert in order to stop Talarico — people kind of went with this narrative."
Then he landed his point:
"I'm not sure it's true. I think, candidly, they've actually done Jasmine Crockett dirty."
When Capehart pressed him on who "they" referred to, Bartlett pointed the finger at Colbert's media team and Democratic staffers connected to Talarico.
Here's the timeline that tells the real story. On Tuesday, Crockett told MS NOW's Jen Psaki that she "received a phone call" informing her CBS had been told "they could go ahead and move forward with the interview of James Talarico," provided that Crockett and the other candidate in the race, Ahmad Hassan, received equal time.
That sounds reasonable on paper. Equal time is a standard broadcast obligation when candidates are involved. But by Friday, Crockett said she had still not been invited to appear on Colbert's show.
So Talarico got his national television moment. Crockett got a phone call and a promise. And the promise evaporated.
Crockett herself seemed to grasp the dynamic, telling Psaki on Tuesday that the entire controversy probably gave her opponent "the boost he was looking for." Which is exactly what Bartlett argued. Talarico, he noted, got a nice little bump in fundraising from the whole episode. The victim narrative worked, just not for the person who was actually victimized.
What makes this worth watching isn't the specifics of a Texas primary. It's the pattern.
The left built a narrative around Trump suppressing the media to protect itself from accountability, then used that narrative to elevate one Democratic candidate at the expense of another. The supposed censorship story became the campaign ad. And when CBS publicly denied that the interview was ever blocked, nobody paused to recalibrate. The story had already done its work.
Bartlett summarized it cleanly:
"Everyone likes to be the victim. I'm not sure Talarico is the victim of Trump's suppression. I think Jasmine Crockett might be the victim of a false media narrative."
Talarico's campaign, for its part, declined to comment when asked about the situation. Silence is a choice.
There's a deeper irony here that conservatives should note. The FCC's equal time rule exists precisely to prevent broadcasters from tipping the scales in elections. It's supposed to be a safeguard. But in this case, the rule's invocation became the story itself, a vehicle for generating sympathetic coverage for one candidate while the other waited by the phone for an invitation that never came.
The rule didn't protect Crockett. It was used to frame a narrative around her opponent's appearance, generate outrage, drive donations, and then quietly ignored when it came time to actually provide her the platform she was owed.
Conservatives have long argued that the mainstream media and the Democratic establishment function as a single organism. This episode doesn't disprove that theory, but it does complicate it in an instructive way. The machine doesn't just target Republicans. When a Democratic primary gets competitive, the same apparatus can be turned on any candidate who isn't the preferred choice.
Crockett is no conservative. She's a reliable progressive vote in Congress. But reliability, it turns out, doesn't earn you loyalty within the party infrastructure. It earns you a phone call on Tuesday and silence by Friday.
A GOP strategist had to go on MSNBC to point it out. That tells you everything about who's actually paying attention.
