A major conservative group is calling on the Republican National Committee (RNC) to abandon plans for NBC to moderate the next presidential debate.
On Friday, Restoration of America Founder and President Doug Truax sent a letter to RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel demanding the Republican Party “immediately switch gears and retract your offer allowing NBC to moderate the upcoming debate.”
“It is amazing this letter is necessary,” Truax wrote. “It is beyond comprehension that the RNC would give a conservative smearing, round-the-clock misinformation network like NBC the right to host a Republican presidential debate.”
The network announced last week it will host the third Republican debate on Nov. 8 at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami-Dade County. The moderators for the prime-time event were revealed Wednesday night, which will include NBC’s Lester Holt and Kristen Welker alongside conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.
“In case you’ve been in a coma the last few years, we live in a new world where the government, Big Tech, and establishment media are openly colluding to hide the truth and help Democrats,” Truax wrote in his letter admonishing the RNC on Friday. “The only way Democrats’ bad policies can survive in America is via a steady stream of propaganda.”
“NBC is right at the tip of this spear,” Truax added. “It has spread thousands of false Russian collusion hoax stories, racial hoaxes, climate hoaxes, and gender and abortion misinformation. It lies 24/7 about nearly everything.”
Welker, the anchor for NBC’s flagship political program, “Meet the Press,” previously moderated the final presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in 2020. As a longtime correspondent for NBC, Welker’s activist track record at the center of the network’s coverage raises concerns over whether the November debate will serve Republican voters.
[RELATED: Kristen Welker’s Activist Track Record Perfectly Qualifies Her For The Anti-Trump Debate Commission]
Just last month, Welker repeatedly lied in an exclusive sit-down interview with former President Trump about the Democratic Party’s platform on abortion and the party’s efforts to indict its top political opponent.
Welker “falsely claimed there is no evidence President Biden had pressured Attorney General Merrick Garland to indict his primary political opponent, Trump,” reported Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway. “In fact, in addition to statements calling for efforts to prevent Trump from running, that pressure campaign was publicly laundered for all the world to see through The New York Times on April 2, 2022, in an article headlined ‘Garland Faces Growing Pressure as Jan. 6 Investigation Widens.'”
According to The New York Times, Biden was frustrated by Garland’s failure to indict Trump quickly and sought to expedite the prosecution.
“But none of that is as bad as Welker’s brazen lies about Democrats’ actual abortion agenda,” Hemingway added. Welker claimed abortion was necessary at times to save the life of a pregnant woman and “lied about Democrats’ actual position on abortion at least four times in her debate with Trump.”
Welker’s co-host for the upcoming event, Holt, previously moderated two debates in the 2020 Democratic primary and was also the moderator for the first presidential debate in 2016. Holt, who’s been at NBC for more than 20 years, is the network’s anchor for “NBC Nightly News” and “Dateline.” During the debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, Holt threw aggressive questions at the Republican nominee while the Democratic candidate escaped the added pressure under the prime-time debate. Trump, for example, was pressed on taxes, his previous endorsement of conspiracies over former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and his prior support for the Iraq war. Clinton, on the other hand, received no questions surrounding the classified emails scandal or corruption in the Clinton Foundation.
According to a new Gallup poll out last week, a record number of Americans have lost all confidence in U.S. news media. Truax cited the diminishing trust of the news media in his letter to the RNC.
“To fight back, new conservative media is spreading across the landscape in spite of efforts to stifle it,” Truax wrote. “As leader of the RNC, it should be your job to encourage and enable those media outlets that are speaking the truth, and to not reward purveyors of false establishment narratives.”
