Senator Markwayne Mullin didn’t flinch when Meet the Press host Kristen Welker tried to corner him on the reduction of the federal workforce. Instead, he turned the tables, exposing the media’s glaring double standard when it comes to job losses.
The exchange, which unfolded on NBC’s latest installment of Meet the Depressed, highlights a growing trend: the corporate press bending over backward to advocate for government workers in a way they never did for the thousands of private-sector employees who lost their jobs under the Biden administration.
Consider this—when President Joe Biden signed executive orders in 2021 that kneecapped the domestic energy industry, thousands of workers, from oil rig operators to pipeline laborers, were put out of work.
Did NBC convene town halls to highlight their struggles? Did they press Democratic lawmakers with emotional appeals about the toll on working families? Hardly. Instead, laid-off workers were met with the now-infamous “learn to code” admonition—brushed aside as necessary casualties of an environmental agenda.
NBC’s @kwelkernbc pleads to @SenMullin: “Talk to the people in Oklahoma who’ve lost their jobs, who say they are hurting, they don’t know how they’re going to pay their mortgage, they don’t know they’re going to make ends meet. Talk to those people. What’s your message to them?… pic.twitter.com/la5mF0iz7j
— Brent Baker 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@BrentHBaker) February 23, 2025
Fast forward to today, and the media can’t seem to stop shedding tears over federal employees losing their jobs. There’s no dismissive talk of “job transitions” or “new opportunities” for them—just wall-to-wall coverage treating them as the ultimate victims. The double standard is glaring.
Mullin, for his part, didn’t back down when Welker pushed him on the issue. She repeatedly tried to frame the firings as a national crisis, pressing him on whether he had attended town halls to hear from displaced federal workers.
But Mullin wasn’t buying the narrative. He pointed out that the supposed groundswell of concern was more astroturf than grassroots—a manufactured media campaign rather than genuine public outrage.
The conversation didn’t stop there. The interview also touched on Ukraine, the dismissal of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the left’s latest bout of hysteria over a joking remark about a Trump third term. But the real focus, and the media’s clear obsession, was the fate of government employees.
