Liberal Gen Z podcaster Adam Mockler blasted CNN commentator Scott Jennings as “a big a–hole” following an explosive spat last week in which Jennings dropped an F-bomb on-air.
NewsNation host Chris Cuomo asked Mockler Tuesday whether he thought Jennings was “being performative” or “really losing it” when he snapped “Get your f–king hand out of my face!” at the young commentator.
“No, that was a genuine, serious moment,” said Mockler, a 23-year-old contributor for progressive media company MeidasTouch who boasts over 2 million YouTube subscribers.
He accused Jennings of lying “week after week after week” about the timeline of the Iran war, which broke out Feb. 28 after joint US-Israeli air strikes, saying the frequent CNN commentator was “not bound to any sort of facts or even decorum.”
“He’s a big a–hole on that show, I’m gonna say it,” Mockler said. “He’s the one who is constantly smug and condescending, that’s his entire bit. So for this to blow up because I give him the energy he gives other people just blows my mind, in my opinion, and I hope that’s understandable.”
Mockler and Jennings got into a bitter fight about the duration of the Iran war during a recent episode of “CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip,” with Mockler accusing Jennings of being a war hawk.
“We all know that Scott Jennings is more than happy to defend a war with a country that starts with the letters I-R-A, that we’re currently failing, that is gonna put us trillions and trillions of dollars more in debt,” Mockler said.
“I was only a few years old while you were in the administration defending prior endless wars. Now this war is failing,” he added, nodding to Jennings’ time spent as a special assistant to the president during the George W. Bush administration.
Jennings asked: “Eight weeks is endless?”
He then took aim at Mockler, questioning whether he has “the attention span of a gnat” and telling him, “When you get up past your bedtime, you get hyper.”
Tensions heated up when Mockler — sitting next to Jennings and gesturing with his hands — pressed the conservative analyst to “give me one political concession” Iran has made since the war started.
Jennings pivoted in his chair to face Mockler and pointed at him, saying, “Get your f–king hand out of my face, first of all!”
Phillip, the show’s host, cut the two men off, saying, “Hey, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa! … Everybody hang tight … Everybody calm down, okay?”
Mockler on Tuesday explained his skepticism of wartime concessions.
“For my entire life, the United States has been at war with some country in the Middle East, in one form or another,” Mockler said, referencing conflicts in countries including Iraq.
“A military success, at first, turned into a grinding counterinsurgency, so people my age are primed to believe that … just because you sink the navy or you sink the air force, [that] doesn’t mean it’s gonna affect us or help us long-term, so I was trying to make a broader point about military concessions.”
