The CBS News documentary “Is America in a New Gilded Age? Wealth, Power and Democracy” is nothing more than a thinly veiled hit piece against President Donald Trump and the conservative-leaning billionaires who support him, while conveniently ignoring the left-wing oligarchs who have spent billions manipulating U.S. politics. The documentary, which aired on June 28, 2025, parroted the same tired rhetoric from radical figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and former Clinton administration official Robert Reich, framing Trump’s return to the White House as a symptom of a corrupt capitalist system. Yet, CBS senior business and technology correspondent Jo Ling Kent deliberately excluded the most egregious leftist billionaires—George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Reid Hoffman—who have spent fortunes reshaping American democracy in their far-left image.
Kent’s documentary leaned heavily on sensationalist claims, echoing President Joe Biden’s farewell warning about a rising “oligarchy.” But her selective outrage was glaring. While she attacked Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, she completely ignored George Soros, who has funneled $32 billion into his Open Society Foundations to push radical policies like open borders, climate extremism, and soft-on-crime prosecutors. His son, Alex Soros, now continues this legacy, boasting about his influence over world leaders, including Biden. Similarly, Michael Bloomberg spent over $1 billion trying to buy the 2020 election and another $47 million in 2024 to prop up Vice President Kamala Harris and House Democrats. Reid Hoffman, the unhinged LinkedIn co-founder, bankrolled the politically motivated E. Jean Carroll lawsuit against Trump while secretly funding Democratic dark-money operations.
Kent’s hypocrisy reached new heights when she allowed leftist commentator Andrea Bernstein to claim, “What are you going to do if you’re wealthy and you have a lot of money? You’re going to put some of that into the political system to try to influence outcomes so that you can hang on to even more money.” Yet, Kent failed to apply this logic to the left’s own billionaire class. Instead, she amplified Dartmouth professor Brooke Harrington’s attacks on Musk and other conservative-aligned tycoons while giving Soros and Bloomberg a free pass.
Even more egregious was Kent’s omission of the $26 trillion asset management giants—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—who dominate Paramount Global (CBS’s parent company) and other liberal media outlets like NBC, ABC, and CNN. These financial behemoths push ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) policies that align with the left’s agenda, yet Kent dared to lecture about media ownership influence, ignoring that her own network is controlled by the same oligarchs she pretends to oppose.
Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley called out this hypocrisy in the documentary, stating: “Are people on the left complaining that other wealthy individuals decide to spend their money on electing people who want to go soft on criminals that are raising hell in low-income communities? If you’re spending your money a certain way, you’re okay. If you’re spending it on free-market ideas and principles—if you want lower taxes, if you want smaller government and so forth—somehow you are villainous.”
Kent’s documentary was nothing more than a partisan smear job, designed to paint Trump and his supporters as threats to democracy while shielding the left’s own billionaire puppeteers. The liberal media’s double standard is clear: billionaires who back Trump are evil oligarchs, but billionaires who fund Democrats are noble philanthropists.
h/t: Steadfast and Loyal
