Topic: Media Research Center
It says something about the Media Research Center's credibility that even though it has been repeatedly busted for spreading lies about Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, it still feels it can lie about her with impunity -- as in this Sept. 26 post by Catherine Salgado. The first thing that's most visible is the image that accompanies it, as highlighted in a Sept. 30 tweet promoting it at the MRC's Free Speech America Twitter feed:
That photo is fake. As Snopes documents, Sanger was dishonestly added to a photo of a Ku Klux Klan rally. As of this writing -- more than a week after Salgado's item was posted -- the fake photo remains attached to it.
As for the post itself, Salgado started by writing:
Facebook and Instagram censored the Media Research Center, slapping an outdated fact-check on an MRC post of a quote criticizing Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s racist views.
The censorship came just one week after MRC Free Speech America published an exclusive in which Brownstone Institute founder and President Jeffrey Tucker accused Facebook of collaborating with government and choosing sides against Trump.
Media Research Center (MRC) posted a quote from former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson on Facebook and Instagram, which are both owned by Meta. Carson pointed out the racist roots of abortion giant Planned Parenthood.
“Planned Parenthood was started by Margaret Sanger who was a eugenicist,” he said. “She wanted to limit the numbers of black people and Hispanic people. That’s why the clinics are predominantly found in minority communities.”
Facebook and Instagram applied a PolitiFact fact-check to censor MRC and claim the post was “missing context.” The fact-check applied to the MRC post was from 2015, and was supposedly correcting an entirely different Ben Carson quote! Carson said in 2015 that Sanger “believed that people like me should be eliminated.”
Media Research Center president and founder Brent Bozell commented, “Planned Parenthood's founder was a vile racist who wanted to abort black babies. No fact check can change that.”
In fact, Sanger expressed explicitly racist views on eugenics and reportedly had ties both to Nazis and to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
So much to unpack here. As we documented the last time the MRC went on a lying spree against Sanger, she was very much a eugenicist -- as were many prominent people in her era -- but there's little evidence she was the "vile racist" Bozell wants his followers to believe she is. We also documented that it's not true that, as Carson claimed, Planned Parenthood clinics are "predominantly found in minority communities"; in fact, the majority of abortion clinices are found in white neighborhoods, and activists like Carson pushing that claim are invoking a dishonest study that portrayed any clinic within two miles of a black or Latino community to be close enough for consideration.
Salgado's evidence that Sanger held "explicitly racist views on eugenics" was a link to a 2020 CNSNews.com column by dishonest Catholic Bill Donohue, who quotes exactly one statement from Sanger that could be seen as racist if taken out of context (we'll get to that later).Salgado's link to prove that Sanger "had ties .. to Nazis" is a 2017 Breitbart article by notorious fabulist Dinesh D'Souza in which he identifies no direct "ties" to Naziism; in fact, as we've documented, Sanger was a member of an anti-Nazi committee and claimed her books were burned in Nazi Germany. Salgado furtherquoted D'Souza:
Sanger published an article by the chief architect of the Nazi sterilization program, and, in 1938, urged America to imitate Hitler’s program, according to Breitbart News. Breitbart wrote that two close Sanger associates praised Nazi eugenics programs.
Again, Sanger herself pointed out that “I was one of the few Americans who joined the Anti-Nazi Committee and gave money, my name and any influence I had with writers and others, to combat Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.” She added that “my three books were destroyed [burned] and have not been allowed to circulate in Germany.”
Salgado's link to prove that Sanger "had ties .. to the Ku Klux Klan" is a highly biased article at the anti-abortion activist site LifeNews that noted she once spoke at a gathering of a "women's branch" of the KKK.
Salgado continued her dishonesty:
Sanger also reportedly started the “ Negro Project” to limit the black population. She also declared that “minorities (including most of America’s immigrants) are inferior in the human race, as are the physically and mentally handicapped,” NewsBusters reported.
Discussing the “Negro Project,” Sanger wrote, “We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” according to a CNSNews.com commentary by Catholic League CEO Bill Donohue. According to a LifeNews report and another CNSNews.com commentary by Grove City College professor Dr. Paul Kengor, Sanger spoke at a 1926 KKK rally, which she boasted led to multiple other speaking invitations from white supremacist groups.
Again, Salgado cites highly biased sources to support the dishonest claim about the Negro Project -- D'Souza and Donohue.In fact, as the Washigton Post, a legitimate news organzation, detailed, the Negro Project was about birth control, not an attempt to eliminate black people, and the "exterminate the Negro population" quote, the post noted, "is frequently taken out of context to suggest Sanger was seeking to exterminate blacks," and actually came from a desire to recruit black leaders for the effort to allay suspicions blacks might have had about whites like Sanger being involved.
That 2017 CNS column by Kengor about Sanger speaking to a KKK women's group was actually a response to a Huffington Post article in which we called out Kengor for an earlier complain malicioiusly portraying the speech as evidence of her support for the KKK's mission. Kengor was ignoring the context that in 1926, when Sanger gave that speech, the KKK was something of a mainstream group with millions of members, and Sanger was seeking to get out her message of birth control to any audience that would have her. Kengor omitted that Sanger called the speech "one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing." As we pointed out at the time, at the end of his CNS column, Kengor started backpedaling and conceded Sanger really wasn’t the rabid racist he has been suggesting the KKK speech made her, yet still tried to parse words anyway: "She was a racial eugenicist. Was she a racist-eugenicist? Be careful."
Still, Salgado whined:
Yet PolitiFact’s 2015 fact-check misrepresented that Planned Parenthood had not targeted black unborn babies in its early days and that eugenics is about “improv[ing] the human race by having people be more healthy through exercise, recreation in parks, marriage to someone free from sexually transmitted diseases, well-baby clinics, immunizations, clean food and water, proper nutrition, non-smoking and drinking.”
Maybe PolitiFact should do a little basic research on Sanger and her associates.
On the other hand, all the evidence Salgado has provided that Sanger had "targeted black unborn babies in its early days" is biased and/or fraudulent.Maybe Salgado is the one who needs to do "a little basic research"-- research that doesn't involve biased sources and mindless repeition of malicious lies
