WND Puts Discredited Author on Its Homeschool Reading List Topic: WorldNetDaily
Liam Clancy writes in an Aug. 12 "news" article that, like so much of WND's content, is actually just an ad targeted to homeschoolers:
It’s August – and you know what that means.
It’s “back-to-school” madness, and parents around the country are shopping for supplies that will help propel their children to success.
But what does your child really need?
As state-run education gradually clamps down on freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and the values that make the United States so great, the WND Superstore has you covered on the books your kids might not find on the classroom bookshelf.
And what's the first book Clancy lists, after a "mini United States Constitution"?
Another great selection for more advanced readers is “The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson,” a book that uncovers truths about the third president of the United States that your child won’t learn in school.
Author David Barton, a historian, attempts to set the record straight, upending centuries of smears from disingenuous scholars.
Except, of course, it does none of that. Clancy doesn't mention that the book's original publisher pulled the book from the marketplace after historians and others found numerous errors. Not only did WND continue to sell Barton's book despite it having been withdrawn everywhere else, it published its own version of the book, which made few changes to the challenged content but added a section attacking the book's critics. To this day, WND is still trying to defend Barton and his book.
Clancy continues shilling:
For adults, especially those interested in homeschooling, the Superstore also has a variety of books for parents directly invested in the education of their children.
“Crimes of the Educators” reveals how “progressive” educators have dumbed-down American children by taking over government schools and pushing dubious reforms such as Common Core.
“How many parents … send their children to school so central planners can mold them into functionally illiterate cogs in a centrally planned machine, having just enough knowledge to do their preassigned task? How will such cogs be able to think critically, much less sustain liberty and the American experiment?” ask authors Samuel Blumenfeld and Alex Newman.
The answer is far too many.
Smearing teachers as criminals, as Newman and Blumenfeld effectively do here, is hardly the way to make that argument and should disqualify Newman's book from serious consideration. But this is WND, after all.
'Far Left' Hurlers At MRC Complain About Purportedly Indiscriminate Use of 'Far Right' Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Scott Whitlock grumbles in an Aug. 15 post (boldface his):
Get it? The vile racists who promoted violence in Charlottesvile, Virginia over the weekend, groups that include the KKK and Nazis, are part of the “far right” and “hard line conservatives.” That’s according to the New York Times in a front page story on Tuesday. The paper used the phrase “far right” or “conservative” six times to connect racist thugs to the political right.
The headline trumpeted, “Far Right Plans Its Next Moves With a New Energy.” Writer Alan Feuer began, “The white supremacists and right-wing extremists who came together over the weekend in Charlottesville, Va., are now headed home.” He later underlined, “The far right, which has returned to prominence in the past year or so, has always been an amalgam of factions and causes.”
First, Whitlock doesn't explain why he's defending the honor of the "far right" by trying to disassociate it from neo-Nazis. Despite his complaining, Whitlock offers no evidence that "racist thugs" are not on the far right.
Second, Whitlock seems to have forgotten that he works for an organization that uses the term "far left" even moreindiscriminately than he's accusing the Times of using "far right." The MRC was quick to label violent Antifa protesters as "far left," which by Whitlock's standards equates them with, among others, Stephen Colbert and sports blog Deadspin.
The MRC is clearly never going to apologize for equating violent protesters with people and publications who merely said something it didn't like. Therefore, it has no moral standing to complain when it thinks others are doing the same (though we still don't understand why Whitlock is so desperate to claim that white supremacists are not "far riight").
Anti-Muslim Propagandists at WND Warn of 'Islamist Propaganda' Topic: WorldNetDaily
Leo Hohmann warns in an Aug. 18 WorldNetDaily article, headlined "Islamist propaganda coming soon to local newspaper near you":
An investigative journalism center is passing off as fact a report by the Hamas-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations that hate crimes against American mosques jumped sharply in 2015 and continue to occur at historically high rates — about once every three days.
ProPublica is a New York City-based nonprofit journalism center partially funded by billionaire George Soros that shares data-driven investigative stories with newspapers of all sizes and local TV stations across the United States.
But ProPublica‘s newest project on hate crimes is raising eyebrows because of its reliance on a questionable source for its data. The report says more than 370 “hate incidents” directed at U.S. mosques and Islamic centers have been catalogued by CAIR since April 2013.
“Most of the incidents are threats to worshippers’ lives or acts of vandalism,” according to the report, which depends solely on CAIR for its list of anti-Muslim hate crimes.
[...]
One revealing statement in the article says: “Note: ProPublica has not researched whether any updates or follow-ups to these articles exist.”
In other words, ProPublica did very little of its own independent research to confirm CAIR’s findings, or to determine whether there were any updates or changes in the original stories, notes Philip Haney, a former Homeland Security officer who co-authored the whistleblower book “See Something Say Nothing.”
Haney said many supposed anti-Muslim “hate crimes” reported in the wake of President Donald Trump’s election were reported as fact but later turned out to be fake reports. CAIR, however, never followed up to inform its followers on Twitter and Facebook that many of these initial complaints of “Islamophobia” were in fact pure fiction.
Of course, Hohmann -- a virulent Muslim-hater -- is engaging in propaganda himself by writing this article. While he criticizes ProPublica for not following up on CAIR's claims, Hohmann doesn't follow up either. WND has published Hohmann's false propaganda claiming that a measles outbreak in a Somali-American community was caused by a Quranic dictate against immunization (in fact, WND's anti-vaxxer fellow travelers have heavily lobbied the community).
And it was just a couple of weeks ago that WND published another piece of anti-Muslim propaganda -- an uncritical report on a bogus study by the anti-Muslim Gatestone Institute falsely linking old churches being torn down in France to the construction of new mosques there.
It's truly hilarious to see the propagandists at WND accusing others of engaging in propaganda. You want it to stop, WND? You first.
MRC's Gainor Admits Conservative Media Will Put Truth Over Reason to Back Trump Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Aly Nielsen sums up an appearance by MRC VP and right-wing apparachik Dan Gainor on Fox Business:
According to MRC Vice President of Business and Culture Dan Gainor, Steve Bannon’s White House exit will not “alienate the conservative media.”
“Donald Trump is a smart guy. He can never go left enough to satisfy the media and the left,” Gainor toldIntelligence Reporthost Trish Regan, “So he’s not going to alienate the conservative media. He will make nice in some way.”
Gainor seems to be inadvertently admitting what we knew all along: the conservative media -- which includes all the MRC's various outlets, including "news" division CNSNews.com -- is putting loyalty to Trump over truth and reason. While Gainor seems to couch this in reflexive media-bashing in complaining about a hostile "left" media, he's also admitting that his conservative media will always give Trump the benefit of the doubt, and if Trump does something that appalls the rest of the nation, CNS and their ilk will contort themselves to excuse it.
Gainor demonstrates this further in his interview, as Nielsen writes:
Bannon, The Chief White House strategist, is leaving his position two days after talking to a liberal journalist at Soros-fundedAmerican Prospect.
“I don’t understand why conservatives consistently feel like they’re gonna -- they, they can go and out themselves to any sort of liberal outlet,” Gainor said on the Aug. 18Intelligence Report,“You know you’re never going to get good treatment, you know the results’ always going to be bad.”
“This also emboldens conservative outlets to be more of a check and a balance on the people who are seen as more liberal on the--in the White House,” Gainor concluded.
Note that Nielsen and Gainor don't blame Bannon for doing the interview; they blame a "liberal journalist" at a "Soros-funded" publication for running it. Talk about attacking the messenger.
Ah, but holding Bannon accountable for his own actions would have meant he alienated the MRC and the conservative media , and Gainor already said that will never happen. Gotta keep that Mercer money rolling in, after all.
WND: Won't Someone Think of the Poor Confederate Memorials? Topic: WorldNetDaily
In addition to hot takes, conspiracy theories and stolen glory, WorldNetDaily has been embraced another reaction to the events at Charlottesville, Va.: defending the Confederacy and its memorials.
WND let discredited adulterer Dinesh D'Souza rant in an anonymously written article:
“Let’s start with the fact this whole thing was kicked off because of an attempt to take down a monument to Robert E. Lee,” D’Souza told WND. “Here’s the irony: Robert E. Lee was the most decorated soldier in the U.S. Army. He was a man of unimpeachable integrity. Lincoln offered him command of the Union Army, but Lee refused only because his loyalty was to Virginia. Lee opposed both secession and slavery.
“And yet to the historically illiterate left, a man who opposed both slavery and secession has come to symbolize both slavery and secession.”
Yeah, when you turn down the opportunity to fight for America to lead the Army fighting for slavery and secession, that tends to happen. It's not "historically illiterate" to point that inconvenient fact out.
Gen. Lee is an ironic lightning rod for such violence. He was such a statesman that had he been born a few miles north, that is, north of the boundary of Virginia, he likely would have gone on to become a winning general for the Union, and possibly on from there to the presidency.
[...]
Gen. Lee didn’t fight to preserve slavery. He freed slaves, at great personal cost, he had inherited by marriage. He hated the “peculiar institution.” He also was in favor of the preservation of the union and opposed to secession. But when asked by President Lincoln to lead the troops to squash the burgeoning rebellion, he asked, “How can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?”
States’ rights was the ostensible reason men like Lee and Jackson fought for the Confederacy, but clearly the catalyst cause was slavery. This reality is clearly a mark against Lee, Jackson and others who fought for the South. But we should also remember them for who they actually were, rather than as two-dimensional cutouts in a simplistic morality play of obvious good versus obvious evil.
If we start to tear down all statues of Lee, Jackson and Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, why stop there? What about the nine presidents of the United States who owned slaves? Washington was the only one of those who freed his slaves.
Well, removing prominently placed statues of people who fought against the United States seems like a reasonable stopping point.
Speaking of monuments, an Aug. 15 article serves up a "big list of the nation’s endangered Confederate monuments and symbols" and approvingly quoted right-wing radio host likeningtaking down Confeerate statues to "the Talilban, pulling down Christian historical sites." The more accurate analogy would be to newly liberated Eastern Europeans tearing down statues of Lenin.
And because WND must make everything about scary, swarthy Muslims, an Aug. 15 article by Art Moore complains that the Council on American-Islamic Relations is "providing a template resolution to be introduced by public bodies such as state legislatures, city councils and school districts" asking for Confederate monuments to be removed.
In an Aug. 18 article, Alicia Powe complained not only that Nancy Pelosi is asking that Confederate-related statues be removed from the Capitol rotunda, but also that she waited so long to do so:
Over the last 100 years, Democrats have controlled Congress almost twice as long as Republicans and there have been 35 years during which they controlled both houses and the presidency. But only in 2017 did the Confederate statues in the Capitol become an issue for them.
Some suggest it’s a way to help eradicate the strong Democrat [sic] connection with the Confederacy – something about which Americans are oblivious. Not only did Republicans lead the charge against slavery, they also were targeted for death and intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan, which represented the military wing of the Democratic Party.
But today, Democrat [sic] lawmakers are accusing President Trump of being proponent of white supremacy, even though he has repeatedly condemned the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Powe didn't mention the inconvenient fact that the post-Civil War Democratic Party is not the Democratic Party of today, and that it is conservatives like her and her fellow WND employees who are now rushing to the defense of the Confederacy.
CNS Blogger Tries to Spin Away Trump Reneging On Border Wall Topic: CNSNews.com
We already know CNSNews.com blogger Craig Bannister is a terrible media analyst. We now also know he's a rather desperate spinmeister for the Trump administration.
After transcripts of President Trump's conversation with the president of Mexico went public, Bannister used an Aug. 3 CNS post to spin away the negative parts of it:
On Thursday, The Washington Post published purportedly-leaked, classified transcripts of President Donald Trump’s conversations with the leaders of Mexico and Australia - but, the worst thing The Post could find to headline its expose’ is that Trump asked Mexico’s president to stop saying he’s against a border wall.
[...]
The Post’s top six ‘Highlights” from the Trump-Nieto conservation, according to its “annotated transcripts” are:
“Trump threatens potential tariffs on Mexican goods,”
“Trump vows to help fight the ‘tough hombres’ driving the Mexican drug trade,”
“Trump seems to acknowledge that his threats to make Mexico pay had left him had left him cornered politically,”
Trump asks that they avoid publicly disagreeing over how the wall will be funded
Trump describes the wall as ‘the least important thing we are talking about,’”
Trump tells Peña Nieto to stop saying publicly that his government would never pay for the wall.
Thus, the biggest scoops from The Post’s claimed leaked documents are that an American president:
Threatened to use tariffs,
Wants to fight drug smuggling,
Says it’ll make him look bad if he doesn’t deliver on his promise,
Discourages public opposition,
Says there are more important problems to tackle than building a border wall, and
Discourages public opposition (See above).
Of course, Bannister is ignoring that Trump is effectively admitting that he's reneging on his own campaign promise to build the wall and make Mexico pay for it. But Bannister cannot admit that's happening, so he must spin things to trying to falsely turn this into a fake-news nothingburger.
This is the kind of so-called analysis for which the MRC is paying Bannister the big bucks.
MRC Turns Trump Tweet Into An Item Topic: Media Research Center
On Aug. 14, after reluctantly expanding his condemnation of the violent events in Charlottesville, Va., to specifically call out neo-Nazis and white supremacists, President Trump tweeted: "Made additional remarks on Charlottesville and realize once again that the #Fake News Media will never be satisfied...truly bad people!"
Three hours later, the Media Research Center turned it into a media-bashing item. Nicholas Fondacaro wrote (excessive boldface his):
On Monday, President Trump called out the racist hate groups involved in Saturday’s chaos in Charlottesville, Virginia. In addition to calling them “evil” and “repugnant,” Trump said: “Those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups.” This full throated denouncement was exactly what the Big Three Networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) craved from the President, but now that they had it, they shifted their attacks to: “What took him so long?”
“President Trump finally finds the words to condemn white supremacists two days after facing an intense bipartisan backlash for blaming quote “all sides” for the violent unrest in Charlottesville,” sneered Anchor Lester Holt during the opening tease ofNBC Nightly News. Soon thereafter, Holt called Trump’s first remarks “tone deaf” and then mocked him for trying “today to find the right notes.”
[...]
During CBS Evening News, White House Correspondent Major Garrett turned the snark up to 11 when he chastised Trump. “The leader of the free world, President Trump, was behind his daughter, Attorney General and Vice President in denouncing white supremacists and neo-Nazis by name,” he chided.
Garrett also pretended that leftist counter protesters didn’t do anything violent during Saturday’s clashes, not that it justified the car attack. “On Saturday, the President implied counter-protesters and armed shield-wielding white supremacists were equally to blame,” he said.
“That initial equivocation echoed ways in which Mr. Trump has played to racially motivated segments of American politics,” Garrett added.
Trump’s latest and most refined condemnation of the violence in Charlottesville was exactly what they had been begging for him to do. But not that they got it from him, they moved the goal post and bemoaned how it wasn’t good enough.
Fondacaro didn't mention the tweet from Trump or that he was effectively writing on orders from the president.
WND's Hohmann Tries to Troll A Muslim Candidate Topic: WorldNetDaily
Muslim-hating WorldNetDaily reporter Leo Hohmann is particularly prone to going into freakout mode when he writes about Muslim politicians. And he does exactly that in an Aug. 13 WND article.
This time, the subject of Hohmann's ire is Minnesota's Regina Mustafa, who is "trying to become the first Muslim woman elected to Congress." After playing the usual guilt by association for having started a community interfaith dialogue group with the help of the Council on American-Islamic Relations -- which he smears as "a Hamas-tied Muslim Brotherhood front group which operates with impunity inside the United States, even though the extremist Brotherhood has been banned as a terrorist organization by several Arab countries" -- Hohmann gets onto the business of hurling increasingly biased and loaded questions at Mustafa. She eventually figures out Hohmann was trying to play gotcha and she ends the interview, which of course makes him even more incensed:
Despite her work on interfaith issues, Mustafa was not open to discussing her personal faith. WND asked what attracted her, as an American woman, to Islam and why she converted.
“How do you know I converted?” she asked.
WND told her it was just a guess, since she doesn’t appear to be from the Middle East or other regions where Islam dominates.
“I did convert,” she said. “I just don’t see why that question has anything to do with my campaign, if I was raised with a certain religion or not I just don’t see that as pertinent.”
WND asked Mustafa why Muslims tend to persecute Christians in almost every Muslim-majority country.
“I think that’s a gross generalization,” she said.
WND asked her which Muslim-majority country would be the most welcoming of Christians.
“Oh Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, I have Egyptian friends who are Coptic Christians,” she said.
All of those countries have blasphemy laws where it is illegal to criticize Muhammad, Allah or Islam.
In fact, it was reported Friday by the Investigative Project on Terrorism that Malaysia has initiated a police program of “hunting down” non-Muslim “apostates” and assigning them to re-education camps designed to “fix” their faith.
Mustafa did agree that some Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia needed to loosen their restrictions on other faiths, although she denied that it’s illegal to own a Bible in Saudi Arabia and said freedom of worship is allowed “in compounds,” where international workers live.
When WND asked her to provide information and facts to support the open expression of Christianity in Saudi Arabia, she abruptly ended the interview and hung up.
WND hadn’t even gotten to these other pertinent questions:
If elected, will you renounce the extremist Muslim Brotherhood?
Will you renounce Shariah law and place the American Constitution above all other forms of law?
Meanwhile, Mustafa has been receiving death threats because of her candidacy. Hohmann apparenlty didn't think that was a "pertinent question" to bring up with her.
Needless to say, the comment thread on Hohmann's article is bursting wiht anti-Muslim vitriol, calling her a "MUZZY PIG" and "a poster girl for everything wrong with America" who "doesn't believe in freedom" and whose children are "future jihadists." Plus, there's the implicit death threat from one commenter declaring that "all muslims - ALL - need to be removed from wherever they infest" and another saying "they are an enemy of the constitution they should be killed."
WND is apparently totally down with such threats -- the death threats have remained live on the comment thread five days as of this writing. We'd complain about WND's sloppy comment monitoring system (we've been banned for pointing out WND's bias, but death-threat issuers get to post with impunity), but holding Muslims up for attack by its readers is Hohmann's job, after all.
Newsmax Complains About Media Covering David Duke, Forgets It Publishes Ed Klein Topic: Newsmax
John Gizzi complains in an Aug. 12 Newsmax article:
Twenty-eight years after he won his only elective office as a Louisiana state representative, following a dozen losing bids for offices ranging from president to governor, David Duke is — almost incredibly — still sought out by the national media.
As reporters from across the nation and abroad covered the white supremacists’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia Saturday, Duke, onetime Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was showcased extensively by the press.
In one widely-shown TV clip, Duke declared: [T]hat’s why we voted for Donald Trump ... because he said he's going to take our country back, and that's what we gotta do"
Trump supporters will inevitably argue that the liberal media is trotting Duke out simply to link a storied white supremacist and the president. But his string of successive losses at the polls and recent embarrassing antics have so demolished Duke's credibility that one wonders why any journalist would take him seriously.
We would remind Gizzi that his employer lovestopublish Ed Klein mostly for his anti-Obama and anti-Clinton attacks, which rarely if ever have on-the-record sourcing -- a major journalistic blunder. That matters because the anonymous sources he loves to cite have been wrong on a regular basis, and his attack books simply can't be trusted.
Klein clearly has no credibility. Instead of complaining about how others work, shouldn't Gizzi be wondering why his employer takes Klein seriously?
WND on Charlottesville: Whataboutism And, Of Course, Conspiracy Theories Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've already detailed the hot mess of hot takes WorldNetDaily columnists have offered following the events in Charlottesville, Va. WND's "news" side -- which is really just opinion written in inverted-pyramid style -- did exactly what you'd expect when its fellow right-wingers get caught in bad behavior: deflect and spin conspiracy theories.
An Aug. 15 article by Chelsea Schilling touted Rush Limbaugh's insistence that "both 'reactionary fringe groups' – neo-Nazis and Antifa – are actually extreme leftists and are not aligned with Republicans at all." Schilling goes on to tie efforts to remove Confederate monuments to George Soros, because everything WND doesn't like can be blamed on Soros, apparently.
In another article, Schilling is just asking (and conspiracy-mongering) regarding Jason Kessler:
The organizer of the violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was until recently a Barack Obama supporter and was also a member of the leftist radical Occupy Wall Street Movement, according to a report from a hard-left activist group.
The details from his recent past have many in the blogosphere and on social media asking: Is the Charlottesville rally organizer really a left-wing plant?
Leftists claim they are fighting hate and violence, and they cite the deadly protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, as a prime example.
But the evidence indicates the left is actually spreading hate and violence.
Those are the conclusions of writers for two prominent left-leaning news outlets, the BBC and the Atlantic.
Their articles describe in detail how the taste for violence is seeping from the fringe left into its mainstream.
As he has before, Kant continued his audition to work at the Trump White House press shop, touting how "Trump had stated a demonstrable truth, recorded by cameras, that there was violence from both sides. But, for some reason, that assertion enraged the press, which responded by trying to portray the president as defending the Nazis.
Kant went conspiracy-mongering too, asserting that "There is evidence that reason is quite literally being removed from American academia, and that it is increasingly seen as racist by academics."
Liam Clancy complained about Republicans who allegedly "defend[ed]" the "violent left" by pointing out that they were attacking neo-Nazis.
And Greg Corombos promotes an interview with a "black leader" -- actually, just a guy from the tiny black-conservative group Project 21 -- getting all conspiratorial about the alleged failure of the police to stop violence in Charlotteville.
MRC Pretends Sinclair Doesn't Have A Right-Wing Bias Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center loves Sinclair Broadcast Group because it shares the MRC's right-wing media agenda. The love is felt so much, in fact, that an Aug. 9 MRC post by Aly Nielsen puts mention of Sinclair's editorial "agenda" in scare quotes as if to falsely suggest it doesn't actually exist. Then again, Nielsen is full Sinclair stenography mode:
Liberal journalists hate to be proven wrong. So they’re going to despise the latest video from Sinclair’s Mark Hyman that bashes Politico and other lefty outlets for sloppy reporting.
“Donald Trump's campaign struck a deal with Sinclair Broadcast Group during the campaign to try and secure better media coverage,” claimedPolitico. Turns out that wasn’t evenclose to the whole story.Sinclair offered to show Politico emails proving it offered the identical deal to the Clinton campaign, but Politico showed no interest.
“They’re either awfully incompetent or awfully dishonest,” said Hyman in a two-minute video.
Hyman -- and, thus, Nielsen -- are being awfully dishonest themselves. Hyman offers no evidence that Sinclair ever provided any balance to offset its pro-Trump coverage deal, and is silent on the fact that it still offers no balance to the right-wing commentary of Hyman and Boris Epshteyn. Nielsen, meanwhile, fails to mention that Sinclair's long history of right-wing bias proves the Clinton campaign correct in rejecting a purported deal.
Nielsen then complained that "The Politico piece was one of many attempts by liberal media outlets to attack Sinclair after it announced it purchased Tribune Media Co. for $3.9 billion. If approved, the May 8 purchase will add 42 new local stations, according to Bloomberg."
Nielsen doesn't mention that Sinclair's bias is playing a major role in the Trump-controlled Federal Communications Commission approving a loophole in federal regulations -- in which looks like a quid pro quo -- to allow Sinclair to own more stations beyond the current cap that would permit the Tribune purchase.She also ignores that other conservative broadcasters, such as Newsmax TV, One America News Network and The Blaze, oppose the Sinclair-Tribune deal because it would eliminate diverse media voices.
Having omitted information that discredits her post, Nielsen is reduced to whining that critics were "opposing what they saw as conservative bias in the media" -- note that she won't admit the unambiguous fact that Sinclair's bias is real -- and that criticism of the Sinclair-Tribune deal "was hypocrisy at best, and censorship at worst."
Of course, "hypocrisy at best, and censorship at worst" is pretty much how the MRC operates.
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah loves to try and steal reflected glory from others, from claiming he marched with Martin Luther King to having thought up the "Left Behind" books. His latest attempt comes in his Aug. 17 column:
When President Trump again Tuesday denounced not only the Klan, the neo-Nazis, the white supremacists and the plain old racists who were clearly guilty of violence, thuggery, instigating mayhem and, possibly, even murder in Charlottesville, Virginia, he also point out accurately and – and this point – even courageously that there was, indeed, another side to this story.
This, despite the fact that the "alt-left" is not an actual thing. As Emma Grey Ellis explains at Wired:
Ultimately, the intent seems to be to frame alt-left as the opposite of alt-right and create a false equivalence between groups on the far ends of the right and left. But here's the thing: No left-wing group has ever called itself the alt-left. And the groups smeared by the alt-left label don't include anything like the heinousness of overt white supremacism that has increasingly defined the alt-right.
It's a blanket term some right-wing media commentators and white nationalists have taken to throwing over groups they disagree with, like the umbrella of "fake news" they use to describe stories they disagree with. Doing so manages to both minimize the ugliness of the alt-right and vastly overstate the actions and intentions of leftist groups.
In other words, Farah is trying to take credit for maning something that doesn't exist. He seems a little desperate for some kind -- any kind -- of legacy.
CNS Disappears Trump's Originial, Deficient Statement on Charlottesville Topic: CNSNews.com
Melanie Arter dutifully transcribed in an Aug. 14 CNSNews.com article:
In an impromptu speech at the White House on Monday, President Donald Trump specifically called out white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Va.
The president said anyone who commits violence in the name of racism are “criminals and thugs,” and specifically named the KKK, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis.
“Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans,” Trump said.
Curiously missing from Arter's article: Any mention of Trump's statement two days earlier in which he failed to specifically call out white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan, criticism over which appears to have forced Trump's "impromptu speech" being more specific.
The following day, Arter wrote up Trump's wild remarks about Charlottesville that took stenography to a new level -- she simply presented Trump's remarks as matter-of-fact as possible and made no mention of the controversy over them. Wouldn't want inconvenient facts to get in the way of the stenography, after all.
Arter also asserted that "The president's comments come a day after he specifically condemned the white nationalists and neo-Nazis who took part in demonstrations in Charlottesville." Needless to say, Arter didn't mention Trump's deficient original statement in this article either.
Your WND Charlottesville Hot-Take Roundup Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've already noted how WorldNetDaily immediately ran to President Trump's defense on his insufficient initial remarks on the neo-Nazi-led violence in Charlottesville, Va., by putting words in his mouth. WND writers' takes on Charlottesville are so hot, they've turned into a crispy black powder.
First up is Jesse Lee Peterson bizarrely claiming that black men hate too much and white men don't hate enough:
I have warned for more than 27 years that we are in a spiritual battle of good versus evil. White people are under attack – especially white, straight, conservative Christian men of power. The children of the lie hate them because they represent good. They love truth, freedom, responsibility, the values that make America great.
Evil already wiped out black and Hispanic men – separated them from their families and deluded their thinking. Evil, too, has chipped away at whites, the last men standing in the way to stop evil from completely taking over America.
But white men have forsaken their responsibility to lead their wives and children in the right way, and to tell the truth in the world without anger, fear or apology.
Instead, white men take a timid, people-pleasing, apologizing approach toward their wives in the home, and toward angry blacks and others in the world. Their fear and weakness toward the children of the lie only makes them a greater target for evil.
Peterson then played the whataboutism card by bizarrely blaming "the anger and false-identity politics of most blacks and leftists" and not, you know, bigoted while people.
Carl Jackson served up his own Obama-centric whataboutism:
I’ve been clear and consistent over the years that I believe President Obama is responsible for setting race-relations back in America a generation because he refused to speak out against the racist propaganda of Black Lives Matter, which ultimately resulted in violence, riots and looting and the assassinations of cops across the country.
Surprisingly, Jackson alsso criticized Trump for having "unnecessarily courted the alt-right during his campaign and brought their homeboy Steve Bannon, who provided them a platform on Breitbart, into the White House.
That entire tragic exercise was a stage-show. By whom, and for what purpose? I say it was a plain and simple part of the slow-motion coup underway against President Donald Trump!
No American election has ever generated as much rage and distress as the remarkable upset victory of Donald Trump. By Saturday, Aug. 12, one thing was becoming clear. Too much good news was coming out of the Trump White House. Jobs, confidence, the fall-off of illegal border crossings and unemployment and the fall-up of American prestige and U.N. support – all this and more overshadowed the failure of all previous attempts to derail the Trump Train. Worst of all – for the Trump haters – it was becoming evident that Trump’s “tough talk” to North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un was working and would propel Trump’s popularity to still higher pinnacles. Trump’s supporters were beginning to feel the heady warmth of total vindication. His enemies were about to gag.
Either the admittedly extreme claim of this Charlottesville theory is correct, or Trump’s enemies have coincidentally harvested one of the greatest rewards in history. Consider!
Naturally, Trump forcefully denounced the violence. I assumed that meant the bigots. the so-called white nationalists or white supremacists with their zero-credible roll-call of Nazis, KKK members, David Duke followers and independent haters. But wait a minute! Apparently, Trump’s forceful condemnation was insufficiently forceful and condemnatory of the bigots!
[...]
We’re told “Trump is afraid to alienate important elements in his base.” Is it possible Trump isn’t aware of the breadth and depth of his own popularity? Trump has no reason to fear calling out the enemy by name.
Since the bigots hijacked all the news channels last Saturday, none of that good news Trump has accomplished for the American people is being mentioned in the coup-complicit media.
Also, WND ran a poll asking readers what they thought about "violence at Unite the Right event." To nobody's surprise, readers regurgitated the WND agenda by overwhelmingly choosing as the top answer: "Antifa, Black Lives Matter and -- ultimately -- Barack Obama are responsible for the outbreak of racial violence in our country."
MRC's Graham: The Act of Asking Questions Has A Liberal Bias Topic: Media Research Center
So Breitbart had a cow recently over a New York Times reporter emailing Environmental Protection Agency employees seeking information -- which, as the Washington Post's Erik Wemple points out, is kinda how journalism works.
Cue the Media Research Center's Tim Graham, whom we last saw insisting that Mike Pence denying something means more than 75 people interviewed by the Times who say otherwise. Graham rants in an Aug. 8 post:
Wemple is right that reporters don’t just have leakers call them up and leak; they often go out looking for disgruntled or ideological insiders to become their anonymous sources. But in hailing [Times reporter Coral] Davenport as “unassailable,” he’s ignoring the obvious point of Davenport’s liberal get-Pruitt agenda. After the election, Davenport lamented the victory of Donald Trump as a "new peril" for climate-change doomsters.
The truly naive people believe that journalism is something created objectively, serving a readership without any explicit attempt to convince readers to support one political side. Anyone who readsThe New York Timesfor a week should know what they’re attempting to manufacture when they create the “news.” They function as Governing Partners when Democrats are in power, and are much more hostile and thumping their chests when the Other Party is in charge.
Graham has this cynical view of journalism because that's how the MRC runs its own "news" outlet, CNSNews.com. Terry Jeffrey, Michael W. Chapman -- and, we must presume, Brent Bozell -- see CNS not as a place for journalism to take place but as a propaganda mill.Under a Democratic president, for instance, only negative news about unemployment must be reported, while a Republican president means the news must be positive.
Because CNS operates this way, Graham assumes that every news outlet operates this way. And because he and CNS are so far right, he thinks that any news outlet that doesn't look and sound like CNS must therefore be "liberal" and must be destroyed.
Of course, unlike the Times, CNS would never be caught doing actual reporting -- it's much more content to be a loyal Trumpstenographer. Graham, meanwhile, can't seem to understand why the rest of the media aren't Trump stenographers.
Graham concludes by huffing: "The email demonstrates the process or [sic] organizing anonymous sources to embarrass or inhibit government officials like Scott Pruitt from doing conservative things." If "conservative things" can be stopped simply and solely by exposing them to the light of day and, thus, embarassment, how good can they really be?
Liam Clancy writes in an Aug. 12 "news" article that, like so much of WND's content, is actually just an ad targeted to homeschoolers:
The Media Research Center's Scott Whitlock grumbles in an Aug. 15 
Leo Hohmann warns in an Aug. 18 WorldNetDaily 
The Media Research Center's Aly Nielsen 
In addition to 
We already know CNSNews.com blogger Craig Bannister is a 
On Aug. 14, after reluctantly expanding his condemnation of the violent events in Charlottesville, Va., to specifically call out neo-Nazis and white supremacists, President Trump 
Muslim-hating WorldNetDaily reporter 
John Gizzi complains in an Aug. 12 Newsmax 
We've already 
The Media Research Center 
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah loves to try and 
Melanie Arter dutifully transcribed in an Aug. 14 CNSNews.com 
We've already noted how WorldNetDaily immediately ran to President Trump's defense on his insufficient initial remarks on the neo-Nazi-led violence in Charlottesville, Va., by putting words in his mouth. WND writers' takes on Charlottesville are so hot, they've turned into a crispy black powder.
So Breitbart had a cow recently over a New York Times reporter emailing Environmental Protection Agency employees seeking information -- which, as the Washington Post's Erik Wemple 
