The Late Chuck Colson Is Still Earning Bylines At CNS Topic: CNSNews.com
Looks like Chuck Colson remains the hardest-working dead guy at CNSNews.com, still earning bylines despite the fact that he died in 2012.
Now, though, Colson is sharing bylines with an actual living person -- John Stonestreet, who now heads the BreakPoint ministry Colson founded. A July 28 CNS column appears to be nothing more than a transcript from a BreakPoint radio show, with Stonestreet doing an introduction followed by a rerun Colson commentary, this one on how archaeology allegedly proves the Bible is true.
CNS took the same lazy transcript approach with a Aug. 25 column, but for a more callous cause -- this time, denying the humanity of transgenders. (Not a surprise, given the anti-LGBT hate of CNS managing editor Michael W. Chapman.) Stonestreet touts anti-transgender "renowned psychiatrist" Paul McHugh, formerly of Johns Hopkins University, followed by a clip of Colson intoning a stereotyped, mean-spirited view of transgenders:
You see them at night in big cities: men dressed up as women, complete with makeup, jewelry, and high heels. Despite their best efforts, it’s not a pretty sight. Nor is the sight of men who take a more drastic step: undergoing so-called sex-re-assignment surgery.
As we've documented, McHugh's views on transgenders have been widely discredited -- something Stonestreet doesn't mention. Inastead, there's an snide editor's note: "This commentary first aired on June 5, 2005. Johns Hopkins University has recently, and tragically, resumed sex-reassignment surgeries."
Interesting, in neither of these columns does Stonestreet or CNS explicitly point out that Colson is dead. That would seem to be a necessary, important disclosure, given that the byline suggests otherwise.
WND's Farah Spins Another Charlottesville Conspiracy Theory Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've noted how spinning conspiracy theories has been a key part of WorldNetDaily's coverage of the events in Charlottesville, Va. And WND's leader, Joseph Farah, made sure he contributed to the cause:
While the left of the ’60s and ’70s accused the FBI and political opponents of employing agents provocateur, they did so because they themselves used them so effectively.
It certainly looks to me like history is repeating itself in 2017.
The Charlottesville “alt-right” rally, bringing together a motley collection of neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and other white supremacist scum, has all the familiar trappings of a setup by the left, designed to incite violence and mayhem that could then be blamed on Donald Trump.
Take the case of “Unite the Right” leader Jason Kessler. He had been a big-time supporter of Barack Obama, an Occupy Wall Street activist, a gun-control supporter, and, for some reason, suddenly shifted gears to become a “pro-white activist” in 2016. I suppose that could happen. Anything can happen. But this strange turnabout certainly came at a convenient time for the left. With the “Russian collusion” narrative fading as the focal point of the “Stop Trump” movement, the left needed a new cause.
The left got what they needed in Charlottesville, tragically, propelled by the death of Heather Heyer.
Did Kessler have any regrets?
Not at all. Instead he tweeted this disgusting message: “Heather Heyer was a fat, disgusting Communist. Communists have killed 94 million. Looks like it was payback time.”
There’s one thing I can absolutely assure everyone. Jason Kessler was never a right-wing activist, a conservative, a constitutionalist or even a rational American nationalist. My guess? Agent provocateur.
In fact, in a 2015 blog post, he may have given himself away. He wrote: “I can’t think of any occupation that I admire more than the professional provocateur, who has the courage and self-determination to court controversy despite all slings and arrows of the world.”
Later in his column, Farah hilariously contradicts himself, insisting he's not spinning a conspiracy at the very same time he's spinning one:
My intent is not to weave a conspiracy theory here; it’s to point out facts about this national tragedy that has left our country on the brink of a new civil war.
Who was it that told the police to stand down in Charlottesville – leading to things getting uglier than almost anyone could image?
Two people come to mind:
Virginia’s Democrat Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a big supporter of Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama; and
Charlottesville’s Democratic Mayor Mike Signer.
Since Charlottesville, we’ve seem similar clashes occur in big cities like Boston. But the police remained engaged, and tragedy was averted.
Let’s hope and pray Charlottesville was one of those unholy “perfect storms,” aided, perhaps, by overly zealous puppeteers who actually welcomed violence, mayhem and death – with the united purpose of hurting the presidency of Donald Trump.
If Farah didn't weave conspiracy theories, what would he write about?
And let's not forget that Farah has worked as the kind of "puppeteer" he now purportedly deplores, guiding Donald Trump behind the scenes on birther conspiracies and doing other things with the purpose of hurting the presidency of Barack Obama.
Newsmax Columnist Complains About Lack of Respect for President, Forgets Who His Employer Is Topic: Newsmax
James Hirsen complains in his Aug. 21 Newsmax column: "One of the unfortunate byproducts of the irrational treatment of President Donald J. Trump by the politically entrenched establishment class, predisposed mainstream media, and Hollywood radical left is a precipitous decline in the respect customarily surrounding the presidency." Hirsen was referencing how some recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors were refusing to show up to accept the award if President Trump was to show up.
Hirsen, however, seems to have forgotten who publishes his column.
Newsmax has never shown much respect for President Obama. Then-reporter Ronald Kessler repeatedly attacked him during the 2008 presidential campaign, as did other Newsmax writers. After the election, Newsmax had trouble accepting the results, with one Newsmax columnist likening him to Hitler and another calling for a military coup to resolve the "Obama problem" -- among the many ways Newsmax disrespected Obama just in his first year in office, which also included embracing birtherism.
Indeed, to this day some Newsmax writers are still suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome.
Seems like Hirsen should have started in his own house before attacking others over lack of respect for the president.
CNS Managing Editor Pens A Political Attack, Calls It 'News' Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman huffs in an Aug. 18 "news" article:
When Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was Speaker of the House for four years (2007-2010), at least 709,885 black babies were killed by abortion, which is 35.4% of all the abortions during those years, according to the Abortion Surveillance reports of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
[...]
In all, that equals 709,885 black abortions -- 35.4% of the total -- during the four years that Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House, based upon the areas that reported to the CDC.
There were a total 1,918,419 abortions during those four years.
Blacks make up 13.3% of the U.S. population, according to theCensus Bureau.
In 2015, Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion provider, presented then-Speaker Pelosi (D-Calif.) with the Margaret Sanger Award. The award is Planned Parenthood's "highest honor" and is named for a woman who believed in breeding better humans through eugenics and even promoted her birth control philosophy to female members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
What is the "news" hook that justifies the existence of this article? None that we're aware of -- the Margaret Sanger Award Pelosi received was two years ago. What direct link does Pelosi have to the number of black women having abortions? None. What relevance does the number of abortions among blacks have to any current debate about abortion, expecially given that no organized campaign led by Planned Parenthood or anyone else exists for force black women to have abortions? None.
In other words, Chapman is simply making a partisan political attack and, yes, presenting it as "news" -- it does appears in the "news" section of CNS.
One side note: As proof of Sanger's speaking to "female members of the Ku Klux Klan," Chapman links to a 2015 CNS column by right-wing historian Paul Kengor in which he's responding to me (though he refused to use my name) after I had called him out for distorting the events surrounding Sanger's talk and for misleading about Sanger in general. Kengor didn't condede his factual failings, of course, but he effectively admits he's exploiting the alleged ambiguity of Sanger's words to present the worst possible interpretation of them as fact in order to smear her as a virulent racist.
Fake-News Story Still Live And Uncorrected At WND Topic: WorldNetDaily
On Aug. 20, WorldNetDaily copied-and-pasted an article from an Australian news website (misleadingly credited to the New York Post, which is merely cited in the article) about Joshua Witt, "believes his long-on-top, buzzed-on-the-sides haircut got him mistaken for" a neo-Nazi, "and he was nearly stabbed to death by a confused anti-fascist."
Turns out that's not true. Authorities now say that Witt's knife wounds were self-inflicted, and that he made up the story about being attacked by a protester "with hopes that the Department of Veterans Affairs would pay for his medical bills."
Despite the fact that Witt's faslehood has been exposed for two days now, WND's original copy-and-past job remains on its website live and uncorrected.
WND does have this problem of perpetuating fake news (not to mention generatingitsown). For instance, a story WND copied-and-pasted onto its website in February about a claim that "dozens of Arab men sexually assaulted female patrons at bars and restaurants in downtown Frankfurt on New Year’s Eve 2016" has long been discredited, but it remains live and uncorrected five months later.
MRC Plays the Reagan Hagiography Card Topic: Media Research Center
In the middle of an Aug. 23 post comlplaining that CNN's Don Lemon had a "deranged reaction to President Trump's Arizona rally," the Media Research Center's Curtis Houck took a little time to complain that "Lemon falsely claimed that Ronald Reagan already had Alzheimer’s Disease while President," later restating that "Lemon promoted fake news about Reagan."
How does Houck know that this is "false" and "fake news"? The only evidence he cites is from conservative columnist George Will and a review of a book by conservative Craig Shirley on Reagan done by "conservative scholar Lee Edwards."
Meanwhile, Reagan's son, Ron Reagan Jr. -- who likely had a closer, more realistic view of the situation than a couple of Reagan hagiogrphers -- argued that his father may have shown some early signs of Alzheimer's during his presidency, such as the occasional bout of forgetfulness.
So it appears that, at best, the jury is out on the issue. Perhaps Houck shouldn't be making such a definitive claim without examining evidence from people not predisposed to default to polishing Reagan's legacy.
WorldNetDaily's Paul Bremmer writes fawningly about his boss in an Aug. 24 article:
“These are sick people,” President Trump thundered during his Tuesday night rally in Phoenix. “If you wanted to discover the source of the division in our country, look no further than the fake news and crooked media. It’s time to expose the crooked media deceptions and to challenge the media for their role in fomenting divisions, and yes, by the way, they are trying to take away our history and our heritage.”
The crowd applauded wildly. This is the type of fighter Trump voters wanted when they elected him president, according to award-winning journalist and WND managing editor David Kupelian.
“Everybody’s been afraid all my life of the news media – all the politicians, because they want to get re-elected,” Kupelian said in an interview this week on “Caravan to Midnight.” “Trump comes out and says, ‘You’re dishonest, you’re fake news. No, I won’t take a question from you; you’re fake news. You’re not fake news; you’re very fake news.’
“Everybody loves that because it’s a guy who’s not intimidated by the news media.”
Of course, the website of which Kupelian is managing editor is infamous for promulgatingfakenews, the fakest of which is its obsession with birtherism. Kupelian has apparently forgotten that he denounced those very same voters for that very act, insisting they purportedly did so "to absolve their guilt over our great national sin of slavery."
Kupelian also tried to defend Trump -- the man for whom he sold out any moral principles he claimed to have because wanted to be on what he hoped would be the winning side -- against accusations of racism and, by extension, the idea that there's still racism in America:
“For God’s sake, America is the least racist nation on the face of the Earth and the least racist nation in all of history,” Kupelian said. “The great American middle class bought into Martin Luther King’s dream of a colorblind America. … The vast engine of America, the great middle class, changed its mind, basically, on segregation in one generation, and we got rid of it legally but also in our culture. And the proof of that – we elected a black guy twice as president.
Kupelian apparently also forgot that his website tried to smear and denigrate that "black guy" at every opportunity, including likening him to Hitler and the Antichrist -- or that his top boss, Joseph Farah, refused to acknowledge Obama was ever president. It's likely that race played some role in WND's vicious campaign of hate against Obama.
CNS Is The Mark Levin's Official Stenographer, Apparently Topic: CNSNews.com
We alreadyknow CNSNews.com is the unofficial stenographer for the Trump administration. But CNS serves also serves as the (apparently) semi-official stenographer for right-wing radio host Mark Levin.
CNS' parent, the Media Reseach Center, has long been in a business relationship with Levin regarding mutual promotion, which is still in force as far as we know. That would certainly explain the frequency at which CNS simply transcribes something Levin said on his radio show.
Indeed, so far in the month of August alone, CNS has a whopping 16 articles of Levin stenography:
In addition, there was a CNS post transcribing a Levin guest host, Ben Shapiro.
No radio host is that newsworthy -- that's more than one stenography session every two days. That frequency tells us the CNS standard on Levin is not newsworthiness at all but, rather, keeping up its end of a business deal. If true, that makes these "articles" advertising, not "news," and they should be identified as such.
NEW ARTICLE: Once More Into The Heart of Whiteness Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's insistence that whites in South Africa are being subject to a "genocide" is so fictional, a WND columnist used bogus quotes from an anti-genocide activist to try and further it. Read more >>
MRC Researcher Plays Trump Protector Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center shows they're all about protecting President Trump and not so much about "media research" in an Aug. 22 post by Nicholas Fondacaro, who's trying way too hard.
Fondacaro is very concerned that an Instagram post by Louise Linton, wife of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, bragging about her designer duds while traveling on a government plane would be used to make Trump look bad.Fondacaro complained that CNN's Jake Tapper "tried to link someone else’s Instagram controversy to the President" and was claiming that Linton's comments were "somehow Trump’s responsibility because of his 2016 campaign messaging.Finally, Fondacaro huffed:
It’s one thing to discuss Linton’s Instagram post and her relation to the Treasury Secretary. But it’s another to try and rope the President into it. Trump appointed her husband, not her, to a position in the government. So her actions bear little or no weight on Trump’s shoulders.
We suspect Fondacaro would not be so eager to distance Linton from Trump if the president was a Democrat.
WND's Medical Misinformer Now Misinforms to Defend Trump Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's chief medical misinformer, Jane Orient of the far-right-fringe Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, knows how to misinform about non-medical things too.
In her Aug. 24 WND column, Orient goes far afield from her claimed area of expertise to play defense for President Trump and to blame the media and other various enemies real and imagined for not letting Trump talk about infrastructure during the White House's Infrastructre Week, and not Trump himself for feeling the need to rant about confederate statues instead of staying on topic:
President Trump sent a signal that he was going to start cutting useless red tape. Would this be good for black people? Poor people? Industry? Taxpayers? Absolutely yes, yes, yes and yes. It would be a start for making America great again.
But the signal set off panic among swamp dwellers: the 3 million bureaucrats who block productive work, the lobbyists who advocate for rules to crush little guys, CEOs of mega-corporations who dread competition. And of course there are those who really don’t want America to be great and politicians who keep their power by demagoguing on problems they themselves caused.
The hate-Trump, stop-Trump-at-all-costs media couldn’t allow people to learn about our infrastructure problems and what must be done to fix them. They needed a diversion. So they talked about a mob scene in Charlottesville, where part of the project to obliterate America’s history is happening.
Orient then decided she knew best about what black people need:
Some type 2s carried Black Lives Matter signs. Black lives are indeed threatened, but not by swastika-waving misfits. These are their real problems:
Crime. Thousands of blacks are killed by (mostly black) criminals, mostly in inner cities ruled by liberal Democrats for decades. Trump wants more effective law enforcement.
Drugs. While authorities blame doctors, international drug cartels thrive under the protection of sanctuary cities, pushing heroin, carfentanyl and other things you can’t get at Walgreen’s. Thousands are dying. Trump wants to clean up sanctuary cities.
Abortion. More than 19 million black babies have been aborted since 1973; the rate is three times that of whites. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was a rabid racist. Trump wants to decrease abortion.
Poor medical care. The past eight years of Obamacare have brought huge cost increases and deterioration in availability and quality. Trump wants to repeal it.
Disease and poverty. Over-regulation by environmental radicals, based on fraudulent science, has killed and keeps on killing millions of African blacks (from resurgent malaria since banning DDT), and the war on affordable energy will keep Africa mired in poverty. Americans are less affected – so far. Trump wants to restore reason and honesty to the EPA and other regulatory agencies.
Many of Orient's assertions are BS. Obamacare reduced racial disparities in health coverage and a repeal would increase them; Margaret Sanger was not a "rabid racist"; and overuse of DDT created malaria-carrying mosquitoes that couldn't be killed by the chemical.
Orient touts how Trump "is serious about draining the swamp." He may or may not be relying on more accurate information than Orient is.
Harvey Ends CNS' Years Of Writing About How Long It's Been Since A 'Major Hurricane' Topic: CNSNews.com
Over the past couple years, CNSNews.com has loved to tout how long it's been since a "major hurricane" has made landfall in the U.S. -- making sure to define "major hurricane" as narrowly as possible -- as an (failed) argument agains global warming. Hurricane Harvey, however, has forced CNS to change its arguments -- though not its conclusion, since that's right-wing dogma, since climate denialism is right-wing dogma that can't be disputed.
On Aug. 24, reporter Susan Jones bid a fond farewell to that longtime template: "Thursday, August 24, 2017 marks a record 142 straight months since the last major hurricane made landfall in the continental United States. But that record major-hurricane drought may be coming to an end." She continued CNS' arbitrary designation of "major hurricane" as one being category 3 or higher.
The next day, as Harvey bore down on Texas, Jones seemingly contradicted CNS' previous talking point by pointing out how hurricanes hit Texas seemingly all the time: "A total of 63 hurricanes have made landfall in Texas since record-keeping began in 1851, according to data posted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Harvey would be number 64." She also included a list of hurricanes that hit Texas, highlighting how many years it was between hurricanes.
That was followed a couple hours later by another Jones article, in which she flip-flopped again by downplaying how many "major hurricanes" there have been:
Major hurricanes, defined as Category 3 or higher, have made direct landfall in the continental United States in every decade since 1851, except for the present decade. That may change tonight.
Since 1851, when the government started keeping records, 274 hurricanes have made direct landfall in the continental United States (see note below), according to data provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Of those 274 direct-landfall hurricanes, only 94, or 34.30 percent, have been "major" storms, defined as Category 3 or higher, with winds at or above 111 miles an hour.
A note at the end of Jones' article demonstrated just how narrowly she was defining things: "The 274 direct-landfall number excludes hurricanes that did not make landfall in the continental U.S. but may have produced hurricane-force winds on land from locations offshore; and it excludes four storms that made landfall in Mexico, producing hurricane-force winds in Texas."
Finally, when Harvey made landfall, Jones wrote a rare weekend article with a final body count, as it were: "Hurricane Harvey roared ashore near Corpus Christie as Category 4 storm late Friday night, breaking a record 4,323-day (142-month, 12-year) major hurricane drought." And, of course, morecaveats about how narrowly she's defining things:
Since 2005, only nine relatively minor hurricanes (Categories 1 or 2 – and yes, they can be damaging) have made direct landfall in the United States.
That does not include the devastating superstorm Sandy, which approached New Jersey as a Category 1 hurricane, but transitioned into a “post-tropical cyclone” just before making landfall near Atlantic City, N.J. in October 2012, according to the National Weather Service.
[...]
(As noted above, Superstorm Sandy devastated parts of the crowded New York-N.J.-New England area during Obama’s term, but it was not a hurricane when it hit land.)
Jones concluded her article with a little Trump stenography, this time transcribing Trump's Harvey-related tweets.
MRC Gives Right-Wing Catholic Activist A Platform to Misdirect Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center regularlygives Catholic League leader Bill Donohue a platform to lie and mislead about untoward sexual matters regarding Catholic priests. It does so again in an Aug. 18 post in which Donohue desperately tries to distract from a Boston Globe story about children fathered by priests.
After trying to reframe the issue by claiming it's really only "as little as one percent or less of priests having fathered a child," Donohue really lets the spin fly:
So the question arises: Is the phenomenon of priests fathering children, then neglecting or abandoning them—while clearly sinful and morally wrong—so singularly egregious as to warrant such an exclusive exposé?
How do these speculative numbers and percentages compare with Protestant, Jewish or Muslim clergy illegitimately fathering children, then neglecting or abandoning them? We don't know, because Rezendes and the Globe show no inclination to investigate any clergy other than Catholic priests. To do so might undermine what is clearly part of the agenda here: to attack the Catholic Church's rule on priestly celibacy. Neglected children of priests, Rezendes writes, "are the unfortunate victims of a church that has, for nearly 900 years, forbidden priests to marry...."
And what of our secular culture? Citing the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Fatherhood Initiative reported recently that "24 million children, 1 out of 3, live without their biological father in the home." And "millions more," notes the National Center for Fathering, "have dads who are physically present, but emotionally absent."
"If it were classified as a disease," the National Center for Fathering observes, "fatherlessness would be an epidemic worthy of attention as a national emergency."
But that is apparently not worthy of the attention of the Boston Globe's "Spotlight" team. They would rather focus on the apparently tiny minority of Catholic priests worldwide who have fathered and neglected their children, than on the epidemic in our own country that has left fully one-third of American children growing up without fathers.
Donohue conveniently fails to mention that most of the religions he cites, unlike Catholicism, permit their priests to marry and do not make them take a vow of celibacy. And Donohue's attempt to grouse about "secular culture" is simply an attempt to put up a smokescreen to hide the fact that Catholic priests are not supposed to be fathering children.
Meanwhile, the MRC once again failed to disclose an important confict of interest: MRC chief Brent Bozell is on the board of advisers for Donohue's Catholic League. Which just makes Donohue's rant even more dishonest.
WND Columnist: Taking Down Confederate Statues Like Whitewashing Holocaust (?) Topic: WorldNetDaily
Ted Baehr begins his Aug. 23 WorldNetDaily column by Ted Baehr begins by bizarrely claiming that the Dachau concentration camp had been "cleaned up, sanitized and almost turned into a park. There was none of the terrible remnants of the genocide that occurred. They had scrubbed and whitewashed the history of Dachau."
Actually, no -- the folks running the Dachau memorial site make sure you know it was a concentration camp.
Baehr then even more bizarrely presents his flawed Dachau claim as an analogy for the debate over removal of Confederate monuments:
Certainly, those who are sanitizing and removing Confederate monuments are also wiping away the memory of the brutality and horrors of slavery. Yes, these monuments might be offensive, but there are lots of things that are offensive. Dachau was offensive. However, anyone who thinks clearly will know that knowing history is important to keep us from repeating the same mistakes and indulging in the same evils over and over again. If you remove all the Confederate monuments and statues in the United States, people will no longer be able to talk about the history of the Confederacy during the Civil War, including the part slavery played in how that war began and how it developed during the four years in which it occurred, or all the many people who died during the war and why.
Hoo boy. First, Baehr doesn't seem to realize that his Dachau-Confederacy analogy makes the Confederacy look even worse than he probably intended.
Second, and more importantly, Baehr doesn't understand that those Confederate monuments were not built to serve as a reminder of "the brutality and horrors of slavery" -- they were built to celebrate the Confederacy and to further the idea of white supremacy and black subjugation. The people who erected many of these monuments wanted to repeat the mistake of the Confederacy.
As for Baehr's claim that "if you remove all the Confederate monuments and statues in the United States, people will no longer be able to talk about the history of the Confederacy during the Civil War," he will be pleased to learn about the existence of things called books and TV shows where the Civil War is discussed in depth. Removal of Confederate statues doesn't affect the existence of other media.
If the Confederacy really was as evil as Baehr says it is, shouldn't he be in favor of removing statues that were erected for the express purpose of celebrating that evil?
Looks like we have a frontrunner for next year's LoBaido Award for dumbest ConWeb commentary.
MRC Defending 'Patriot Prayer' Rally, Hides Its Alt-Right Roots Topic: Media Research Center
In an Aug. 18 CNSNews.com post, Craig Bannister was eager to serve as stenographer for "Patriot Prayer" organizer Joey Gibson when he appeared on Fox News (of course) to defend an upcoming rally in San Francisco from allegations of white supremacist ties:
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is calling for the National Park Service to revoke the permit for a Patriot Prayer event because she says it’s a “white supremacist rally” – even though the organizer and all but one speaker are not white.
“The National Park Service’s decision to permit a white supremacist rally at Crissy Field raises grave and ongoing concerns about public safety,” House Minority Leader Pelosi declared in a statement calling for cancellation of the conservative event scheduled for Aug. 26 in San Francisco, California.
[...]
But, Patriot Prayer rally organizer Joey Gibson calls Pelosi’s claim a “ridiculous lie” intended to gin up violence, not stop it.
Speaking to Fox News Host Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, Gibson explains that he’s not even white – and has scheduled an extremely diverse group of speakers:
“I’m not white.We have about eight speakers and only one speaker is white. You know, we have a couple of black speakers, a Hispanic, we have a transsexual speaker; we have a woman speaker. It’s very diverse. It’s really just about what’s on the inside – what you believe, what’s in your heart, your soul – it has nothing to do with skin color.”
[...]
Gibson not only promises to keep Nazis and white supremacists out of the event, he also says they won’t even want to attend - because all, but one, speaker is non-white[.]
Similarly, Corinne Weaver rushes to Patriot Prayer's defense in an Aug. 25 MRC NewsBusters post attacking counter-protester Terrence Ryan for calling the rally "alt-right" in an article on the website Bustle:
One has to wonder: did Ryan read the Patriot Prayer announcement on Facebook? The group specifically stated that they are bringing in minorities to speak at the rally. It said, “Before you accuse Patriot Prayer as being hateful, please find specific examples. You will not find any hate speech, you are being lied to by corrupt politicians. SF is supposed to be a safe haven for minorities. If this is true then please be respectful to the speakers we are bringing in. 3 black, 2 hispanic, 1 asian, 1 Samoan, 1 muslim, 2 woman, and 1 white male. There will also be an opportunity for an open mic for moderate Americans.”
There is also a transexual who will be leading a prayer group at the rally. But all the people saw was that it was organized by a Trump supporter. While Bustle begrudgingly admitted that the group had stated that it was not a “hate group,” it also gleefully reported that the rally has less than half of the pledged attendees that the “poop protest” has.
Why is Bustle encouraging this kind of passive-aggressive childish behavior? The Patriot Prayer Rally isn’t illegal, while a rally to have dogs defecate on public property is an act of civil disobedience.
Are these people--and Bustle--guilty of the same kind of hatred that they accuse Neo-Nazis of harboring?
Well, Bannister and Weaver are definitely guilty of trying to whitewash the fact that Patriot Prayer does indeed have alt-right origins.
David Neiwert explains at the Southern Poverty Law Center that a previous Patriot Prayer rally featured members of the white-nationalist Identify Evropa group, and the right-wing "III Percenter" militia provides security at all of Gibson's events. The SPLC adds that a typical Gibson "prayer" event "clearly appears more an attempt to troll the left than a sincere effort at dialogue."
In other words, there are legitimate concerns about the intent of Gibson's rally. Too bad the MRC doesn't feel like telling its readers the whole truth, instead gullibly taking Gibson at his word when he claims there's no alt-right ties.
UPDATE: Matthew Balan insisted that NPR "improperly" labeled Patriot Prayer as "alt-right"; his only defense is that "the controversial liberal Southern Poverty Law Center "does not list Patriot Prayer as such, nor is [founder Joey] Gibson considered an extremist," acccording to a Wednesday report from The Mercury News."
Oh, suddenly the MRC considers the SPLC to be authoritative when it's in the MRC's interest to do so? Balan didn't mention that the SPLC considers Gibson to be a troll.
Looks like Chuck Colson remains the hardest-working dead guy at CNSNews.com, still earning bylines despite the fact that he died in 2012.
We've noted how spinning conspiracy theories has been a key part of WorldNetDaily's coverage of the events in Charlottesville, Va. And WND's leader, Joseph Farah, made sure he 
James Hirsen complains in his Aug. 21 Newsmax 
CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman huffs in an Aug. 18 "news" 
In the middle of an Aug. 23 
WorldNetDaily's Paul Bremmer writes fawningly about his boss in an Aug. 24 
We 
The Media Research Center shows they're all about protecting President Trump and not so much about "media research" in an Aug. 22 
WorldNetDaily's chief medical misinformer, 
Over the past couple years, CNSNews.com has 
The Media Research Center 
Ted Baehr begins his Aug. 23 WorldNetDaily 
In an Aug. 18 CNSNews.com 
