In a stunning example of moral sanity and common sense, the Department of Education will now reject any cases dealing with bathroom complaints by transgender students, reported BuzzFeed, and which leftist Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) addressed in a tweet with #ProtectTransStudents.
On Monday, BuzzFeed ran a storyheadlined, "The Education Department Says it Will Reject Transgender Bathroom Complaints."
The story noted that the Trump administration, back in February 2017, rescinded Obama-era rules that said public schools should allow transgenders to use the bathroom of their choice, e.g., a male student who imagines he is female may use the ladies room. Since then, liberals and LGBT activists have demanded that the Trump administration clarify its position on this issue.
On Feb. 8, Education Department spokesman Liz Hill told BuzzFeed that the federal Title IX law "prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, not gender identity."
Note Chapman's highly biased language, portraying the right-wing policy change as dripping with "moral sanity and common sense" while dismissing critics of it as "liberals" and "leftists."
Chapman went on to quote his favorite anti-trans doctor, Paul McHugh, claiming that "transgenderism is a 'mental disorder' that can be treated and sex change is 'biologically impossible' because one cannot change one's chromosomes." He didn't mention that McHugh's views have beendiscredited.
Chapman concludes: "Clearly, the proper response to transgenderism is mental health treatment, not bathroom reassignment." Meanwhile, Chapman's employer (and, quite likely, Chapman himself) thinks the proper response to homosexuality is conversion therapy.
Another WND Columnist Peddles Lies About Margaret Sanger Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily writers love to lie about Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. The latest is the guy who calls himself (at WND, anyway) Mason Weaver, who spends his March 22 column falsely portraying Sanger's unfortunate predeliction for eugenics as racism. Weaver writes:
Her “The Birth Control Review” stated in the July-August 1932 edition, “There are other more remote but equally important gains. One is the enhanced respect to be had from the dominant white race. That the Negro must acquire if he is to enjoy the rights and prerogatives he covets. But acquire it he cannot and will not so long as he remains the thriftless, childlike, irresponsible dependent that he is, for such behavior does not command respect.” Even in the social climate of 1932, this seems harsh and racist.
Weaver seems to have lifted this with minor editing -- as well as much of the rest of his column -- from a pseudonymously written 2009 blog post. But while Sanger did found Birth Control Review, she gave up control of it in 1928, four years before this article allegedly appeared, and thus could not have responsible for it.
Weaver goes on to revive an old false chestnut:
Why are black leaders silent on this? How much has their silence cost us? And how much damage has been done to the mental state of the community from their silence? Now that you know, will your silence add to the pain?
It does not matter that the sins of the past were done out of lack of knowledge – to continue them after awakening is the greater error.
In a famous letter to a Dr. Gamble, dated Dec. 10, 1039 [sic], Sanger reveals her plans but warns, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
But as fact-checkers regularly point out every time some rabid Sanger-hater pulls this quote out of context, Sanger was trying to trying to separate her birth-control campaign from sterilization campaigns targeted at blacks that actually were racist.
So not only is Weaver wrong, he's effectively a plagiarist as well.
MRC Suggests Stephon Clark Deserved To Be Killed By Police Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Brad Wilmouth writes in a March 23 post:
On Friday'sThe Beaton MSNBC, host Ari Melber claimed that the media do not spend enough time on stories of excessive force committed by police officers as his panel that included rapper Vic Mensa and conservative commentator Bill Kristol all seemed to prejudge Sacramento police officers as having behaved improperly in the shooting death of 22-year-old Stephon Clark.
No one mentioned that the police were pursuing him because they had reason to believe -- including infrared footage from a police helicopter -- that he had just perpetrated several acts of vandalism and robbery, or that Clark has a criminal history that includes domestic abuse and robbery.
In fact, it's not clear that Clark was the subject police were pursuing, and it's highly unlikely police knew of Clark's criminal record before shooting him.
Wilmouth does not explain why -- even if both of those things prove to be true -- Clark deserved to be shot 20 times for, essentially, holding a cell phone.
David Kupelian's Factual Fail Topic: WorldNetDaily
As a sidebar to the sparsely read Whistleblower magazine's theme of the month, "Why the Left Hates America" (“Christianity, the flag, free speech, being white – when did they become problems?”) WorldNetDaily managing editor David Kupelian posted a March 18 column presented as "based on a speech David Kupelian recently delivered in St. Louis as the lead-off speaker at the Constitutional Coalition’s annual conference" but also apparently appears in the magazine as well.And almost at the beginning, Kupelian shows he's willing to distort the truth:
A new California law, SB 219, signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, says you can be thrown into prison for 12 months for failing to use the correct transgender pronoun. That is, for refusing to use words that never existed before – newly created pronouns like co, en, ey, xie and yo, which correspond to dozens of new genders that also never existed before in human history, like genderqueer, pangender, hijra and genderfluid.
Kupelian is basically lying. As PolitiFact explained when others made the claim Kupelian is echoing:
There’s no doubt conservative media groups wrote misleading and inflammatory headlines about California’s LGBT Senior Bill of Rights. They seized on the small chance that one could face criminal charges for using the wrong pronoun to identify a transgender resident in a long-term care home.
But the headlines, and some of the articles that follow, don’t fully explain the high bar necessary for criminal prosecution. Calling someone by the wrong pronoun would have to be repeated and willful, as some articles detail. But this action would also have to put a resident at risk of death or serious physical harm -- though at least one religious liberty group disputes that this would be necessary to bring criminal charges.
What seems clear is that in the overwhelming majority of cases, this would be treated as any other violation of the health and safety code at a long-term care center, such as violating a smoking ban, and punished with a fine.
While not without a sliver of truth, the claims by conservative groups clearly distort the penalty proposed for violating this part of the bill.
Nevertheless, Kupelian clung to this fiction, ranting later in his column: "When you’re talking about putting people in jail because they refuse to enter into your delusional world wherein you’re some gender that doesn’t exist and they must use some pretend, unpronounceable pronoun – we are way beyond politics and into genuine madness."
The rest of Kupelian's column is his usual liberal-bashing claptrap, none of which is any different from the kind of content that nearly put WND out of business.
MRC Defends Government Conspiracy Theories -- Then Blames Hollywood, Not Conservatives, For Them Topic: Media Research Center
Media Research Center intern Ryan Foley spent a March 20 post presenting as credible a Republican congressman's argument there really is a massive "deep state"-type conspiracy going on against President Trump:
During a Monday night interview with Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz (Fla.), CNN's AC360 host Anderson Cooper dismissed the idea of a "secret society" within the FBI, arguing that the text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page alleging the existence of such a society were "lighthearted." When Gaetz suggested that an "informal cabal" committed to taking down President Trump may actually exist, Cooper dismissed Gaetz’s premise: "that sounds like a massive conspiracy theory."
[...]
Gaetz did not seem confident in Cooper’s assertion of the text messages as “lighthearted remarks”, adding “there are still messages we haven’t seen” and implying that the 1.2 million records the House Judiciary Committee has requested may prove the existence of “an informal cabal functioning in secret with a societal goal of hurting President Trump without any evidence.” Cooper remained dismissive of the idea of corruption at the FBI and an “informal cabal” at the FBI, telling Rep. Gaetz “That sounds like a massive conspiracy theory.”
Gaetz again made the case that the conspiracy presents a threat to American democracy, citing the Inspector General’s report advocating for McCabe’s firing as a validation of “many of the concerns that I’ve raised along with many of my colleagues.” McCabe received a pink slip on Friday, mere hours before his retirement was scheduled to go into effect.
Along with some of his fellow House Republicans, Gaetz has advocated for a second Special Counsel to examine the work of the Inspector General and Congress in addition to taking legal action against any purveyors of wrongdoing at the FBI and the Department of Justice, which the Inspector General’s Office does not have the authority to do.
Gaetz will continue to have a hard time convincing Cooper and the rest of the media that some at “the upper echelon” of the FBI have an out for President Trump and want to use their power to take him down. The media will never openly admit it but many of them have the same exact goal.
Despite this embrace of right-wing conspiracy-mongering, the MRC's Tim Graham just five days later blamed this exact thing not on right-wing politicians desperate to defend Trump no matter what but, rather, on ... Hollywood? Yes, Hollywood:
It’s self-evident that the vast majority of our government is unelected – 536 officials supervising a federal workforce estimated at 7 to 9 million people (including contractors). But what about the secret manipulation of policy? One blatantly obvious current illustration of a “deep state” is the current and former unelected officials who hide behind a wall of anonymous sourcing as they direct the news media on how to report on government and public policy.
But if [Chris] Matthews wanted to complain about the public being overly concerned about secret manipulation of government, there is an obvious culprit in building this viewpoint: Hollywood.
First, think of the decades of movie plots centering on government conspiracies, from George Clooney’s Syriana to Oliver Stone’s JFK. The X-Files has been a movie and a TV series (now making a second run for the ratings under Trump). Everything we believe about the history of America, and our belief in the goodness of America, is mocked as naïve by films like this.
Then think of the TV shows. These days, we are loaded with TV shows with secret government machinations: Scandal and Designated Survivor on ABC, Blindspot and The Blacklist on NBC, Snowfall on FX and Homeland on Showtime. Even the police procedurals, from the Law & Order franchise on NBC to the NCIS franchise on CBS, have featured plots exposing nefarious government conspiracies.
Yet we doubt Graham will be lecturing Gaetz anytime soon about his inability to differentiate between fact and fiction.
Graham then tries to push his claim one step further:
Hollywood focuses all of its venom on Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex.” It’s easy to build suspicion about our intelligence agencies and the Pentagon abusing their Top Secret clearances for greedy ends. There’s zero chance of a plot on a large government-funded abortion conglomerate outrageously selling the body parts of aborted babies. They’d probably suggest that’s too over-the-top for a fictional program.
That might make sense, too, if 1) any federal money to Planned Parenthood actually paid for abortion, which it doesn't, and 2) numerous state-level investigations hadn't found there was no actual evidence Planned Parenthood sold body parts.
Graham would seem to deserve being mocked for going conspiratorial.
WND Portrays Ban on Discredited Gay Conversion Therapy As A 'Speech Ban' Topic: WorldNetDaily
The Media Research Center isn't the only ConWeb outlet that's trying to defend the discredited practice of conversion therapy to turn gays straight.
Bob Unruh's March 2 WorldNetDaily article on a proposed ban on all conversion therapy in California hits all the biased, anti-gay notes:
Unruh frames the therapy ban as a "speech ban."
He refers to being gay as a "lifestyle choice" and the entire LGBT spectrum as "alternative lifestyle choices."
He gives a platform to Randy Thomasson, head of the anti-gay group Save California, to claim that "There are tens of thousands of FORMER homosexuals and FORMER transsexuals in our country. They changed back to their natural gender once they learned that homosexuality and transsexuality are not biologically-based" -- but Thomasson does not substantite the numbers.
He also puts a weird frame on conversion therapy itself, claiming that youth seeking it "want counseling in ways that differ from state orthodoxy on LGBTQ issues." Isn't the "state orthodoxy" on the issue one of keeping these people from being exploited or abused?
Unruh also claims as fact that "the bias of a trial court judge and the prevailing political perspective in the Obama administration that homosexuality should be promoted killed a New Jersey counseling program that offered help to those who are frustrated with same-sex feelings," citing a 2015 WND article as evidence. In fact, the article, also by Unruh, attributes the "bias" claim to a "licensed professional counselor" who opposes efforts to ban conversion therapy, and he does not substantiate his claim that the Obama administration "promoted" homosexuality as opposed to, say, merely refusing to discrimiate against it, as Unruh apparently prefers.
Unruh even went on to provide a sanitized rehash of the lawsuit that forced JONAH, a counseling organization that specialized in conversion therapy, out of business, lamenting that JONAH was deprived by the judge of using "five of the six expert witnessees" in its defense. But he ignores the evidence showing that the verdict was deserved. As the Southern Poverty Law Center reported:
Testimony at the trial revealed the JONAH program’s bizarre and abusive techniques, which included instructing men to undress and instructing one plaintiff to touch his genitals in a private counseling session. JONAH orchestrated violent role-play exercises, encouraging clients to beat effigies of their mothers, who were sometimes blamed for their sons’ homosexuality. Male counselors advocated “healthy touch” sessions that included prolonged cuddling. JONAH’s tactics alienated some clients from their families and caused them to blame themselves or family members for their sexual orientation.
Unruh does not explain, either in the 2015 article or now, how those "expert witnesses" could have possibly explained that away as acceptable counseling methods.
CNS Gives Anti-Trans Writer (And His New Book) A Platform Topic: CNSNews.com
As befits a "news" organization with an unrepentant homophobe as managing editor, CNSNews.com gives a lot of space to peple with anti-LGBT views. One of them is Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation.
Anderson is an anti-gay activist who tends to rely on shoddy research and dishonest attacks to back up his work, and he get lots of right-wing press because he presents himself as reasonable, though he really isn't.
Last July, CNS gave Anderson space to rant that, as summarized in the headline, "Biology Isn’t Bigotry: 5 Reasons Why Trans Accommodations Aren’t Compatible with Military Realities." Anderson also promoted "my forthcoming book 'When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.'"
When that book came out earlier this year, CNS gave Anderson a lot more space. A Jan. 22 column touted the work of anti-trans doctor Paul McHugh, despite the fact that his work has been widelydiscredited. (Of course, that hasn't exactly stopped that homophobic managing editor, Michael W. Chapman, from promoting McHugh either.)
Anderson's Feb. 1 CNS column perfectly illustrates the faux-reasonable attitude he purports to bring to the trans debate:
Properly understanding sex, gender, gender identity, and gender dysphoria will continue to be pressing concerns in 2018.
A proper understanding is a prerequisite for properly forming people in the truth and properly ministering to people in need.
As new gender ideologies are promoted throughout America, their lies will impact not only those who suffer from gender dysphoria, but all children who need to mature in their self-understanding as a boy or girl, man or woman, a potential husband or wife, father or mother.
Anderson then claims that "My book provides a nuanced view of our sexed embodiment, a balanced approach to policy issues involving transgender identity and gender more broadly, and a sober and honest survey of the human costs of getting human nature wrong." Given that he's already dismissed anyone who disagrees with his viewpoint as liars, we doubt there's much actual nuance involved.
Indeed, his Feb. 9 column huffed that "at the heart of the transgender moment are radical ideas about the human person," adding: "A transgender future is not the 'right side of history,' yet activists have convinced the most powerful sectors of our society to acquiesce to their demands. While the claims they make are manifestly false, it will take real work to prevent the spread of these harmful ideas."
Anderson's Feb. 19 column huffed that "Parents in Ohio lost custody of their 17-year-old daughter Friday because a judge ruled that she should be allowed to receive therapy, including testosterone therapy, to identify as a boy" -- he declined to comment specifically on the case, meaning he didn't have to discuss the fact that the parents' attitude toward their child was inducing suicidal feelings -- then used that story to go on another anti-transgender rant.
Finally, Anderson's March 9 column denounced sex reassignment surgery, citing McHugh once again and engaging in more faux reasonableness: "Thoughts that disguise or distort reality are misguided—and can cause harm. In 'When Harry Became Sally,' I argue that we need to do a better job of helping people who face these struggles.
Anderson's anti-trans campaign has also gotten the endorsement of the folks who run CNS' parent, the Media Research Center. Tim Graham and Brent Bozell's Feb. 9 column touted Anderson's book for making the right enemies in their eyes: "Anderson's book is dismissed as 'hate speech,' and let's not kid ourselves: The LGBT folks would like to ban a book like this, especially when he discusses that which they wish were silenced.
Graham and Bozell even used the book as an excuse to ignore President Trump's history of immorality: "That's a strong reason for the churchgoing conservatives to look past Trump's 'Access Hollywood' braggadocio and affairs from before he became a politician and vote against the extremism — the evil extremism — that Hillary Clinton endorsed."
Talk about demonizing people you oppose. No wonder CNS and the MRC love Anderson and his book.
WND Columnist Keeps Up The Manhood Fixation Topic: WorldNetDaily
Laura Hollis' March 8 WorldNetDaily column falls in with WND's recent manhood fixation, this time looking at Hollywood's version of it:
Because, let’s face it, Tinseltown has a spotty record when it comes to accurate representation of the men out here in the rest of America.
In fact, Hollywood has a strange take on masculinity generally.
What kinds of men does Hollywood fawn over? Men who sleep with other men (the film “Call Me By Your Name” won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, and features a love story between a 24-year-old man and a 17-year-old boy. This didn’t strike anyone as awkward in the current climate?). And then there are the men who dress like women, not to mention the men who cut off their genitals and declare themselves to be women. And, until recently anyway, heterosexual men who are predators.
Detecting a pattern here?
[...]
Were one so inclined, the argument could be made that Hollywood promotes gun bans for the same reason it celebrates penisless men: They simply lack the vocabulary to explain concepts like judgment, morality or self-control. You can’t control your “weapon,” you see, so it must be taken from you. (And we’ll applaud those who unilaterally “disarm.”)
Just so we’re clear, I’m not calling men’s genitals “weapons” (although that is a not uncommon message in certain feminist scholarship). What I’m saying is that just as most gun owners don’t kill people, most men aren’t sexual predators. Those who refrain from that conduct do so because of the other organs they possess – their hearts and their brains. Hollywood has apparently promoted casual and callous sexuality for so long that it has lost sight of the other, higher human functions and capabilities.
Hollis then took a detour to complain about abortion because outgoing Planned Parenthood president was honored at the Oscars:
Those calling for gun control seem to overlook that every gun sale doesn’t kill a human being. But every abortion does.
So while Hollywood rails against men and penises and guns and killing children, who has presided over the destruction of more children than anyone else in this country?
Women.
Even the women at WND hate women, apparently (well, the women who won't fall in line with WND's right-wing fundamentalism, anyway).
NEW ARTICLE: Scientifically Unsound, Totally Political Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center keeps trying to defend discredited "conversion therapy" aimed at turning gays straight, but the sources its writers cite are questionable at best, if not discredited themselves. Read more >>
Jack Cashill uses the Stormy Daniels scandal to spend his March 21 WorldNetDaily column rehashing one of the most completely unbelievable claims of the Obama years: that Larry Sinclair once slept with Barack Obama.
Sinclair began the 2008 conference by detailing his past criminal history, his convictions largely involving check fraud. “But I am also an American citizen,” he noted.
Sinclair then told a very detailed story and included the names of all involved, the dates, the hotel, even some phone numbers.
As the story goes, and he told it very convincingly, Sinclair came to Chicago in November 1999 to attend his godson’s graduation.
He asked his limo driver, name provided, if he could recommend someone with whom he could “socialize” while in Chicago.
The driver recommended Obama by name. When Obama showed up, he introduced himself as “Barack Obama.”
Together they smoked crack and Sinclair performed fellatio on Obama. The next day Obama showed up at Sinclair’s hotel, and they repeated the ritual.
Actually, no, Sinclair was not convincing at all. As one attendee at that press conference noted, Sinclair provided no evidence to back up his claims other than "a few phone numbers — registered under different names and in different states — that Mr. Sinclair claimed he used to call, variously, a limousine driver, the deceased choir director of Trinity United Church of Christ, and others."
Cashill went on to complain that "Politico, whose 'most read' story this week concerned Stormy Daniels’s alleged affair with Donald Trump 12 years ago, headlined its account of the Sinclair press conference, 'Obama accuser has long rap sheet.'" It's telling that Cashill doesn't link to that article -- it was written as a preview of Sinclair's presser, not a summary -- or give his readers any detail about that lengthy rap sheet, which includes a 16-year jail sentence for forgery, as well as other deceit-related crimes.
Being the inveterateconspiracy-monger he is, Cashill can't stop peddling the never-substantiated claim that Donald Young, a member of the church Obama attended in Chicago who was later murdered, also slept with Obama, insisting that many people, "including Young’s mother, believe Young was murdered to protect Obama’s reputation."
Despite his background and utter lack of evidence to back up what he says, Cashill clearly still considers Sinclair to be credible.
That continued, bizarre embrace of a convicted felon is a reminder that there still isn't any reason to believe anything Cashill says.
CNS Is A Little Too Cool With Putin's Re-Election Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com reporter Patrick Goodenough plays it weirdly straight in a March 18 article on the Russian elections:
As widely anticipated, Vladimir Putin has won another six-year term as president of Russia, securing his biggest victory yet in this his fourth presidential election campaign.
With 99 percent of ballots from the country’s 97,000 polling stations counted early Monday morning, Putin had won 76.6 percent of the votes, according to the Central Elections Commission (CEC).
His past presidential election victories garnered him 64 percent in 2012, 72 percent in 2004 and 53 percent in 2000.
With calls for a boycott and expectations of voter apathy due to the absence of any credible opposition among the seven challengers to the incumbent, a key factor in this year’s election has been voter turnout.
[...]
TASS reported that larger numbers of Russians abroad voted than had been the case in previous elections. At the Russian Embassy in London, where headlines have been dominated this month by allegations that Russia was behind the attempted murder by nerve agent of a former Russian spy, more than 3,400 votes were cast shortly before polls closed, it said.
The foreign ministry said earlier than almost 400 polling places were set up in 144 countries to offer some 1.8 million Russians living abroad the chance to vote.
[...]
Provisional results give the Communist Party’s Pavel Grudinin 11.8 percent of the votes in second place, ahead of Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the ultra-nationalist Liberal-Democratic Party with 5.7 percent.
The one opponent thought likely to offer Putin any realistic opposition, Alexei Navalny, was disqualified from running by the CEC, as a result of an earlier conviction on fraud charges which he and his supporters viewed as trumped-up.
That's the only reference to Navalny in the article -- which is strange, given that Goodenough in December wrote an article about Navalny's disqualification, and in January wrote an article featuring Republican Sen. Tom Cotton denouncing the jailing of Navalny after a anti-Putin rally, saying that "Every time [Putin] imprisons an opposition leader, it only shows the world just how corrupt and oppressive his regime truly is." So he was a position to add more information about it; instead, he provides only a hint of the rigging that took place to ensure Putin's re-election.
The same day, Goodenough wrote an article that devotes its first four paragraphs to how Putin denied involvement in the poisoning of a former Russian military official and his daughter in London, oddly waiting until the fifth paragraph that "The comments by Putin on the day of a major election victory directly refuted a claim made by British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson hours earlier" that Russians were involved.
This evenhandedness is at odds with the rest of what passes for CNS' "news" coverage, which is heavy on one-source wonders designed to push a right-wing, pro-Trump narrative.
WND Columnist: Gay-Teen Movie Is 'Device of the Devil' Topic: WorldNetDaily
Larry Tomczak declares his hatred of the film "Love, Simon" in his March 19 WorldNetDaily column for committing the offense of not hating gays:
The reality is, this is more propaganda from Hollywood, which regularly condones practices God prohibits because they are destructive to His design for those He created, loves and gave His Son to redeem. How the movie moguls like to advance their “progressive” agenda celebrating profanity, drug usage, fornication, adultery, nudity, homosexuality and sexual deviancy.
Consequences are ignored as new barriers are broken and “cutting-edge” comedies and dramas corrupt America’s morals and youth. The coarsening of our culture continues seemingly unabated. How we desperately need a spiritual awakening in the United States today!
[...]
“Love, Simon – Everyone Loves a Great Love Story” is a sham. It’s also another device of the devil to “steal, kill and destroy” (John 10:10) our children.
Here’s the deal: The greatest love story is how God sent His Son not only to forgive our sins but to liberate us from sin’s power. Jennifer Garner and gang, please take your defiling propaganda elsewhere ’cause we smell something rotten and refuse to let it seduce our kids.
Tomczak then tells the story of Stephen Bennett, who says he believed the "lie" that that he was gay, then was converted by a friend who "clearly showed me from the Bible how God did not make anyone ‘gay’ and how no one was born homosexual and who now, in Tomczak's words, serves "young men and women confused about their sexuality and seduced by the preponderance of LGBTQ propaganda in America today."
Tomczak doesn't mention that Bennett is so filled with hatred for the LGBT community that he doesn't believe they deserve equal rights.
MRC Treats Mark Levin Like A God At NewsBusters Too Topic: Media Research Center
CNSNews.com is not the only part of the Media Research Center empire that treats right-wing radio host Mark Levin like a god whose words demand slavish transcription for hungry readers. CNS has devoted 17 articles dutifully transcribing Levin in the first two months of 2018 alone.
Levin swooned at the Media Research Center's ridiculous awards gala last fall that "I rely on" the MRC and leader Brent Bozell. (He didn't mention that the two have had, and may still have, a cross-promotion deal.) That's enough for the MRC to do some bonus stenography on his behalf at NewsBusters that's beyond what it already does at CNS:
No less than Tim Graham did the honors in a March 9 post transcribing how Levin "grew angry at how the 'Praetorian guard media' are protecting the Obama team from the emerging story of how they unmasked Trump campaign officials -- as well as Blackwater founder Erik Prince, he charged -- and leaked word of their meetings with Russians to their media buddies."
Randy Hall was on stenography duty in a March 15 post stating that "During an interview you would not see on CNN or MSNBC, radio host Mark Levin slammed Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff (Calif.) while the conservative activist was a guest on Wednesday evening’s edition of Fox News Channel's Hannity." The reason that interview would not happen on CNN or MSNBC, of course, is that Levin does not want to appear on a media outlet that would not fawn over every word he says.
The MRC also goes into full-on defense mode for Levin, even when the target is orbsure or irrelevant. In a March 10 post, Graham ranted about a newspaper in Israel calling Levin "controversial" and a "shock jock," huffing that "Other countries have the same liberal bias as America does." (Actually, the Times of Israel is independent, but to Graham and the MRC, any media outlet that does not blindly repeat right-wing orthodoxy is "liberal.")
Graham also huffed that "There was nothing in this article that would explain how Levin is not a 'shock jock' like Howard Stern." Apparently, Levin sneering about Jon Stewart that "I don't trust Jews who changes their names" was not a shocking statement to Graham even though obsessing over Jews who change their names is a pastime Levin shares with the neo-Nazis at Stormfront.
And then, returning to lackey mode, Graham quotes Levin's rant about the "shock jock" label, including the pithy retort "If I had a bird, I wouldn't even want to use your paper at the bottom of my birdcage...I wouldn't want to poison the bird." In fact, the Times of Israel is an online-only publication, so that would be impossible to do. Not that Graham would ever deign to fact-check his idol, of course.
WND Forgets Its History of Pushing Rothschild Conspiracy Theories Topic: WorldNetDaily
An anonymous WorldNetDaily writer states in a March 19 article:
A Democratic lawmaker is under fire after he promoted a conspiracy theory claiming Jewish financiers manipulate the climate and are to blame for the weather.
Trayvon White, a Washington, D.C., councilman who represents Ward 8, published a video to his Facebook page Friday as snow began to fall in the nation’s capital.
“Man, it just started snowing out of nowhere this morning, man,” White can be heard saying in the video as he drives west on interstate 695. “Y’all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation. And D.C. keep talking about, ‘We a resilient city.’
“And that’s a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful.”
White was referencing the Rothschild family, a European banking dynasty, and a conspiracy theory that claims the family and other Jews secretly control global events.
WND not gets White's first name wrong -- it's Trayon, not Trayvon -- it also conveniently forgets how it too has pushed Rothschild-linked conspiracy theories over the years.
A 2002 column by Joan Veon rants about monetary power: "The paper trail established by the banking houses of the Rothschilds, Kuhns, Loebs, etc. are Jewish while their half brothers, al-Qaida and the Muslim states, under which 75 percent of the world’s oil is found, use an untraceable system."
A 2004 article by Ron Strom attacking a resolution asking that the prinicples of feng shui be included in the California building code noted that "The text of the legislation says several designers and companies have used feng shui principles, including Citibank, N.M. Rothschild, Shell and Sime Darby."
Devvy Kidd ranted in a 2005 column: "You cannot buy or own stock in the privately owned Federal Reserve. That privilege is reserved for the money interests, i.e., the Rockefellers, Rothschilds and other global elites."
A 2007 article whose byline appears to have disappeared along the way states: "The hottest selling book in China right now is called “Currency Wars,” which makes the case that the U.S. Federal Reserve is a puppet of the Rothschilds banking dynasty and it has persuaded some top officials Beijing should resist America’s demands to appreciate its own undervalued currency, the yuan." The article doesn't dispute that claim.
Hal Lindsey wrote in a 2008 column: "Though just who the private owners of the Federal Reserve are is a closely guarded secret, it has been widely accepted that Goldman, Sachs, along with such names as Rothschild, Warburg Lehman, Kuhn, Loeb and Seif are private owners.
In a 2013 column, WND editor Joseph Farah cited a quote by Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty -- “Give me control of a nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes the laws" -- to go on a conspiratorial rant: "Who controls the money supply in America today? The big bankers. Congress long ago abdicated its authority. It’s time to elect a Congress that will take it back, or America will cease to be a nation under the rule of law and governed by the will of the people."
Unraveling all the organizations that yank the strings of American politics can be daunting. In 2005, I penned two important pieces for WND: “The treasonous Council on Foreign Relations” and “The treasonous Trilateral Commission.” Nothing has changed. Those two organizations are not some harmless think tanks. If you go to the CFR’s history page, nuggets of the truth are right there for everyone to see. Elihu Root headed the original CFR. The Rothschilds and Wall Street were instrumental in financing the Bolshevik Revolution. Root was the bag man to deliver $20 million to the Bolsheviks who were founded by mass murderer Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov.
Additionally, the WND online store sells the book "Brotherhood of Darkness" by Stanley Monteith, which claims to be about "secret societies, how they have directed the course of civilization and how they influence your life today." In it, Monteith writes that "Those who believe that Jewish banks are responsible for our problems cite Benjamin Disraeli's book ["Coningsby"] and claim that he exposed the Jewish Banking Conspiracy. Then they point to the Rothschilds, Kuhn, Loeb and Co., the Warburgs, the Lazard Bank, Lehman Brothers, and Goldman Sachs to justify their contention that Jewish bankers control the world." Monteith then adds that "those arguments are convincing," though he went on to note that non-Jewish bankers played a major role in the banking industry and that "Jewish banks played an important part in financing industrial development in Europe, but they never controlled the financial institutions of the world."Monteith also claims that Disraeli and Rothschild promoted the Jewish banking conspiracy to obscure the real banking conspiracy, in which the Masons control everything.
It's rather cute how WND is now pretending it's never been a conspiracy theory-laden website.
Finally! CNS' Jones Speaks Stormy Daniels' Name Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com reporter Susan Jones has finally decided that She Who Must Not Be Named has a name after all.
After writing a story about the burgeoning Stormy Daniels scandal involving President Trump that somehow avoided using Daniels' name (while also dismissing the entire story as a "liberal media" narrative), Jones has finally decided that Daniels has a name after all -- while also continuing to try and pigeonhole the story as nothing but a liberal media narrative.
In a March 13 article, Jones dismisses MSNBC's Joe Scarborough as a "Trump hater" for bringing up the story:
To Trump haters, anything the president does lately is done with one goal in mind: to knock the Stormy Daniels story out of the headlines.
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough on Tuesday morning questioned why Republicans on the House intelligence committee abruptly announced on Monday that their investigation into Russian interference has all but ended, with no evidence of collusion found on the part of either the Trump campaign or the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Jones then added her pithy summary of the scandal:
Stormy Daniels is a porn star who says she was paid $130,000 by one of Trump's attorneys to keep quiet about an affair she claims to have had with him in 2006. Trump was married to Melania at the time.
Trump has denied the affair, and Daniels did too, for a while – but then Daniels changed her mind and now insists it really did happen.
She launched a strip club tour in January on the anniversary of Donald Trump's inauguration.
Daniels is now suing to void a nondisclosure agreement she reportedly signed before the 2016 election. Her lawyer has told various cable outlets she's not doing this for the money...
You know who else denied a sexual incident with a politican and then "changed her mind and now insists it really did happen"? Juanita Broaddrick. But you'll never see Jones report it that way.
In a March 16 item -- presented as a blog post even though its partisan tone is no different from the above "news" article -- Jones huffed: "Making the rounds of liberal cable channels Friday morning, Stormy Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti said he was not there to hype an upcoming "60 Minutes" interview with the porn star -- even as he hyped the upcoming interview." She huffed even further that "Rarely has a porn star been accorded such credibility."
Jones ended the article by complaining:
Trump's womanizing hardly comes as a shock to the American people, so the question for people on both sides of the Trump divide is whether and how any of this matters to anyone, anyway -- except as a means of further undermining Trump's presidency.
Starting 14 months ago, the politics of personal destruction has become a daily spectator sport in Washington, with liberal media outlets leading the charge.
Jones has a conveniently short memory if she thinks the "politics of personal destruction" began only 14 months ago. Bill Clinton's womanizing didn't come as a shock to Americans either, despite CNS parent the Media Research Center's pearl-clutching over it in the 1990s. Using Jones' argument, this means that the MRC was never motived by any sense of morality but as a means of trying to undermine his presidency -- which would seem to be a violation of its nonprofit tax status.
In a March 26 article, written after Daniels' interview on "60 Minutes," Jones makes sure to identify Daniels as an "aging porn star," then huffed that she "assured America she's not in it for the money -- then talked about all the "job offers" she's getting by going public with her claims about Donald Trump." And in a companion article, Jones complained that Daniels' attorney, Michael Avanetti, was trying to "discredit Donald Trump" by trying to get a deposition from Trump regarding Daniels -- as if Trump hasn't already discredited himself long before now.
We already know Jones is a slavish pro-Trump loyalist, but she's just embarassing herself her with her aggressive defense of Trump over something she'd be in attack mode over if Trump were not a Republican.
Does CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman still hate the LGBT community with a passion? You betcha! Chapman grumbled in a Feb. 13 blog post:
WorldNetDaily writers 
The Media Research Center's Brad Wilmouth writes in a March 23 
As a sidebar to the sparsely read Whistleblower magazine's theme of the month, "
Media Research Center intern Ryan Foley spent a March 20 
The Media Research Center isn't the only ConWeb outlet that's 
As befits a "news" organization with an 
Laura Hollis' March 8 WorldNetDaily 
Jack Cashill uses the Stormy Daniels scandal to spend his March 21 WorldNetDaily 
CNSNews.com reporter Patrick Goodenough plays it weirdly straight in a March 18 
Larry Tomczak declares his hatred of the film "Love, Simon" in his March 19 WorldNetDaily 
CNSNews.com is not the only part of the Media Research Center empire that treats right-wing radio host Mark Levin like a god whose words demand slavish transcription for hungry readers. CNS has devoted 
An anonymous WorldNetDaily writer states in a March 19 
CNSNews.com reporter Susan Jones has finally decided that She Who Must Not Be Named has a name after all.
