CNS Censors Trump's Role In Tariffs Pushing Harley Production Overseas Topic: CNSNews.com
An Aug. 15 CNSNews.com article by Emilie Cochran highlghted a question to White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about whether "President Donald Trump would like to see a boycott on Harley-Davidson." By way of explaining, Cochran added, "In June, the company announced they would move some production overseas to avoid tariffs from the European Union."
But Cochran didn't mention why Harley is trying to avoid European tariffs: because of Trump's trade war.
Harley explained that the EU tariffs against it were enacted in retaliation for Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The company has already been laying off workers in the U.S., closing a factory and using Trump's corporate tax cut to buy back stock isntead of passing it down to employees.
That seems like important context to report. But we know that CNS doesn't like to report when Trump or his administration does something negative.
WND Columnist Once Again Mansplains Why 'Radical Feminism' Is To Blame For Immature Men Topic: WorldNetDaily
The last time we checked in on WorldNetDaily columnist Carl Jackson, he was mansplaining that because feminists are sluts, men don't have to act mature (but he didn't explain why it's the job of women to make men mature or why he's relieved men of that responsibility).
Jackson doubles down on that attitude on his Aug. 27 column, which is devoted to attacking "radical feminism" and once again blaming them for the state of manhood:
Sadly, radical feminists leave victims in their wake that are rarely considered. Such is the case with the two individuals I spoke with over the weekend. By the way, they don’t know each other, nor have they ever met. However, they’re perspective as singles of different sexes wanting to marry was eerily similar. Both of them are relatively young, under 30, and attractive. The guy explained to me that the women he encounters don’t want to be tied down. He attributed this to radical feminism. He admitted that although he wanted to settle down, he and his millennial friends felt as though that wouldn’t be possible until he was about 35 years old. Why? That’s how long he and his friends figured it would take for the women they knew to let go of the radical feminist pose in exchange for a husband. In other words, they were waiting until the women were done being played by men. Until then, they figured they’d sit back and play along with the “feminist game.”
Likewise, the female I spoke to had been played by a guy she hoped to settle down with. He was living two separate lives, and when he was caught he explained to both women that he wanted to continue seeing them, but with no strings attached. Thank God my friend didn’t go for that. However, she was convinced that this guy had gotten away with playing the field because ladies today make it so easy for men. Therefore, women like her are forced to sit on the sideline, hoping men will mature enough to want to settle down and marry them. Unfortunately, by ignoring the basic physiological and emotional differences between men and women, feminists have helped cultivate the type of men they claim to despise.
In short, radical feminists haven’t created better men. They’ve created confused and immature little boys that will never grow up, because they don’t have to.
Again, Jackson pretends that men don't have agency, despite eons of Western civilization being largely patriarchial. If men are too immature to properly deal with a relationship, isn't at least half their fault?
Jackson also rants against the existence of the pay gap between men and women, citing a right-wing Heritage Foundation writer blaming "women's intentional job choices" for the gap and asserting that "the “pay gap” argument hasn’t been a major issue for over a half century, but that hasn’t stopped radical feminists from lying to their followers." (Here's an argument that the pay gap does, in fact, exist.)
In other words, Jackson is just doing more mansplaining.
NEW ARTICLE -- The MRC's War on Journalists, Part 1: Katy Tur Topic: Media Research Center
After priming President Trump's attacks on her, the Media Research Center seems to think that the NBC correspondent deserves to fear for her safety for failing to be a Trump sycophant. Read more >>
WND Gushes Over Putin Visiting Jerusalem's Western Wall, 6 Years After The Fact Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily has become rather fond of Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent years -- which became even more prevalent during the Trump presidency, since taking President Trump's side on whether Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election effectively means taking Putin's side.
WND takes that love for a dictator a step further in an Aug. 26 article, in which an anonymous writer tries to shoot down the idea that Putin is anti-Semitic by -- apropos of no particular news hook -- touting a 2012 visit he made to Jerusalem:
He’s been called an anti-Semite.
He was challenged recently by Jewish leaders and American media for blaming so-called “Russian meddling” in the 2016 presidential election on Jews.
In fact, some Jewish and Christian Bible prophecy watchers suspect he is the infamous of Gog of Ezekiel 38-39 – an anti-Messiah figure they believe leads a last days invasion of Israel along with Persia (Iran) and a coalition of other countries.
Those accusations and suspicions have been made against none of other than Vladimir Putin, the leader of Russia.
Yet, Putin maintains a deep and complex relationship with Russian Jews, Israeli leaders and the state of Israel. He also supported the founding of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, even donating his own money, has stated his “fierce opposition to any manifestation of anti-Semitism and xenophobia,” ensured the return of many synagogues to Russian Jews previously seized by the Soviets and in 2015 initiated a law against anti-Semitic biblical commentary.
He has also visited Jerusalem’s Western Wall three times, donning a yarmulke and praying.
Perhaps the most dramatic, surprising and little-known of those visits, his third and most recent, came June 26, 2012, when he made an early morning pilgrimage to both the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Western Wall sometime after 2 a.m., saying he did not want to miss out on seeing the two sites that offer a “special feeling.” His first visit came when he as first elected president, the second in 2005, during Passover – all odd behavior for an anti-Semite, blaming Jews for meddling in a U.S. election and for a Gog candidate.
What did Putin pray for during his quiet visit to the Kotel in 2012?
Shortly afterward, an Israeli bystander called out in Russian, “Welcome, President Putin.” Putin approached the man, who explained the importance of the Temple Mount and the Jewish Temple. Putin responded in a video-recorded conversation reported in Chadrei Charedim, an Orthodox Hebrew news site, “That’s exactly the reason I came here – to pray for the Temple to be built again.”
Putin shook the unidentified man’s hand and added with a smile, “I wish you that your prayers will be received.”
A person who witnessed the three-minute conversation said, “I guess he’s is not as closed and tough as we thought.”
The anonymous writer does admit that "tensions between Israel and Russia remain high because of Moscow’s alliance with Iran and the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad." Though, clearly, not so high that WND can't gush over its favorite Russian strongman -- albeit without anyone apparently willing to put their name to it.
For the past few months, CNSNews.com has been running promotions from a website called TellMeNow. One ad bears the headline "Find Out The 21 Journlalists Who Sold Out America! Never Trust Them!"
The headline on the article itself is slightly less inflammatory: "These 21 Journalists Sold Out Their Profession and America for Hillary Clinton." The first slide rehashes right-wing attacks on ABC's George Stephanopoulos for having worked inthe Clinton adminstration. The second attacks Politico's Glenn Thrush for "asking the Hillary Clinton campaign to fact check his pieces" (by contrast, Newsmax's John Gizzi asked Trump White House officials to fact-check his articles without any blowback whatsoever from TellMeNow).
But strangely, most of the rest of the 21 slides don't even identify what purported offense they committed to get on the list; they're mostly just screenshots of mostly TV personalities and short bios. Some include teasers to the next slide accusing the journalist of never-identified violations. For instance, the slilde before the one for ABC's David Muir states: "Our next slide was voted one of the sexiest men alive in 2014, but his good looks won’t be able to allow him to swindle out of his betrayal to the American public! What makes him even more dangerous is that he had the most airtime in 2012 and 2013!" But the slide for Muir states ashort bio and that "Muir's reporting received the most airtime in 2012 and 2013" -- not exactly evidence of "betrayal to the American public!"
In other words, it's just lame right-wing clickbait from a website that's becoming known for fake news. And like any lame clickbait, the slideshow has no byline, and the website itself has no masthead of who works there. Other articles have presumably fake bylines like "James Conrad" (the guy from the "Kong" movie?) and "Erin Perri."According to the WHOIS database, the owners of the website's domain have been blocked from public access, though it notes that the "Registrant Organization" is a company called Intermarkets, which sells advertising space on mostly conservativef websites such as TellMeNow, the Drudge Report ... and CNS and other Media Research Center websites.
A promotion page on the Intermarkets website for TellMeNow gushes that "TellMeNow leverages proprietary software and a unique perspective to take trending content viral. This is THE destination for the hottest stories and videos on the Web!" Funny, no mention whatsoever of clickbait or the anonymous nature of the operation.
The address provided on the website as a contact is a co-working office in Reston, Va. -- the same Washington, D.C., suburb that, as it so happens, is also where CNS, the MRC and Intermarkets are located.
We tried contacting TellMeNow via email to find out its criteria for putting journalists on the list and why its HQ is in a group office, but we got no reply.
WND Doubles Down on Steve Stockman Conspiracy Theory Topic: WorldNetDaily
A couple months back, we highlighted how WorldNetDaily has decided to frame the conviction of Steve Stockman -- a former Texas congressman who was so close to WND that it effectively served as his PR shop -- on 23 financial crimes as a "Deep State" conspiracy theory. Well, WND is doubling down on the conspiracy.
The headline of an anonymously written Aug. 19 WND article claims that Stockman was guilty of nothing more than "sloppy bookkeeping." Sotckman has a supporter in Sidney Powell, who recently appeared on Fox News to bizarrely claim that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's guilty plea on numerous offenses "doesn't even mean that Michael Cohen is guilty."
Naturally, as the "sloppy bookkeeping" claim indicates, WND whitewashes what Stockman actually did:
A significant portion of the criminal indictment focuses on this time frame, charging that Stockman used funds donated to the Center for the American Future, a non-profit set up by an associate, to benefit his political campaign. The Center sent out a newspaper-like mailing to prospective voters contrasting the policy positions of Cornyn and Stockman, but the former lawmaker’s legal defense team argued it did not expressly advocate for him and therefore did not violate FEC law.
In fact, Stockman was accused of, among other things, spending that money for a slew of oddball personal expenses, including tanning salon visits, a new dishwasher and dolphin boat rides. The article also frames misuse of money donated to a Stockman-run charity called Life Without Limits as a "straw donor" issue "similar to ones brought against conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza in 2014." In fact, prosecutors said a $350,000 donation to Life Without Limits was diverted to Stockman and two aides, who later pleaded guilty and testified against Stockman; none of the money went for its intended purpose of a "Freedom House" meeting facility for the group.
WND also uncritially quoted Powell complaining that Stockman being imprisoned while awaiting sentencing "is a further outrage calculated to impede his ability to appeal and to break him." In fact, Stockman was deemed to be a flight risk, in part because he uses Bitcoin and burner phones and helped an aide avoid FBI detection for years in Egypt, as well as having government contacts in Egypt, the Republic of the Congo and South Sudan.
The article concludes by quoting Stockman's wife calling her husband a "political prisoner" and WND editor Joseph Farah suggested Stockman was targeted because he tried to "defeat the Deep State" in his brief stints as a congressman.
Such dishonest, conspiracy-obsessed reporting does not raise confidence in WND's reporting, casting further doubt on any case Farah and Co. have to offer that it deserves to live.
MRC Selectively Decides When Context Matters Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Brad Wilmouth went off on people in the media he said were "smearing Fox News host Laura Ingraham as someone who uses her show to promote 'racist' and 'white supremacist' views as they reacted to a commentary she gave on The Ingraham Angle show in which she advocated for merit-based immigration and lamented 'massive demographic' changes." Wilmouth further huffed:
As the various hosts showed skepticism that she was telling the truth in her clarification, they all neglected to inform viewers that even in her original monologue from Wednesday, August 8, she declared that "it's not about race or ethnicity" and quoted President Donald Trump's assertion that "merit-based legal immigration is fantastic."
Instead, it appeared that none of the hosts who were so eager to weigh in and condemn the FNC host could be bothered to actually watch her 13-minute commentary, instead relying on one 30-second clip in which she referred to demographic changes and "in some cases, legal immigration" being a problem.
So context matters, huh? That's usually not the argument the MRC makes when ignoring context advances its right-wing agenda.
For instance, the MRC's Tim Graham recently assailed a PolitiFact fact-check on a Republican challenger to "ultraliberal Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin" claiming that she "opposed displaying the flag and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or singing the National Anthem in our classrooms,"calling it "mostly false" because the claim ignores the context that the bill in question was narrowly tailored and never made it into law: Graham insisted the claim was true on its face, whining: "The website doesn't call itself PolitiContext. It claims to be a Fact Checker."
WND's Crowdfunding for Movie of WND-Published Book Remains A Failure Topic: WorldNetDaily
More than a year ago, WorldNetDaily started a crowdfunding campaign to raise $120,000 to finance pre-production on a film -- not actual production, mind you; this is in part for materials to lure someone to finance production -- based on Anita Dittman's WND-published Nazi-era memoir "Trapped in Hitler's Hell." That included a couple of promotional misfires, like encouraging WND readers to give up their lattes from Starbucks to donate (though the typical WND reader is likely not a Starbucks customer) and stealing another's glory by insisting the film would be just like last year's movie "Dunkirk" (but without Christoper Nolan and the $100 million budget).
Well, WND is still at it. A WND article last month takes a slightly different tack by likening its would-be film to "Unbroken," the 2014 film that told the story of Louie Zemperini's survival in World War II concentration camps, arguing that making films about heroic figures "can sometimes take decades." In doing so, WND basically cribbed from, if not outright plagiarized, the Wikipedia page on "Unbroken.".
Wikipedia: "Universal Pictures purchased the rights to the book in January 2011, having already acquired the film rights to Zamperini's life story towards the end of the 1950s."
WND: "Universal Pictures bought the book rights in January 2011 to augment the film rights to Zamperini’s life story, which it had already acquired at the end of the 1950s."
Wikipedia: "The film received some criticism for omitting Zamperini's fight against alcoholism and PTSD, as well as his Billy Graham-inspired religious conversion."
WND: "What you didn’t see was Zamperini’s fight against alcoholism and PTSD, and most significantly his conversion to Christ after attending Billy Graham evangelistic crusade."
The point of invoking "Unbroken" is for WND to claim that "The team behind 'TRAPPED' does not want God’s work in Anita’s life ignored or set aside as was done for 'Unbroken.' That’s why it wants 'TRAPPED' to remain an 'independently' financed film."
Note the scare quotes around "independently," meaning that it knows nothing of the sort will happen. Why else would it feel the need to spend $120,000 to attract someone to fund the actual film?
The article went on to tout how the film is allegedly "well advanced in its successful script development phase" and howDittman an Jan Markell, who co-wrote the book WND is basing the movie on, are among the film's "biggest supporters" and have "not only provided moral support and prayers but have brought early funding for the movie, helping to finance its script development." It also notes George Escobar, vice president of WND Films, claiming that "All the critical issues Anita faced in the 1930s and 40s are coming back," among them being "Fake news being perpetrated like Nazi propaganda, undermining our freedoms."
In the middle somewhere was the admission of failutre: "a GoFundMe campaign for 'TRAPPED' has raised just over $16,000 out of the $120,000 required for film funding expenses that will be used to raise the millions it will cost to make the movie."
That's right -- more than a year of fundraising got the campaign only one-eighth to its goal. And in the three weeks since this article first appeared, it didn't do much better -- the total as of this writing stands at a mere $16,810, raising just $210 in those three weeks.
After begging readers to keep WND alive and finance its promulgation of Seth Rich conspiracy theories -- which after 15 months hasn't even broken the $5,000 mark -- it seems that WND's target audience is suffering from fundraising fatigue. WND's pet project may not survive.
In July, CNSNews.com not only parroted the Trump White House line of attack against former CIA director John Brennan for speaking out against President Trump over his infamous press conference, it also joined in the right-wing call for Trump to pull Brennan's security clearance.
So when Trump did indeed pull Brennan's security clearance, CNS couldn't have been happier.
Melanie Arter's article on the revocation -- as you would expect from the unofficial Trump White House stenographer -- contains statements only from Trump and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders reading from a statement by Trump. That was followed by an even more fawning post from Susan Jones transcribing an anti-Brannan rant by Mark Levin cheering his revocation because "he has a big mouth, he will never shut up, he'll go on TV and be the kook that he is."
Surprisingly, CNS also offered alternative points of view, albeit in an attempt to portray Brennan as a spiteful Trump-hater. An Aug. 16 article by Jones summarized a Brennan op-ed claiming that Trump's claim there was no collusion with Russia was "hogwash," then does something neither she nor Arter did in their other articles: offering an alternative point of view by dedicating several paragraphs to what Trump has said on the issuse "as a reminder." Arter touted a Republican congressman who called Brennan a "butthead."
A separate article by Patrick Goodenough highlighted for director of national intelligence James Clapper saying that pulling Brennan's security clearance and threatening the pull the clearances of other former intelligence officials like himself for being critical of Trump will help them "sell more books." And Arter finally got around to serving up her version of balance in an article quoting a former National Security Council executive secretary criticizing the revocations.
WND's Farah Attacked Kavanaugh -- Until Trump Nominated Him Topic: WorldNetDaily
Last year, we noted how WorldNetDaily editor went on a tirade against Brett Kavanaugh for "his role in leading the badly flawed investigation into the death of Vincent Foster in July 1993" and purportedly ignoring "smoking-gun information" that purportedly "blows holes in the government’s conclusion that Foster’s body had a single self-inflicted gunshot wound." Farah was worried because Kavanaugh was one candidate for a potential Supreme Court seat and further fretted: "Does the president really understand who it is he’s considering for a U.S. Supreme Court nomination?
When that SCOTUS opening did, in fact, open up, Farah penned a July 4 column asserting that Kavanaugh "should be removed for consideration – too risky for such a pivotal swing-vote position." Farah rehashed his Vincent Foster conspiracy theory again, adding that "President Trump has shown he believes there was something 'very fishy' about Foster’s death and the ensuing cover-up by the Starr commission." Farah concluded: "There are too many super-qualified candidates for this position who would do a fine job without the specter of a whitewash in the matter of Vincent Foster’s untimely and unexplained death. President Trump’s instincts are right about Foster. He should follow them and look elsewhere for his best pick next week."
Trump did end up nominating Kavanaugh. Curiously, Farah has not devoted a single word to Kavanaugh in his column in the two months since.
Granted, Farah has been busy begging for money to keep WND from going down the tubes (again) and obessing over the conspiracy theory that the "Digital Cartel" of Google and Facebook are out to get him (and not, say, WND's shoddy, fake news-laden content). But even with the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings kicking off this week, Farah has stayed silent on the candidate he opposed. But it seems that Farah is intent on demonstrating the state-run media aspect of WND by being so slavishly devoted to being pro-Trump that he won't criticize a decision he knows is wrong. What Trump wants, Trump gets, and it seems Farah has decided that he will help Trump get what he wants.
How silent has WND been about this after the fact? Even Art Moore's "news" article on Kavanaugh's nomination touted how he "led the investigation into the suicide of Clinton aide Vince Foster" -- but made no reference to his boss' attacks on Kavanaugh over that very thing.
We already knew that the first two components of WND's new "Credible. Indepdendent. Fearless." slogan were bogus. Now it's clear the final one is as well.
As we saw with its coverage of the latest Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal, the news isn't "news" at CNSNews.com -- only the right-wing spin is.
Here's another example. Any news junkie -- and anyone working in the news business should be one -- would agree that Aug. 21 was a big news day. After all, it was the day that former Trump presidential campaign manager Paul Manafortwas found guilty on eight counts of fraud, and it was also the day that President Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to eight criminal counts.
Those stories warrant coverage by any news organization. But CNS is not any news organization -- it's a pro-Trump state media outlet.
The first story CNS did on Cohen's plea deal was spin, a stenography piece by Melanie Arter uncritically quoting White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisting that "just because Michael Cohen made a plea deal doesn’t mean that that implicates the president on anything." This was followed by two blog post quoting CNS' favorite right-wing radio host and Trump loyalist, Mark Levin (95 articles on him this year and counting!): The first featured Levin asserting that the media "don't know what they're talking about" in the Cohen plea deal, and the second on Aug. 24 on Levin's desperate rant that Cohen's plea deal is "nothing, nothing, nothing."
Manafort's criminal conviction, meanwhile, didn't warrant a headline story of any kind at CNS. The only mention it received in a "news" story is in the last four paragraphs of Arter's story on thte White House reaction to Cohen, in which she quotesSanders' declaration that "The Manafort case doesn’t have anything to do with the president, doesn’t have anything to do with his campaign, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the White House" and her denial that Trump was thinking about pardoning Manafort.
It's not as if CNS didn't know Manafort was on trial. A June 28 blog post by Craig Bannister touted how the judge in the trial said that "any blind person can see" that the trial was really about getting Trump.
So CNS clearly knows what's going on. It's simply choosing not to report news unfavorable to its favorite president until it can find a way to put a positive spin on it.
Perhaps it's time for CNS to take the "news" out of its name, since that's no longer what it does.
Has Farah Considered That Nobody Wants To Read WND's Shoddy Content? Topic: WorldNetDaily
After we highlighted WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah's complaint (well, conspiracy theory) that Google includes WND in so few search results that it's hurting WND's revenue (and that it's doing so to punish WND for bashing Google), we heard from blogger Richard Bartholomew, who pointed out one reason for the dearth of traffic to Google -- which is not Google's fault.
Bartholomew showed a screenshot of a Google search regarding the 2017 death of former Haitian government official Klaus Eberwein, in which a WND article was listed among the "top stories":
As we reported at the time, WND's reporting on Eberwein's death is what we would call fake news. WND hyped claims that Eberwein "was expected to testify against alleged Clinton Foundation corruption and malpractice" and that he "reportedly told acquaintances he feared for his life for his fierce criticism of the Clinton Foundation." In fact, Eberwein was set to testify in a case unrelated to the Clinton Foundation, and there's no independently sourced on-the-record evidence to back up anything he purportedly said about the Clintons.
So, rather than Farah's conspiracy theory, it appears the real problem is that WND reports stories that are either fake news or that nobody cares enough about to search in any significant quantity on Google.
Which all goes back to the thing we've been pointing out all along, and which Farah and WND have aggressively refused to discuss: that WND's perpetually imminent demise is being caused not by a grand conspiracy against it by the "Digital Cartel" but by bad, biased, fake news-heavy content that fewer people want to read.
MRC Mocks Another Reporter For Being Concerned About Her Safety (Again) Topic: Media Research Center
The last time the Media Research Center mocked reporter April Ryan for being concerned about her safety at a time when President Trump has declared the media to be the "enemy of the people," we pointed out that Ryan felt sufficiently threatened to need bodyguards.
The MRC's Kristine Marsh address the issue of Ryan's bodyguard in a sneering Aug. 24 post -- only to argue that she ought to feel threatened:
In a laughably obtuse interview with The Hollywood Reporter published August 21, April Ryan, the White House correspondent for American Urban Radio and CNN contributor, griped about needing to pay for security because of how often she is approached or heckled in public. This comes just a few weeks after Ryan complained that White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders shouldn’t need security guards.
According to the media outlet, Ryan said she feared for her personal safety at times because she is approached in public and complained that the White House should fund her bodyguards:
[...]
She added:
There is a concern now. I mean, I've had death threats, I've had craziness, so I have a real concern. An honest, real concern.... Do I have a bodyguard? Yes, I do. Am I paying for it? Yes, I am. And, I think [Sanders] should have to pay for it, especially if she's stirring it up with her boss [Trump].... I did not sign up for this. I was just doing a job.
Sound familiar? Isn’t this exactly what Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters explicitly ordered liberals to do to Republicans? The media didn’t care about public harassment then, as long as it wasn’t happening to them. In fact, many journalists went on television and defended the abuse of Trump Administration officials and Republican party members. But suddenly it’s a different story when the shoe is on the other foot.
So Ryan should feel threatened because some people in the White House feel threatened? Tallk about utter hatred for -- and the desire for vengeance against -- journalists doing their jobs.
The MRC's callousness toward the safety of journalists continues to be appalling.
Yet Another WND Author Turns Out To Be An Anti-Semitic White Nationalist Topic: WorldNetDaily
What is it with WorldNetDaily authors who turn out to be white nationalists and/or anti-Semites? First we had Paul Nehlen, who turned so egregiously hateful after WND published his book and promoted his right-wing candidacy for Paul Ryan's seat that WND was forced to ever-so-slowly stop selling his book (Nehlen, by the way, came in a distant third in the Republican primary to replace Ryan; WND still has yet to make a public statement about its business relationship with Nehlen). Then there's Walid Shoebat, the self-proclaimed ex-terrorist-turned-"Christian Zionist" who was the star of a WND-published book about people leaving Islam who has become rabidly anti-Semitic.
Now comes word from reporter Rosie Gray at the Atlantic that Scott Greer, a former editor at the conservative Daily Caller, wrote anti-Semitic and white nationalist articles under a pseudonym for the Radix Journal, published by white supremacist leader Richard Spencer.
Last year, WND published Greer's book "No Campus for White Men," which WND Books claims "shines a bright light on the growing obsession with diversity, victimization and identity politics on today's college campuses, and shows how it is creating an intensely hostile and fearful atmosphere that can only lead, ultimately, to ever greater polarization in American society." Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur who was abandoned by most conservatives (and, maybe, WND) after he was caught defending pedophilia, wrote the foreword.
WND had been giving Greer a platform for his racial grievances as early as 2013, when he cited none other than WND columnist Jack Cashill -- whose best know foray into racial relations is to denigrate Trayvon Martin as a thug and George Zimmerman a hero for shooting him -- in claining that the fim "12 Years a Slave" could "heat up racial tensions." We caught WND promoting Greer complaining that some Trump White House aides "are closely associated with white nationalists" -- not because it wasn't true, but because the label is "menacing" to conservatives.
WND has made no public statement yet about Greer as of this writing, his pro-white, anti-Semitic past has not been reported on the WND website, and his book is still for sale at the WND online store.
CNS Cheers Franklin Graham's Insults, Ignores That He Went Godwin Topic: CNSNews.com
One of CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman's favorite right-wing clergymen (who's not Catholic, anyway) is Franklin Graham, who hates gays and Muslims as much as he does. Chapman loves publishing Graham's rants, and will never criticize him for going to far or for contradicting himself.
For instance, in a Aug. 9 blog post, Chapman touted Graham's attack on New York Times columnist Frank Bruni for being critical of Vice President Mike Pence's right-wing Christianity, which he called "slanderous" and "vile." Chapman himself piled on by claim tha Bruni was making "tawdry claims" (though he cites only one complete sentence from it and fragments and single words elsewhere, which is journalistically tawdry) and tried to denigrate Bruni as "openly homosexual and a militant promoter of the LGBT agenda (his proof for the latter is a column of Bruni's in which he argues that Christians shouldn't hate gays -- what a sinister "agenda"!).
Just 11 days later, an Aug. 20 blog post by Craig Bannister detailedGraham's freakout over Chelsea Clinton claiming that abortion has added money to the economy because women were able to work: "What a lie. Hitler probably also claimed that killing the Jews would be good for their economy."
Isn't likening someone -- and not just anyone, the daughter of a former president -- to Hitler just as slanderous and vile as and what he claimed Bruni wrote about Pence? Is going Godwin a good idea for someone who claims to be a man of God (not to mention an admission that he had no better argument)?
Chapman and Bannister will never ask those questions. Graham served up the conservatively correct goods, and that's all that matters.