MRC's Bozell Justifies Capitol Violence, STILL Clings To His Election Fraud Conspiracy Theory
Topic: Media Research Center

Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell is as shameless as he is dishonest.

Bozell made an appearance on Fox Business Wednesday to justify -- yes, justify -- the violent insurrection at the Capitol earlier in the day: "This is an explosion of pent-up outrage from Middle America. Look, they are furious that they believe this election was stolen. I agree with them. They are furious that with the Deep State, they believe Washington is utterly corrupt, and they've had it. I agree with them. They are furious with Antifa and the rampaging in the streets and the lawlessness ,and one cop every single week is being shot to death -- think about that one for a second -- and I agree. They are furious with the vast censorship of free speech that's taking place. So the fury was there."

Then, he pivoted away, trying to minimize the violence as done by a small group of actors: "Unfortunately, it was controlled fury with the vast majority, and one element went forward with lawlessness, and it has done tremendous damage to everyone else." Remember that Bozell's MRC loves to mock commentators who said the same thing about the summer's racial justice protests. He then went the whataboutism route, caying that critics of the violence have "damn well better have criticized Antifa for the last year and Black Lives Matter for their lawlessness, their destruction of property, their killing of people. If they have done that they have every right to be critical. If they have not done that, let those people who have been reasonable and have been objective in this, let them speak out."

Bozell also reiterating that he agrees with those who claim the election was stolen and effectively justifed the violence, betraying his own words.He then ranted: "It's hundreds -- it's millions, tens of millions of people -- it's 40 percent of the American people believe this stolen. This is not a handful of people."

But Bozell has spread lies and misinformation about the election and fed thsi false story that these people believe. As we documented, Bozell asserted without evidence that pre-election polls showing Biden with a big lead over Trump were "deliberately wildly wrong," and he hired right-wing pollsters -- one of whom actually worked for the Trump campaign -- to push his conspiracy theory that the media stole the election from Trump.

Bozell then explained he really cared about what the violence will do to the conservative movement and again complained: "I am heartsick about that element that has been so destructive and has done so much damage to a very noble cause, but the damage they have done to conservatives like me is profound. ... No one's going to look at pictures of the whatever, the 900,000 that didn't participate in this, who were there marching peacefully. No one's going to look at that. No one ever looks at marches by conservatives that are peaceful --  the right-to-life march every single year, the Tea Party marches where they pick up their own wrappers. They've never gotten credit for this. So one's going to look at the overwhelming majority that were peaceful. They're going to look at the bad guys."

He concluded by declaring, "I hope there is a through investigation. My guess is when all this is over you're going to find that there were some bad guys on the other side who were also participating. It's just a hunch."Bozell was silent about President Trump -- whom his MRC has been dedicated to defending in an unquestioning manner over the past four years -- or his role in instigating the violence.

After his TV gig, he went on Twitter to thank the host, adding: "Violence is never the answer and hurts the cause of the millions, like myself, who know this election was stolen." Bozell will never admit that when you lie to people the way he has, violence is inevitable -- and he's got blood on his hands for encouraging it.

SHOCKER: Falsehood-Prone WND Publishes A Fact-Check (Of Someone Else)
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily is best known for publishing falsehoods and conspiracy theories. So it's a bit of a surprise to see WND pretend to be an actual news organization and publish -- gasp! -- a fact-check. Art Moore served it up in a Dec. 18 article, but rather than go after anything WND has previously published -- James Zumwalt's libelous election-fraud smears, to name just one recent example, about which WND has remained silent despite the fact that other right-wingers have been sued for publishing the exact same things -- he went after an obscure, easy to debunk claim:

A claim repeated by a Texas elector that Chief Justice John Roberts was heard from an adjacent room at the Supreme Court building screaming at colleagues for considering the Texas election-fraud case has a fundamental flaw.

The justices have been meeting remotely for the past two months during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Nevertheless, video of Texas elector and State Republican Executive Committee official Matt Patrick making the claim Monday at the Texas State House has gone viral on social media.

"This is an absurd fantasy," said Ed Whelan, the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, of Patrick's claim.

"For starters, the Justices haven't been having in-person conferences," tweeted Whelan, a former clerk for the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

This may be just a front to drum up business the finally launched Daily Caller-clone nonprofit WND News Center and portray it as something legitimate rather than a last-ditch bid to keep WND alive by offloading its reporters from the core for-profit operation.

CNS -- Which Calls Alveda King 'Dr.' -- Is Mad That Jill Biden Uses 'Dr.'
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com columnist Hans Bader did a lot of whining over Jill Biden using the "Dr." honorific despite having a PH.D. and not a medical degree. First came his Dec. 14 column:

I am a lawyer with a "Juris Doctor" degree from Harvard Law School. But calling myself "Doctor" would be misleading, because I don't practice medicine. Indeed, it would be insufferably pompous. As law professor Eugene Volokh notes, lawyers don't call themselves "doctor," even though the word "doctor" is in their degree.

Jill Biden has an Ed.D degree that required even less study than becoming a lawyer, and no original research -- indeed, it required less research than I conducted while at Harvard Law School.

Yet, Biden calls herself "Dr." And liberal media -- the same liberal media that ridiculed conservatives with doctorates for calling themselves "Dr." The conservative White House official Sebastian Gorka was  mocked for calling himself "Dr." by TV host Samantha Bee, and the Washington Post questioned Gorka's doing so, because, it said, "mainstream news outlets generally refuse to attribute the 'Dr.' prefix to anyone who is not a medical doctor."

[...]

Calling Biden "Dr." makes even less sense than calling a lawyer like me "Dr." That's because Biden's "Ed.D" degree required less study (3-4 years part-time study) than a law degree (which requires three full years of study), according to one of the nation's leading law professors, Eugene Volokh. Biden's studies also did not require the equivalent of a dissertation, which is typically required for a doctorate.

So Biden's claim to be called "Dr." is far weaker than that of people like Sebastian Gorka, who completed a dissertation to get their PhD. (Remember, the media mocked the conservative Gorka for calling himself "Doctor Gorka").

You know who else had no problem calling Gorka "Dr."? CNS. A July 2017 article graced him with the honorific. An October 2017 CNS article by managing editor Michael W. Chapman, meanwhile, referenced not only "Dr. Sebastian Gorka" but also "Dr. Alveda King."

You remember her, right? CNS has literally spent years gracing King with "Dr." even though her doctorate is honorary.

Meanwhile, Bader wasn't don't making personal attacks on Biden. His Dec. 17 column attacked her doctoral dissertation, insisting without evidence that "its quality was so poor that people would likely have raised questions about its adequacy, if her husband hadn't been a powerful politician in Delaware, whose state university gave her the degree." He rehashed his earlier whining about Biden's purported lack of rigor:

People assume that because Mrs. Biden received a doctorate, her paper must have been a "dissertation." But it wasn't; in reality, it was a mere "executive position paper." As law professor Eugene Volokh notes, the University of Delaware did not require Mrs. Biden's paper to conduct any original research, as is required for a dissertation. Her degree was also not like a Ph.D, because it required less coursework than is needed to get even a lesser professional degree like a J.D.

Lawyers like me need three years of full-time study to get a J.D; Mrs. Biden's degree only required part-time study for 3-4 years.

So her degree wasn't the equivalent of a Ph.D, a medical degree, or even a professional degree, in terms of its rigor.

Bader made sure not to mention that, unlike with Biden, there are questions about the legitimacy of Gorka's doctorate, earned from an obscure Hungarian university, which is much more of a polemic than actual researcch and which the doctoral referees team (one of whom co-wrote a book with Gorka, so he may have been a bit bias) to have merely rubber-stamped instead of offering any sort of detailed evaluation.

That's the sort of thing CNS is doing these days -- bashing anything Biden because it can.

NEW ARTICLE: The MRC Division Of The Trump Campaign, Part 2
Topic: Media Research Center
As the presidential election neared, the Media Research Center became even more of a loyal Trump defender and Biden attacker. Read more >>

MRC Throws A Huge Tantrum Over An Editorial Cartoon It Didn't Like
Topic: Media Research Center

The left is so unhinged in their hatred and fear of President Donald Trump that they’re flat out publicly dehumanizing anyone who would dare try to get him back in office for another four years. 

According to Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes and her latest hate-filled artwork for the D.C.-based rag, Republicans who have publicly supported Trump’s legal fight to challenge Joe Biden’s presidential victory, despite how fishy that victory may be, are sneaky, evil rats.

Oh yeah, these republicans are sneaking and scurrying around, trying to overturn what powerful establishment dems have ordained. And if we’re to take the allegory to its final conclusion, what does one do about a rat problem? Well, you know. 

With her latest artistic creation, Telnaes portrayed each of the Republican lawmakers that endorsed Texas’ lawsuit against voting irregularities in the 2020 election as hideous, scheming rats. It’s quite a shocking image. A whole page of the Washington Post was dedicated to this shocking insult, called “All the Republican Rats.” Though insult is too light a term for the work, as it’s a dehumanizing piece of illustrated libel that should get Telnaes tossed from any polite establishment.

But again, this is The Washington Post we are talking about …  

In the abhorrent cartoon, the name of each and every Republican Attorney General and U.S. congressman who signed on to the Texas lawsuit to defend Trump’s claims of a fraudulent election was scribbled next to a drawing of a nefarious-looking rodent.

[...]

Sadly none of this is surprising from this cartoon-scribbling fascist hack. Telnaes resorted to this same partisan wickedness before by depicting Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) children as monkeys in 2015. Though “All the Republicans rats” is truly her seminal moment of artistic hatred.

And, as some have pointed out, the cartoon can be seen as blatantly anti-Semitic, so there's that too. Of course, that's anything but surprising for someone as openly partisan and hateful as Telnaes.

-- Gabriel Hays, Dec. 21 MRC NewsBusters post

Newsmax's Hirsen Still Spinning Election-Fraud Conspiracy Theories
Topic: Newsmax

Smirky Newsmax columnist James Hirsen has become quite enamored of bogus right-wing election-fraud conspiracies, and that hasn't really stopped. We've noted his Dec. 7 column likening the election to a bank heist, but he's done more of that.

In his Dec. 14 column, Hirsen lashed out at the Supreme Court justices who refuse to take up the highly dubious Texas lawsuit trying to intervene in the elections of other states:

To the heartbreak of millions of Americans who were hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court would give justice a fighting chance in the current fog of electoral war, seven of the nine members of the High Court simply slunk away last Friday without even lending an ear.

Approximately one week ago, shortly before midnight, the state of Texas filed a lawsuit directly with the high court.

In that suit, Texas challenged the election procedures that had taken place in the states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The seven members of the high court, who took the position that Texas and the other co-plaintiff states would not be allowed to have their case heard, committed a fundamental error.

The justices may have been influenced by a slew of legal prognosticators, some of whom had taken to the Democratic-dominated media to ridicule the Texas attorney general for having initiated the action in the first place.

[...]

The threshold issue that was before the Supreme Court was whether the constitutional prescription for the selection of electors had been violated by non-legislative actors.

This was, and will always remain, central to the functioning of our republic, and it is a premise that is vitally important for all of the justices to recognize.

Seven simply did not.

These wayward seven failed to allow the case to move forward.

In his Dec. 28 column, Hirsen ranted about Americans allegedly being victims of intelligence-style PSYOP tactics over the election:

There has been a concerted effort to perpetuate two falsehoods: first, the claim that no such evidence of election fraud exists; the second, the repeated mantra that the election is "over" and everyone needs to "move on."

The first falsehood supports the fallacious premise that the 2020 presidential election was conducted in a legitimate manner. It was not.

Even former Attorney General William Barr, among others, admitted that there was fraud.

The second falsehood seeks to sweep the rigged election under the rug.

The nation cannot.

The Republic ceases to exist without free and fair elections.

At present, approximately half of the country believes that the election was conducted in an illegitimate manner.

These are the folks who are not just distrustful of the way the election was conducted.

They are the folks who have lost trust in their government; lost trust in their elected officials; lost trust in the complicit news media; lost trust in the social media; lost trust in the tech companies; and on and on.

No doubt, the use of PSYOP on an unsuspecting public played a major role in the vanquishing of their trust.

However, this type of undermining typically leads to cynicism, which can be unhealthy for an individual and fatal to a society.

But Hirsen is engaged in his own PSYOP here. His goal as a right-wing activist is to instill that distrust in people for the benefit of Trump -- otherwise, why would he spend the past two months ranting about how the election was stolen from Trump, something he would know is not true if he had ever bothered to closely examine the evidence?

Hirsen wants people to be distrustful of government and the media and to be cynical about the state of things. That's his job. That's what Newsmax pays him to do.

At Last, WND Launches Its Daily Caller-Clone Nonprofit Reporting Operation
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Remember the WND News Center, that clone of the Daily Caller News Foundation whose main function is to offload WND's reporting operation (or what was left of it, anyway) to a nonprofit organization that would allow WND to publish its content for free (as long as other people could as well)? It appears that -- after getting announced back in February 2019, it has finally happened. Joseph Farah announced it in his Dec. 22 column -- but not, of course, establishing a sob story behind its creation in which he played victim and served up a little of his health history over the past couple of years:

I've been more or less absent from the scene for a little over 18 months. Some of you know what happened to me. I was working really hard trying to save this journalistic experiment from the plague of the Tech Giants. They destroyed our advertising revenues through underhanded, dishonest and monopolistic means we've been documenting for years, which caused our annual revenues to plunge from $15 million to $1 million. Staff had to be cut to a bare minimum. We had to stop publishing books and producing movies – two of our big successes for years.

Then I had to drop out myself from the race because of a series of massive strokes from November 2018 to March 2019.

Call me a casualty of Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which launched this massive "indecency" by giving the Tech Giants a waiver from the lawsuits that tend to plague journalism sites – even though their brazen "editing" and "censoring" of news and viewpoints they don't like makes them de facto journalists, not simply "neutral platforms" like AT&T and Verizon, as they claim. Their mega-monopoly status has also made Google and Facebook advertising behemoths – landlords to what remains of the press. The Tech Giants promote reporting they like, namely that with a progressive-left slant, while censoring and suppressing independent, honest, hard-hitting reporting like ours.

The carnage started shortly after the arrival of President Trump. My public pleading could not stop it. It was a massacre. Frankly, we're fortunate anything is left of WND. No one was hit harder.

Needless to say, Farah is not going to tell the full truth -- that its business model of publishing falsehoods and conspiracy theories failed and, given that little has changed about WND's editorial operation since then, raises questions about whether WND even deserves to live.

(Also: if the book and movie operations were "big successes," there was no reason to shut them down, since "success" typically equates with generating profits. The fact they were shut down tells us they weren't moneymakers.)

From there, it was time to self-promote (and, of course, beg for money):

Allow me to introduce you to the WND News Center – the reader-supported, tax-exempt 501(c)3 nonprofit that is giving birth to an optimistic, credible, fearless and uncompromisingly truth-oriented news entity in a sea of fake news, propaganda and disinformation.

The original vision and hopes we have long had for WorldNetDaily are still intact at your favorite news site, WND.com. But those ideals are now shared by our sister organization, an intrepid new journalism nonprofit called the WND News Center. Approved by the IRS as a public charity, the WND News Center is committed to making its journalistic output freely available for publication by other news organizations. Many believe the nonprofit route is the wave of the future in American journalism, where the traditional advertising-based business model has been largely destroyed by Big Tech.

Freedom's not going away in America. It's here to stay. Allow me to make a plea that my selfless partner, David Kupelian, has often written in my absence: Please give generously to the WND News Center and help rejuvenate a truly free press in America!

While the WND News Center is finally off the ground, it's not offering too much so far -- as the website shows, the available content is just article rewrites by the few remaining WND writers like Bob Unruh and Art Moore, as well as WND-exclusive columnists. Those articles on the WND website proper now have tags stating that "Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience."

Farah might want to watch himself, though. The Daily Caller model he's clearly following -- ironically, WND publishes a lot of Daily Caller News Foundation content -- has brought complaints that the nonprofit is improperly funding the for-profit operation and have engaged in political activity that clashes with the foundation's nonprofit status. Right-wing financier Charles Koch is a major bankroller of the DCNF.

On the other hand, the fact that the WND News Center is a 501(c)3 nonprofit means that it has to file tax reports that reveal how much money it raises and from whom, as well as what it spends on salaries and other expenses -- all of which must be made public. That might be a little much for the secrecy-loving Farah (whose strokes shortly after the announcement of the News Center, if you'll recall, weren't publicly revealed until the Washington Post sought comment on an expose it was working on about WND's financial shenanigans).

Whether or not Farah's health issues caused it, WND has been very slow on the uptake in doing basic things to shore up its fragile finances. It wasn't until November that WND got around to setting up a subscription option, after wasting precious time on things like giving away sketchy cybercurrency. WND's management has not changed in the interim -- meaning that the way WND is run and the policies it follows are not changing in any significant way -- and it's to the point where all of the last-minute fixing being done here may be too little, too late.

But how much money will donors ultimately kick in? This is content by the same people whose work has already been discredited and rejected by the public. Why would anyone outside WND want to pay for the privilege of generating it when there's no return on it?

MRC Defends Proud Boys Supporter To Own The Libs, Or Something
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center's Alexander Hall complained in a Nov. 20 post:

American band TRAPT was reportedly booted from Facebook for sharing a meme. 

“Nu-metal one hit wonders Trapt were kicked off of Facebook after the group shared a Proud Boy meme to promote their new account on social media site Parler,” Newsweek reported Nov. 19. Alternative-rock band Trapt had tweeted: “For posting this pic and saying the same thing in the post, Facebook has completely deleted the TRAPT FB account.” The official Trapt account then declared: “I will be suing Facebook.” Trapt was the nu-metal one-hit-wonder band known for the song “Headstrong” in 2002.

The MRC loves supporting fringe people and conspiracy theories when they can be used in its dishonest war against social media.

Hall went on to complain that "Facebook’s moves to restrict activist groups in the name of preventing unrest have appeared to be completely partisan in nature." Of course, the Proud Boys are not just an "activist group"; they're violent thugs with a white supremacist and anti-Semitic bent.

But a couple weeks later, Trapt 'sTwitter account got banned. Why? This is why:

The nine-month hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck has come to a screeching halt. Trapt’s Twitter account was finally suspended after frontman Chris Taylor Brown vehemently defended underage sexual encounters between teenage boys and adult women.

As the COVID-19 pandemic began to ravage the planet, Chris Taylor Brown became one of the most inflammatory users on Twitter by defending President Trump’s COVID response, blaming George Floyd for his own death, threatening to fight or sue countless Twitter users, supporting neo-fascist group The Proud Boys and more.

Brown’s Proud Boys support got Trapt removed from Instagram and Facebook, but Twitter didn’t take action until the musician began publicly defending statutory rape.

“A 15 year male and a 25 year old female is not pedophilia, you fucking moron,” Brown later tweeted. “I wouldn’t care if a 15 year old boy banged his 25 year old teacher. That’s it…”

“I would be giving the kid high fives!” Brown continued in yet another tweet. “Only if the teacher was hot though… So much worse when a grown man does that with a 14 year old girl. They get much tougher prison sentences, so society agrees with me. As long as the kid wasn’t sad about it. I mean the teacher could break his heart and that would be sad.”

Hall isn't going to tell you what Trapt did to get banned from Twitter, since that doesn't fit with his dishonest agenda. But this is the crowd Hall and the MRC are associating with.

(At least Hall conceded that Trapt was a "nu-metal one-hit-wonder.")

Scott Lively's Anti-Vaccine Rant
Topic: WorldNetDaily

One of the most troubling questions about our very near future as Americans is whether our state or the federal government will mandate a COVID-19 vaccine – either by a clear government dictate like the lockdown policies or by coercive measures in cooperation with leftist-controlled private companies to make refusal to "voluntarily" vaccinate so onerous as to force compliance.

The prospect is all the more troubling given what we already know about vaccine puppet-master Bill Gates' Malthusian agenda and its vaccine-based biometric tagging of human beings for tracking purposes (though there is no indication so far that this would include a microchip), the well-established greed and untrustworthiness of "Big Pharma," the reports of fetal remains being used in the vaccine creation process and perhaps in the vaccines themselves, the emerging dystopian "Great Reset" plans of the global elites, and the horror stories of proven COVID-19 side-effects from the initial human trials.

Compounding our anxieties in this matter is the massive cover-up of data on COVID-19 death rates, the truth of which (were it known by the general public) would largely neutralize the fear-based motivation and justification for the vaccine. One need only consider that even the highest-risk category of Americans (those over 70 years old) have a 99.5% survival rate and that the total death rate of the nation (from all causes) in 2020 is statistically no higher than prior years.

This disease is not only not a modern version of the bubonic plague, but is far, far less lethal for children and young people than the flu. And in terms of overall public health, it has done virtually nothing but shift the body counts of dead people from, for example, the heart disease and pneumonia columns to the COVID-19 column in the data-reporting process. And, increasingly, to the suicide column, now inflated due to incessant soul-draining media fear-mongering to emotionally vulnerable lockdown victims.

Trump has pledged not to mandate the vaccine, but you can assume Biden will, regardless of what he says now, if the ongoing coup d'etat of the Purple Revolution steals the presidency for him.

I am not opposed to vaccines, per se, but as a Christian and a constitutionalist I am strongly opposed to government health mandates of any kind that purport to supersede my sovereign right under God to the control of my own body. It is my choice whether to seek or accept any health remedy or procedure regardless of the opinion of government officials.

[...]

More importantly, personal bodily sovereignty is a core biblical tenet, and, therefore, as a Christian attorney and the founding pastor of First Century Bible Church, I have drafted a policy against vaccine mandates and posted it on our church website as our official doctrine.

-- Scott Lively, Dec. 4 WorldNetDaily column

CNS Joins MRC Parent In Attacking Warnock
Topic: CNSNews.com

Following in the footsteps of its Media Research Center parent, the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com, also went on the attack against Democratic Georgia Senate candidate Raphael Warnock.

CNS managing editor and Franklin Graham fanboy Michael W. Chapman repeated Graham's attack on Warnock over abortion, declaring that he "champions the killing of babies in the safety of a mother’s womb through abortion." In a Dec. 7 article, Patrick Goodenough returned to the issue, highlighting how "the contrast in their views on abortion was on full display" in TV appearances by Warnock and his Republican opponent,Kelly Loeffler -- but, unusually, he did fact-check Loeffler by noting that she falsely claimed that Warnock invoked the Bible when defending a woman's right to choose (but, in more typical CNS style, this wasn't the headline claim). Two days later, though, Craig Bannister hyped right-wing activist Alveda King's claim that "I wish Rev. Warnock would read the Bible for real" on the subject of abortion.

A Dec. 16 article by Goodenough featured right-wing attacks on Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the Democrat running for Georgia's other Senate seat, claiming that "ceding Republican control of the Senate would pave the way for an agenda of creeping socialism, Supreme Court packing, and attacks on religious freedom." On Dec. 21, Goodenough took offense to Warnock's claim thatAmerica was not only fighting COVID-19 but systemic racism, which he called "COVID-1619." Goodenough ramped up the prudishness over rappers supporting Warnock and Ossoff in a Dec. 28 article:

An Atlanta rapper whose sexually-explicit lyrics leave nothing to the imagination campaigned on behalf of Georgia Democratic Senate hopefuls Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock on Monday, urging voters to “paint Georgia blue” and “get both of those Senate seats.”

Performing at a campaign drive-in concert in the parking lot of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Ga., BRS Kash changed the title of his song, “Throat Baby” to “Vote Baby,” and adapted some of the other lyrics.

“I love the way you walk, love the way you talk, Let a young n**** come play in your throat,” became “I love the way you walk, love the way you talk, let’s all go walk to the polls.”

After performing, BRS Kash said, “Hey if you wanna make a change, early election has already started. I need everybody to go vote by January 5. We need to paint Georgia blue, we need to get both of those Senate seats. So I need everybody to go vote for Jon Ossoff and Reverend Warnock.”

The lyrics of “Throat Baby” are too graphic to reproduce here, but include offensive terms for women and blacks, along with explicit references to sexual activity, genitalia, and bodily fluids.

Chapman returned on Dec. 30 for more fanboying over Graham, regurgitating his claim that "the soul of the nation is at stake" in the Georgia runoff election.

Oppo Research: MRC Helps Ga. GOP Senate Candidate By Attacking Opponent
Topic: Media Research Center

Just like it did with the Trump campaign, the Media Research Center got its marching orders from Republican leadership: Go on the attack against Raphael Warnock, the Democratic candidate in one of the two Georgia Senate runoff races. And Warnock was very much targeted: A search of the NewsBusters archive found a whopping 46 articles that referenced Warnock between the Nov. 3 election and press time, compared with 35 articles referencing Jon Ossoff, the Democratic candidate in the other Georgia runoff race.

The MRC got started early with making misleading and nit-picky attacks on Warnock. That was followed by a  Dec. 9 post by Gabriel Hays parroting "serious conservatives and Christians" bashing Warnockfor not hating abortion enough:

If there was one thing that could make it obvious that Democrat Senate candidate Raphael Warnock is a terrible choice for U.S. Senator, it would be one of his most recent tweets proclaiming himself a pro-choice Christian. Talk about living with cognitive dissonance.

First off, supporting the killing of unborn babies is a non-starter, as is openly admitting you’re a hypocrite by saying you’re Christian and then saying you ignore fundamental parts of Christian teaching. 

Warnock, a Baptist “pastor” and radical, pro-BLM, pro-abortion leftist vying for one of two U.S. Senate seats in the upcoming Georgia run-off elections, went afoul of conservatives on Twitter in recent days by declaring himself to be proudly pro-choice and Christian.

What is this? A joke?

Hays has the patter down, including the right-wing talking point that Warnock is a "radical."

(This echoed in part a Nov. 20 column by Tim Graham whining that conservatives were being called out for attacking Warnock's religion but tended to cry discrimination when liberals criticized the extreme religious views of their fellow conservatives.)

On Dec. 17, Kristine Marsh tried to make a big deal out of saying that Fidel Castro's legacy as Cuban dictator is "complex" as most people's legacies are, and that Castro spoke at a church 25 years ago where Warnock was youth pastor (though there's no evidence Warnock played any role in the visit).

The perpetually ragey Nicholas Fondacaro thought he had the key to destroying Warnock's campaign in a Dec. 22 post:

Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock apparently got an early piece of coal in his stocking on Christmas week. According to police body camera footage exclusively aired on Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson Tonight on Tuesday, the radical leftist pastor was accused by his ex-wife of running over her foot with his car as she tried to stop him from driving off with their kids, last March.

The video was stunning and featured Warnock himself talking with the responding Atlanta police officer, but will any of the broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, or NBC) share it with their viewers on Wednesday?

[...]

The incident raised deep concerns and questions about his temperament and actions that needed to be probed by the media. Unfortunately, the press was more interested in helping Democrats win control of the Senate no matter who the candidates were.

Fondacaro buried the fact that officers on scene found no apparent injury on the ex's foot and that Warnock was never charged. And his complaint is doubly ironic given that neither Fondacaro nor anyone else at the MRC told their readers that the Staten Island bar owner they lionized for standing up to purportedly draconian coronavirus lockdown restrictions actually did run over someone with his car: a sheriff's deputy. Nevertheless, Fondacaro returned the next day to rant that non-right-wing networks didn't cover the minor dispute.

Then -- as if he was on the payroll as opposition researcher for Warnock's Republican opponent, Kelly Loeffler -- Fondacaro served up another Warnock attack on Dec. 28:

Even with new reporting from the Washington Free Beacon out Monday that detailed how, in 2002, a then 12-year-old boy was abused at a church camp overseen by future Senate Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock, CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront continued to be a staunch defender. Instead of reporting on the account of abuse victim Anthony Washington, senior national correspondent Kyung Lah defended Warnock’s radical sermons from Republican “attacks.”

Throughout the 2020 election cycle, numerous videos had surfaced of Warnock preaching radical leftist ideology from his pulpit. And as National Review published in mid-November, it was off the wall stuff. Warnock accused Israel of being like “apartheid South Africa,” described Israelis as “birds of prey” in a letter, and gave a speech praising Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s “God damn America” sermon.

[...]

And according to a Maryland state trooper investigating the abuse claims, Warnock was arrested for trying to obstruct justice by interfering with the questioning of camp counselors. Though, the charge was later dropped.

The story has been a key Loeffler campaign talking point, hence Fondacaro's glomming onto it. He censored the fact that law enforcement found  Warnock to be "very helpful" with the investigation into the camp, blaming miscommunication for the arrest; Warnock said he interrupted a law enforcement interview of a counselor to make sure the counselor had legal representation.

Despite the fact he censored key exculpatory aspects of the story that interfered with his narrative, Fondacaro hypocritically lectured: "If CNN was going to do a report defending Warnock’s time as a church official, then they needed to take responsibility and report on his abusive camp. In this instance, the situation wasn’t political at all. It was about his time overseeing a camp that abused children and his alleged attempt to obstruct justice."

The next day, Joseph Vazquez served up his own attack on Warnock, invoking all the key right-wing buzzwords:

Outsiders are funding nearly the entire cost of Georgia’s Democrat Senate candidates Jon Ossoff’s and Rev. Raphael Warnock’s campaigns, a new report said.

This is the same Fidel Castro-sympathizing Warnock who referred to himself as a “pro-choice pastor,” and the same Ossoff who has ties to Communist China. Warnock, in particular, had also disparaged service in the U.S. military, telling church parishioners in 2011, “America, nobody can serve God and the military.” Oh, and let’s not forget that Warnock also has a record of spewing anti-Semitic hate at Israel.

Of the $100 million each that the two leftist candidates have hauled in the last two months, “95 percent of that money is coming from outside of the Peach State,” according to the New York Post. The biggest financial backers reportedly are based in “the Democratic strongholds of New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.”

Again, this was a hypocritical attack. Vazquez was silent on the source of Loeffler's donations, and there was a reason: She and her fellow GOP Senate runoff candidate, David Perdue, received 92 percent of donations from out of state, nuch of it from, yes, California, Texas and Florida.

Are all these explicitly political attacks in line with the MRC's nonprofit status, which forbids explicit political activity? One has to wonder.

Newsmax Columnist Calls Biden A 'Manchurian President'
Topic: Newsmax

Calling someone a "Manchurian candidate" has been a reliable form of attack by right-wingers against political candidates they don't like. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and even John McCain have been portrayed as one. Right-wing lawyer Michael Dorstewitz, in his Dec. 14 Newsmax column, is now arguing that Joe Biden is one:

Life imitates art. "The Manchurian Candidate" was a 1962 political thriller that depicted an American soldier who was captured during the Korean War. He was brainwashed to later assassinate a political figure as part of an international Communist conspiracy.

In this case former Vice President Joe Biden wasn't brainwashed — he's a willing participant. And the assassination isn't of a political figure but of the United States.

Biden will most certainly reverse the Trump administration's policy of holding the Chinese Communist Party responsible for its past misdeeds, either by underestimating the threat that China presents, or out of a desire for monetary gain. He'll allow China to increase its influence on the United States and would permit manufacturing to migrate back to China, taking American jobs with it.

[...]

Today, the Electoral College meets to officially elect the president. Biden is expected to receive 306 votes; Trump, 232.

Assuming that holds until the January 20 Inauguration Day, the Manchurian President will be sleeping in White House that night.

That's not the only attack Dorstewitz has launched against Biden. In his Dec. 23 column, he attacked Biden's religious faith:

But it’s one thing to spend an hour in church once a week. It’s another thing altogether to actually live your faith, and with Biden, it’s all showboating. In reality, Biden’s neither honorable nor devout.

Biden has aligned with his party’s stance on abortion for decades, notwithstanding the church’s belief that life begins at conception, and destroying that life is murder. He at least supported the Hyde Amendment for decades, which in most cases prevents public funds from being used to pay for abortions.

But that fell by the wayside last year when he realized he had to fall in line if he had any hope of winning the Democratic presidential nomination. A desire for power trumped adherence to his faith.

Dorstewitz even brought up petty, nearly 50-year-old attacks on how Biden met his wife, Jill, first advanced by her bitter first husband and later promoted by the Media Research Center.

Dorstewitz ranted in his Dec. 28 column:

If Joe Biden has his way, the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms could be nearly legislated out of existence.

And that would have the blessing of the Communist Party of China.

The New York Post’s Nels Frye observed back in March that President Xi Jinping and the People’s Republic of China were rooting for former Vice President Joe Biden to emerge victorious in November’s general election.

Yeah, quite Manchurian.

WND Defends The Honor Of the Proud Boys -- Again
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Back in October, WorldNetDaily responded to presidential debate remarks about whether the far-right thugs in the Proud Boys are white supremacists by pointing out that national leader of the group, Enrique Tarrio, is "a black-Hispanic American" who denies any white supremacist motives. Not only is that not true, there is a Proud Boys faction that is quite proud to be white supremacist and anti-Semitic.

Nevertheless, WND felt the need to defend the honor of the Proud Boys once again. In a Nov. 20 article, Matt Keener wrote about how he "talked with Enrique Tarrio – the Afro-Cuban leader of Proud Boys – on camera about how his group became a lightning rod in the 2020 election" during a trip to the Million MAGA March:

Aside from that, if your only familiarity with the group is Chris Wallace and Joe Biden teaming up to ask the president to condemn white supremacy yet again, specifically the Proud Boys, during the first debate, then there is one thing that immediately comes to your attention when you see this "white supremacist" group.

There are quite a few people of color in their ranks.

Indeed, as I approached Tarrio, he was joking around, apparently drinking a beer and hugging a fellow group member who is black.

I spoke with Tarrio on camera about how on earth the Proud Boys came to be a focal point of this year's election.

Keener gave Tarrio a pass in letting him handwave the group's history of violence:

Tarrio pulls no punches when asked about how the Proud Boys are portrayed or if they are misunderstood.

"We're not this violent f–ing group of guys – we're not. Can we be violent?" he asks rhetorically. "Absolutely so. Are we good at self-defense? Yes sir. But we don't – we had 250 Proud Boys on the streets today. But they didn't board up businesses because we came into town. They're boarding up businesses when the left are the ones that get together."

Tarrio explained how he handles the perception or claims they are a white supremacist or hate group.

"I'm not concerned about the people that hate us or call us white supremacists. I really don't give a s–t about them. All right? Because they're not reasonable. So I don't try to reason with them. I don't try to argue with them. I avoid them," he says, before adding, "The people that don't know who we are – or somebody that thinks that we're something but isn't 100% sure? Those people I reach out to. Because we're not a white supremacist group."

What Keener isn't going to tell you is that the Proud Boys are, indeed, a violence-driven group. Since then, Tarrio admitted to burning a Black Lives Matter banner he stole from a church during a December march, and he falsely claimed he was invited to the White House (turns out he just took the regular public tour).

All this stuff was interspersed with rants from Keener like this:

You can call yourself "woke," but if you are canceling, censoring, eliminating, or assaulting someone based on who they voted for, you are misguided. It is you who is the oppressor.

You can call the Proud Boys white supremacist, but the leader of the group and several members are black and brown. I saw them with my own eyes.

The media manipulate and lie to you.

Look around. Use your eyes.

The emperor has no clothes.

And no one wants to say it.

Keener has a bright future as a WND columnist ... if WND survives that long, anyway.

NEW ARTICLE: The MRC Division Of The Trump Campaign, Part 1
Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center was such a devoted Trump apologist and promoter, it may as well have been on the payroll. Read more >>

What Is The MRC Trying To Hide In Its War On 'Big Tech'?
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center huffed in a Dec. 18 press release:

MRC President L. Brent Bozell denounces Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFPF) for aiding Big Tech companies in their fight to suppress and restrict conservative content. AFPF filed a lawsuit, following a FOIA request, for communications between the Department of Commerce and conservatives working to stop Big Tech from unjustly censoring conservative content. The Media Research Center, Bozell, and MRC VP Dan Gainor were all specifically named.

"AFPF backed off naming groups and leaders after strong pushback for their efforts, but what is done is done. The Koch machine has shown its true colors,” said Bozell. “Koch and AFP should do the honest thing and disclose their agenda. Koch also launched a multi-million dollar venture with George Soros.

“Section 230 must be reformed to stop the abuse of conservatives by Big Tech. That’s our position. It’s the essence of free speech and free enterprise. The Koch machine believes in neither. They’re supporting massive monopolies while also snooping about to read others’ private emails. What they’re doing smells to high heaven. They should just admit they’re doing the bidding of Big Tech, and we’ll all know where they stand,” Bozell concluded.

Weird how Bozell and the MRC are suddenly concerned about the content of "private emails" when it spent years salivating over Hillary Clinton's leaked private emails and Peter Strzok's private texts. If the MRC did nothing wrong and all of its lobbying to change Section 230 was above board, it shouldn't be bothered by anyone's "snooping." What are Bozell, Gainor and the MRC trying to hide?

Also: The AFPF's original FOIA request was made back in September. Why did the MRC wait three months to complain about it? Presumably because there was an article in the Washington Times two days before Bozell's rant noting that the AFPF filed a full lawsuit against the Commerce Department becuase it wouldn't release those emails.

Also curious is that the MRC is specifically lashing out a prominent funder of conservative causes. this is likely driven by the fact that it doesn't get much funding from Koch-related foundations -- just $15,000 in recent years, according to one count. It linked to another reason: a July 2019 MRC post complaining that Charles Koch is cooperating with hated liberal boogeyman George Soroson something called the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, the creation of which was driven in part by U.S. emphasis on military force over diplomacy and "the foreign policy establishment is ill-equipped to interpret what was happening, particularly the foreign policy of Donald Trump." Writer Joseph Vazquez -- the MRC's designated Soros fearmongerer -- rehashed that "An MRC Special Report proved that 'In just 10 years, Soros has given more than $550 million to liberal organizations in the United States. And that's really just a beginning. That total represents about 27 percent of the $2 billion given out by the American branches of his Open Society Foundations from 2000 to 2009.'" Besides, the MRC has its own right-wing funders in the form of the Mercer family.

As the old saying goes: If you have nothing to hide, you hide nothing. The MRC is very much acting like it has something to hide. It had noproblem with the release of Hillary Clinton's emails or Strzok's texts, so it should have no problem with the release of its own emails for the purposes of full transparency on an issue in which it is heavily involved.