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Tuesday, May 24, 2022
MRC Completes Flip-Flop, Defends Musk Against Criticism Of China Ties
Topic: Media Research Center

Remember when the Media Research Center soured on Elon Musk when it was pointed out he's quite cozy with China so he can sell Teslas there, which it totally forgot about when Musk got interested in buying Twitter? well, the flip-flop became complete in an April 26 post by Kyle Drennen, who criticized media outlets for reminding people of that fact:

On Tuesday, both NBC’s Today show and ABC’s Good Morning America hyped a suggestion from Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos that fellow billionaire and new Twitter owner Elon Musk might be under the influence of China’s authoritarian regime given the amount of business the Tesla CEO does in the country. However, neither network mentioned that in a follow-up tweet, Bezos admitted that Musk was “probably not” beholden to China.

“Sold. After weeks of watching and waiting, Elon Musk reaches a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion,” co-host Hoda Kotb announced at the start of NBC’s Today show. She then was quick to sound the alarm: “This morning, inside the world’s richest man’s plans to change the popular platform, the critics who call the move dangerous, and the looming battle of the billionaires as Jeff Bezos raises his own questions about the deal.”

[...]

Bezos initially quote-tweeted someone pointing out Musk’s business interests in China, speculating: “Interesting question. Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?”

However, in a second tweet in the thread, Bezos promptly dismissed the notion: “My own answer to this question is probably not. The more likely outcome in this regard is complexity in China for Tesla, rather than censorship at Twitter.”

In the final tweet in the thread, Bezos neutrally observed: “But we’ll see. Musk is extremely good at navigating this kind of complexity.”

Bezos conceding that Musk is "probably not" under Chinese influence is not the ringing endorsement that Drennen wants you to think it is. Drennen also failed to remind readers that just three and a half months earlier, MRC sports blogger Jay Maxson was cheering then-NBA player Enes Freedom Kanter for calling out Musk because heopened a Tesla showroom in Xinjiang, "the province which contains what many view as modern-day concentration camps," adding that "Fanboy Musk also credited China with its people’s happiness, indicating he must have a warped sense of what constitutes that human emotion."

Instead, Drennen played whataboutism with Bezos, complaining that the media reports lacked "an examination of the significant business ties Bezos has with China. That includes the Chinese state-run publication China Daily paying millions to run an insert in the Post for years that spewed regime propaganda."

It will not surprise you to learn that the MRC has never menttioned Musk's coziness with China again.

That wasn't the only flip-flop the MRC performed in service of Musk, however. An April 30 item by Autumn Johnson stated:

Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen said she was “cautiously optimistic” about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Haugen alleged last year that Facebook prioritized its own profits over public safety and encouraged content moderation in her testimony to Congress.

Fox News reported that she said that Mark Zuckerberg has too many people around him who “tell him what he wants to hear.” She said that Musk handled feedback better.

"I have a feeling that Facebook is going to rationalize to itself that it can't really do anything different than it already does because of the demands of the market," Haugen said, according to Fox. "I think there's a huge opportunity here for Elon to really demonstrate that there's another way forward."

Last fall, the MRC was trashing Haugen for her whistleblowing -- a script that just happened to be supplied to it by Facebook itself. Johnson didn't mention any of that or concede her employer was acting as a Facebook tool; instead, she uncritically quoted Haugen saying that "maintained her stance about the issues at Facebook."

Meanwhile, the MRC was still busy gushing over his planned Twitter purchase and whatever else he says:

Of course, the MRC was also still lashing out at anyone who dared criticize Musk over his deal:

Needless to say, the MRC made no mention of the fact that, as we've noted, Musk's real-life commitment to "free speech"  pales in comparison to the flowery language the MRC has heaped upon him.


Posted by Terry K. at 9:41 PM EDT
Updated: Tuesday, May 24, 2022 9:58 PM EDT
WND Twists Obama's Words To Portray COVID Vaccines As A Failure
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Barack Obama hasn't been president for years, but there's still a raging case of Obama Derangement Syndrome at WorldNetDaily. Read how Art Moore twists Obama's words to conform to WND's COVID vaccine conspiracy theories in an April 21 article:

In a direct appeal to the Silicon Valley tech giants to censor "misinformation" on social media, former President Obama on Thursday unwittingly affirmed the contention of critics of the COVID-19 vaccines that the fact that clinical trials have not been completed makes the people who have received the shots part of an experiment.

"Despite the fact that we have now essentially clinically tested the vaccine on billions of people worldwide, around one in five Americans is still willing to put themselves at risk, and put their families at risk, rather than get vaccinated," he said in a speech at Stanford University.

"People are dying because of misinformation."

The former president's remarks illustrate the danger of censoring "misinformation," if only because one person's misinformation might well be another person's evidence-based opinion or eventually become common knowledge.

Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social media platforms notoriously have censored the voices of some of the world's most highly qualified medical scientists because their views don't align with the ever-evolving government and establishment media position on the pandemic and related issues.

President Biden and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, for example, assured Americans when the vaccines were rolled out that if you get vaccinated – for a disease that the CDC says has a survival rate of nearly 100% for people without chronic comorbidities – you won't get infected and you won't transmit the virus.

That hasn't turned out to be true, confirming the censored warnings of scientists such as Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Peter McCullough, who in January observed the "crumbling" establishment narrative that included "false statements regarding asymptomatic spread, reliance on lockdown and masks – which obviously didn't work – the suppression of early treatment, the mass promotion of vaccines that failed."

Both Malone and McCullough are COVID misinformers who have been repeatedly proven wrong, so maybe they're not the best example Moore could be citing. It's also a lie to portray the COVID vaccines as still experimental -- but the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been fully approved by the FDA -- as a "failure" because they weren't 100% effective in preventing COVID infection with zero side effects -- no vaccine meets that extremely high bar.In fact, the vacciners have been credited with preventing millions of deaths and hospitalizations.

The rest of the article is largely a rehash of dubious claims aout the vaccine WND has previously published. WND has a bad habit of publishing false and misleading claims about the vaccines.

Posted by Terry K. at 6:36 PM EDT
Updated: Tuesday, May 24, 2022 7:06 PM EDT
Newsmax's Hirsen: You Lose Your Soul If You Get Microchipped
Topic: Newsmax

Last year, Newsmax columnist James Hirsen embraced extremist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for pushing the idea of COVID vaccination passports as the mark of the beast. Hirsen went that direction again in his May 2 column that declared getting an implantable chip that could be used for making financial transactions would also be the mark of the beast under the dire headline "Submitting to Microchip Means Forfeiting Your Soul":

Bible adherents who are Christian believe that The Word of God contains prophecies within the Books of Revelation and Daniel, which provide a description of a future time in which a single global government will assert control over a world economy.

Not all Bible believers view prophecy in a literal sense, but a sizable number do. Such individuals give greater weight to the Scripture passage in which a malevolent world leader forces “…all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads.”

The Bible passage goes on to state that the people oppressed by this evil leader would be unable to “… buy or sell unless they had the mark …”

The demand that one's hand or forehead be marked in order to purchase or otherwise engage in trade is commonly referred to by Scripture scholars and Bible adherents alike as “The Mark of the Beast.”

In order to conform to Biblical predictions, the above described hand implant technology would have to be implemented through coercion. This is not nearly as far-fetched as it used to seem; that power hungry elites would actually force individuals to be microchipped.

The notion of our economy being transformed into a cashless society, where governing authorities have power over the operation of individual microchips, is a nightmare scenario. Freedom itself would be snuffed out.

[...]

When you think about it, if all of your personal data were to be stored in your hand, it would be way too easy for that information to be misused.

Bottom line: If you allow yourself to be chipped, you may find that you have handed over your life to the powers that be. And possibly even your soul.

Hirsen himself seems to be on a journey of trying to reclaim his soul after selling it in the form of enthusiastically embracing Donald Trump's lies about election fraud, which culminated in the Capitol riot -- though he's never confessed to being taken in by Trump's fraud.


Posted by Terry K. at 3:47 PM EDT
CNS Censors Donohue, Greene Duking It Out Over Catholic Stuff
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com loves far-right extremrist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. It also loves dishonest Catholic Bill Donohue. So you'd think a controversy involving both of them would be splashed all over CNS, right? Well, think again.

In an interview with the right-wing Catholic outlet Church Militant, Greene lashed out at the Catholic Church's longtime support for undocumented immigrants, calling it "Satan controlling the church" and adding (wihtout offering evidence for her claim): “The church is not doing its job, and it’s not adhering to the teachings of Christ and it’s not adhering to what the Word of God says we’re supposed to do.” Donohue retorted: :"She needs to apologize to Catholics immediately. She is a disgrace. We are contacting House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy about this matter. He’s got a loose cannon on his hands."

Greene then posted a lengthy response to Twitter claiming to be a "cradle Catholic" who left the church over the clergy sexual abuse scandals, going on to huff of bishops she claimed she was referring to in her claim about "Satan controlling the church": "The Catholic Church must throw out these monsters instead of lecturing the people its own bishops have driven away. I refuse to use kinder, gentler language as Bill Donohue might prefer when I talk about his disgusting and corrupt friends, who have made him rich with the donations from ordinary churchgoing Catholics." She also called out Donohue for making "a million dollars a year, partly from sending out emails to defend corrupt bishops" and having "breezily claimed on television recently that the abuse crisis was 'over,' relying on the same biships who rake in taxpayer money in the name of our Heavenly Father yet have still, somehow, bankrupted theChurch, and who spend donations on lawsuits to silence their victims."

Donohue did not respond to Greene's criticism of him; instead he posted a letter he sent to the House Ethics Committee demanding that Greene be "sanctioned" and complaining that she said "that her sweeping condemnation of the entire Catholic Church was meant only to apply to the bishops, as if that makes her hate speech acceptable. Greene has a history of offending African Americans and Jews, so bigotry is something that is apparently baked into her." He issued another statement commenting "on the fallout from our dispute with Marjorie Taylor Greene" in which he again refused to address Greene's criticisms of him but instead calling her an "angry ex-Catholic" whose views of the church are akin to "radical Muslims":

Angry ex-Catholics and militant secularists within the Jewish community are consumed with hostility over the Church’s sexual ethics. Practicing Catholics and observant Jews are not the problem—it is those who have lost their way.

When radical Muslims lash out at Catholics, it is usually the result of some twisted understanding of their own religion. Similarly, there is a strain of anti-Catholicism among Protestants, more commonly exhibited by extremists within the evangelical community.

Marjorie Taylor Greene belongs to two of these groups: she is an angry ex-Catholic and an extreme evangelical.

CNS was completely silent about this kerfuffle. It did, however, find the time and space while this was going on to write and publish an article headlined "WATCH: Biden Chokes on the Word 'Kleptocracy'."

CNS sure has some funny ideas about what it considers "news."


Posted by Terry K. at 12:52 AM EDT
Monday, May 23, 2022
As Musk Buys Twitter, MRC Goes Orgasmic Again
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center went from squeeing like a teenage girl when Elon Musk announced he had become the Twitter's largest shareholder to going pretty much orgasmic when Musk launched a hostile takeover bid for the company. After that, the MRC went into defense mode on behalf of Musk.

An April 17 post by Autumn Johnson unuronically quoted the guy who wants to spend billions to gain sole control of Twitter criticizing Mark Zuckerburg for allegedly having too much control over Facebook and its owner Meta. That was followed by various attacks on people criticizing Musk:

That was joined by stenographical cheerleading for Musk and stenograpahical details on his plans:

In an April 20 so-called "study" attacking the Washington Post for covering Musk's attempt to buy Twitter, Joseph Vazquez huffed:

The leftist newspaper owned by the second richest man in the world is obsessed with smearing his main competitor’s $43 billion Twitter takeover bid. It was willing to spend over 17,000 words to do it.

An MRC Business study of The Washington Post archives found that the newspaper published at least 15 articles between Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s April 14 Twitter announcement and April 17 alone criticizing him over his mission to turn Twitter into a platform that upholds free speech. That’s just four days worth of articles making up news items and op-eds.

The articles included made up a whopping 17,046 words, all of which attempted to smear Musk. One columnist claimed that if Musk succeeds, “we’re all doomed.”

Vazquez offered no evidence that 1) the Post is "leftist, 2) Post owner Jeff Bezos demanded that editors and reporters attack Musk over the purchase, or 3) that Musk genuinely believes in free speech.

Johnson excitedly wrote in an April 24 post that "Twitter is reportedly reconsidering Elon Musk’s offer to purchase the platform for $43 billion." The next day, it was time for Joseph Vazquez to go orgasmic after Twitter decided to accept Musk's offer, under the headline "Musk Wins":

The world’s richest man is set to complete his hostile takeover of Twitter for $43 billion, according to news reports.

Reuters released an exclusive saying that Twitter is “nearing a deal to sell” itself to Tesla CEO Elon Musk for “$54.20 per share in cash.” That was the original price Musk offered when he launched his bid to own the company. Twitter may announce the deal “later on Monday once its board has met to recommend the transaction to Twitter shareholders, the sources said.”

[...]

Musk slammed the platform on March 26 for its censorship-heavy environment: “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines his bid was successful.

Then, under the headline "VICTORY!", Alexander Hall cheered that Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal "broke his silence to share the news that free speech advocate and billionaire Elon Musk successfully bought Twitter," going to tout Musk's tweet that "I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means." By contrast, the MRC didn't mention how, according to Judd Legum, in real life Musk is all too eager to censor speech by trying to censor critics, firing Tesla workers for union advocacy, and asking the Chinese government (which is communist, as the MRC loves to remind us) to silence Tesla critics in that country.

Then it was defense mode again, as the MRC was offended by the (arguably accurate) suggestion that Musk really doesn't care about free speech and is more interested in self-promotion and creating chaos:

Of course, the MRC continued to act as Musk's PR agent as well. An article by Johnson hyped Twitter Jack Dorsey cheering Musk's purchase, followed by a repurprosed CNSNews.com article noting MRC favorite Mark Levin's return to Twitter because of Musk even though Musk had not actually completed the purchase at this point. Then the boss got his sycophantic say, courtesy of a lovingly transcribed (and anonymously written) Fox Business appearance:

Billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter was totally about protecting the First Amendment, and had little to do with labor considerations or investing for financial gain. MRC President and founder Brent Bozell made those remarks during an appearance on Fox Business’ Varney & Co. on Tuesday.

“Today’s a great day for freedom,” he said. “This entire debate has been over free speech, with the left saying that this ought not to be allowed. Let’s understand this very clearly: This has nothing to do about economics, nothing having to do about work practices. It’s all about Elon Musk saying, ‘I’m buying this company because we have to have free speech in America to have a functioning democracy.’”

[...]

“This is a totalitarian institution, Silicon Valley, and along comes Elon Musk and he’s tipped over the apple cart, just like [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis tipped over the applecart with Disney in Florida,” Bozell said. “The American people have had enough of this totalitarianism.”

Musk said in a statement that he wants to enhance Twitter by launching unnamed new features, open-sourcing algorithms to improve public trust, defeating spam bots, and “authenticating all humans.” The last statement was a nod to free speech.

"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," Musk stated. “Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it."

Again: All this overblown MRC praise for Musk's fealty to "free speech" belies his actual record. The MRC doesn't want you to know that, however.


Posted by Terry K. at 9:24 PM EDT
Updated: Monday, May 23, 2022 9:45 PM EDT
WND Still Dishonestly Presenting Promos For Employee's Book As 'News'
Topic: WorldNetDaily

In February, we reported how WorldNetDaily has promoted employee Joe Kovacs' new book through weekly ads disguised as "news" articles and with no disclosure that Kovacs is a WND employee. Three months later, WND and Kovacs are still dishonestly promoting his book -- ironic, since it's about finding the Bible in pretty much anything and we're pretty sure that the Bible admonishes people not to engage in deception.

Here are the articles WND has published to promote Kovacs' book -- they carry no byline, but we can assume Kovacs himself wrote them, another little piece of deception -- since we last checked in:

WND even tried to tie Kovacs' book to recent events that occurred after the book's publication. A March 13 article used the Russian attack on Ukraine to shill for the book:

The events in the daily news can be catastrophic and unnerving at times, with huge numbers of lives lost and incredible suffering taking place, as is evident by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And sometimes, as is the case now, there seems to no good reason for the disturbing mayhem taking place.

"In Ukraine, rivers of blood and tears are flowing," said Pope Francis. "This is not just a military operation but a war which sows death, destruction and misery."

But is there something unseen at work amid the horror of this war? Is there a hidden cause for nightmarish disasters that people are forgetting or ignoring?

"The answer to these questions is an obvious yes," says author Joe Kovacs, who digs deeply into this subject in his brand-new best-seller, "Reaching God Speed: Unlocking the Secret Broadcast Revealing the Mystery of Everything."

"Catastrophes and disasters such as military conflict are not just happenstance. There is an underlying cause, and it's spelled out quite clearly in the Bible."

"The simple truth right out of Holy Scripture is that God Himself is causing disasters. Read it for yourself in your own Bible:"

But all this biblical pontificating ultimately comes off as Kovacs suggesting that Ukraine deserved to be destroyed and subjugated by Russia:

The "Reaching God Speed" author says "the bad news taking place in our world is not just some random, haphazard mayhem."

"The catastrophes, calamities, and disasters of all stripes are attention-getters, reminding people that we're all going to perish, to be dead forever, unless we get our act together and get with the program."

"The bottom line is that bad news can be likened to an attention-getting spanking that a parent gives his or her child. But God does not like spanking His kids."

"Why do you want more beatings? Why do you keep on rebelling?" (Isaiah 1:5 CSB).

"He creates the bad news with an intention: to prompt us all to do some inward reflection and make drastic changes to how we think and act, to put an end to our ludicrous, wicked ways and get on the path of everlasting life. And painless life without end is truly Good News."

WND also tried to shoehorn Kovacs into articles that more closely resemble "news." A Feb. 27 article (unblylined, of course) repeated a Jerusalem Post article that is also effectively a promotion for Kovacs' book and is keyed on an earlier WND promotion of it: "An apparent biblical 'dilemma' regarding the precise location where Jesus was crucified has caught the attention of a major newspaper in Israel." The article then evolved into the usual WND promo for the book.

An April 24 WND article on the vandalism of Joseph's Tomb in the West Bank was also used to promote Kovacs' book as well. The article even called on an old friend, Aaron Klein, who was described only as "WND's former Jerusalem bureau chief," with no mention of the fact he quit years ago to work for Breitbart, then as an adviser for corrupt  former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

WND also devoted an article to promoting the audiobook version of the book.

Despite all this shilling, however, Kovacs' book is not being sold through WND's online store. All links for the book in WND articles go to a website dedicated to the book (presumably set up by Kovacs himself), which in turn links to Amazon. WND's online store hasn't added new books or other significant things since its current downward spiral began a few years back. Kovacs may be deceitful, but he's not dumb, and he knows where to sell his books to make some money.

 


Posted by Terry K. at 6:37 PM EDT
MRC Parroted Secret Facebook Attacks On TikTok
Topic: Media Research Center

In March, the Washington Post reported that Facebook's owner, Meta, paid a Republican consulting firm called Targeted Victory to manufacture fear about competitor TikTok as a Chinese-owned app that is endangering teenage users, which included "placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor," as well as emphasizing TikTok's foreign ownership.

The Media Research Center didn't tell its readers about this developement -- probably because it was dancing to Facebook's tune. Here are some of the attacks on TikTok that the MRC issued in the months and years before the Post story came out -- stories that hewed close to Facebook's anti-TikTok narrative:

The MRC also enthusiastically shilled for the Trump administration'sattempts to ban TikTok in the U.S. or force its sale to a non-Chinese firm., which apaprently came in response to a campaign organized by TikTok users to snap up free tickets to a Trump rally in Oklahoma, which ended up being sparsely attended (which the MRC hated):

When a federal judge blocked Trump's TikTok ban in September 2020, Kayla Sargent lamented it but optimistically claimed it was "thankfully, only temporarily." The Trump administration abandoned the ban completely after the presidential election Trump lost, Sargent returned to complain that it did so despite "serious national security concerns."

The MRC, by the way, is not unfamiliar with Targeted Victory. Both MRC chief Brent Bozell and Targeted Victory co-founder Zac Moffatt were among the attendees at a 2016 meeting between consercvative activists and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg, which took place after allegations that Facebook's news feed was biased against conservatives  (which turned out to be overblown). But bozell and his right-wingers got what they wanted: to have Facebook afraid of doing anything that might anger them, even if it harmed Facebook's overall quality.

The MRC has never told is readers about how Facebook fed TikTok attacks to a GOP strategy firm, but it did keep up the attacks. An April 17 item by Autumn Johnson hyped how "The Department of Homeland Security reportedly investigated how TikTok handled material that detailed the sexual abuse of children," making sure to add that "The platform is designed to be popular among teenagers." Johnson failed to mention the Facebook smear campaign against TikTok.

This is the second time the MRC has been caught playing both sides of the war on "big tech" and secretly promoting Facebook talking points. We've already documented how the MRC attacked Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen at the same time that Facebook as a purported liberal activist (whose criticism of Facebook, not coincientially, got a lot more traction that the MRC's war on Facebook has) as Facebook was working behind the scenes to feed thosevery same attacks on Haugen to conservative groups.

The MRC has never public admitted that Facebook wrote its anti-Haugen script -- and it's certainly not going to admit that it was taking dictation from Facebook in attacking TikTok -- but the parallels are too obvious to dismiss.


Posted by Terry K. at 2:27 PM EDT
Updated: Monday, May 23, 2022 2:45 PM EDT
NEW ARTICLE -- WND Profiles In COVID Misinformation: Robert Malone
Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily not only loves to amplify Malone's misinformation about COVID vaccines, it also likes to inflate his role in developing the technology behind the mRNA vaccines. Read more >>

Posted by Terry K. at 1:44 AM EDT
Sunday, May 22, 2022
MRC Got Mad When Truth Was Told About Double Standard For Ukraine Refugees
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center really hates it when it'spointed out that the white and Christian refugees of Ukraine are getting much more love in the U.S, particularly from conservatives, than brown-skinned ones from elsewhere. Kevin Tober huffed in a March 7 post:

On Monday night's The ReidOut on MSNBC, host Joy Reid used the last segment of her prime-time show to exploit the war in Ukraine in order to play racial politics. Reid claimed that the reason the United States and the rest of the world care so much about Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that their population is "white and largely Christian."

Reid started off by stating the obvious that "what we’re seeing in Ukraine is absolutely the worst humanitarian crisis that Europe has seen in decades." Of course, with Reid there is always a catch: "but we haven't witnessed the same type of solidarity for the Yeminies as we do for the Ukrainians," Reid whined. 

Tober went on to misleadingly defend the disparity:

Contrary to Reid's hate-fueled ranting, we do see an outpouring of support and compassion for the Uyghurs (a group that is neither white nor Christian) in China as they have a genocide carried out against them. Although, the economic entanglements here are more serious than with Russia, thus making them harder to break.

But Reid didn't mention the Uyghurs (or at least did not quote her doing so), and Tober said nothing about the Yemeni refugees that Reid did reference.

Curtis Houck kept up the whine, with his own version of defense, the next day:

On Tuesday’s CBS Mornings, co-host and Democratic Party donor Gayle King channeled MSNBC’s ReidOut host Joy Reid by playing the race card concerning the ongoing plight of the millions of Ukrainian refugees, lamenting that those who’ve come to the United States from El Salvador, Haiti, and Honduras “were not welcome” nor “received very well.”

In other words, the west has shown its racist bones by showing unity for displaced white people while scoffing at similarly innocent black and brown people.

King conveniently ignored the facts separating the two with Ukrainians given permission to cross the border to neighboring countries due to Russia’s unprovoked war while the latter group has flooded and crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.

Houck wasn't done reframing right-wing discrimination against refugees:

In essence, what Reid did was what RedState referred to as “whataboutism with the ongoing brutality against the Ukrainian people,” while ignoring what Ian Miles Cheong pointed out as a long track record of the west being “the most compassionate donors of developing nations in their times of need,” including earthquakes in Haiti.

We could restate the point about how flooding the U.S. southern border and expecting amnesty and welfare is entirely different from Ukrainians being shot at and shelled as part of a war by a nuclear state, but it’s safe to say it wouldn’t make a difference for King.

Houck didn't explain why, exactly, one class of refugee deserves to be treated worse than another simply because they're not "being shot at and shelled." And Ukrainian refugees are technically "illegal" too.

Meanwhile, Scott Whitlock whined in another March 8 post that Rep. Ilhan Omar -- who right-wingers like the MRC love to hate for being an outspoken liberal who's not a Christian -- pointed out the disparity:

Radical Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is at it again. The Democrat on Sunday called the U.S. hypocritical in terms how it deals with Ukrainian refugees vs. countries like Syria and Central America. She also appeared way out of step with most Republicans and Democrats, decrying “disastrous” military aide to Ukraine. 

Yet on the networks? Crickets from them as they ignore the potentially embarrassing comments from the hard-left Democrat. But this is a pattern for ABC, CBS and NBC.  Omar’s past hateful, bigoted and anti-Semitic comments get buried by the same journalists who initially promoted her.

Indeed, most of  Whitlock's post is about attacking her for previous thing she said and nothing about rebutting the comments that prompted his little screed.

Alex Christy took up the complaint baton in a March 12 post:

As ordinary Ukrainians flee the country in order to escape from the Russian invaders, CBS Saturday Morning declared that, unlike other refugees, they benefit from their race.

As part of a video report, anchor Jericka Duncan interviewed historian Kimberly St. Julian Varnon on the racial aspect of the evacuations. St. Julian Varnon declared, “You know, it's—it’s-- one of those things where if you are a person of color and you work in Eastern Europe and research Eastern Europe, racism isn't new. I mean, the racial discrimination is not new, but to see it on display and being exacerbated by war, it was just really heart-wrenching.”

Christy had his own defense as well, regarding the claim about Syrian refugees at the border were treated:

While there were Syrians at the border in November and December, it is wrong to claim that crisis was a refugee crisis. There were also several non-refugee economic migrants from Iraq and they were victimized and all used as political pawns by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who lied to them by promising they would be granted asylum there, to destabilize the E.U.

Tober returned on March 15 to parrot Christy blaming Lukashenko for creating a Syrian refugee crisis in Europe in criticizing MSNBC's Chris Hayes for bringing up Poland disparate treatment of refugees:

Hayes seemed to bemoan the fact that " Poland's right-wing Prime Minister along with the PMs from Slovenia and the Czech Republic met with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in Kyiv" as a sign of solidarity with Ukraine. The leftist host seemed stunned that Hungary and Poland who believe in strong borders and opposed "Syrian refugees are together accepting millions of people displaced from Ukraine."

This also ignored the fact that Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko manufactured the latest migrant crisis by lying to desperate refugees about them being allowed to enter those countries in an effort to destabilize the region. Hayes also didn't have the honesty to ask why other Middle Eastern countries didn't take in those refugees.

Ending his race-obsessed rant, he claimed that "there's a lingering question that’s been surrounding this war pushed by bad faith actors on the American right. You know why should I care? Who cares what happens in Ukraine? What do I have to do with Vladimir Putin?" 

Aside from Hayes' usual knee-jerk reaction to make everything about race, it is clear that he needs to understand that Poland and Hungary are eager to help Ukrainians because they know what it is like to be victimized by Russian aggression. It should also be noted that Ukraine neighbors Poland. Neighbors help neighbors.

Clay Waters used an April 24 post to complaing that the New York Times published an article about Republicans' anti-immigrant strategy that includes demonizing (non-white and non-Christian) refugees, complaining that the reporters "were unable to make the obvious distinctions between war refugees flying in from Ukraine and random people crossing the southern border." And Ukrainian refugees aren't "random"?

Of course, one doesn't even need to leave the MRC headquarters for examples of disparate treatment. As we've documented, the MRC's "news" division CNSNews.com hasn't fretted a bit about Ukrainian refugees coming to the U.S. even though it complained loudly that refugees coming to the U.S. from Afghanistan were supposed not sufficiently vetted.

The double standard is real, but the MRC wants you to think either that it doesn't exist or that it's completely justified.


Posted by Terry K. at 7:41 PM EDT
CNS Columnists Keep Hiding Pro-Russia Sentiment Behind Isolationist, Anti-NATO Rhetoric
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com columnists have been hiding their support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine by disguising it as anti-NATO, pro-isolationism sentiment. Let's see how they have been doing lately, shall we?

Doug  Bandow devoted a May 3 column to complaining about U.S. financial support for Ukraine and demanded that Europeans do it instead:

Why the U.S.? Americans have spent nearly eight decades protecting Europe. European governments, after shamelessly leeching off U.S. taxpayers for the entire Cold War and beyond, should take the lead on underwriting their neighbor under assault from Russia.

[...]

Aid to Ukraine is a worthy cause, but the U.S. already has provided some $3.5 billion in military assistance to Kyiv and another $1 billion for nervous NATO members. More important, Washington is not the only rich industrialized country in the world. It is not the industrialized nation with the most at stake in Ukraine’s defense. And it has not spent decades relying on other nations to protect it. The Europeans are all those and should step up.

Bandow went on to go fully into isolationism:

For America, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a human tragedy, not a military threat. Through most of U.S. history, Ukraine was ruled by someone else, which bothered Americans not at all. Washington treated Ukraine as a "captive nation" for propaganda purposes during the Cold War, but President George H.W. Bush discouraged Ukrainian independence. Ironically, over the last decade, Russia’s Vladimir Putin did more than anyone else to spur a sense of Ukrainian nationhood.

As a victim of unjustified aggression, Kyiv warrants U.S. support, but the U.S. role should be secondary. Washington’s highest duty remains to the American people. That especially means avoiding pressure to escalate militarily and risk war with Russia, which has become an increasing possibility. Treating Ukraine as a proxy war against Moscow increases the cost to Ukrainians and risks accidentally triggering World War III.

[...]

Europe should take the lead in dealing with both Ukraine and Russia. The U.S. government is broke, while European governments have more reason to give. After decades of defending so many other countries and peoples, Americans deserve a break. Now.

Ted Galen Carpenter's April 28 column dismissed Ukraine as "an appalling corrupt and increasingly authoritarian country" and insisted that it is "utterly irresponsible" for the U.S. to aid it, adding: "Corrupt and increasingly authoritarian Ukraine is not worth the life of a single American. Risking war with a nuclear-armed Russia that could take the lives of millions of Americans is beyond shameful. The Biden Administration needs to take several firm steps back from the abyss."

In his May 4 column, Carpenter blamed Russia's invasion on NATO and not, you know, Russia:

In one of the great foreign policy blunders of modern times, U.S. and European leaders repeatedly disregarded Vladimir Putin’s warnings that Russia would never tolerate Ukraine becoming a NATO military asset. Because of resistance from the French and German governments (which had as much to do with Ukraine’s chronic corruption as with concerns about Russia’s reaction), the Alliance delayed offering Kyiv a Membership Action Plan – an essential step toward membership. Nevertheless, at the 2008 summit in Bucharest, NATO’s existing members ostentatiously insisted that "someday" Ukraine would join the Alliance, and they repeated that pledge on numerous occasions thereafter.

[...]

Western officials implicitly assumed that Russia could be intimidated and eventually compelled to accept Ukraine as part of NATO. They dismissed the Kremlin’s increasingly pointed warnings that efforts to make Kyiv an Alliance asset would cross a red line that violated Russia’s security. Their assumption that Moscow would tamely accept a NATO presence inside Russia’s core security zone proved to be spectacularly wrong, and Ukraine is now paying a very high price in treasure and blood for their miscalculation.

One might hope that NATO leaders would have learned an important lesson from such a costly mistake. However, they are stubbornly ignoring a new set of ominous warnings from Moscow, and this time, the price of such tone-deaf arrogance could be utterly catastrophic. Indeed, it is creating the risk of a nuclear clash between Russia and the United States.

[...]

Western officials and members of the foreign policy establishments in the United States and Europe speak openly of helping Ukraine win its war and inflict a humiliating defeat on Russia. What such individuals do not seem to comprehend is that Ukraine is a vital Russian security interest, and the Kremlin will do whatever is necessary – probably even the use of tactical nuclear weapons – to prevent a defeat. The failure to understand just how important Ukraine is to Russia caused Western leaders to disregard Moscow’s warnings over more than a decade against making Kyiv a military ally.

Ryan McMaken used a March 21 column to insisting that the "lesson of 1938" learned about trying to appease Hitler does not apply to Russia: "But it is not, in fact, the case that every act of diplomacy or compromise designed to avoid war is appeasement. Moreover, we can find countless examples in which nonintervention and a refusal to escalate a situation was — or would have been — the better choice." He claimed that the "lesson of 1914," in which countries decided to "rush to war, immediately escalate, and confront "enemies" with military force in the name of countering aggression" is the proper lesson to apply, though nobody but Russia is escalating things.

Meanwhile, CNS edidtor Terry Jeffrey's pet columnist, Pat Buchanan, continued to serve up calls for U.S. isolationismm that benefits Russia:

  • On April 22, he endorsed letting Ukraine be dstroyed by Russia if it meant keeping U.S. troops out: "To avoid war with Russia, President Harry Truman refused to breach Joseph Stalin's Berlin Blockade. Eisenhower let the Hungarian revolution be drowned in blood and told the Brits, French and Israelis to get out of Egypt. President John F. Kennedy let the Berlin Wall go up. President Lyndon B. Johnson let the Prague Spring be crushed by the Warsaw Pact. The sooner this war ends, the better for all."
  • He used his April 29 column to complain that "the new, or newly revealed, goal of U.S. policy in Ukraine is not just the defeat and retreat of the invading Russian army but the crippling of Russia as a world power," insisting that "the more we destroy Russian conventional power, the more we force Moscow to fall back onto its ace in the hole — nuclear weapons" and adding: "When he warns of military action, Putin has some credibility."
  • He fretted on May 10: "By bragging publicly that we helped engineer the killing of Russian generals and the sinking of the cruiser Moskva, we taunt Russian President Vladimir Putin. We provoke him into retaliating in kind against us, thereby raising the possibility of a wider U.S.-Russia war that could escalate into World War III."
  • He spent his May 17 column huffing that Finland might be allowed to join NATO : "But why would the United States consent to go to war with Russia, the largest nuclear power on earth, for violating Finland's frontiers? ... By welcoming Finland into NATO, Biden is offering Helsinki the kind of war guarantee Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave to Poland in the spring of 1939, which led to Britain's having to declare war on Sept. 3, 1939, two days after Germany invaded Poland. How did that work out for Britain and the empire?
  • He gushed inhis May 20 column that even with its failures in Ukraine, "Russia today remains a great power. The largest nation on earth with twice the territory of the U.S., Russia has the world's largest nuclear arsenal and exceeds the U.S. and China in tactical nuclear weapons. It has vast tracks of land and sits on huge deposits of minerals, coal, oil and gas." He did graciously concede that "Russia also has glaring weaknesses and growing vulnerabilities, though he didn't identify the invasion of Ukraine as one of them. He ended on an isolationist note: "In 230 years, the United States has never gone to war with Russia. Not with the Romanovs nor with the Stalinists, not with the Cold War Communists nor with the Putinists. U.S. vital interests dictate that we maintain that tradition."

Buchanan offered no solution beyond apparent appeasement.


Posted by Terry K. at 6:24 PM EDT
Updated: Sunday, May 22, 2022 6:27 PM EDT
Saturday, May 21, 2022
MRC Still Fretting Over Injured Fox News Reporter, Ignoring Dead Non-Right-Wing Reporter
Topic: Media Research Center

We've documented how the Media Research Center expended much expressive public weeping over the deaths of two Fox News correspondents and the injury of another while covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine -- while almost completely ignoring the death of another reporter covering the same conflict, Brent Renaud, who was effectively expendable because he didn't work for Fox News. That even made the MRC's regular Jen Psaki-bashing sessions, when Kevin Tober cheered how Fox correspondent Jacqui Heinrich "who, in light of the news her Fox colleague Benjamin Hall had been injured, wanted to know how the Biden administration would respond now that it appears that Russia is now shooting at American journalists," then whinined that "Psaki didn’t give an adequate response to Heinrich’s question other than reminding her what actions Biden has already taken towards Russia." Needless to say, Heinrich didn't ask about Renaud.

In an April 7 post, lead mourner Nicholas Fondacaro returned  for an update on the wounded Fox News reporter:

In a series of now-deleted tweets Thursday night, Fox News State Department correspondent and war reporter Benjamin Hall spoke out for the first time publically about his condition after his crew was attacked by Russian artillery outside of Kyiv, Ukraine (leaving 2 others dead). And before getting to how banged up he was (including the loss of body parts), Hall made a point to first pay tribute to his colleagues who lost their lives in the attack.

“Its [sic] been over three weeks since the attack in Ukraine and I wanted to start sharing it all. But first I need to pay tribute to my colleagues Pierre and Sasha who didn’t [sic] make it that day. Pierre and I traveled the world together, working was his joy and his joy was infectious. RIP,” he wrote on Twitter.

[...]

And while many in the media had enough class to know when not to take cheap shots at a rival during a time of crisis, there were some who made sure to use reports of the initial incident to score grotesque political points.

As if Fondacaro isn't making a grotesque political point by censoring mention of Renaud simply because he didn't work for Fox News. To him, reporters' lives matter only if they are right-wingers like him; otherwise, they deserve to die in obscurity.


Posted by Terry K. at 10:33 AM EDT
WND's Farah Can't Stop Blaming Big Tech Instead Of Himself For WND's Impending Failure
Topic: WorldNetDaily

A key part of Joseph Farah's money begs to keep his flailing WorldNetDaily alive is portraying himself and WND as victims of Google and "big tech" while refusing to concede that the real cause of WND's impending demise is Farah himself for his editorial agenda of fake news and conspiracy theories. Frah cheered in his March 25 column that the Heritage Foundation declared that "Big Tech is an enemy of the American people" then ramped up his own victimhood:

I've been screaming from the rafters since 2017 about it. It caused me so much anxiety that it gave me five strokes – the last one being a major one.

It cost me so much lost revenue in that period that, from 2016 through 2022, I can conservatively estimate it at $100 million.

That's how much this news site, WND.com, been devalued, demonetized and dehumanized in the last several years.

That's what countless other conservative, Christian news sites have experienced.

But I coexisted with Google, Amazon, Facebook and the rest through most of the history of the internet – almost 20 years. Perhaps I'm a slow learner. We at WND were doing all right. We were growing. We were making a real difference. We weren't being compromised. We weren't being blackballed. We weren't being canceled.

All of that ended in 2016.

Why?

Because we took a strong stand for one presidential candidate – perhaps stronger than any stand we had ever taken: Donald J. Trump. In America, we had that right, and everyone knew it – but Google, Amazon, Facebook and the rest began denying that right. It's just that simple.

They didn't care what I said about them, like when I called Google "evil" years before. Amazon didn't smear or not order the books I published or the videos I made before 2016. Facebook didn't restrict the reach to readers we'd developed through our use of the social site before 2016.

That's because in 2016 we were playing for all the marbles – the presidency of the United States. And we won.

Farah "won" in 2016 because he didn't care about the truth. It spread bogus stories about Hillary Clinton's health, and then-WND reporter Jerome Corsi aligned himself with the pheomenally sleazy right-wing political operative Roger Stone to smear Clinton, and published other fake-news stories during and after the campaign.

In his April 1 column, Farah asserted that Google "hasn't faced any government investigations into its monopolistic trailblazing efforts" because "just pays off the government 'watchdogs'" -- a claim for which he provided no evidence. He then regurgitated his victimization narrative again:

Google controls it all.

And this is the world WND lives in and has to navigate through. We can't use Google's search engine. We're prevented from using the one and only major ad platform, Google Ad Manager. And most of the rest of the media operate in a state of constant intimidation and fear – of this TYRANT.

WND is now DEMONETIZED PERMANENTLY! That's official. You simply can't do what we do – tell the truth about the 2020 election, tell the truth about the pandemic, tell the truth about the southern border, tell the truth about the transgender agenda and so on – while Google is running the media!

WND wasn't "demonetized" by Google -- as we explained, Google made the sensible business decision to no longer associate its ad service with the unreliable, conspiratorial content of WND. As if to prove Google's decision to decouple from WND was indeed a sensible one, Farah continued spewing claims he doesn't support:

Google and Big Tech are a BEAST. It may be the No. 1 existential threat to the USA. I know it is to WND and what little is left of America's truly free press.

Google uses all of its tricks to slant the news to the left and in support of the official Joe Biden positions. It's not even funny. It's more than a 20-1 ratio in their news feed, and the more "fake" the news, the more play it gets on Google.

This column, like the other, ends in a money beg.

Such nonsensical ranting from Farah and his deputy, David Kupelian, only serve to reinforce the decision of normal business not to have anything to do with WND, and his counterfactual insistence on blaming everyone but himself for WND's current situation and absolute refusal to seek repentence for his self-inflicted wounds seems to indicate that WND does not deserve to live.


Posted by Terry K. at 1:27 AM EDT
Updated: Saturday, May 21, 2022 1:31 AM EDT
Friday, May 20, 2022
MRC Psaki-Bashing, Doocy-Fluffing Watch
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center's Curtis Houck got over his pouting that he couldn't smear White House press secretary because she was out with COVID just in time to mock her for preparing to leave for a job at MSNBC. For the April 4 briefing, Houck gave his man-crush Peter Doocy a cookie for staying on message by pestering Psaki with biased questions on the sex-obsessed right-wing outrage du jour:

Monday on The Psaki Show, Fox’s Peter Doocy made what could be one of his final cracks at White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki before her rumored move to MSNBC and he made it count with a tense exchange on transgenderism, the Florida parental rights in education law, and whether the White House thinks children at age six should learn sex ed.

Doocy pivoted from question about Russia’s war against Ukraine (more on that later) to one White House reporters had refused to ask: “A question about college sports. In some places like the Ivy League now, there are biological males competing against women. Does the White House think that is fair?”

Psaki began by saying the White House isn’t “the governing body for the NCAA or any other [sports] system out there” and, after acknowledging his question was in reference to transgender Penn swimmer Lia Thomas, she framed the need to endorse transgenderism as a way of “protect[ing] the dignity and identity of all Americans” as it relates to their mental health.

After she said the administration “hope[s] all leaders” join them, Doocy brought up Florida’s education bill that forbids sex education for children from pre-K through third grade: “At what age does the White House think that students should be taught about sexual orientation and gender identity?”

As we’ve learned, the left has shown that it indeed wants children that young to be exposed to such topics and Psaki was no exception as she said the law’s “a reflection of...politicians in Florida propagating misinformed, hateful policies that do absolutely nothing to address the real issues.”

Remember, for Houck it's all about Doocy staying on message and Psaki being purportedly destroyed by it (note the "Kaboom" in Houck's headline); it's not about whether Doocy's talking points are actually true.

Houck served up more Doocy-gushing for the April 5 briefing, this time over the right-wing (and MRC)  Hunter Biden obsession:

Tuesday during a late-afternoon Psaki Show, Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy questioned the White House press secretary over calls for Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to give full independence from the Biden White House to investigate First Son Hunter Biden and his life of corruption. Predictably, Psaki wanted nothing to do with this.

“A lot of stories about Hunter Biden surfacing this week. So, to ensure the independence of the investigation, would the President support the appointment of a special counsel,” Doocy asked.

Along with insisting the Department of Justice (DOJ) would make that call as they “make...decisions independently,” Psaki insisted the President has “abide[d] by” his campaign promise to not interfere with the DOJ and thus “has never had a conversation with [them] about any investigations into any member of his family.”

Houck then hyped Doocy still pushing the old right-wing narrative about U.S. sanctions against Russia being ineffective because they didn't stop Vladimir Putin frominvading Ukraine:

Prior to his Hunter Biden questions, Doocy followed up on what CBS’s Weijia Jiang had astutely observed, which was whether, in Jiang’s words, “anything...can be done to stop Putin now, in the immediate” given the White House’s insistence that sanctions take time to reach their intended affect.

When Psaki gave an answer of nothingness, Doocy followed up in wanting to know “how much time do you guys think that these innocent Ukrainians have” until Russia’s economy is so crippled it hampers their war efforts.

Psaki cited the levels of inflation and projected economic contraction hitting Russia and the “historic...military and security assistance” to Ukraine, so Doocy cut deeper in his second Russia question: “But do you guys assess that anything you’ve done so far has prevented a war crime from happening?”

for the April 6 briefing, Houck again praised Doocy for staying on right-wing talking points about Hunter biden and scary immigrants while actual reporters inquired about actual news (though that's not how Houck viewed it):

Wednesday’s Psaki Show marked a contrast between the constructive and the absurd as Fox’s Peter Doocy engaged the White House press secretary on questions surrounding President Biden’s son Hunter and brother Jim and, as other reporters would as well, immigration. But in contrast, others expressed discomfort with a lack of COVID restrictions, raised concerns about right-wing terrorism, and pleaded for more January 6 indictments.

Starting with the constructive, Doocy led with what one could call Bidenphones (following in the footsteps of Obamaphones “Our team in Texas is saying that you guys are starting to give smartphones to border crossers, hoping that they’ll use the phones to check in or to be tracked. I — which part of that is supposed to deter people from crossing illegally into the states?”

Psaki argued “you of all people” should “recognize that we need to take steps to ensure that we know where individuals are and we can track...them” as one of the “alternatives to detention programs” with phones allowing for facial and voice recognition and GPS tracking.

Doocy followed up: “With the telephonic, though, any concern by folks around here that these migrants will take the phones and just toss them?”

When Psaki countered with a question as to whether he knows of “people throwing phones away,” Doocy hit back that he was merely asking a question.

[...]

On a second matter, Doocy wanted to know whether it was accurate that, as per emails (from Hunter’s laptop), Joe “was officemates with Hunter and his brother Jim here in D.C.” during Hunter and Jim’s business venture with a Chinese energy company.

Psaki insisted three times that it wasn’t “accurate” and “they were not officemates” despite Doocy noting the fact that Hunter had emailed the landlord asking for keys to be made for Jim as well as the then-former Vice President and wife Jill.

Houck then uniroinically whined about "four fear-mongering COVID-19 questions from The New York Times’s Katie Rogers" regarding the COVID pandemic. He didn't complain about Doocy scaremongering about "illegals" carrying "Obamaphones" -- which, as we documented way back in 2012, never was a thing beyond right-wing narratives.


Posted by Terry K. at 3:16 PM EDT
Updated: Monday, June 13, 2022 12:57 AM EDT
WND's Brown Praises Orban's 'Pro-Family' Leanings, Whitewashes His Hate And Authoritarianism
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Michael Brown devoted his April 6 WorldNetDaily column to gushing over the re-election of Hungary's authoritarian leader Viktor Orban:

Judging by reports from the left-leaning media, the people of Hungary showed their true colors by electing Prime Minister Viktor Orban to an unprecedented fourth consecutive term. If these reports are to be trusted, Orban is a dangerously nationalistic, far right-wing, anti-gay, anti-Muslim bigot, a friend of Russia's Putin and an adversary of Ukraine's Zelensky.

If this description is accurate, what does this say about the people of Hungary?

Orban was expected to have an especially tough challenge this time because all six opposition parties united against him. Instead, he won by his largest margin to date, with his party now looking to take 135 seats and the six-party opposition alliance taking only 56 seats.

As we pointed out when Newsmax's John  Gizzi similiarly gushed over Orban's win, Orban used his years in pwer to rig the country's election process to undercut any opposition; voting districts have been gerrymandered to the point that while Orban won only 53 percent of the vote, he won 83 percent of the districts.

So committed to this narrative was Brown actually quoted from Gizzi's whitewashing of Orban's win:

But Orban's relationship with Putin is not the primary reason for his great popularity. Instead, as explained by John Gizzi on Newsmax, "With the economic growth rate at 7.1% in 2021 and unemployment at roughly 3%, the economy was clearly on the side of Orban."

Gizzi also notes that "Orban also got high marks from voters for his policy of 'support for responsible child bearing' – notably that mothers who have four children are exempt from federal income taxes for life.

"The fruits of this pro-family policy (in which the government invests 5% of Hungary's Gross Domestic Product for family support) includes an increase in the fertility rate of 24% in the last decade – 'the largest in Europe,' Minister of Families Katalin Novak told Newsmax last October.

Brown then did some whitewashing of his own, trying to justify Orban's anti-Muslimand anti-LGBT agendas:

As for Orban being anti-Muslim, the truth is that Hungary largely closed its doors to Muslim refugees when the government found that, by and large, they were not trying to integrate into society but were instead living off government support, often while remaining hostile to Hungary itself. (Orban actually styled them "Muslim invaders.")

And the people of Hungary have not forgotten that they were under Ottoman (Muslim) rule for 145 years, from 1541-1699. This, too, affects their views on having open borders to large numbers of Muslim immigrants.

As for Orban being anti-LGBTQ, the reality is that Orban upholds Christian moral values when it comes to marriage, family and the sexualizing of children.

Accordingly, in 2020, the government altered "the constitutional definition of families to exclude transgender adults and same-sex couples, asserting that the 'foundation of the family is marriage and the parent-child relationship.'"

Then, in 2021, "Hungary's parliament … passed a law banning gay people from featuring in school educational materials or TV shows for under-18s."

And the majority of the Hungarian people supported these changes, which is another reason they voted again for Orban. Can you imagine?

After writing all that, Brown laughably denied he was defending Orban's hate:

Yet in saying all this, my intent is not to be an apologist for Orban, to minimize the suffering of the Ukrainians, or, in particular, to defend his relationship with Putin.

It is simply to say that, to the best of my knowledge, being informed by well-connected, mature Christian sources within Hungary, Prime Minister Orban is not the man the left-leaning West is making him out to be. He has done much good and stood for many noble causes, and in turn, his nation has shown its support.

If those "well-connected, mature Christian sources within Hungary" are willing to be apologists for Orban's hate and authoriterianism, how Christian are they really?


Posted by Terry K. at 2:04 PM EDT
CNS Tries To Shame Biden Again For Not Giving Enough To Charity
Topic: CNSNews.com

Back in 2014, CNS tried to shame then-Vice President Biden by attacking him for not giving enough money to charity:  "Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, reported an adjusted gross income of $407,009 in 2013, from which they contributed 5% to charity, or a total of $20,523, according to their 2013 income tax return, which was released by the White House on Friday." CNS went to the same well of attempted shame again in an anonymously written April 19 article:

President Joe Biden and his wife Jill have released their 2021 federal income tax return, which shows that they had a total income of $610,702 for the year and that they gave $3,400 of that—or 0.55 percent—to Catholic Churches and a Catholic charity.

According to the first page of their tax return, the Bidens had a total income of $610,702. With itemized deductions worth $42,290, they were able to reduce their taxable income to $568,412.

Those $42,290 in itemized deductions included a $10,000 deduction for state and local taxes, $14,896 for home mortgage interest payments, and $17,394 for deductible contributions.

This total of $17,394 in deductible contributions was itemized on Statement 5 of the Bidens’ tax return and included $5,000 to the Beau Biden Foundation; $3,194 to Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors; $2,000 for NoVa, $1,000 for Cranston Heights Fire Company, $1,000 for Ministry of Caring.

The anonymous CNS writer didn't explain how much, exactly, would have been a suitable donation to Catholic charities, or why the Bidens' donations to other charities didn't make the headline. The writer also didn't mention that CNS was not able to do this story between 2017 and 2021 because Donald Trmp refused to make his income taxes public, unlike every other president and presidential candidate in the past 40 years.And when Trump's taxes were leaked, CNS complained that one liberal congresswoman used a "vulgar" word in noting that Trump paid only $750 in taxes one year, which CNS defended because it "does not include the millions Trump paid in the form of the [alternative minimum tax] over the seven-year period reported."


Posted by Terry K. at 1:03 PM EDT

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