MRC Keeps Falsely Pretending Anti-Abortion Ruling Won't Lead To Contraception Ban
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center has spent much of its time since the leak of a draft of Justice Samuel Alito's opinion overturning the abortion rights in Roe v. Wade in denial that his reasoning would affect other rights threatened by the right to privacy that underpinned the ruling -- particularly Griswold v. Connecticut, which cited a right to privacy in finding there was a right to contraception, the Obergefell decision affirming a right to same-sex marrage:

When historian Jon Meacham pointed that out, Alex Christy huffed in a May 3 post that "no state is moving to ban birth control, so the Court will not even have to address the question and the current makeup of the Court means Obergefell is almost certainly safe as well."

• Curtis Houck complained that someone on CNN cited "broad examples" like contraception were cited as being in danger if Alito's opinion stood.
• Nicholas Fondacaro whined that pointing out that contraception was in jeopardy meant that one was "parrot[ing] talking points personally handed out by President Biden."
• Kevin Tober declared that noting that gay marriage would be endangered under Alito's opinion was just "repeating propaganda from other people."
• Kyle Drennen groused that news programs reported the news that President Biden was "warning the conservative court could unravel other privacy rights, like same-sex marriage and contraception," than tried to change the subject by harrumphing that "no mention was made of the 'assault' on theover 63 million babies that have been killed through abortion since the Roe v. Wade decision was issued in 1973."
• Tober whined that a Democratic senator was allow to "lie about Republicans wanting to ban 'birth control', 'Plan B', and 'IUDs'-- even though some forms of birth control take place after fertilization and, thus, would be considered abortion under some anti-abortion legislation.
• When former Eric Holder cited contraception as a right that would be in danger under Alito's reasoning, Christy actually didn't deny it, instead stating: "As a former attorney general, Holder should know that except for the contraception example, all the cases he cited are equal protection cases, not privacy ones."
• Christy followed that with another post claiming a statement that“Contraception is a target now of abortion forces”  is a "false assertion."
• Tober insisted it whas "a frequent and repeatedly debunked talking point" to claim that "conservatives will seek to ban gay marriage or contraception if Roe v. Wade is overturned."

But that opinion came down mostly intact at the end of June -- and Justice Clarence Thomas issued a concurring opinion specifically stating that "In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence [v. Texas, the ruling that established a right to same-sex sexual acts], and Obergefell," though, oddly, not Loving v. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriages like the one Thomas himself is in.

This meant that the MRC's narrative to the same argument suddenly had to change. When a CNN commentator pointed out Thomnas' opinion, FOndacaro retorted in a June 24 post: "So, are they essentially arguing that Justice Clarence Thomas is trying to sabotage his interracial marriage?" Thanks, Nick, for confirming that conservative justices rule on personal beliefs and not the law.

Emma Schultz tried to downplay the importance of Thomas' opinion in a June 29 post, claiming that "no other justice signed on to Thomas’s concurrence. In fact, they all signed on to opinions that said the ruling was limited to abortion." Christy did the same thing in a July 1 post: "Thomas is always writing concurrences saying certain precedents are wrong and should be reversed, but no other justice joined him on this one."

Christy complained in a July 12 post that a news report "played up ill-founded fears that birth control is next," but didn't mention Thomas' opinion suggesting such fears are quite founded.

Michael Ippolito took a different approach: When Meghan Markle expressed concern about "the future of same-sex marriage, contraception access, and many fundamental rights to privacy," he huffed that she was trying to "stoke fears about the potential to overturn lousy court decisions."

In fact, Missouri did, in fact, outlaw some forms of birth control and other states are considering doing the same -- putting the lie to the MRC's claim that nobody's considering outlawing contraception.

The MRC, it seems, can't quite escape reality when making its biased proclamations.

WND's Root Spreads Lies To Justify Bogus 'Treason' Accusations
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Wayne Allyn Root got popular in right-wing circles for promoting birther conspiracy theories about Barack Obama -- with his narrative centered on his never having seen Obama while both were students at Columbia University in the 1980s, though he never provided any reason he would have noticed an unknown Obama at the time -- so it's no surprise that he would dip a toe back into that fetid conspiracy pool again, and he did in his June 10 column, in which he rants that Obama is secretly running the country under the orders of the usual evii cabal that right-wingers love to fearmonger about:

It turns out Sen. Joe McCarthy was right; he was just early. The communist traitors are everywhere in government, political leadership, public education, universities, unions, the mainstream media, social media, Hollywood, judges, lawyers, even in the leadership ranks of the military and police. Communist traitors have infiltrated every level of government, society and industry.

And I know their plan. I learned it at Columbia University, class of 1983. My classmate was Barack Obama. I believe Obama is now the leader carrying out this plan. He is the "shadow president of the United States" – i.e., operating from the shadows while dummy dementia puppet President Joe Biden serves as decrepit front man.

And who is giving Obama the orders? The enemies of America – billionaire, meglomaniac, psychopaths George Soros, Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates and the Chinese Communist Party. Schwab, by the way, is not just a globalist and communist but also allegedly the son of one of Hitler's right-hand men. That's right, the billionaire son of a reportedly deranged Nazi is now trying to conquer America. My guess is he's obsessed with finishing the job of his Nazi father. And George Soros is reported to be a Jew who handed over Jews to the Nazis as a boy.

You couldn't make this stuff up. You couldn't sell this in a Hollywood script. Hollywood would call it "preposterous and unbelievable." But real life is stranger than fiction.

Needless to say, Root is making this stuff up. Soros did not "hand over Jews to the Nazis as a boy" -- he was a teenage Jew posing as the nephew of a man inventorying property left behind by Jews who fled Hungary in order to avoid detection by the Nazis. (Add Root to the list of right-wingers who fervently wish that the Nazis had murdered just one more Jew.) And Schwab's father was not "one of Hitler's right-hand men" -- there's no evidence he was ever a high-ranking Nazi official.

The fact the Root tried to throw a little doubt on his false claims by saying they were "reported" or "alleged" does not absolve him of failure to do research before writing his column because right-wing conspiracy theories are too good to fact-check. 

Root went on to rant about "open borders," and "hyperinflation," as well as "the purposeful destruction of the energy industry, supply chain dysfunction and vaccine mandates that cost middle-class Americans their jobs and have made many Americans too sick to fight back, and soon we're guaranteed to see massive food shortages, mass starvation, food riots and a breakdown of society. In the middle of all this, they want to take our guns away." Then Root truly lost it:

 

I repeat: We're not going to make it to 2024.

This is TREASON. Biden and his handlers are radical communist traitors. They are domestic terrorists and suicide bombers. It's time to take the gloves off. These people want us banned, censored, silenced, bankrupt, stripped of all property, stripped of all guns, imprisoned for our political beliefs or dead. You can't compromise with people who want you silenced or dead.

But the first step is to admit: THIS IS TREASON.

There's no reason to admit anything based on the discredited evidence of such an obvious liar.

Newsmax's Greg Kelly Is A Host Gone Wild
Topic: Newsmax

Newsmax TV host Greg Kelly is working hard to try and be the most outrageous host on the channel -- no mean feat when you have the likes of Eric Bolling to compete against. He's been working hard on that over the past couple months. In May, he took part in Newsmax's war on upstart Pennsylvania Senate candidate kathey Barnette when she started to threaten primary leader (and eventual winner), the Donald Trump-endorsed Mehmet Oz. Things got a bit crazy after that:

• Kelly called police in Dallas after seeing a video of children attending a show featuring drag queens, then tweeted the outraged message he left.
• Kelly smeared Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, who was knocked unconscious during the Capitol riot, as a wintess who was chosen to testify during the House committee hearings on the riot as nothing more than an "attractive blonde" who wouldn't be criticized and insisted she merely "fell" and "bumped [her] head" during the insurrection.
• After the committee revealed that Trump tried to contact a witness who was about to testify before the committee, Kelly proffered that Trump may have just "butt-dialed" the person.
• Kelly attacked New York Gov. Kathy Hochul as someone who "has not really done much of anything, other than, I’m sorry but, be somebody’s wife" while interviewing her Republican opponent, Lee Zeldin, which even the right-wing New York Post seemed offended by.
• Kelly sicced cops again on something he didn't like, this time on a sex shop that offered sexual instruction to minors.

These stunts are likely designed to attract viewers to the sparsely watched channel, but they do nothing to enhance any credibility Newsmax might have.

CNS Censors Jan. 6 Committee Hearings
Topic: CNSNews.com

We've documented how CNSNews.com, despite portraying itself as a "news" organization, is apparently under orders to not treat the hearings by the House committee looking into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot as news. While it spent a lot of time whining about the first hearing without actually covering what was revealed during it, it has almost completely censored the findings revealed in subsequent hearings. As with the first hearing, no CNS news stories have been devoted to what was covered in the five subsequent hearings. In fact, it barely recognized the existence of those hearings at all -- again, despite them being what most non-biased journalists would call news.

Susan Jones spent a highly biased June 15 article (presented as "news") whining about the committee's purpose:

The carefully scripted, one-sided, anti-Trump work of the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is "legislative" in nature, according to one of the Democrats who sits on the committee.

"We're a legislative committee," Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) told CNN on Tuesday. "So the purpose of our work is to provide legislative recommendations to prevent something like this from happening in the future.

"And we're looking at a whole range of things. It is not just this one particular topic (criminal referral) that's been of interest in the last day, but what can we do to protect our electoral system? What can we do to prevent something like this from actually being successful if someone were to try it again in the future?"

But beyond legislative prescriptions, the committee also is digging for evidence of criminality -- a politically motivated hunt.

By contrast, CNS has praised the work of right-wing prosecutor John Durham and how he  too is "digging for evidence of criminality" wthout dismissing his work as "a politically motivated hunt." Jones went on to push the right-wing narrative that the hearings are biased:

Rep. Liz Cheney, one of two anti-Trump Republicans on the committee, likewise tweeted, "The committee has not issued a conclusion regarding potential criminal referrals. We will announce a decision on that at an appropriate time."

[...]

Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Monday he is watching the hearings (the one-sided hearings) with interest.

[...]

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said last week that the committee's work is purely political, and the committee itself falls outside House rules:

"First, Nancy Pelosi has broken a 232-year history of the House by not allowing the minority to appoint anyone to the committee," he said. "This committee does not have 13 members, as the power of the House voted for it to have.

Jones censored the fact that McCarthy was given the opportunity to appoint Republicans to the committee, but when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected two of his five nominees (for being extreme pro-Trumpers who would like sabotage the committee's work), McCarthy threw a fit and pulled his entire slate. That, on top of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell refusing to create a bipartisan independent commission to investigate the insurrection, means that the Republicans sabotaged their own chances to make the committee less than "one-sided."

The hearings were not mentioned again until a June 30 "news" article attacking another member of the "one-sided" committee:

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, lapped up the applause on "The Late Show" with leftist host Stephen Colbert last night.

Kinzinger is one of two anti-Trump Republicans who joined Democrats in what amounts to a mock trial of Donald Trump, but there is no one on the select committee to cross examine witnesses or refute the carefully scripted, made-for-TV narrative pushed by Democrat politicians.

Kinzinger admitted that the select committee's one-sided investigation is intended to prompt legal action by the Biden Justice Department, although indictments aren't coming as fast as Kinzinger would like:

"I'm frustrated at the speed. I know they (DOJ) have a job to do," Kinzinger said.

[...]

Kinzinger said the select committee is getting new information "every day." And he's already touting what he views as the historic nature of what critics deride as an anti-Trump witch-hunt:

"Yeah, I think we're going to do a couple more hearings. Obviously the investigation will continue," Kinzinger said.

[...]

(The interview ended at that point, with Colbert thanking Kinzinger "for your dedication to representative democracy.")

Jones is clearly one of those "critics," even though she's supposed to be a fair and objective reporter.

The same day came another "news" article by Jones which brought the only specific acknowledgment of a committee hearing other than the first one -- which, of course, was focused on trashing the witness of that hearing, Cassidy Hutchinson, former staffer for then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows:

President Donald Trump says he personally rejected Cassidy Hutchinson for a job with his post-presidency team in Palm Beach, Florida.

And former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Trump supporter, backed up Trump's statement in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday night.

Bondi said she had two conversations with Hutchinson, who "loved President Trump" and was "very upset" she was turned down for a job in Florida.

"She reached out to me because she was very excited she was moving to palm beach to work for the president. She loved president trump well after the election. She loved him," Bondi said.

After uncritically repeating that attack, Jones then surprisingly and fairly summarized Hutchinson's testimony. So Jones does know how to act like a journalist when it suits her purposes to do so -- though, of course, that was buried at the end with the Trump and Bondi attacks on Hutchinson headlining her piece.

MRC's Double Standard On Deleted Tweets
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center looks for any excuse to attack non-right-wing media outlet -- even when they do the responsible thing and delete tweets that contain incorrect information. Curtis HOuck lashed out in a May 24 post:

On Monday night, The Washington Post posted a tweet asking its left-wing audience to share how the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 affected their lives and “what has — or hasn’t changed” in regards to policing, protests, and other far-left priorities. Besides the eye-roll-inducing premise, there was one problem with this part of the tweet: “George Floyd was shot and killed in police custody.”

The tweet remained up for a few minutes before being deleted and replaced with this esoteric and wimpy excuse: “We’ve deleted a previous tweet for this form that included language that was changed after publish.”

Misspellings, mistakes, and typos happen. We all make them. But it was quite the mistake considering the submission page had the same error in a short blurb before the blank space for readers to weigh in: “On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was shot and killed in police custody. His death sparked outrage, wide scale [sic] protests and calls to change policing. Two years later, what has — or hasn’t changed?”

If everyone makes errors, it makes no sense for Houck to lash out at the Post for making one -- unless the goal is to attack the existence of said outlet.

Kevin Tober did something similar in a June 30 post:

On Thursday afternoon, ABC's Good Morning America (GMA) tweeted a video of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson being sworn in to replace the now-retired Stephen Breyer with the obviously false caption claiming "Ketanji Brown Jackson is sworn in as the first Black Supreme Court justice in U.S. history." This is despite the fact that not only is she the third black justice (behind Thurgood Marshall & Clarence Thomas), but she is now serving alongside Justice Thomas.

The tweet remained up for almost five hours before the backlash and ridicule online became so much that GMA was forced to take it down.

GMA's apparent ignorance of basic Supreme Court history wasn't just relegated to Twitter. The same video and caption were also posted to GMA's YouTube page before changing the video title and caption shortly after they deleted the tweet. 

To make matters worse, both the Twitter video and YouTube video were monetized meaning the network made money from it and there were companies who ran ads that viewers had to watch before playing the video (see the end of the blog for the list).

Tober gave the game away by then hyping how "GMA got absolutely roasted on Twitter for this epic failure of a tweet," then sneering that "maybe if Good Morning America spent less time being corporate whores for their parent company Disney constantly, they would pay more attention to these little details about the makeup of the Supreme Court." That's a reference to its hypocritical attacks on ABC for promoing Disney content despite the fact that the MRC uses its own "news" division, CNSNews.com, to promote MRC initiatives and narratives.

You will not be surprised to learn that, by contrast, the MRC won't highlight the deletion of erroneous tweets by its own employees and operations. For instance, MRC chief Brent Bozell issued aMay 10 tweet stating, "Agree with @elonmusk that the Trump ban "was morally wrong and flat-out stupid. Twitter knew that, but they did it anyway to interfere with the 2020 presidential election." As the Washingotn Post's David Weigel pointed out, Trump wasn't banned from Twitter until Jan. 9, 2021 -- more than two months after the election. Bozell quietly deleted the tweet and wrote a replacement one, and his employees censored any reference to it, let alone criticized him for spreading false information.

WND's Lively Is Still Putin's Propaganda Mouthpiece
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily columnist Scott Lively has been a bizarrely vociferous defender of Russia's Vladimir Putin over his war on Ukraine, insisting that Russia is a more Christian country than the U.S. despite slaughtering thousands of Ukrainian troops and civilians foir no apparent good reason. He was at it again in his June 13 column, defending Putin as a fighter of "globalism" and embracing how he hates LGBT people as much as Lively does:

To my knowledge, I am the only culture war analyst in the world who contends that the current Russia/Ukraine war started not with President Putin's Feb. 24, 2022. "Empire of Lies" speech, nor with the Obama/Soros-orchestrated Maidan coup on Feb. 22, 2014, to replace pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych with their own stooge, but with Vladimir Putin's signature on June 30, 2013, making the LGBT propaganda ban the law of the land.

More than any other factor in the vast constellation of geopolitical rivalries and concerns, that single act declared the Russian Federation an enemy of globalism, and more importantly in the realpolitik sense, an enemy of the megalomaniac "closeted" homosexual Barack Obama who, even then, had done more to advance the global LGBT agenda than any other living man.

[...]

Regarding the Ukraine war, the conservative movement has been slowly awakening from the globalists' propaganda-driven hypnosis to realize that Russia is NOT the bad guy in this conflict, but was set up and used as a scapegoat by the very people who orchestrated the plandemic, stole our election and turned America's children into sexual anarchists and social-justice terrorists. Being forced to take preemptive military action to preserve legitimate and essential national security interests is not "unprovoked aggression." In fact, Russia's legal defense under international law to all of the globalist false accusations and propaganda is very sound. 

[...]

However, if you are among the remnant of the remnant who appreciate just how close our nation has come to triggering the wrath of God, and that Russia is now actually far closer as a nation to honoring the biblical worldview than we are, you will recognize that IF the Lord tarries, and IF He intends humanity to have a reprieve from globalist tyranny, it just might be that Russia, not America, will be responsible to stop the evil elites from enslaving us all. Or perhaps (best case scenario), we MAGA millions might retake our country in 2022 and 2024 and partner with Russia against the globalists (as Trump strongly implied we would in his 2016 campaign)!

Frankly, I think it is much more likely that we have reached the end of the line and are watching the final scenes of prophecy unfold. Yet, that is all the more reason to speak the truth about all things. And the truth is that Russia is now a more Christian nation than we are, and the evil people ushering in the Antichrist kingdom are based here, not there.

Needless to say, Lively doesn't bother to explain how Putin slaughtering thousands of people who posed no military threat to Russia before his invasion of the country can be justified as "Christian."

Lively also touted as evidence of how "Christian" Russia supposedly is thatthe country's "national Duma (legislature) has just introduced legislation to expand its 2013 ban on LGBT propaganda to children to include ALL LGBT propaganda throughout the society." You'd think Russia might have more important things to deal with these days than censoring speech it doesn't like, but that just makes Lively love Putin all the more. Not only did Lively explain how censorship is "Christian," he also didn't mention that his source for this story got its information from Russia's own propaganda outlet, RT.com.

That means Lively is serving as a propaganda agent for Russia -- but we knew that already. Still, it's not a good look for an American citizen to be a foreign country's mouthpiece. Let's hope Russia is at least sending a few rubles his way for the effort.

MRC's DeSantis Defense League Assembles Over Purported CRT In Math Textbooks
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center is eager to defend Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for pretty much everything he does, so it was unsurprising that it rushed into defense mode over another conspiracy. An April 19 post by Alex Christy complained, as the MRC's "news" division CNSNews.com did, that DeSantis' government was called out for rejecting purported examples of critical race theory in elementary school math textbooks:

On his Monday show on CNN, Don Lemon suggested that Florida is trying to cancel math with its new anti-Critical Race Theory Law while Bakari Sellers suggested that these types of laws are “Putin-esque” and tantamount to book burning.

Lemon led Sellers by implying that the idea that CRT is in math is insulting:

[...]

Using math, it appears that Florida green lit 29% of textbooks, which means young Floridians will continue to be educated in math without any problems. Still, Sellers joked, “Wait until they find out some math is non-binary, right?”

Christy didn't mention the important fact that DeSantis cited no actual examples of purported critical race theory in the textbooks that were rejected.

Christy lashed out again at CNN in an April 23 post:

On his Friday CNN show, Don Lemon and correspondent Leyla Santiago condemned Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for banning math textbooks that contained Critical Race Theory. When giving examples, including a bar graph alleging conservatives are more racist than liberals, it was still DeSantis that was accused of culture warring.

Lemon introduced a video of Santiago by taking a Democrat’s word that CRT is not a real thing in Florida schools, “Florida education officials rejecting dozens of elementary school math textbooks, claiming that they contain objectionable material, including Critical Race Theory, which one Democratic lawmaker points out is not taught in elementary schools. Education officials now releasing four images from math books that they claim prove their point.”

At the beginning of her video, Santiago showed four examples released by the state to prove this isn’t a made up controversy, “One of the images, which the Department of Education says were sent to them by the public, shows a bar graph measuring racial prejudice by political identification.”

What Santiago didn’t say, but what the picture showed was a bar graph showing alleged racial bias in different political groups as measured by the Implicit Association Test with conservatives coming across as more racially biased than liberals and moderates.

But as we noted, those examples were released without context, and the graph Christy cited regarding the Implicit Association Test is from a high school textbook, not one for elementary students. Christy, however, didn't dispute that the test does, in fact, show that conservatives are "more racially biased than liberals and moderates," and he didn't that students are not required to take it as part of a math lesson. Instead, he attacked the test itself: "If CNN was a real news network, they would have got a differing perspective that would have informed them that the IAT is junk science that doesn’t measure bias so much as reflex times measured in milliseconds, meaning that if you take the test multiple times, you will get different results each time."

Christy then got into slippery definitions of CRT that have been encouraged by its chief right-wing critic, Christopher Rufo: "Maybe CRT is technically not the correct term for the IAT and other examples the state provided, but public schools should not be teaching that one of the two major political ideologies in this country is more racist than the other, especially in a math class. That is indoctrination and CNN never gave any compelling reason why it should be in public school math curriculum."

But like DeSantis and his minions, Christy never actually proved that those things were specifically being taught in those textbooks.

NEW ARTICLE: The Tulsi Gabbard Fan Club At CNS
Topic: CNSNews.com
After trashing her during the 2020 presidential campaign, CNSNews.com now wants you to think that Gabbard is a real Democrat, even as it promotes her right-wing views and support for Russia in its war against Ukraine. Read more >>

MRC Loves McConaughey's Calls For Unity -- But Not If They Involve Guns
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center loved actor Matthew McConaughey when he at least didn't hate Donald Trump. In 2017, it cheered him as among a group of actors who "have urged accepting President Trump and moving forward. Gabriel Hays gushed in a May 2020 post:

Not all Hollywood stars are partisan hacks. Some, like Matthew McConaughey, want to see a brighter future for all Americans, regardless of their political affiliation.

The Hollywood A-lister appeared on a May 12 segment of the Fox News Channels Special Report with Bret Baier to urge political unity between Americans in order to defeat the virus. Through his charity foundation, Just Keep Livin, McConaughey has been sharing a message of unity amidst the pandemic and Fox News invited him to share that message with its viewers. He urged Americans to wake up and realize they’ve been losing their focus on the larger war with coronavirus because of nasty politics.

[...]

McConaughey expressed his opinion that these petty arguments have contributed to a “false divide.” Not only is there a war on coronavirus but a war with ourselves. “If we try to fight both those wars, we’re gonna lose both of them,” he affirmed.

The MRC never followed his advice, decided that politicizing COVID to fight culture wars and perpetuate dangerous misinformation was more important than national unity. Still, the MRC tried to pay lip service to this message; a December 2020 post by Hays touted how McConaughey, whom he again identified as a "Hollywood A-lister," "discussed how many people in the entertainment industry are 'illiberal,' that they 'condescend, patronize, and are arrogant,'" to the half of the country that’s conservative or that voted for Trump, which was followed the next month by Alexa Moutevelis claiming that he "is the latest to draw the ire of the left-wing Gestapo for thought crimes because he called out the 'illiberal left' for being arrogant towards 50 percent of the population and talked about the country getting "aggressively centrist" instead of divisively polarized. 

All that unity talk, however, did not keep the MRC from going fiull Gestapo on McConaughey when he said things that deviated from right-wing orthdoxy, particularly when he unity talk turned to guns. Hays lashed out at him in 2018:

According to Matthew McConaughey, assault weapons are not “alright, alright, alright.” But banning them is.

The 48-year-old actor spoke at the Austin, Texas March for Our Lives, stating that he was there because he’s an American citizen, a proud Texan, a March for Our Lives believer, and, most importantly, because “I’m a father and I’m a husband.” Though he claimed that he wasn’t advocating for gun control, he asked that Second-Amendment supporters “take one for the team.”

McConaughey, a famous face at the gun-control rally, announced that he didn’t attend for the sake of subverting the Second Amendment, but that he wanted America to acknowledge that it is in the middle of an “epidemic.”

[...]

He concluded his speech by telling the audience to come together, and avoid the partisanship plaguing the issue: “This is an issue anchored in purpose for all of us. It’s not anchored in politics, it’s anchored in purpose.”

After all, maybe conservatives’ disagreement on the gun issue is just bitter partisanship, and not a valid point of view. And hey, with leading-man charm that intoxicating, how can any gun-owner say no to his list of demands? Nice propaganda there, Hollywood!

McConaughey's stance on guns was a reason Tierin-Rose Mandelburg dismissed talk of him running for Texas governor in a March 2021 post: "Oh, boy. Having a net worth of $140 million just isn’t enough for McConaughey. We may have another celebrity on the ballot in the coming future." We don't recall Mandelburg having any problem when TV celebrity Donald Trump ran for public office. Hays lashed out further at McConaughey's gun stance as a reason to oppose him as governor the following month:

Apparently Matthew McConaughey would be a popular contender against Governor Abbot (R-TX) in the upcoming gubernatorial race, but people who have a soft spot for the “nice guy” need to realize that McConaughey might not be so good for the freedom Texas prides itself on. ... Despite the nice guy appeal, Governor McConaughey would also fall right in line with Dems’ gun control ambitions.

Matt Philbin took a break from the attacks to praise McConaughey in a November 2021 post  for declining to have his children vaccinated against COVID, though he did stay in attack mode long enough for bash him for opposing Texas' draconian anti-abortion law, sneering that "There is no right time or context in which to take a child’s life."

But when McConaughey spoke out about the gun massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas -- his hometown -- and argue for sensible gun regulations, the MRC went into full-blown Gestapo mode again.Wallace White ranted in a June 6 post:

After Uvalde, many Hollywood celebrities have taken it upon themselves to spout off platitudes on gun control and how everyone needs to be on board with the liberal cause. If you aren’t on board with gun-grabbing, then you are an evil person who wants children to die. Matthew McConaughey in his recent plea has taken these talking points and bubble-wrapped them under the guise of moderation. 

According to Deadline, McConaughey is calling for “enacting background checks, Red Flag Laws and age upping the requirement on semi-automatic firearms to 21.” He says that he only supports “gun responsibility.” It doesn’t take an expert to realize that propositions such as Red Flag laws at the federal level are anything but moderate, but extremely radical.

Red Flag laws, in essence, allow the government to strip private citizens of their legally-purchased weapons because they’ve been deemed “at-risk”. The problem lies with who gets to deem who as “at-risk” and what criteria can constitute an “at-risk” individual. The untapped potential for tyranny is ripe with laws such as these. No wonder the radical left are champions of it.

McConaughey has been quite reasonable about issues in the past and has at least shown a willingness to talk with and debate with conservatives. That much is commendable. However, it is clear that he has a misunderstanding of the potentially catastrophic consequences of Red Flag laws for the 2nd amendment and freedom across the nation.

White didn't explain why gun rights are more important than saving a person's life from the threat of an unstabled armed individual.

When McConaughey appeared at a White House press briefing to make the same plea, Kevin Tober was the designated hater in a June 7 post:

On Tuesday, Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey took to the White House podium to plead for Congress to pass stricter gun control laws in the aftermath of the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde. As per their usual arrangement, the evening news broadcasts were more than happy to act as stenographers for the leftist agenda.

ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News all lead with the McConaughey rant and the ongoing negotiations on Capitol Hill over gun control.

With all the drooling over McConaughey's support for tougher background checks and other measures that the media supports, what's interesting is that they left out his call for restraint on "sensationalized media coverage."

Tober didn't explain why the murder of 21 people, 19 of them children, should not warrant sensational coverage or why the MRC's rabid abolutism in ranting about even the slightest regulation of guns -- which conflicts with its earlier praise of him in calling for unity and common ground -- was not sensationalizing the issue.

CNS' Bader Hypes Overpriced Gas In One Calif. Town To Bash Biden
Topic: CNSNews.com

Hans Bader used a June 3 CNSNews.com column to hype how a gas station in Mendocino, Calif., hiked gas prices to $9.45 a gallon, far above the national average at the time and even well above the average price in California. He cited a local blogger to claim that the owner did it because her station and repair shop is "an independent business, not a franchise of Chevron. Her business does not sell food and drink, the goods that most often bring profit to gas stations across the United States."

But that's not the whole story. As an actual media source noted, the station's prices have been unrealistically high since thte current owners took it over -- the only gas station in town -- in the early 2000s, and that gas prices are much cheaper down the road

Dubious notoriety is growing for the only gas station in town, one that is earning scorn from locals in the tight-knit community and guffaws from out-of-state looky-loos. As gas prices across the country climb to near daily records and drivers are crushed by $100 fill-ups, Mendocino’s fuel depot has become a lightning rod for outraged drivers who say they have no clue if the local station is setting a fair price or gouging them for an essential good.

“I don’t give a diddle what the next guy down the streets thinks,” said Schlafer, the station’s 71-year-old proprietor who is fielding calls from fed-up drivers across the country. “I’ve gotten really hard.”

[...]

“Twenty years ago everyone used it. They were priced competitively. Then all of a sudden she jacked up the prices,” said Gary Poehlmann, a contractor living in Mendocino for four decades. “She’s obviously giving everybody the middle finger.”

Now the station caters almost exclusively to people in a pinch after long drives up the California coast and tourists unaware that they can cruise 15 minutes north to Fort Bragg where gas is nearly 40% cheaper.

Because Bader is more interested in delivering right-wing talking points than enlightening readers with relevant facts, Bader used this station's wildly overpriced fuel not to criticize the owner for gouging customers but, rather, to attack President Biden:

Gas prices continue to rise despite Joe Biden partially emptying the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. As the Daily Caller reported, gas prices rose every time Joe Biden released oil from the reserve, showing that it achieved nothing except leaving less in the reserve to deal with a future emergency.

Biden's release of oil from the reserve is just a political gimmick designed to make it look like he is trying to cut oil prices. Critics have argued that Biden's releases of oil were illegal, because they weren't in response to an emergency.

In a recent gaffe, Biden suggested he actually likes high gas prices, because they push people away from using fossil fuels. 

Bader doesn't note that the Caller is engaging in the correlation-equals-causation fallacy by suggesting that releases from the SPR caused gas prices to rise.He also didn't explain why Biden should be treated as the sole cause of higher prices when there are undeniable contributing factor like the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Bader is engaged in a political attack, not a fact-based one. Unfortunately, we expect nothing less from him.

MRC Whines That Reporter Sought Out Creator Of Anti-Biden Meme Stickers
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center loves to attack reporters who expose the people behind the right's favorite narratives -- odd, since you'd think the MRC would want to make sure the right people got the public adulation they deserved for what they do. So, just as it lashed out at Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz for doing basic reporting to learn the identity of the homophobic "Libs of TikTok" Twitter account, P.J. Gladnick spent a June 7 post complaining that a reporter sought the identity of the person behind the Biden "I Did That" stickers that right-wingers use to vandalize gas pumps:

Nina Burleigh of Business Insider who is best known to the world for having "Offered Oral Sex to Bill Clinton to Keep Abortion Legal" found a new mission in life. This time it was focused away from presidential candle sticks to presidential stickers. Specifically, the highly popular "I Did That!" Joe Biden stickers that have appeared pointing at rising prices of gasoline on station pumps during the past year.

Those stickers have so irritated Burleigh that she went on a great meme hunt for the creator. Her Odyssey was described on Monday in "'I Did That!': Anti-Biden stickers are plastered on gas pumps nationwide. But who created them?"

Her meme hunt for the heinous creator was inspired by Burleigh's extreme rage at many for blaming poor Joe Biden for the rise in gasoline prices in particular and for inflation in general.

[...]

With self-righteous indignation, Burleigh then goes on to describe her great crusade to hunt down the "I Did That!" sticker creator who, in her eyes, unfairly blamed Biden for the sudden surge of gasoline prices which began almost from the moment he entered the White House in January 2021.

The MRC loves to blame Biden for high gas prices but has never named a specific policy that it could directly link to those higher prices. And, needless to say, Gladnick doesn't identify any either. 

After Burleigh noted that as she zeroed in on the creator, that person called her, Gladnick whined further:

So now that Burleigh tracked down the sticker creator, who in reality contacted her, will she demand that his stickers be labeled as disinformation despite the fact that sticker version Joe Biden is more truthful by declaring "I Did That!" than the flesh and blood version who is constantly shifting blame for rising gasoline prices to others?

Again, Gladnick offered no "truth" that directly proved high gas prices are solely Biden's fault and that things like the Russian invasion of Ukraine had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Throughout the piece, Gladnick never explained why Burleigh is a bad person for doing basic reporting on a subject of public interest. Doesn't he want the sticker creator to get the credit he deserves for being a right-wing meme master?

Farah's Fantasy Of Sneaking Trump Back Into Presidency Continues
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah's favorite fantasy of late is that Republicans will take control of the House in the midtern elections, name Donald Trump speaker of the House, then impeach President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, which will then elevate Trump to the presidency. It's a fantasy he still clings to, and he rehashed it again in his March 28 column, with a massive dose of his usual Biden derangement:

When Joe Biden took the oath of office to become president – or, should we say, presidential pretender – I was morose.

It was not an easy rigged election to take. Come on, man! Do you really think Biden got an astonishing record 81,284,666 votes – more than Barack Obama did? I believe the last three numbers – but no way did he win legitimately. He probably got half that many. He didn't even campaign. He never left his house.

That was not easy to accept. I believe Donald Trump was the greatest president in the history of the United States. That's right! His achievements in four years exceeded that of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. I loved them all. Reagan changed my politics. But Trump was one of a kind – a Republican and a fighter for America and the Constitution, just like Washington, Jefferson and John Adams.

So, immediately I started calculating how to get him more time to complete the job. I knew the only way I could figure out a plan depended on getting him up to six years as president – two if he assumed the presidency after a brief time as speaker of the House, followed by another four-year term.

[...]

Biden is sullen, his voice hurts my ears, he's cognitively challenged, he's incoherent, he falls a lot – and, worst of all, he's mean. He lies on a grand scale, and he's hopelessly immoral.

The worst thing he has ever done was to commit a high crime against America by perpetuating election fraud against the greatest country the world as ever known.

[...]

[T]he latest to join the campaign is Ed Martin, president of Phyllis Schlafly Eagles.

Martin told "Secrets": "I'm serious. We need the Trump voters. With the possibility of having Donald Trump as speaker, conservative voter turnout would be through the roof nationwide."

Let's make it a real big "red wave." Ride the wave. This might be a magic MAGA moment!

All I want for my role in this is a "thank you" note from Trump, and to be a semi-regular attendee at his White House press conferences.

In his June 21 column, Farah referenced a column a few days earlier by fellow Trump fanboy Wayne Allyn Root, who interviewed Trump yet again and decuced from his criticism of Mich McConnell and refusal to endorse him that "I drew the conclusion Trump is considering running for House speaker and leaving his options open. B-I-G news!" He ranted:

Do you agree with Root and me that we can't wait for January 2025?

I've been waiting for a long time to get President Trump back in office.

It seems possible now. It seems necessary now. It seems VITAL now.

There is a way under the laws of our land. There always is.

It won't be easy.

It will take much planning under our constitutional system.

There will be much opposition.

And, we mustn't take anything for granted.

[...]

We must win big! Very big! We have to take on the RINOs and the Democrats. We must deliver the House and the Senate – which doesn't seem plausible with the mathematics of it. But here's how we must do it. We have to win so big that we scare the RINOs into backing the "Speaker Trump" plan as the only one that can SAVE THE COUNTRY – because it is!

Beginning in January, Speaker of the House Trump then would preside over the impeachment of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

[...]

"I told Trump that I don't know if America will exist in 2024," Root noted. "Trump responded with pure honesty, 'That's actually the much bigger question ... will the country (exist). There's been more damage done in the past year and a half ... than in the worst 25 years in America's history (combined).'"

The worst thing Biden has ever done was to commit a high crime against America by perpetuating election fraud against the greatest country the world has ever known.

I know this country continues to be strong, but we dare not test its limits. The plan to save it I've outlined here must go forward.

Are you with me?

The fact that the only folks buying into Farah's fantasy are extremists like Root and Steve Bannon tells you all you need to know about this attempted coup by another name.

MRC Continues To Attack Jean-Pierre For Giving Interviews
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center's hatred of new White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is so virulent that it even lashes out at her for doing interviews. Kevin Tober worked in his employer's obsession with excessively hyping a threat to Justice Brett Kavanaugh in a June 12 post:

On Wednesday, a deranged pro-abortion leftist went to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house to attempt to assassinate him, thankfully he got cold feet and called the police on himself. Regardless it is a huge news story that many in the leftist media refused to cover

Such was the case on Sunday when ABC’s This Week spent the entire hour without even a mention of the attempted assassination of a Supreme Court Justice. Instead, co-anchor Martha Raddatz spent time swooning over the Democrats January 6 committee hearings, followed by an interview with the survivors of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shootings.

In the last full segment of the show, Raddatz introduced a fawning interview between White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and correspondent Gio Benitez for “Pride Month.”

“At her first press conference back in May, newly appointed White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre marked the many firsts she brings to her role” Raddatz announced before previewing the interview. 

“In a new ABC News special ‘Pride: to be Seen,’ correspondent Gio Benitez sat down with Jean-Pierre at the White House to discuss how her LGBTQ+ identity has shaped her and the unique position she's now in” Raddatz gushed. 

Parroting the Democrat Party line, Benitez asked Pierre: “We are seeing so many laws across the country that many see as anti-LGBTQ+. I wonder for you as a mother what do you think?”

Jean-Pierre responded to the softball question by noting how she is “always concerned as a mom because you're trying to raise a little person that's going to be the best of themselves. I see those laws and I feel for young people who are in school, right, who are trying to just be who they are.”

She added that’s “why I'm here, to continue to fight and to make sure that we hopefully deliver and change things and make people's lives better.”

As we've noted before, the complaint over Jean-Pierre being given a "softball" interview rings hollow given the softballs the MRC's Tim Graham and Curtis Houck lobbed at former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany in an April podcast interview, refusing to even bring up the fact that McEnany notoriously abandoned her job after the Capitol riot, absolutely refusing to hold any press briefings at all during the last two weeks of Trump's presidency.

Emma Schultz repeated much of the same whining about a separate interview in a June 15 post, with added leaning into the MRC's narrative that Jean-Pierre is an incompetent diversity hire:

“[We’re] in a place where we can actually put us in a place where the American people feel -- can actually -- we can take on inflation,” stated White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in a train wreck interview on Monday’s CNN Don Lemon Tonight. Welcomed by Lemon Jean-Pierre struggled to defend President Biden in his work for the country, placing blame for the economy on other outside factors and even explicitly stating that the country needs to be “in a good historic economic place, which is where we are right now.”

[...]

Surprisingly, Lemon actually called her out by noting we have rising inflation and gas prices “before the war.” “They also say that last year's stimulus package, which you mentioned, contributed to inflation,” he added.

Fumbling for words to convince Lemon about the President’s win for gun legislation, the Press Secretary stated the following: “So, the President has – has done everything that he --he can from – from -- from the White House to take -- to call - to call on Congress to act. So, this is one step forward, right? We haven't seen anything like this, a bipartisanship agreement on gun reform in decades, in a generation even.”

Convincing, right?

We don't recall the MRC ever snarking about whether McEnany's mindless defenses of Trump were "convincing."

Newsmax Lets DeSantis Whine About 'Smear' (That's Absolutely True)
Topic: Newsmax

Jeffrey Rodack wrote in a June 9 Newsmax article:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is ripping into The Washington Post and the "legacy media" after a report that his press secretary registered as a foreign agent for her previous work under a former president of Georgia.

"I am not deterred by any smear piece from these legacy media outlets," DeSantis said, according to WFLA-TV. "The only reason they're attacking her is because she does a great job, and she's effective at calling out their lies and their phony narratives.

"I would be much more concerned with my secretary if the Washington Post was writing puff pieces about her. Then I would think something is wrong."

However, Rodack and DeSantis never identify what, exactly, the "smear" is. They do not dispute the facts of the story; indeed, Rodack went on to describe Pushaw's offense further:

A Post report on Wednesday said DeSantis' press secretary, Christina Pushaw, registered this week as a foreign agent of former president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili. The newspaper reported she belatedly detailed work she performed for him between 2018 and 2020.

She disclosed her work for the politician following contact from the Justice Department, her attorney Michael Sherwin said. She reportedly received $25,000 for her work.

"Her efforts included writing op-eds, reaching out to supporters and officials, and advocating on his behalf in Georgia and in the United States," Sherwin said. "The work ended in 2020. Ms. Pushaw was notified recently by the DOJ that her work on behalf of Mr. Saakashvili likely required FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act] registration. Ms. Pushaw filed for the registration retroactively as soon as she was made aware."

If the facts are undisputed, it can't possibly be a "smear," and facts are an absolute defense.

Yet Pushaw herself pushed that narrative in a statement to a Florida newspaper: "The governor said it better than I could. It is an attempt at a smear. It’s non-news." Even she doesn't dispute the facts and is instead complaining that the facts were reported -- which, again, is not a "smear."

WND Pushes Dubious Doc's Unverified Story About Blood Clots From COVID Vaccines
Topic: WorldNetDaily

We've documented how Dr. Ryan Cole is a discredited anti-vaxxer and a hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin enthusiast -- to the point that some of his patients have ended up in the emergency room suffering from COVID after following his advice. His lab was kicked out of Idaho's largest health care network over his divergence from sound medical care. He has falsely claimed that COVID vaccines cause cancer and autoimmune illnesses. He has since been accused of misdiagnosing patients with cancer. But WorldNetDaliy for some reason --likely because his bogus claims generate clicks -- gives him regular promotion.Art Moore does just that in a June 12 article:

A pathologist who heads one of America's leading labs is finding unusually long blood clots, as long as one foot, in the bodies of deceased people who received COVID-19 vaccines.

Dr. Ryan Cole of Cole Diagnostics in Boise, Idaho, said his lab is "seeing mushy organs, we're seeing incredibly inflamed organs."

"We know the spike protein causes all the ... bad outcomes that the virus did in 2020," he said in an interview with Greg Hunter for USAWatchdog reported by Just the News.

Cole said that in people with comorbidities – serious chronic diseases   – the synthetic spike protein in the mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna are "causing inflammation in the lung, the brain, the liver, the kidneys, the heart; it's causing the same damage that the virus was causing."

Neither Moore nor the Just the News article from which he cribbed his article offered indepdently verifiable proof of Ryan's claims; indeed, both are servile stennographers for Cole despite his dubious medical history.

Moore also referenced an earlier WND story dentered on COVID misinformer Steve Kirsch in which "a veteran embalmer told Kirsch he and more than a dozen colleagues in the industry had been noticing strange blood clots in most of their cases." As we noted at the time, that story is highly dubious because embalmers typcailly don't know the vaccination status of the person they're enbalming.

There's no reason to trust WND if it continues to publish unverified information -- especially from someone who has been repeatedly been discredited.