MRC Whitewashes Another 'Twitter Files' House Hearing Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's wavering over Elon Musk has ceased for time being, because there's some agenda-feeding to be done. Autumn Johnson did her part in a March 8 post:
A congressional Interim Staff Report revealed that The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) made apparently “partisan” demands of Twitter owner Elon Musk.
According to the Interim Staff Report released by the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, The FTC sent “over a dozen” letters to Twitter’s legal counsel and made “more than 350 specific demands” for information. The report slammed the FTC for having blatantly abused its power. “[T]he Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is orchestrating an aggressive campaign to harass Twitter,” the report critiqued. “These demands have no basis in the FTC’s statutory mission and appear to be the result of partisan pressure to target Twitter and silence Musk.”
The FTC reportedly asked Twitter to hand over “[e]very single internal communication ‘relating to Elon Musk’ by any Twitter personnel” since he bought the company. Additionally, Twitter was asked to "’[i]dentify all journalists’" who were granted access to the internal files and explain why the company fired Jim Baker, the company’s ex-deputy general counsel and former FBI lawyer.
The Interim Staff Report also accused the FTC of making “partisan” demands with no “rational basis in user privacy. "The timing, scope, and frequency of the FTC’s demands to Twitter suggest a partisan motivation to its action,” the report noted.
[...]
The Interim Staff Report shows exactly the type of damning federal government overreach that the Twitter Files helped expose.
But Johnson is censoring the full story. As an actual news organization reported, the FTC's investigation is part of a 2011 consent decree Twitter signed with the government over protection of user data, and the change in Twitter's ownership did not absolve the company's responsibility in living up to it; an FTC spokesman explained that "Protecting consumers' privacy is exactly what the FTC is supposed to do."
After that came another Republican-led House hearing inspired by the "Twitter files," in which the most interesting revelations included Matt Taibbi laughably pretending that Musk wasn't his source for his "Twitter files" reporting (even though he was using selected internal Twitter files Musk allowed him to peruse), a Democratic congresswoman pointing out Taibbi's self-interest in serving as Musk's stenographer, Taibbi being unsure whether Kayne West's anti-Semitic tweets should have been deleted, and the failure of Taibbi and fellow Musk stenographer Michael Shellenberger to report on Donald Trump pressuring Twitter to censor Chrissy Teigen over that glorious "pussy ass bitch" tweet. But as with the previous House hearing in February, the MRC didn't want its readers to know about anything that didn't conform to the predetermined right-wing narratives. Curtis Houck huffed in a March 10 post:
On Thursday, the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held a hearing on the bombshell Twitter Files and the implication of the government colluding with Big Tech to censor free speech. The lively hearing featured two of the Twitter Files authors, Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi. And throughout, Democrats tried to demean their work and lambaste the free press as their reporting has reflected poorly on their friends in the federal bureaucracy.
Of course, the major broadcast networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC were not interested and ignored the story on their flagship Thursday evening and Friday morning newscasts. Instead, they spend 44 minutes and seven seconds previewing Sunday’s Oscars, otherwise known as Hollywood’s biggest night of self-gratification.
Houck went on to lavishly praise Fox News for adhering to the narrative:
The Fox News Channel’s flagship evening newscast, however, took a different tract as Special Report opened with a three-minute-and-two-second report.
[...]
FNC’s Jesse Watters PrimeTime followed Baier and opened with a brutal, 10-minute-plus breakdown. Watters said the work of the Twitter Files team was “exactly the type of corruption journalists are supposed to air out” and “should be celebrated,” but aren’t since “Democrats aren’t happy” since they “only like a free press if the press works for them.”
[...]
Watters reemphasized that leftists were “caught conspiring with the FBI and Big Tech to censor free speech and freedom of the press and they’re not even denying it,” but instead “accusing the reporters who broke the story of being in it for the money and hounding” and “strangl[ing] them”.
Ironically, he said, these are “the same people who spent years telling us not to bully the media, remember, and how important the free press was to democracy” while their friends in the press “got book deals and Pulitzer Prizes” for “fake collusion” claims.
Catherine Salgado used her own March 10 post to offer her version of the narrative:
Republican lawmakers and self-professed liberal journalist testifiers bashed Big Tech coordination with "weaponized government" while Democrat lawmakers attacked the testifiers at a congressional hearing Thursday.
The House Judiciary Committee held a March 9 hearing on the bombshell Twitter Files, which exposed that the government coordinated with Big Tech and pressured Twitter to censor Americans. “We are here focused on a weaponized government, a whole-of-government approach that has been turned against the American people,” Congressman Matt Gaetz said. Congressman Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Twitter Files journalists and testifiers Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger shared Gatez’s sentiment as they ripped government-Big Tech censorship.
Salgado insisted that anyone who doesn't adhere to the right-wing pro-Musk agenda is opposed to free speech:
House Democrats were less pro-free speech, as expected. In fact, they harassed Taibbi in an attempt to uncover his sources. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) even accused Taibbi of essentially profiteering off his Twitter Files reporting, because his Substack subscriptions greatly increased after he first released The Twitter Files.
“[New Twitter CEO] Elon Musk spoon-fed you his cherry-picked information, which you must have suspected promotes a slanted view point or, at the very least, generates another right-wing conspiracy theory,” Wasserman Schultz sneered condescendingly.
But there is no “conspiracy theory.” Democrats have openly advocated ever harsher censorship and unequivocally demanded only one narrative be allowed online.
Salgado and the rest of the MRC think that holding conservatives accountable for false or hateful speech equals "censorship." Also, she didn't dispute Wasserman Schultz's assertion that Musk fed Taibbi selective and biased information -- and if you're doing that to manufacture a partisan political narrative that would not exist in the presence of fuller information that is currently being hidden (by Musk), you are, in fact, creating a conspiracy theory.
Renata Kiss served up more Musk-fluffing in a a March 13 post:
Twitter owner Elon Musk recently doubled down on his pro-free speech rhetoric, saying free speech cannot be lost because “you don’t get it back.”
Twitter CEO Elon Musk shared his vision for Twitter in an open web forum on Tuesday emphasizing his continued commitment to more open public discourse on the “town square of the internet.”
2:26 “What is the bedrock of a functioning democracy?” he asked. “It has to be free speech and a level playing field. That’s why it’s the First Amendment.” He went on to say that “once you lose freedom of speech, you don’t get it back. So that’s why we must protect it at all costs.”
Musk explained that Twitter isn’t limited to the narrow point of view of legacy media. On the contrary, Twitter empowers the public to choose a narrative for themselves.
Kiss didn't mention that Musk suspended the Twitter accounts of journalists who reported on him, demonstrating that his supposed commitment to "free speech" is little more than lip service.
Johnson returned to do stenography for Musk stenographer Taibbi as he whined about being criticized:
One congressional Democrat seemed unprepared for the response she received after she implied that Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi wasn’t really a journalist.
"This isn't just a matter of what data was given to these so-called journalists before us," House Ranking member Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) said at last week's Twitter Files hearing. Plaskett directed her comments at independent journalists Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger who each testified at the hearing. Taibbi, the first journalist to report on the Twitter Files, immediately responded by reminding Congress of his list of credentials.
"Ranking Member Plaskett, I'm not a so-called journalist," he said during the hearing. "I've won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and I've written 10 books, including four New York Times bestsellers." But Taibbi didn’t leave it at that. He responded once again in a Racket News Magazine article Friday.
In his article, Taibbi wrote that Democrats could not care less about free speech and were only concerned with pushing their own agenda.
Again: If Taibbi and Shellenberger are Musk's compliant stooges serving up stenography for him, they are not "independent journalists."
CNS Joins Right-Wing Narrative Campaign To Blame Bank Collapse On ESG Policies Topic: CNSNews.com
Just as its Media Research Center parent did, CNSNews.com sought to exploit the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank by imposing right-wing narratives to blame things that didn't actually happen.
Susan Jones kicked off things with an unusually straightforward story, though she still found a to inject bias with a snarky shot at President Biden, claiming that a statement on the collapse released by the White House was done "in President Joe Biden's name." Then it was narrrative-pushing time, as Jones wrote an article baselessly suggesting that the collapse was caused by the bank following ESG policies (a narrative CNS has been heavilypushing lately):
"Our values guide everything we do," says Silicon Valley Bank's "Environmental, Social and Governance Report" for 2022.
"We start with empathy, take responsibility, speak and act with integrity, embrace diverse perspectives, and keep learning and improving," says the introduction written by (former) SVB President and CEO Greg Becker.
Federal regulators took over the failed bank on Friday, following a run by depositors. The Biden administration says all of SVB's depositors will get their money back, even those who exceed the $250,000 limit for federally insured deposits.
SVB's 66-page ESG report lays out the following social justice initiatives that were important to the bank, which mainly served technology startups:
Jones then hyped that "Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 presidential Republican candidate, says he would not bail out Silicon Valley Bank, if it were up to him," for the purported sin of taking ESG into consideration. Later in the day, managing editor Michael W. Chapman gave Ramaswamy -- a right-wing darling CNS' MRC parent helped hype into a presidential run -- his own article to rant (and to further the anti-ESG narrative):
Commenting on the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Vivek Ramaswamy, a highly successful asset management chairman, best selling author, and GOP presidential candidate, said the bank should not be bailed out by the government but should be allowed to fail, "if needed."
Bailing out SVB is nothing more than "crony capitalism," he added, noting that we saw all this happen before with the bank bailouts in 2008.
[...]
The anti-woke money manager also criticized the ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) agenda followed by SVB.
"Silicon Valley Bank just last year made a $5 billion commitment to sustainable finance to ensure a better and more sustainable planet," noted Ramaswamy. "If they had actually sought for a more sustainable balance sheet, they would have better done their job."
Jones returned to gush over partisan commentator and Fox Business host Charles Payne -- whom she laughably described as a "financial journalist" -- weighing in on the bank's collapse:
"First and foremost, for me, that was a bailout of Silicon Valley. Not Silicon Valley Bank -- of Silicon Valley. And everyone needs to be clear on that. This was not a bailout of hard-working Americans with small accounts. This was a bank that only catered, for the most part, to Silicon Valley and their customers.
"So how did Silicon Valley (Bank) get so big? All the money that cascaded into our economy at the beginning of the pandemic helped to spur...over a thousand IPOs (initial public offerings)," Payne said. He said 59 percent of those IPOs were SPACs.
(A SPAC, or Special Purpose Acquisition Company, is one without commercial operations that is formed to raise capital through an IPO for the purpose of acquiring or merging with an existing company).
Payne said 90 percent of the SPACs were "pure crap."
"The others all went out overvalued," he continued.
Jones didn't mention that Donald Trump's social media website Truth Social is linked to a SPAC.
After a couplemore articles tepidly reporting on what non-conservatives had to say, Craig Bannister served up even more anti-ESG ranting from Ramaswamy:
Funding ideological environmental, social and governance (ESG) causes, instead of the most profitable ventures, helped cause last week’s failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) – and most clients don’t even know their retirement account managers are investing in ESG, Republican 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy says.
"Silicon Valley Bank just last year made a $5 billion commitment to sustainable finance to ensure a better and more sustainable planet," Ramaswamy told CNN on Sunday.
"If they had actually sought for a more sustainable balance sheet, they would have better done their job," he noted.
Bannister did not quote Ramaswamy providing any direct evidence of a link between ESG and the bank's collapse.
When questions were raised about a bank deregulation law signed by Trump that may have contributed to the bank's collapse, Melanie Arter contributd a March 14 article featuring a Republican trying to change the subject:
Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.), who serves on the House Financial Services Committee, said Tuesday that the failed Silicon Valley Bank was not because of a failure of banking regulations, and more regulation on regional banks “is not the answer.”
Instead, he said, it was fueled by “overspending by the Democrats, which fueled inflation,” among other things.
“Well, what we need to be doing right now, what we need to be focused on is not assigning premature blame but instead focusing on vigorous oversight of the financial regulators to make sure we prevent systemic risk and restore financial stability,” Barr told Fox Business’ “Mornings with Maria.”
There were a few more articles that, of course, mostly leaned right:
The rest of CNS' coverage of the SVB collapse occurred in the commentary section, which differentiates itself from its "news" division only in the degree of bias allowed.
MRC Sports Blogger Frets That Baseball Isn't Manly Enough Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has a weirdthing about masculinity, and that popped up again in a Feb. 21 post by Jay Maxson fretting that major league baseball has become insufficiently manly:
The rigid walls of toxic masculinity are crumbling before our eyes -- because a major league baseball player for the Boston Red Sox plans to paint his fingernails and toenails before every game this season. First baseman Tristan Casas is helping to change the “stereotypically macho image of MLB players for the better,” according to sensationalist Outsports writer Ken Schultz.
During spring training in Florida, Casas displayed red fingernail polish and white painted toenails. This girly look is “great” for baseball, Schultz declared.:
[...]
This fitting development from the Grapefruit League is an important step in encouraging once-macho big leaguers to freely express their personalities (inner femininity?), making baseball a more compelling and welcoming game, Schultz raved.
Given that Maxson melted down the day before over a minor league baseball player coming out as gay, it's no surprise that the rant about manliness in baseball continued:
By painting his nails, Casas is adding to the legend of softer baseball players like Joc Pederson, who wore a pearl necklace during the Atlanta Braves’ World Series run in 2021. Along with St. Louis hitting coach Turner Ward kissing Lars Nootbar’s cheek last year to celebrate his birthday. These are men who add color to a sport that’s been suffocated by tradition. With the implication it’s been damaged by men acting like men.
These outliers in the manly sport of baseball are helping to generate more inclusion in baseball culture. In fact, Schultz argues that the men cited above made it possible for White Sox minor leaguer Anderson Comas to simultaneously come out of the bullpen and the closet. They’re just being who they really are … and all that jazz, the LGBTABCD narrative goes.
A little thing like red nails makes a bigger statement than one would think, Schultz goes on. Stepping outside “the rigid definition of masculinity” opens a window for inclusion allowing Comas to live out his truths and emboldens allies to affirm him.
Even though no major leaguer has ever come out as an active player, a guy painting his nails is no small feat. It’s another step in the feminization of men. Somehow, this is supposed to make us a better nation.
But Maxson never explains why this matters. If Casas or any other player can perform at the major league level, what does it matter if they paint their nails or even fail to be heterosexual? Could be that Maxson is just a homophobe -- an odd stance for someone whose bio carries a sexually ambiguous first name and no photo so he readers would know what sex he is.
WND's Mercer Hates Modern Music (Especially If Black People Are Involved) Topic: WorldNetDaily
Ilana Mercer's Feb. 23 WorldNetDaily column is headlined "Beethoven & Bach ARE the West, not Cardi B, Kanye, Rihanna." While she didn't explicitly make a point of it in the column itself, it's worth noting that the three musical artists she deemed not "the West" are black -- not surprising for a writer who's very much white nationalist-adjacent. Ultimately, the column is one long while about how she doesn't like popular music:
Symbolically, the decaying Empire unveiled some of its most putrefying, pornographic cultural products in the week in which Burt Bacharach, composer of sublime pop music, departed to the heavens. The beastly bacchanalia unfolded at the 2023 Grammys and the Super Bowel (sic) halftime hump-along, showcasing zero skill, zero imagination, zero talent and zero beauty. Those vaguely familiar with my prose recognize that I'm being charitable.
[...]
The only substantive conservative case to make over the Grammys is that it signifies the complete loss of immutable artistic standards. For while artistic taste is subjective and personal; artistic standards are everywhere and always objective.
Nobody looking at, and listening to, the 2023 Grammys should dare talk about beauty – of melody or movement – harmony (as in consonance and counterpoint), chord progression and a facility with musical instruments, for these were nowhere apparent. Better melodic progression is to be found in "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" and "Three Blind Mice."
Nobody watching these erogenous-zone centered extravaganzas, for which the celebrity Idiocracy clapped like clapped-out whores, should dare conclude anything but this:
The Grammys were about the end of art – about the loss of all meritocratic, objective standards in art.
The true meaning of the West is not to be found in the staged acts of ugly exhibitionists and filthy pornographers who bedeck our cultural and sporting events, the likes of loud, lousy Lizzo, a mountain of meritless flesh, and Sam Smith Sicko –demented degenerates who are all engaged in publicly tolerated indecent exposure and tuneless yelping, that not even the Auto-tune magic software, the "holy grail of recording" technology, can correct.
[...]
Beethoven is the West. It's men like Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Debussy, César Franck, Dvorák, Tchaikovsky (a Russian homosexual, whose manly music could never be queered), Elgar, Fauré and more – they embody the West. They and the many young performers furthering their work, the work of the Lord, are examples of the best of the West.
"Ode to Joy," inspired by Friedrich Schiller's eponymous poem, is but the soundbite in Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. Sublime as it is, "Ode to Joy" is the popular tune in a more magnificent whole.
One should not seek out exclusively the Ode of the symphony's finale – the fourth movement – without assimilating the typically ballsy build-up by Beethoven throughout the preceding Allegro (first movement), scherzo (second movement) and Adagio (third).
MUSIC IS MAN. These men, to be precise.
[...]
And that's the West, too. Alas, it has become anathema in Neurotic Nation USA to be stoic and heroic like Beethoven. I shall close with guidance neither fuzzy nor diffuse: Honor Western civilization, not Kanye West: Do it up, parents.
Note that all of the classical composers she names are white, and that of all the musicians whose work she despises, all but one (Sam Smith) are black.
This follows the recent trend of WNDwriters (and others) who have declared their unhappiness with modern art.
MRC Was Really Hoping For An Economic Collapse After Bank Failures Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Resarch Center moved from baselessly blaming "woke" policies for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, as well as another bank, to being disappointed that the banks' failure didn't destroy the economy because the Biden administration intervened to keep the situation from spreading. Catherine Salgado huffed in a March 16 post:
Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary bashed the federal bailout of Silicon Valley Bank depositors.
O’Leary explained his critiques on Fox Business’s Cavuto: Coast to Coast with host Neil Cavuto on Tuesdsay. Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is one of several banks that collapsed last week. O’Leary accused regulators of taking an “isolated incident” and creating a “moral hazard” by applying it as an overall banking concern, guaranteeing deposits above the $250,000 Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. limit. He said when the next bank fails, the federal government should just “let it fail.” O’Leary would later state during a segment hours later on the Fox News Channel's Hannity that SVB was “run by idiots.”
O’Leary told Cavuto he predicted “unintended consequences” from the bailout policy, such as signaling to banks that the Federal Reserve will rescue them no matter what.
A March 27 post by Joseph Vazquez returned to rooting for the economy to collapse over ther bank failures beause it will hurt President Biden:
Economist Peter Schiff blasted the media aversion to acknowledging that the ongoing banking turmoil is in fact a “financial crisis” that could be worse than 2008.
Schiff highlighted America’s record high credit card debt and the failing banks and noted that it wasn’t a coincidence that “both the borrowers and the lenders are broke.” The “reason for that,” said Schiff on the March 21 edition of One America News’ Real America with Dan Ball, “is the Fed. The Fed kept interest rates artificially low for more than a decade, encouraging people to go deeper and deeper into debt and banks to extend” credit to them. Now, Schiff said the Fed’s incessant number of missteps corralled it into a position where it is being “forced” to “raise interest rates, something that was always going to happen.” In turn, the Fed effectively “created another financial crisis,” Schiff analyzed.
Schiff then turned his sights onto the liberal media trying to gaslight people on the real severity of America’s financial situation and deflect away from the horrid memories of 2008. “The media is reluctant to call this a financial crisis. They keep saying it’s a banking crisis. The financial crisis of 2008 was a banking crisis!” According to Schiff, “nobody wants to say what it is because they don’t want to evoke memories and comparisons to 2008.” However, Schiff warned, the collapse of a number of financial institutions like Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank were a “sequel to 2008. And like all sequels, this one’s going to be worse.”
Vazquez spent a March 29 post shockingly not hating George Soros (indirectly, anyway) because a Soros-funded outlet meshed with his talking points:
A major global outlet funded by leftist billionaire George Soros actually published scathing criticism by two economists blasting the Federal Reserve’s role in creating the pretext for the bank failures that rocked U.S. markets.
Project Syndicate, which dubs itself as the “World’s Opinion Page,” published an op-ed by economists Raghuram Rajan and Viral Acharya headlined: “The Fed’s Role in the Bank Failures.” The authors iterated Silicon Valley Bank's (SVB) and Signature Bank's collapse aren't merely linked to the fact that 90 percent of their deposits were “uninsured.” The problem, said Rajan and Acharya, “may be more systemic,” and it involves the Fed’s recklessness. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Apparently Project Syndicate — which has a notorious habit of peddling radical anti-capitalist and eco-extremist views on a global scale — decided to let the truth slip out for once. Soros funded Project Syndicate with at least $1,682,390 between 2018 and 2021 alone.
The authors pointed out that “there is typically a huge increase in uninsured bank deposits whenever the US Federal Reserve engages in quantitative easing [(QE)].” The Fed kept interest rates at near zero and “purchased trillions of Treasury and mortgage bonds” for around two years to artificially stimulate the economy, according to The Hill. This served as the genesis for the inflation crisis that preceded the Fed’s aggressive interest rate hike campaign that would ultimately lead to SVB’s collapse.
Vazquez didn't mention how this op-ed discredits his anti-Soros narrative by proving he (unlike, say. the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com) is interested in promoting a diversity of views.
The next day, Vazquez was compelled to quote another commentator he normally hates because, again, only blind adherence to his narratives matters:
It’s obvious things have gotten bad when President Joe Biden’s talking points are being undercut by one of his most ardent lapdog economists.
Biden took to the press podium March 13 to congratulate himself on his administration’s wild efforts to secure the deposits at Silicon Valley Bank following its historic collapse. Biden attempted to dismiss any notion that what he was pushing was a government bailout. “No losses will be — and this is an important point — no losses will be borne by the taxpayers. Let me repeat that. No losses will be borne by the taxpayers,” Biden claimed.
Not so fast, said New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman, aka Mr. “Transitory” inflation. “[Y]es, they were bailouts,” Krugman rebutted. “I wish the Biden administration weren’t trying to claim otherwise.”
That didn't last, however, beause Krugman debunked the right-wing claim that"wokeness" is what caused SVB to fail:
He then went on a tirade, flailing at some of the criticisms levied at SVB for its failures. One that Krugman couldn’t swallow was the allegation that SVB failed because of its fixation on environmental, social and governance standards (ESG). “[That’s] only marginally less ludicrous than claiming that wokeness somehow causes train derailments,” Krugman scoffed. “S.V.B. didn’t stand out from other banks in its concern for diversity, the environment and so on.”
But Krugman didn’t explain his rebuttal well. Perhaps that’s because he was wildly off the mark — kind of like his inflation calls.
Of course, Vazquez didn't offer any sort of coherent rebuttal; instead, he parroted a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Kimberly Strassel that quoted the SVB website saying that "We serve those creating positive environmental change" -- which, of course, is proof of nothing. And he even went on to condede that "there were a myriad of factors that played into SVB’s collapse, such as the Federal Reserve’s ridiculous easy money policies." Still, he insisted it was "ludicrous" for Krugman "the ESG component entirely as a legitimate factor" despite, again, offering no evidence of that purported legitimacy.
With Trump Indicted For Real, Newsmax Cranks Up The Freakout Topic: Newsmax
When Donald Trump delcared that his arrest was imminent -- the predicted date turned out to be false -- Newsmax snapped into action, repeatedlyfreakingout over the pronouncement and continuing to host people defending him even though his predicted date had long past, falsely portraying that failed prediction that a New York grand jury investigating him had decided not to charge Trump at all. Still, Mark Schulte wrote a pre-emptive March 29 column attacking Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, claming that his investigation of Trump was "egregiously dishonoring a nationally prominent prosecutor's office."
When a credible media outlet reported on March 30 that the grand jury decided to indict Trump after all, Newsmax snapped into action again to peddle new outrage. Its first story on the development was a wire story, followed by copy-and-pasting Trump's response. Newsmax then hyped Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' declaration that he would fight Trump's extradition to New York for arraignment, but didn't mention that DeSantis has no power to actually do that and is obligated by federal law to not interfere -- and anyway, that was followed by a one-paragraph wire article noting that Trump and the Manhattan district attorney have been in contact to arrange surrender. Then came another wire article dclaiming that some Trump adversaries "fear the first-ever prosecution of a former US president could be a loser that undermines more consequential cases."
That's at least 27 attack articles Newsmax published since the indictment was announced. That's the kind of stenographical Trump-fluffing Newsmax had to convince DirecTV it couldn't do without.
Newsmax also published a March 31 commentary by Garrett Ventry asserting that the indictment of Trump was "un-American" and based on a "faulty legal theory; it represents the latest weaponization of the justice system — against Trump." Newsmax, however, prefaced the column with an editor's note to distance it from the opinion: "The following article has not been authored by an attorney. It does not constitute a legal opinion by Newsmax."
CNS Flip-Flops Over Messing With Books Topic: CNSNews.com
Spencer J. Fairfield began a Feb. 23 CNSNews.com article this way:
In Massachusetts, Superintendent of Abington Public Schools Peter Schafer has allowed a book that discusses sexual activities into public libraries for children. The book, written by author Juno Dawson, is titled “This Book is Gay” and, as reported by Fox News Digital, discusses “orgies, kinks, fetishes, sex apps,” as well as a wide variety of other sexually explicit topics.
Fox News Digital asked Superintendent Shafer if he was “aware that the book discusses the following, among other things: orgies, kinks, fetishes, sex apps, bath house, [a] casual hookup, [and] detailed information on how to have anal sex, as well as other sexual activities.”
“After reading the entire book and understanding it in full context, I decided to put it back in the library,” Shafer responded.
Then, blowing off the idea that the book is suitable when taken in its full context, Fairfield proceeded to take thing from the book out of context:
The book describes the author’s experience with Grindr, saying, “The benefits are obvious: quick, easy, and uncomplicated sex… I’ve met a variety of interesting people… I don’t have a problem with that aspect of it-if people want casual sex, then something like Grindr is a must."
The book also discusses topics of sex meets, sex parties, the “kink community,” and the use of sex toys.
On the topic of sex parties, the book promotes the use of saunas as a legal means of obtaining “some random sex”:
Fairfield didn't expalin why he took small sections of the book out of context when the superintendent explicitly stated that a review of the book's "full context" showed that it belonged in the library. Further, the headline of Fairfield's article falsely portrayed thebook as being only about "Orgies, Kinks, Fetishes, Sex Apps."
CNS is showing a double standard on books. The same day, it published a column by the Heritage Foundation's Jarrett Stepman complaining that books by Roald Dahl were being edited to have offensive elements removed:
You see, in progressive modernity we don’t burn books. Too crass, too simplistic.
Instead, our Inclusion Ambassadors comb through old, cherished texts to alter and remove wrongthink before publication. The past won’t just be erased, it will be rewritten.
[...]
Now, we haven’t quite arrived at the dystopia of George Orwell’s classic novel “1984.” Newspeak isn’t being enforced by the government, yet.
However, this censorship and control of information and thought by a vast array or private corporate entities (with occasional aid from government agencies) is in some way more insidious for the long-term future of free thought. It inures us to tyranny over the mind and allows woke fanatics to get their way without the dramatic step of government prohibition.
This was followed by a March 1 article by managing editor Michael W. Chapman that a book shop in Ukraine was destroying books by Russian authors:
A book shop in Kiev, Ukraine is encouraging people to turn in Russian books to be destroyed -- "recycled" -- and, so far, more than 150,000 volumes have been ground up and pulped, including books by such great Russian writers as Leo Tolstoy, and most likely Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekov, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
In Kyiv, ABC News correspondent Patrick Reevel reported on Feb. 23, "we're at a paper recycling plant here, and the reason we're here is that we're watching hundreds of Russian books about to be pulped."
Chapman didn't explore why Ukrainians were motivated to do this, outside of a passing reference to the "Russia-Ukraine conflict" -- you know, the one in which Russia invaded Ukraine and which CNS tried to blame President Biden for provoking by not being totally opposed to Ukraine joining NATO.
The irony, of course, is that both Stepman and Chapman would ban and pulp "This Book Is Gay" and any other book that notes that L:TBT people exist because it offends their right-wing perspectives.
NEW ARTICLE -- The MRC vs. Google: The Bogus Gmail Battle Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has repeatedly misrepresented the results of a study in order to accuse Gmail of being biased against Republican fund-raising emails -- and it even got Republicans to buy into the manufactured outrage. Read more >>
MRC Desperately Tries To Blame 'Woke' Policies For Collapse Of 2 Banks Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center is nothing if not a slave to right-wing narratives, and it slavishly tried to promote them in the wake of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank by trotting out various right-wing bogeymen as the cause and denying that lax bank regulation that grew under Donald Trump had anything to do with it. First up was an easy layup by Joseph Vazquez mocking CNBC's Jim Cramer for promoting SVB stock a month before its failure; that was followed by a March 12 post by Kevin Tober that went into Trump defense mode:
It was only a matter of time before the left-wing propagandists at ABC's This Weekblamed former President Donald Trump for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank which occurred over two years after he left office. During an interview with Virginia Democrat Senator Mark Warner, Raddatz blamed Trump’s regulatory policies for the bank’s collapse and asked Warner if regretted voting for a banking deregulatory bill.
Raddatz started off the discussion by falsely placing blame: “after the financial crisis in 2008, regulations were put into place to make sure banks could weather large losses. Under President Trump, some of those were rolled back.”
“You were 1 of only 17 Democrats who voted for the bill that rolled back some banking rules including for institutions the size of Silicon Valley Bank,” Raddatz asked.
Even Warner disagreed with her and correctly noted that “these mid-sized banks needed some regulatory relief.”
Explaining to the partisan and economically illiterate Raddatz, Warner said “no matter what the capital had been in this bank if you don't get banking 101 straight if you don’t manage your interest rate risks if you've then got a run at $42 billion in a single day,” it’s unprecedented.
Tober then embraced one of those right-wing narratives: "Since the Silicon Valley Bank was more interested in leftwing gender ideology and other woke priorities, they failed to manage their interest rate risk and as a result, collapsed." Tober offered no evidence that this was, in fact, the case; instead, he linked to a tweet by someone from the right-wing website RedState that had an alleged screenshot of a bank official's bio that called herself a first-generation immigrant who sought to "creatte a sense of community for our LGBT+ employees and allies." Is Tober saying that immigrants and LGBTQ+ people are unqualified to work at a bank?
After another Vazquez dunk on Cramer, Renata Kiss peddled the "woke" narrative again in a March 14 post:
California’s woke Silicon Valley Bank went belly up last week, showing the inevitable consequence of ESG policies, according to HomeDepot co-founder Bernard Marcus.
On the March 11 edition of Fox News Cavuto Live, Bernard Marcus, co-founder of The Home Depot, slammed Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) woke practices that led to its recent collapse. “These banks are badly run because everybody is focused on diversity and all of the woke issues and not concentrating on the one thing they should, which is shareholder returns,” said Marcus. “Instead of protecting their shareholders and their employees, they’re more concerned about social policies.”
[...]
When asked if there are more woke banks out there, Marcus said yes adding that, “the system and the administration has pushed many of these banks into [being] more concerned about global warming than they do about shareholder return.”
Despite not offering any evidence whatsoever that being "woke" had any direct role in the bank's collapse, Kiss insisted Marcus was correct: "Marcus is right on point. Just last year, 19 state investigated six U.S. banks for working with the U.N. to deny credit to fossil fuel-related companies. More recently, the Royal Bank of Canada instituted “climate modifier” bonuses for its top executives as part of their ESG agenda." But that doesn't prove Marcus correct on anything either -- it's just an attempt to peddle the anti-ESG agenda currently in vogue at the MRC.
Vazquez angrily returned for another March 14 post, seething that President Biden got credit for keeping the bank failure from morphing into a full-blown financial crisis:
White House propaganda machine Politico wasted no time in trying to cast President Joe Biden as the savior of Silicon Valley startups by praising his ridiculous federal "bailout" plan.
Politico was off to the races in its ridiculous Mar. 13 story headlined: “How Biden saved Silicon Valley startups: Inside the 72 hours that transformed U.S. banking.” The first paragraph made the entire article sound like the plot of a Mission: Impossible script: “On Sunday afternoon, an exhausted group of Biden administration officials gathered to put the finishing touches on a hastily composed plan to stave off a nationwide banking crisis.”
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, according to Politico’s spin, “trigger[ed] a weekend sprint [by Biden officials] to contain the fallout that spanned several agencies and all hours of the day and night.”
[...]
Politico dishonestly attempted to make Biden seem prudent in his scheme to guarantee depositors' funds above the $250,000 limit by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The outlet followed the president’s lead and deflected away from his plan being labeled a “bailout.”
Vazquez didn't explain why it was a bad thing to keep the U.S. financial system from collapsing.
Autumn Johnson complained -- under the overwrought headline "TYRANNY!" -- about the idea that social media could be moderated in order to stop a bank panic that could cause the financial system to collapse:
The U.S. government and leftists of all stripes have set out to silence speech on Big Tech platforms to protect their preferred narrative on a number of issues, and the latest bailout news following recent bank failures is apparently no exception.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) tweeted March 12 that “[a] Democrat Senator essentially asked whether there was a program in place to censor information on social media that could lead to a run on the banks.” As it turns out, there just might be. The cybersecurity branch of the Department of Homeland Security, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (or CISA), published a report adding financial “misinformation” and “disinformation” in June 2022 to a list of threats that supposedly pose “a significant risk to critical functions” of the federal government that it should act on.
“With every passing day it seems we learn of yet another nefarious way in which Big Tech and government are working to silence Americans,” MRC Free Speech America & MRC Business Director Michael Morris stated. “Over and over again we hear from leftist elites in both the government and private sector how they will protect us from impending doom. But how they will protect Americans, it seems, is often the same, by censoring constitutionally permissible speech online. Simply outrageous.”
Morris didn't explain how disinformation that could collapse the country's financial system could be "constitutionally permissible."
Vazquez came back for take yet another shot at Cramer, this time complaining that government intervention to the the SVB collapse from spreading meant that the economy "is on the cusp of a soft, safe landing."
Executives at Signature bank apparently preferred that their employees attend woke lectures and participate in cringey music videos instead of doing what they were hired to do: banking.
On Tuesday’s edition of his eponymous show, Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson lifted the veil on Signature bank’s woke practices that allegedly contributed to its pathetic downfall during the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) meltdown. “If the central bank handed you trillions of dollars free with no strings attached, you would... virtue signal like it was 2023,” he said. “You would spend hundreds of millions of dollars bragging about what a good person you are. And that, of course, is exactly what they did.”
He showed clips of a woke pronoun lecture put on by the Pride Council’s self-proclaimed “gender-queer, transmasculine person” in December, just months before the bank went under. But that’s not all. The bank also filmed cringe-worthy parody as far back as 2011 to attract potential employees and clients to the company.
As before, no actual evidence was offered to directly link videos made 12 years ago to the bank's collapse. Kiss and Carlson don't seem to understand that repeating partisan narratives is not the same thing as providing hard evidence.
WND Columnist Warns Against Fearmongering -- Then Fearmongers Topic: WorldNetDaily
Larry Tomczak began his Feb. 28 WorldNetDaily column this way:
Red alert! We must not be naïve "evanjellyfish" allowing false narratives, skewed polls and supposedly "scientific" data to mislead us anymore. It's time to expose deceptive propaganda the same way Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did in his 1974 manifesto "Live Not by Lies."
We are regularly facing nonstop narratives intended to frighten and form us into malleable foot soldiers marching in lockstep to the Pied Piper progressives.
In the 1947 book "Nuremberg Diaries," we're told how Hermann Göring, the Nazi architect of Germany's police state, said that "people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders by telling them they're being exposed to danger."
But later in his column, under the subhead "Expose/Expunge," did a bunch of fearmongering:
"Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them" (Eph. 5:11).
"All that's required for tyranny to gain a foothold is for people of conscience to remain silent." –Thomas Jefferson
Who are some of the people and entities that need to be called out for deceiving Americans and actively working to promote radical progressive initiatives to topple traditional America?
• Big government
• Big media
• Big tech
• Big globalist elites (World Health Organization, World Economic Forum)
• Big academia
• Big-name celebrities
• Big companies
They've been used as mouthpieces for malevolent forces trying to convince millions, especially young people, that America is racist and systemically evil; our Founders and heroes were racists whose statues must be torn down; capitalism is bad and based on greed; the time has come for the Constitution to be rewritten, the Electoral College should be abolished and voter ID be outlawed; life does not begin at conception; our criminal justice system is corrupt and must be replaced, recognizing offenders as victims needing counseling, no bail and release from oppressive prisons; police departments have to be defunded; Critical Race Theory and LGBTQ propaganda must be taught in schools; "Death with Dignity" (physician assisted suicide) must be recognized as a basic human right; millennials aren't proud to be Americans; the traditional family and religious values are being discarded; the 2020 election had minimal irregularities; Black and Hispanic Americans believe the U.S. is inherently racist and do not trust whites; religion is rapidly losing its place in America.
Tomczak didn't explain why his fearmongering is somehow pure while everyone else's is evil, instead, he played the religion card: "Here's the deal: We are at a tipping point for a major revival and Third Great Awakening!"
MRC Continued Complaints That Right-Wing 'Censorship' Narrative Is Being Isgnored Outside The Bubble Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center spent a lot of time complaining that February's House hearing inspired by Elon Musk's selectively released "Twitter files" had its preferred narrative of purported pre-Musk Twitter "censorship" of conservatives overshadowed by things like Donald Trump actually trying to use the power of the presidency to atttempt to censor by demanding that Twitter delete a mean tweet from Chrissy Teigen. There were even more examples of that. Tim Graham's Feb. 10 column on the hearing began with a bit of whataboutism:
In the Trump years, CNN oppressively promoted the conspiracy theory of Donald Trump’s “collusion” with the Russian government to get elected in 2016. So they were heartbroken when Robert Mueller’s investigation ended with a negative verdict: “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
The Mueller investigation's conclusion does not negate that there was plenty of evidence to warrant an investigation in the first place, and maybe Graham should be welcoming the investigation instead of using it to help Trump play victim. Graham then launched into his main grievance:
CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy climbed to the mountaintop of shamelessness in his so-called “Reliable Sources” newsletter on February 8 under the heading “The Collusion Delusion.” Who’s delusional now? House Republicans investigating the role of the Biden campaign and the “intelligence community” in Twitter’s suspension of the New York Post over a Hunter Biden story.
This is not a "news" letter.
Republicans are living in a reality distortion field,” Darcy began. He blustered there was “no real evidence” to support the claim that Twitter bowed to government bureaucrats when they suppressed the Hunter-laptop story and branded it as toxic misinformation. Just forget all the reporting that Twitter executives had weekly meetings with the FBI (which had the laptop in its possession) and engaged in a “tabletop exercise” about “hack-and-leak” operations with the Department of Homeland Security. That’s some thick smoke, if not fire.
Darcy continued: “Republicans were unrelenting in peddling it to the American public. At Wednesday's hearing they showed no regard for misinforming those who turn to them for accurate information, or the fact that they were smearing a private business and its former executives in the process.”
It’s not “smearing” to make the former Twitter chieftains testify. Liberals just don’t like other liberals being on the wrong end of the hardball questions.
As we've pointed out, if the New York Post -- a biased pro-Trump publication -- didn't want its laptop questioned (a story pitched to it by pro-Trump partisans like Rudy Giuliani), it should have immediately provided independent verification of the story that have overcome questions about partisan motivation.
Graham got really angry, though, when Darcy challenged the right-wing "censorship" victrimization narrative:
But probably the most hypocritical passage in this purple prose was about election denial: with this hearing, “Republicans are not so subtly feeding their election-denying base reason to believe that the 2020 election was effectively rigged against Donald Trump.”
Earth to Darcy: what did your network obsess about in the Trump years? We could easily counter with “CNN was not so subtly feeding its election-denying base reason to believe that the 2016 election was effectively rigged against Hillary Clinton.”
Darcy, who believes that Fox News should be de-platformed, then ranted that Fox News recounted “the nonsense coming out of the hearing as if it were a serious affair uncovering considerable wrongdoing. The facts — reality — simply do not matter.”
But it’s Darcy who is pushing the transparently counter-factual narrative that there is no such thing as Big Tech “intentionally and unjustly censoring conservative views,” when the evidence is ubiquitous. MRC Free Speech America’s CensorTrack.org database has reached the milestone of 5,000 verified incidents of conservatives being censored, suspended, and cancelled.
Of course, CensorTrack is not legitimate "media research" -- it's a partisan tool designed to advance a narrative, which means it's not really evidence of anything other than that the MRC can manufacture numbers in service of a narrative. Graham also seems to have forgotten that his employer devised its own conspiracy theory about how the 2020 election was "rigged" against Trump, or that Fox News promoted a false story in 2016 about how Hillary's indictment was imminent (which the MRC also breathlessly hyped without ever telling its readers the truth about it being false). Like the rest of the MRC, Graham is too invested in the narratives and conspiracy theories to ever admit there's actually nothing to them.
Similarly, a Feb. 12 post by Clay Waters complained that a different outlet, this time the New York Times, complained that the right-wing narrative was ignored and the one actual example of censorship that didn't fit the narrative was pointed out:
The New York Times is doing its best to minimize the controversy over Twitter’s squelching of conservative opinion during the Trump-COVID era, as shown by its weird coverage of a House Committee hearing on the social media platform’s biased behavior and pressure from government agencies to push the company to censor conservative speech.
In Thursday’s paper, Luke Broadwater and Kate Conger found “Five Takeaways From the House G.O.P. Hearing With Former Twitter Executives.” But they conveniently skipped over the juicy scene of Republican Rep. Nancy Mace questioning the medical expertise of Twitter executives for limiting the influence of Stanford medical professor Jay Bhattacharya for the sin of questioning COVID lockdowns, instead shaping an anecdote to portray Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez as a heroine.
From the start, it was clear the reporters were only going to talk about the bits that would interest their liberal audience: Less FBI interference, more Chrissy Teigen.
[...]
Their first “takeaway” from the hearing was a silly Twitter spat between President Trump and model Chrissy Teigen, headlined: “Mr. Trump tried to get the model Chrissy Teigen censored for insulting him.” Yet Twitter didn’t delete Teigen’s vulgar tweet, which makes the whole anecdote a bit pointless.
Waters wouldn't have called it "pointless" if a Democratic president tried to do the same thing. Instead, he grumbled that "The piece ended with sympathy for former Twitter executive Yoel Roth, who said he had to sell his home while suffering online threats" without mentioning the fact that Elon Musk maliciously incited those threats.
CNS Followed MRC Parent In Exploiting CPAC (And Censoring Lawsuit Against Matt Schlapp) Topic: CNSNews.com
Like its Media ResearchCenter parent, CNSNews.com has had its issues with conservative gathering CPAC -- mainly due to failures to hate LGBT people as much as CNS does. And like its MRC parent, CNS let bygones be bygones and gave this year's gathering relentlessly positive coverage. Coverage kicked off with an anonymously written March 2 piece touting the musings of CNS' boss:
While participating in a panel discussion at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, Brent Bozell, the founder and president of the Media Research Center (of which CNSNews.com is a part) discussed Don Lemon, the co-host of CNN’s “This Morning” program.
The panel was moderated by radio host Larry O’Connor and included Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik and Townhall columnist Kurt Schlichter as well as Bozell.
[...]
“If they believed in market economics, by the way, they would fire everybody on CNN,” said Bozell.
A second anonymously written article from that panel quoted other panelists praising Bozell for the MRC's focus on "big tech" and Bozell ranting that those platforms are"censoring speech."
That was followed by a March 3 article by Craig Bannister hyping GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley ranting about how Chinese companies owning land in the U.S. means taht "enemies own land in our country."
CNS typically takes the weekend off -- an odd thing to do for something that claims to be a "news" operation -- so the next CPAC-related articles didn't appear until March 6. Spencer J. Fairfield hyped former Trump adviser K.T. McFarland's dubious apprach to Russia's invasion of Ukraine: “a negotiation is so much more effective when you’ve got your arms around the guy’s neck.”
The big attraction, though, was Donald Trump's speech -- so much so that CNS devoted two articles to it, even though one would have easily sufficed. The first was a stenography piece from Susan JOnes:
In a speech at CPAC on Saturday, former President Donald Trump talked at length about "the forces tearing America down," and -- sounding a familiar theme -- he discussed his plan to "make American great again."
"The agenda I have laid out today will end America's destruction, but it is not enough just to stop the forces tearing America down," Trump said:
"I want, once again, to build America up," Trump said:
[...]
Earlier in his speech, Trump noted that in 2016, he promised to be the "voice" of Americans.
"Today, I add, I am your warrior, I am your justice," he said.
"And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution. I will totally obliterate the deep state..."
The second was anonymously written but took the same stenographical approach Jones did:
Former President Donald Trump gave a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, where he described in stark terms what he sees happening in America if those who oppose what conservatives are fighting for succeed.
“If those opposing us succeed, our once beautiful USA will be a failed country that no one will even recognize--a lawless, open borders, crime-ridden, filthy, communist nightmare,” said Trump.
“The most important battle in our lives is taking place right now as we speak,” said Trump. “For seven years, you and I have been engaged in an epic struggle to rescue our country from the people who hate it and want to absolutely destroy it.”
Here is a transcript of the part of Trump’s CPAC speech where he said opponents of what conservatives are fighting to achieve for America, this nation will become “a lawless, open borders, crime-ridden, filthy, communist nightmare:”
CNS loves to be Trump's servile stenographer, in stark contrast to its constant nitypicking of President Biden. We've noted how CNS refused to fact-check Trump's 2021 CPAC speech, though a couple weeks earlier it claimed to find "3 errors in 12 seconds" in a speech by Biden a couple weeks earlier.There were fact-checks of this year's Trump speech as well, but CNS wasn't interested.
Another thing you won't find at CNS: any mention of the sexual misconduct lawsuit filed against CPAC leader Matt Schlapp by a male staffer for Herschel Walker's doomed Georgia Senate campaign. Apparently, using CPAC to promote its parent's right-wing agenda meant more to CNS than indulging in the homophobia that previously caused it to trash CPAC (or, you know, behaving like the "news" organization it claims to be and report news).
Hate-Filled MRC Sports Blogger Pushes Even More Anti-LGBT Hatred Topic: Media Research Center
Mysterious Media Research Center sports blogger Jay Maxson has always hated LGBT people, despite having an sexually ambiguous name and an utter lack of presence outside the MRC that makes it unclear what gender Maxson is. Maxson reprised his (or her) hatred of transgender athletes in a Jan. 17 post:
Welcome to your nightmare as the incoming president of the NCAA, Charlie Baker. At the NCAA’s most recent convention, people protested the association’s leniency on allowing males to compete in women’s sports. You’re also bringing along trans baggage from your time as the former governor of Massachusetts. Hope you can handle the heat!
The NCAA convention in San Antonio ended three days ago, but not without boiling controversy. Demonstrators blasted the NCAA for allowing men, like Penn U. swimmer Will “Lia” Thomas, to compete in and destroy the competitive balance in collegiate women's sports. They gathered 10,000 petition signatures against this nonsense.
[...]
Bottom line? Lia Thomas wannabes, elbow the women aside and walk right into their locker rooms and have a go at ill-gotten national fame and glory. The NCAA appears primed to maintain the status quo – making a mockery of women’s athletics.
Maxson used a Jan. 26 post to praise an Australian basketball team for rejecting a pride-themed jersey:
A brave pro basketball team in Australia said “no” to the ‘bow Wednesday. As in the LGBT rainbow pride uniform logo they refused to wear in their game. Several team members felt the pride event was an affront to their religious beliefs, and the entire team rebuffed pride night. No American pro sports team has ever displayed such courage against the LGBT mafia.
[...]
It’s a sad statement that in this Australian league each team’s toughest opposition comes from the LGBT mafia.
Maxson never explained what this "LGBT mafia" is supposed to be or even who its members are; do they whack you if don't give them a cut of your pride jersey revenue?
Maxson returned on Feb. 1 to hype a Fox News commentary by anti-trans college swimmer Riley Gaines, adding: "The woke madness needs to stop...and women’s sports need more people like Gaines with the courage to speak up against the injustices perpetrated on them."
Maxson ranted about another pride jersey-related incident in Australia in a Feb. 16 post:
Remember when the LGBTQABCD was an appeal for live and let love liberalism? Those day are long gone., and the tolerant folks have gone fascist. They continually try to impose their views on others, and now six-year-olds in Australia have been given an ultimatum to either wear rainbow shirts or sit out a high-profile kids’ soccer game.
Next week, children will play during the halftime of an A-League pro match between Melbourne Victory and Adelaide. That is, they’ll play only if they bow down and wear the rainbow shirt. Those refusing to go along with the rainbow power move will not play in front of a large crowd.
[...]
A soccer fan Tweeted that forcing kids to wear pride shirts is not about inclusion. The fan is right. It’s all about indoctrination and treating non-participants as pariahs.
Note that Maxson has to run to Australia -- where the MRC's readership is negligible -- to feed his anti-LGBT outrage machine.
Maxson spent a Feb. 20 post sneering at a minor-league baseball player who came out as gay:
No active Major League Baseball player has ever come out of the closet. The alphabet mafia is hoping for that day, but for now, LGBTQABCD folks can only get excited when obscure minor leaguer announce that he's homosexual while playing in the bus leagues or somebody comes out after he's given up baseball.
The alphabet crowd was crowing over the weekend when Anderson Comas, a pitcher somewhere in the depths of the Chicago White Sox organization announced he digs guys.
The Chisox announced on Twitter, “We are all so proud of you, Anderson!” Oddly enough, the Sox post also included the name of singer Lady Gaga and the name of her song “Born This Way.” Whatever.
Comas, 23, pitched last season for the Kannapolis, N.C. Cannon Ballers, a Class A affiliate of the White Sox. He was called to the mound just 11 times and recorded an awful 6.35 earned run average. His unearned pride average is now soaring though.
[...]
Heterosexual players are never congratulated or celebrated for helping to raise the next generation of human beings.
Maxson lashed out at transgender athletes again in a March 2 post:
Quick, what is Minnesota’s state bird? If you said “loon,” you nailed it. Some of those loons are not the feathered kind, but those of the robed variety. As in members of a Ramsey County district court that ruled USA Powerlifting violated the human rights of a man seeking to compete in the women’s division.
Equally loony? The state legislature, which created the Minnesota Human Rights Act, which is a get-out-of-male card allowing people to compete in any division they want to. Most notably, it prevents the ability of women to compete on a level playing field of sports without the intrusion of stronger males.
This was followed by a March 8 post cheering Elon Musk and "non-woke" ESPN talking head Sage Steele for having the conservatively correct opinion about this.
Maxson used a March 13 post tohave a freakout over soccer star Megan Rapinoe (whom Maxson and the MRC despise for her failure to be heterosexual) for being a bit critical of white heterosexuals:
If soccer players could score goals with their big mouths, Megan Rapinoe would have scored 10,000 times on the pitch by now. Late last week, she received one of Time magazine’s woman of the year awards and turned the awards ceremony into a thorough trashing of straight white women and the states attempting to ban transgender males from women’s sports.
Like a shock jock, Rapinoe took the stage, with her underwear sticking up above her slacks, saying, “Ya all gotta be f**ked up, goin’ after (fellow woman of the year award winner) Angela Bassett and f**k you, man. This f**ked up.” It was all downhill from there for Rapinoe. Real classy. Nice selection there, Time.
“White women have left black women—and everyone else—behind. Straight women leave queer women behind,” Rapinoe told those in the Los Angeles audience. “Let’s not be those kinds of people. Being a woman: make it expansive. Don’t ever leave anybody behind.
"Let’s bring everyone in and figure the rest out from there," she concluded.
Yeah, let’s turn the world into one big gender-confused mess and see what happens. What a splendid idea. And what a role model, she isn’t.
[...]
Unfortunately, nothing about the grandstanding Rapinoe’s presence on the world stage is indicative of any shrinkage or softening. She’s all big mouth, all rainbow rad, all the time - not to mention a terrible role model for young girls.
Says a guy (or gal) who can only grandstand by spewing hate at a right-wing blog.
Author Of New Anti-Fact-Checker Book Moonlights As Propagandist For Shady Chinese Billionaire Topic: Newsmax
Matt Palumbo is the author of a upcoming book pushing the right-wing narrative against fact-checkers for committing the offense of fact-checking right-wingers (a narrative the Media Research Center also likes to peddle). We had a little dust-up with him on Twitter a couple weeks back, in which Palumbo responded to our snark with lame insults. His apparent day job, according to his Twitter bio, is "content manager," whatever that is for right-wing radio host Dan Bongino (who is publishing Palumbo's book under the Liberatio Protocol imprint).
But it turns out that Palumbo has another side gig: shilling for Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui (a.k.a. Miles Guo and Ho Wan Kwok), the moneybags keeping far-right activist Steve Bannon afloat who was recently indicted for fraud.
Asexposed by fellow right-winger Lawrence Sellin, Palumbo is among a group of writers Guo and/or his affilates are paying to write nice things about him, then paying to have those articles published at websites such as Newsmax and the GatewayPundit. The posts at Gateway Pundit are listed as being sponsored by something called "NewNoah," which Sellin suggests is a consulting firm controlled by Guo. A couple of these articles recently popped up on Newsmax, under gray-box "SPONSOR" posts on the front page, both of which are listed as being sponsored by "Token Team," which we can presume is another Guo-controlled company.
On March 15th, Miles Guo was arrested by the DOJ just before he was scheduled to testify in the trial of Pras Michel. Is The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) making every effort to prevent that testimony - because they know it’ll pull back the curtain and further expose the CCP’s infiltration of the U.S. government?
Another paid writer, Kelly John Walker, ranted in the second article:
The "fox hunt" for prominent Chinese dissident, Mr. Miles Guo reads like a Cold War-era spy novel. Indeed, the U.S. is in a high-stakes cold war against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with the tendrils of their malign influence pervading our legal system like a cancer. That infiltration raises the question as to whether or not some defendants are being denied due process or have instead become victims of the CCP’s “lawfare” strategy.
[...]
Why, in light of these foundational legal principles, is prominent anti-CCP dissident Mr. Miles Guo being held in custody without bail and without due process? Has the CCP exercised undue influence and pressure on the DOJ? Are there conflicts of interest and bias in the prosecution of Guo?
As Sellin has noted, neither Palumbo nor Walker promote their Guo work to their own readership even as it's being spread in pro-Guo circles.
Getting caught shilling for a shady foreign billionaire, and a recently arrested one to boot, is not a good look for a guy with a new book to plug. We wonder if any of Palumbo's interviewers will raise this shady connection with him as he promotes his new book.Perhaps he can shed light on why he's doing this.
WND's Kupelian Rants In Interview With Larry Elder Topic: WorldNetDaily
In promoting a recent softball interview he did with Larry Elder -- the failed right-wing California gubernatorial candidate and WorldNetDaily columnist who's still desperatelytrying to justify discredited pro-Trump narratives -- WND managing editor David Kupelian made sure to flatter his interviewer:
Just days after disclosing that he’s seriously considering a run for the U.S. presidency in 2024, popular talk-show host, bestselling author and columnist Larry Elder interviewed longtime WND Managing Editor David Kupelian on his Epoch Times daily video podcast.
The first column outlined those three alleged ways: pray, support the constitution and "support parallel institutions in America that champion our cherished Judeo-Christian values and not the communistic, nihilistic, globalist values of society’s current ruling elites." Kupelian unsurprisingly followed that with a money beg for WND -- as if spreading fake news and misinformation is a "cherished Judeo-Christian value." In the latter column, Kupelian ranted that "Today’s rampant transgender grooming craze amounts to widespread child sexual abuse of the most serious and irreversible kind," huffing that colleges are "undoubtedly the most deranged and toxic places in the country, where young people are indoctrinated assembly-line style with Marxist ideology, intimidated into adopting perverse “woke” sensibilities and effortlessly drawn into immoral and hopeless lifestyles." He ranted further that "The left literally violates all of the Ten Commandments every single day – not accidentally, but purposefully, since the core dynamic of the left’s operating system entirely depends upon violating God’s laws. Therefore, they create false gods to worship (though some vainly pretend to venerate the true God), they specifically teach children not to honor their parents, they kill innocent babies, they steal citizens’ wealth, they encourage and revel in sexual immorality, and they 'bear false witness' (lie) nonstop against good people." Whining about poeple who "bear false witness" is ironic coming from someone who runs a website designed to lie and mislead people.
This cartoonish depictions of anyone who's not as right-wing as he is continued in the interview, which began with Elder uncritically repeating Kupelian's words. Kupelian ranted: "liberals are for cutting the breasts off of 13- and 14-year-old girls. No -- that's not a liberal value, that's bat-guano insane and it's actually evil."Then he went on this wild rhetorical bender:
The truth is, the elites who rule us, they don't care about men who believe they're women and all this stuff. This is all an act. They're in -- Larry, I don't think they have the capacity to really care about anybody but themselves. They're so corrupt, they are interested in their own power and wealth and privilege and just power -- it's all about power. And so the causes -- you know, Biden, even when he was vice president, said the transgender issue is the civil rights issue of our time. Again, Biden is not capable of caring about other people, maybe outside of his own family. And the same with the racial issue. They know America is the least racist, most successful multiethnic nation in the history of the universe. They know this, they're not stupid. These are not the college professors who are caught up with these Marxist ideologies. I'm talking about the poeple with the real power -- they know it's crap. They don't believe any of this stuff. They're just in it for the power and the glory because they want to be God.
After an extended MyPillow commercial, Elder and Kupelian discussed Christianity and argued that the on-fielkd collapse of NFL player Damar Hamlin will bring people back to God. Somehow, Kupelian refrained from spreading the anti-vaccine conspiracy theories he publishes at WND in talking about Hamlin.
The Media Research Center's wavering over Elon Musk has ceased for time being, because there's some agenda-feeding to be done. Autumn Johnson did her part in a March 8 post:
Just as its 
The Media Research Center has a 
Ilana Mercer's Feb. 23 WorldNetDaily 
The Media Resarch Center moved from 
When Donald Trump delcared that his arrest was imminent -- the predicted date turned out to be false -- Newsmax snapped into action, 
Spencer J. Fairfield began a Feb. 23 CNSNews.com 
The Media Research Center is nothing if not a slave to right-wing narratives, and it slavishly tried to promote them in the wake of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank by trotting out various right-wing bogeymen as the cause and denying that lax bank regulation that grew under Donald Trump had anything to do with it. First up was an 
Larry Tomczak began his Feb. 28 WorldNetDaily 
The Media Research Center 
Like its Media ResearchCenter parent, CNSNews.com has had its issues with conservative gathering CPAC -- mainly due to 
Mysterious Media Research Center sports blogger Jay Maxson 
Matt Palumbo is the author of a 
In promoting a recent softball 
