MRC's DeSantis Defense Brigade Stayed Salty About Botched Launch Topic: Media Research Center
Having labored to defend Ron DeSantis from his botchedcampaign launch and an NAACP travel advisory for Florida (and even his alleged comedy chops), the Media Research Center's DeSantis Defense Brigade was kept plenty busy. The Brigade was kept busy throughout late May and early June:
Days after that botched launch, it was still salty about it. Clay Waters complained in a May 30 post:
As the only network morning show Tuesday to cover the 2024 campaign, ABC’s Good Morning America again did the bidding of parent company Disney by bashing Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL). Unsurprisingly, they continuing to fixate five days later on the bandwidth issues with his 2024 presidential campaign launch on Twitter, whined his interviews have been with conservative talk radio hots, and painted him as one of many top-line candidates.
[...]
Chief Washington correspondent and lucrative Trump author Jonathan Karl noted Tuesday marks the start of a four-day tour for DeSantis through the first three voting states (Iowa, New Hampshire, then South Carolina) before throwing jabs.
“The announcement was plagued with technical difficulties, but DeSantis — the DeSantis team claims that they raised more than $8 million just on the first day,” Karl whined, seeming to be one of the few still obsessed with the less-than-ideal launch and questioning the veracity of Team DeSantis’s fundraising claims.
Karl again poo-pooed DeSantis for not having “actually interacted with voters since he announced he was running for president last week” and, when it comes to interviews, he bemoaned the Florida governor did “a flurry of” them, but mostly “with conservative talk shows.”
One word for Karl and the liberal forlorn DeSantis won’t appear on their airwaves for what would be a trap: Cope.
Waters offered no evidence that ABC "did the bidding" of Disney by reporting on DeSantis. He came more aggressively to DeSantis' defense in a post the next day:
PBS reporter Lisa Desjardins gave Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis a chilly welcome to the 2024 presidential race on Wednesday, before his Twitter-hosted interview with Twitter owner Elon Musk.
Desjardins included positive details about the new candidate, standard practice when introducing new candidates. But she poisoned the paragraph with the unsubstantiated allegation that DeSantis oversaw “beatings and forced feedings of prisoners” while stationed at Guantanamo Bay, complete with a still of an article making the allegation:
[...]
Desjardins tapped into the lazy media smear of DeSantis sacrificing Floridians with irresponsible Covid policy in the name of business:
[...]
The voiceover was accompanied by two shots: a grim hospital scene cutting to two women dining alfresco, a huge margarita on the table between them -- as if people were dying in Florida just so people could go out and drink?
And “wave of deaths” compared to what? Florida did permit its residents to get back to their livelihoods quickly, yet three years later the state’s pandemic toll trails that of long-shuttered New York, even though then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo was praised for his authoritarian handling of Covid. Florida’s numbers look especially good when one considers the state’s disproportionately aged population.
In fact, Florida's COVID death rate is higher than that of New York and the 18th highest in the country.
Newsmax Continued To Crank Out Attack-And-Defend Articles After Trump's (Third) Indictment Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax covered the third indictment of Donald Trump with its usual barrage of defending Trump and attacking prosecutors. In the third day of coverage on Aug. 3, the pattern continued:
MRC Plays Whataboutism (Again) On Hunter Biden Coverage Topic: Media Research Center
One of the Media Research Center's biggestcomplaints amid news of Hunter Biden's plea deal was that Republicans were continually called out over their obsession with Hunter. Bill D'Agostino tried to put a whataboutism spin on that in a June 22 post:
After CNN earlier this week attempted to accuse one of its competitors of being “obsessed” with Hunter Biden, we thought we’d take a look at CNN’s own past fixation on the son of a President: Donald Trump Jr.
It’s not exactly news that the liberal cable network devoted far more air time to Trump Jr. than they have to Hunter Biden, but the numbers don’t tell the whole story.
During the Mueller investigation, Donald Trump Jr. was a hot topic on CNN: be it his phone calls, his emails, or his twitter exchanges, all of his communications were treated as self-evidently suspicious by the network’s curious hosts. By contrast, they were positively bored by anything relating to Hunter Biden.
D'Agostino failed to mention that, unlike Hunter, Don Jr. made himself a public figure by working alongside his father in the family business and vociferously defending him during his presidency and since. He continued:
In July of 2017, CNN ran numerous lengthy reports about Trump Jr.’s “bombshell emails” from June of the previous year. A few months later, when those emails had proven fruitless, CNN instead shifted to caring about his Twitter messages. In November of 2017, New Day host Chris Cuomo excitedly announced: “Trump Jr. released the Twitter messages. The timing of the exchanges is raising a lot of eyebrows!”
When those too turned up nothing of note, 2018 saw the “bombshell report about the original emails” back in the spotlight. Another dud.
Fast forward to 2019, and the network had begun hoping that perhaps Trump Jr.’s phone records might provide some proof of his father’s non-existent collusion efforts. On January 31 of that year, Congressional correspondent Manu Raju briefed viewers of The Lead about a handful of phone calls the then-President’s son had made to unlisted numbers. Yet again a thread was pulled, and again nothing unraveled.
Eventually Bob Mueller concluded his investigation, having uncovered no proof that President Trump had conspired with Russians to steal an election. Years of investigative fervor, all for naught.
D'Agostino was curiously vague about those emails were about, aside from claiming it involved "non-existent collusion efforts." In fact, those email exhanges involved Don Jr.'s 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton (who ultimately failed to deliver), so it's a bit strange to claim that evidence of possible collusion was "non-existent." He continued:
But when Hunter Biden began appearing in headlines about his potential role in a family corruption scandal, eyes quickly glazed over at CNN. Most of the network’s reporting on the current President’s son has come laced with lazy dismissals and assertions that “there is no evidence” that either Biden “did anything wrong.”
If we’re going to nitpick, claims of “no evidence” are most certainly false. There is plenty of evidence of potential wrongdoing — for example, Hunter’s own admission that he would not have landed landed his $50,000 per month gig on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma if not for his last name. That is, by definition, circumstantial evidence.
What the allegations against the President and his son lack are definitive proof.
Note that he undercuts himself by referencing "pottential wrongdoing" and not actual wrongdoing. But if all that alleged evidence doesn't result in actionable proof, don't look for D'Agostino to apply the same standard here by calling the obsession with Hunter by his employer and other Republicans a "hoax" and insisting the invesgation was filled with "years of investigative fervor, all for naught."
How Did WND's Lively Hate LGBT People During Pride Month? Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily columnist Scott Lively's Pride Month of anti-LGBT hate actually began a couple days earlier, with a May 29 column describing how, after a move to Springfield, Mass., to start a ministry, he "discovered an official 'Gay Pride' banner hanging from the lamppost in the same place and manner as the annual Christmas banners." He cheerfully added:
At 4:30 p.m. that very day a massive tornado touched down in Westfield (where Anne and I had lived the first couple of months after our arrival) and carved a 39 mile path of destruction through West Springfield, South Springfield and several towns eastward. It barely missed the Old First Church, but ripped through the rest of Court Square right where the offending banner had hung. The way I see it, God tore down that particular flag Himself.
He failed to mention that the tornado killed three people, so it seems Lively is happy that innocent people died just so that a rainbow banner could be removed from his vision -- they were just collateral damage to advance his hateful ideology, apparently.
In a related cheering of destruction, he referenced the tornado again in his May 31 column, then noted that he as he drove past a strip club called Scores, he repeated an "imprecatory prayer" against the club "and then asked God why He had never answered any of my imprecatory prayers against this and other targets." He added: "I received no immediate answer, but less than 24 hours later Scores was completely destroyed in a natural gas explosion – and I mean completely destroyed, as in Christ's prophecy about the Temple in Matthew 24:2, 'not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.'" He didn't mention that 18 people were injured in the blast; he probably thinks they deserved to be wounded and maimed.
Lively's first column of hate in Pride Month proper was on June 5, in which he tried to liken being transgender to transhumanism:
I have been alone in linking transhumanism directly to the LGBT movement, contending that the LGBT agenda represents not just a coalition of sexual dysfunctions but a chronology of stages in the deconstruction of God's created order (from the tips of the branches toward its roots), and that "transhumanism" represents a hidden "T" contained within "transgenderism" in the LGBT acronym.
Transgenderism is the penultimate stage of deconstruction of the civilization God made for us – erasing the human recognition that we are created male and female in His image (Genesis 1:27).
Transhumanism is the final stage – eliminating through genetic modification God's wall of separation between humans and animals as distinct "kinds" (Genesis 1:11-25). Transhumanists perceive themselves as wiping the earth clean of God's "mistakes," restoring the blank canvas of Genesis 1:6-10 and creating their own perfected utopia in which they are immortal.
This is not hyperbole but an actual plan currently being pursued by the World Economic Forum's Yuval Noah Harari (whom I have labeled the best candidate for the end-times False Prophet I've seen in my lifetime). Significantly, Harari is an admitted homosexual in a counterfeit "marriage" to another man.
Lively then tried to maliciously suggest that transgender people are pedophiles:
Sadly, with transgenderism also comes pedophilia, because the tactical framework for normalizing transgenderism is making gender self-determination for children a legally enforceable civil right. Assumed as fact in all their rhetoric and public policy arguments is a child's inalienable right to self-assess his or her "true" gender identity and to force society, especially parents, to honor it. But "children's rights" has always been the back door to the normalization of adult/child sex, "The repeal of all laws governing age of consent" being one of the last unachieved agenda items of the 1972 Gay Rights Platform (Section 2, Item 7). And in terms of defeating public opposition, it's a relatively small step from the right of a child to choose sexual mutilation to the right to choose their sexual partners of any age or type.
But, importantly, pedophilia is not the worst aspect of transgender normalization: the worst is the transhumanist worldview in which children who become cognitively divorced from the reality of the natural order regarding sexuality and physiology willingly become guinea-pigs in the Yuval Harari's nightmare of human cyborg experimentation because they no longer have any sense of authentic humanness.
Lively's June 9 column began with some self-aggrandizement of his anti-LGBT hate:
I am one of the last remaining front-line leaders of the pro-family movement that started during the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s and largely ended with the Obergefell v. Hodges "gay marriage" betrayal by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015. For the next few years I thought the culture war was pretty much over and we'd lost everything, but then as the left repositioned its armies to begin normalizing transgender insanity, a new generation of conservatives arose and formed today's anti-groomer movement. Seeing a new glimmer of hope, I'd like to help them succeed where my generation failed, by offering some hard-won insights from a life on the battlefield.
He then smeared people who don't hate LGBT people as much as he does as "groomers":
This article addresses the second force and is inspired by this week's news of a revolt by Muslim and Christian parents against the forced LGBT indoctrination of their children by Montgomery County Maryland Public Schools. The spark that ignited that particular conflict is a new school policy that eliminates the long-standing right of parents to opt their children out of exposure to LGBT "grooming" resources that normalize homosexuality and transgenderism.
[...]
At the command level it is essential to identify and expose the Sheiks – the George Soros, shot-caller types (big and small) – which is sometimes harder said than done because they don't want public scrutiny. Infiltration of the opponents' organizations, James O'Keefe-style, may be the only way to find the big fish. I'm not a fan of so-called "gay conservatives" on the grounds that anyone who defends sexual-orientation theory as valid science and defines homosexual conduct as equivalent to heterosexual normalcy is part of the problem, not the solution (regardless of their position on other public policy issues). BUT for true conservatives who admit their same-sex inclinations are dysfunctional even if they can't yet overcome them, there is cultural redemption in secret-agent espionage against Marxist evil, using their past lives to establish credibility.
In the end, whether we're called pro-family or anti-groomer, our agenda is all about saving the children from homo-fascist tyranny, and we all should do whatever we can to serve that cause.
Lively spent his June 12 column being angry that the government won't hate LGBT people like he does:
In the same week Trump was indicted on blatantly bogus and political charges, bombshell new evidence of Joe Biden's glaring, pervasive and long-standing criminality earned not even the suggestion of an investigation. Instead of the FBI and CIA enforcing the law against their co-conspirator boss, both agencies changed the subject by highlighting their celebrations of "Pride Month."
[...]
We have Bill Clinton to thank for creating this particularly foul cesspool of the federal swamp. It was Clinton's Executive Order 12968 on Aug. 2, 1995, that ended the long-standing ban on top-secret security clearance for homosexuals – opening the floodgates for the LGBT takeover of U.S. Intelligence that then ensued.
Why had that ban been U.S. policy in the first place? The common wisdom holds it was based exclusively on the fact that homosexuals were especially at risk of blackmail in an era when that lifestyle was (rightfully) discouraged by society. But the greater, less recognized reason was the affinity homosexuals have always had for political intrigue and espionage. That affinity alone wouldn't be so bad from the perspective of national intelligence agencies, but the corollary tendency of homosexuals to put self-interest and loyalty to each other above national interests made them an unacceptably bad risk.
Lively offered no evidence to support that claim.
We've already noted Lively's bizarre claim in his June 15 column that misogynistic "incels" are going transgender. In his June 19 column, he purported to offer "the authentic Jewish view of homosexuality" despite the fact that despite a Jewish and Catholic heritage, "I am neither Jewish nor Catholic" and "I do not claim a right to speak for the Jews of today." Yet he did so anyway, referencing his discredited book "The Pink Swastika," which purported to claim that "the Nazi Party is best understood as a neo-pagan, homosexual cult." He then huffed:
It is estimated that only about 10 to 20% of American Jews are conservative, so it is understandable that by the sheer force of numbers American Judaism is assumed to be fully supportive of so-called "gay pride" and the widespread normalization of LGBT deviance. One might be excused for thinking the same about Christianity if it were measured only by the so-called "mainstream" denominations. But as affirmed by the eminent rabbis cited above, the authenticity and therefore weight of one's religious opinions is based solely on their alignment with the sacred writings on which the religion is based.
Thus, the authentic Jewish (and Christian) view of homosexuality is that it is an abomination unequivocally condemned by God – and it matters not how many confused and arrogant people of either faith tradition, no matter how "credentialed" they may be, disagree with HIM.
Lively's June 23 column indulged his gay-Nazi fixation again, focusing on a claim that one of the neo-Nazis who infamously led a parade in Skokie, Ill., who was later convicted of pedophilia. He then outed himself as a partial Holocaust denier:
To be clear, I am a staunch defender of the truth of the Jewish Holocaust – which was the deadly fruit in Nazi Germany of the exact same eugenics movement that spawned the abortion industry in the U.S. (and today pushes “transhumanism” worldwide). But I am a vehement opponent of the Gay Holocaust Hoax, which is a gross exaggeration of the deplorable but relatively minor mistreatment of a small minority of German “gays.” Kevin Abrams and I wrote "The Pink Swastika" to debunk that fraud, but we couldn’t stop the more devious “gay” exploitation of the Jewish Holocaust through control of the museums.
Even today, the landing page of the US Holocaust Museum in D.C. (whose hugely influential first director was openly "gay" Klaus Mueller) features the Gay Holocaust lie.
Lively spent his June 26 column explaining that he hates gay marriage so much, he refuses to read the Supreme Court decision that made it legal:
I'm writing this letter in the early hours of June 26, the anniversary of the murder of marriage in America in the Kennedy majority's 5-4 SCOTUS ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) inventing a constitutional right to "gay marriage" by judicial fiat. You've heard of "fiat money" created from nothing? Well, the Obergefell ruling was "fiat morality."
In protest, I have never read the Obergefell decision because I hold it to be illegitimate on its face – not only because it's blatantly unconstitutional, but because two members of the Kennedy majority, Ginsberg and Kagan, grossly violated their ethical duty of impartiality in having performed same-sex "weddings" during the pendency of the case. Before that ruling was issued, I led a protest in front of the Supreme Court with a sign reading "Ginsberg and Kagan Don't Get to Choose – Biased Judges Must Recuse" (see below.) Their betrayal of judicial ethics was the most egregious in the court's history.
Obergefell v. Hodges is the coffin within which the institution of true, natural marriage has lain dead and decomposing since that day, draped, oh so appropriately, under a purple funeral shawl.
He then had another Tinky Winky meltdown:
Years ago the late Jerry Falwell was mercilessly mocked for asserting the true fact that a pop-culture toy called Tinky Winky (a character in the children's "Teletubbies" TV show) was designed to groom kids as LGBT allies/experimenters. Tinky Winky (a boy) was colored purple, sported the "gay" movement's inverted purple triangle on his head, and often carried a red purse. Unknown to most normal people, per Wikipedia: "Twink is gay slang for a gay man who is usually (but not always) in his late teens to 20s whose traits may include a slim to average physique, a youthful appearance that may belie an older age, having little or no body hair, flamboyancy and general physical attractiveness."
In other words, a "Twink" is an effeminate teen boy, just like its cartoonish derivative "Tinky Winky" (and the children who identified with him) were intended to become when they grew up. And isn't that exactly what happened to a large number of so-called "soy boys" of that generation? How many of those young men who grew up watching the child drag queen Tinky Winky cavort on television are the same ones now "transitioning" into fake women? Falwell was absolutely right that purple Tinky Winky was a tool of leftist social engineering, i.e, "grooming."
MRC's Hunter Biden Plea Deal Derangement, Day 3 And Beyond Topic: Media Research Center
As with the first two days, the Media Research Center spent a good part of its third day covering the Hunter Biden plea deal, June 23, complaining that the Republican obsession with Hunter was commented upon. It was Ana Schau's turn to complain first:
Wednesday morning’s CNN News Central featured a slew of guests to complain about the Republican response to the specifics of the Hunter Biden plea deal, and to present their own opinions on the deal as well. Anchors Kate Bolduan and Sara Sidner brought on CNN senior legal affairs correspondent Paula Reid, “It’s Complicated” podcast host Renato Mariotti, former federal prosecutor Shan Wu, and former U.S. attorney Michael Moore to rail about how “absolutely not true” Republicans were because they “paint the whole thing as a sham.”
Paula Reid’s complaint was that Republicans had “put a lot of energy and time into” discussing Hunter Biden’s legal issues, and that this was superfluous because the “Trump-appointed U.S. attorney” had “narrowed this case down” to several relatively insignificant charges. She emphasized how the plea deal for the tax misdemeanor charges was absolutely normal, but the gun charge itself was abnormal. She attributed this abnormality to how it was “uncommon to be prosecuted at a federal level for failing to disclose addiction on the form when you purchase a firearm.”
Yes, it may be abnormal to pursue such charges, but it’s also rather abnormal to have a case in which there is proof in the accused’s own words, both in an autobiographical book and on social media, that he was addicted to narcotics during the exact period of time in which he had purchased the gun. Reid may want to consider that.
NIcholas Fondacaro followed with the same complaint:
The morning after the broadcast networks seemingly moved on from Hunter Biden’s cushy plea deal with his father’s Department of Justice, NBC’s Today show revisited the story Thursday morning to decry Republicans’ attempts to hold Democrats accountable. They also huffed at Republicans for censuring Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff (CA) for using his former position on the House Intelligence Committee to push the Russia Collusion Hoax, a censure ABC and CBS ignored.
Leading into the report, Capitol Hill correspondent Ryan Nobles lamented that “Republican lawmakers are convinced there's still more dirt to dig up on the president's son” and that they were trying to ensure Hunter’s “legal woes” were “becoming a pestering political problem for his father.”
Intentionally ignoring the audio evidence and whistleblower reports showing that President Biden indeed talked with his son about his oversea business dealing, Nobles rhetorically scoffed at the GOP’s focus on the possible misdeeds of the Biden family:
The MRC got bored with the story after that. A May 24 item by Clay Waters, however, made sure to rehash all the talking points:
Hunter Biden, the controversial son of President Biden, announced he would pled guilty to two federal charges of tax fraud and a felony charge of gun possession last Tuesday, and that evening’s taxpayer-funded PBS News Hour proved itself eager to move along, dismissing Republican accusations of a cushy plea deal from his father’s Department of Justice, appealing to emotion by painting the President as a distraught father who deserves sympathy, not suspicion of possibly benefiting from his son’s sordid business undertakings in China and Ukraine, even suggesting Hunter's plea deal was "somewhat harsher" than usual.
Host Geoff Bennett claimed that “the deal promises a potential end to Hunter Biden's ongoing legal saga. But the political drama is far from over."
Host Bennett ran a soundbite of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy complaining of “the two-tier system in America. If you are the president's leading political opponent, the DOJ tries to literally put you in jail and give you prison time. If you are the president's son, you get a sweetheart deal.”
Johnson tried to deny favoritism was shown to the president’s son, even suggesting Hunter was treated more harshly that he should have been.
Yep, even the complaints about the GOP's obsession with Hunter were repeated.
Newsmax's Morris Weighs In On Non-Trump Issues Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax's Dick Morris is a massive Trumpsycophant, but he will chime in on other political issues from time to time. In his June 15 column, he took the surprisingly sensible stance that Republicans shouldn't be trying to cut Social Security and Medicare because it will cost them votes:
The House Republican Study Committee (RSC) is hard at work figuring out how Republicans can lose the next election.
They are planning amendments to the government spending bills this year to privatize Medicare and to means test access to benefits now given as a matter of right.
They also call for as yet unspecified cuts in Social Security.
The Washington Times reports that the Study group proposes to means test Medicare.
[...]
But regardless of the merits of the issue, one thing is clear: cutting Medicare or Social Security is the one sure way for the Republicans to lose the election of 2024.
Even the report that the RSC is studying the idea is sure to make itself felt in Democratic negative ads during this entire cycle.
Winning elections is hard enough without handing the Democrats gratuitously a golden issue.
RSC, please cease and desist - now.
For his July 3 column, though, Morris was regurgitating right-wing talking points about purpored "censorship" of right-wing hate and misinformation:
In 2018, the Trump administration created CISA — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — to focus on protecting critical infrastructure and guarding against cybersecurity threats, largely from abroad.
But, under Biden, CISA has morphed into a different story, an ominousy dark tale of an agency that a House Committee calls "the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media."
The House Weaponization subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, charges that CISA "facilitated the censorship of Americans directly and through third-party intermediaries during the Biden administration."
[...]
So as censorship spreads online and gets contracted out to private agencies, we now see that it is catalyzed, fueled, and enabled by a federal agency — CISA.
Biden used an agency created to protect America’s infrastructure to spy on us and to suppress the truth if it doesn’t comport with the official government line.
As George Orwell wrote in his book "1984," "Big Brother is Watching You."
In 2023.
Morris identified no specific information that CISA has supposedly "censored."
WND's Haynes Aims For Civil War Revisionism Topic: WorldNetDaily
Carole Hornsby Haynes loves spreadingmisinformation about education, but she also spreads historical misinformation as well. She spent her June 19 WorldNetDaily column playing the revisionism card about the Civil War. She started by complaining that the Juneteenth holiday is being described as a "national independence day" -- though it clearly was for the slaves freed under the Emancipation Proclamation -- then nitpicking dates involving it: "Juneteenth is a reference to June 19, 1865 when Union forces arrived in Galveston, Texas and informed the slaves of their freedom. Yet slavery did not legally end on June 19, 1865 but with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment on Dec. 6, 1865." Then came the historical revisionism:
Many Americans today believe the historical myth that the War Between the States was fought to abolish slavery. Clear thinkers have to ask: If the war was waged to end slavery, why was the Emancipation Proclamation issued a year and a half into the war? Since 90% of Southerners did not own slaves, why would hundreds of thousands of Confederate soldiers risk their lives to end slavery? Why did the Union army invade only those slave holding states that seceded from the Union but not those slave holding states that did not secede from the Union? Why did Lincoln send 75,000 volunteers to Fort Sumter to enforce the tariff in the South yet did not call for an invasion to free any slaves?
In reality, the war was fought, not over slavery, but whether the Southern states had the right to secede from the Union. The fact is that the North was just as intertwined with slavery as the South. The agrarian South had no ships. It was Northern ships that sailed out to buy African slaves from other black Africans – for settlement in both the North and South.
In fact, even the right-wing PragerU admits that slavery was the core issue behind the Civil War, with the secession documents of every Confederate state stating a desire to preserve slavery was a reason for leaving the Union. Haynes then played more date nitpicking:
Juneteenth, initially celebrated in Texas, is now is a federal holiday that celebrates nothing. The fact is that Dec. 6 conflicts with the Marxist agenda to keep the slavery propaganda at the forefront and suck in more government dependents.
She did not further explain exactly what relevance Dec. 6 has to any purported "Marxist agenda." Then she concuded with a huge whinefest:
American taxpayers are now on the hook for more than $600 million every year to give federal workers another paid holiday. Confederate hysteria will be stoked to rally national demonization of the Christian South, while obscuring the fact that slaves were held in Northern states that imported slaves and sold them to Southerners.
According to some estimates, 80 to 100 million Americans are descended from Confederate soldiers. With a population of approximately 330 million, 1 out of 4 of the U.S. population is genetically linked to the old Confederacy. Canceling all mention of the Confederacy effectively cancels the heritage of 25 percent of all Americans.
Destroying Confederate monuments, presumably because they evoked memories of slavery, was the Cultural Marxist justification to lay siege to America’s heritage with final annihilation of every vestige of our founding ideals and culture. With a second federal holiday for independence, it appears that July 4th is next on their cancel culture calendar.
It’s time for all Americans to rise up against the satanic fringe that displays a pathological hatred of all things Southern and Christian. Most importantly, we must return to calling July 4 Independence Day and educate Americans about its significance.
Lots to unpack here. Haynes' complaint that Northerners are really to blame for slavery falls flat because she also admitted that the slaves were "sold ... to Southerners." Those same Southerners had the choice not to buy slaves, and that would have gone a long way toward ending the practice; instead, again, they bought those slaves and cited the right to do so as a reason to secede from the Union.
Haynes also elides the main implication of the fact that "1 out of 4 of the U.S. population is genetically linked to the old Confederacy" -- that their ancestors were effectively traitors against their country and lost their war against it. That seems like a "heritage" that perhaps ought to be "canceled." And nobody's "canceling all mention of the Confederacy" -- they just want it made clear what the Confederacy really was, something Haynes clearly doesn't want to honestly discuss.
Haynes' suggestion that taking down Confederate statues means destroying "our founding ideals and culture" is laughable given the Confederacy, by seceding from the U.S., was all about rejecting the country's "founding ideals and culture." (Also, those statues were erected in no small part to help enforce white supremacy in the Jim Crow South.) And her reference to "the satanic fringe that displays a pathological hatred of all things Southern and Christian" is even more nonsensical; some Christians, especially in the South, invoked the Bible to justify slavery, which certainly seems more "satanic" than anything she's citing.
Finally, Haynes forgets that no slave was freed by the Declaration of Independence, making her insistence that July 4 is the true "Independence Day" something of a misnomer.
NEW ARTICLE: Matt Palumbo, Right-Wing Propagandist Topic: Newsmax
Palumbo's day job is working for Dan Bongino and writing books that get love from the Media Research Center -- but he has been moonlighting penning propaganda for shady Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui published by right-wing websites like Newsmax. Read more >>
MRC's Hunter Biden Plea Deal Derangement, Day 2 Topic: Media Research Center
We've shown how the Media Research Center cranked up its Hunter Biden Derangement the day news of a plea deal was released. On the following day, June 21, the derangement continued. Kevin Tober complained that someone defended him:
Failed former Senator and MSNBC political analyst Claire McCaskill took the the airwaves on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House to tearfully lash out at Republicans for wanting to see equal justice under the law and see President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden prosecuted for all the crimes he has been credibly accused of. Instead of arguing for Hunter’s innocence based on the merits, she lashed out in an emotional rant about how mean Republicans are. Despite Hunter receiving a sweetheart plea deal from his father’s Justice Department, McCaskill still wasn’t happy.
“I don't know what America they live in. And I don't know how they sleep at night,” McCaskill proclaimed. “You know, alcoholism and addiction are probably the most pervasive diseases in America. I don't know of one family that hasn't been touched by the pain of these diseases. And it's particularly painful when you have someone you love unconditionally that is suffering from these diseases.”
[...]
It’s clear that McCaskill doesn’t follow the news. If she did, she would know that there’s plenty of evidence to file charges against Hunter Biden and eventually his father for their role in the Biden bribery scandal (among other crimes).
Tober actually called McCaskill a "failed senator" twice, presumably referring to her losing re-election. He would never call Donald Trump a "failed president" because he lost re-election.
Nicholas Fondacaro again called the plea deal "cushy" without offering evidence to back it up:
ABC’s Good Morning America was up in arms Wednesday morning over Republicans calling out what they understand was a two-tier justice system, one where President Biden’s son continued to benefit from the family name by getting a cushy plea deal on tax crimes and a felony gun charge. Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce whined Republicans didn’t care how “painful” this was for President Biden and chief legal analyst Dan Abrams absurdly suggested the Biden name led to harsher treatment.
When Abrams pointed out that the gun-related charge Biden faced is almost never charged by itself without an accompanying related crime, Fondacaro got defensive:
In reality, it’s a hard charge to prove in court. But Hunter had been very open about being using and being addicted to crack at the time he bought and owned his firearm, something rarely present in such cases.
And it’s a lie Hunter had to consciously make. The ATF’s Form 4473, which every gun buyer in America has to read and fill out before the background check and purchase can be completed, makes it known that lying on the form is a felony.
When MSNBC host Joe Scarborough pointed out how Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley said that "We aren't interested in whether or not the accusations against Vice President Biden are accurate or not" and that the right-wing Wall Street Journal effectively said there was, in Scarborough's words, "a lot of smoke butno fire" regarding Republican efforts to target Biden -- making it clear that the real "witch hunt" was targeting Biden,not Trump, Mark Finkelstein went into defense mode:
In other words, far from Scarborough's misrepresentation that Grassley said that there's no evidence of wrongdoing, but that Republicans will go after Hunter regardless, Grassley's point was the document he was demanding that FBI Director Chris Wray make public does contain accusations, but that Grassley would not prejudge it. That's precisely the opposite of a witch hunt!
And Scarborough's misrepresentation of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board column was even more egregious. Scarborough depicted it as concluding: smoke but no fire.
To the contrary, the editorial indicated that there was a ton of evidence pointing to illicit influence peddling by the Bidens. The headline set the tone: "The Biden Family Business—House report shows how Hunter and relatives profited while Joe was Vice President."
[...]
This was nothing less than a fraudulent misrepresentation of the facts by Scarborough. It reveals just how deep he was willing to sink in defense of Democrat political prospects.
Alex Christy grumbled that CNN did something the MRC does -- word counts:
Senior political analyst John Avlon killed all irony on Tuesday’s CNN Tonight as he used some sketchy research to accuse Fox News of being obsessed with Hunter Biden. At the same time, Avlon sought to fact-check Republican claims that a legal double standard exists, but didn’t actually address the main point of the GOP’s allegations.
Avlon kicked off his “reality check” by declaring that “there's a lot of doubling down on this idea of a legal double standard, especially in the wake of Donald Trump's 37-count indictment. But does that stack up to the facts? Well, the investigation first was conducted by a Trump appointee, U.S. Attorney David Weiss of Delaware, specifically to reduce concern about politicized results.”
The man who works for the network that spent nearly 97 percent of Trump Indictment Day talking about Trump and mentioned him 191 times on May 25 alone accused Fox of being obsessed with Hunter, “But of course, Hunter Biden has been demonized by the right pretty thoroughly. To use just one measure? Get this, a LexisNexis search found that he was mentioned more than 2,200 times on Fox News between 2020 and 2022. For those doing the math at home, that's well over once a day.”
From January 1, 2020, through December 31, 2022 is a time span of 1,095 days which means that Avlon’s definition of obsessive is two mentions per day. Two! Even worse, NewsBusters tried to reverse engineer CNN’s research and could not duplicate the results. A NewsBusters search of Nexus for Fox News transcripts yielded 2,045 mentions of “Hunter Biden” with each transcript providing for several mentions of Hunter.
At the same, NewsBusters searched CNN transcripts for mentions of “January 6th committee” during the same time span and found 2,374 results. NewsBusters also searched for Trump Jr.", "Trump, Jr.", and "Trump Junior" and got 2,440 results despite Donald Trump Jr. never being charged with a crime.
Christy didn't explain why, exactly, Hunter should have been mentioned an average of twice a day every day for two years considering that, unlike Don Jr., he has not made himself a public figure. He also didn't mention that a few weeks earllier, the MRC published a post by Bill D'Agostino claiming that "Trump was mentioned by name a whopping 399 times" in a 10-hour period on CNN and MSNBC -- never mind that he's the frontrunning Republican presidential candidate who adores seeing his name in the media and is facing myriad legal challenges. Still, D'Agostino complained that "it’s hard not to agree that the liberal TV news outlets still see him as a ratings gold mine" -- something he will never say (out loud, anyway about Fox News' obsession with Hunter.
Cassandra DeVries made the usual complaint that Republican obsession with Hunter was called out, playing whataboutism to deflect from it:
CNN This Morning criticized Republicans for spending too much time discussing Hunter Biden’s laptop this Wednesday. Political commentator Errol Louis claimed Americans did not care about President Biden’s son and his alleged crimes and said Republicans did not know how to talk to the country.
[...]
Ironically, Louis’s criticism came amid extensive coverage of President Trump’s indictment by CNN, which also did not make this list of acceptable topics that interested voters. Yet, CNN still spent considerable time examining every possible angle of Trump’s case. Perhaps Louis forgot to add Trump’s legal problems to his list of relevant issues.
[...]
Throughout his commentary, Louis made broad sweeping claims and conclusions about voters, Republicans, discussion-worthy topics, and political elections. CNN aired these claims as factual news, just as they ran with the Trump-Russia collusion hoax for four years, which was another topic the American people didn’t care about.
Previously, a Democratic president’s son charged with tax fraud and illegal firearm possession might negatively affect that president in the upcoming election. However, according to CNN, Hunter Biden’s charges instead demonstrate that Republicans are incompetent and out-of-touch. Thankfully, Errol Louis helped CNN viewers avoid that assumption.
Fondacaro and bill D'Agostino summarized all this in that day's NewsBusters podcast:
As loud Italians, we sound off on Hunter getting away with a felony gun charge average Americans would be locked up for given the evidence, and call out CNN for their lazy research into Fox News coverage of Hunter’s scandals.
The weak punishment on the felony gun charge had me particularly hot under the collar as NewsBusters’ resident gun guy. I, along with other law-abiding gun owners take filling out the form and gun safety very seriously, so to see the federal government failing to throw the book at the President’s son tells us what the federal government thinks of its own laws.
We also call out ABC for doing the heavy lifting in terms of protecting the Biden administration and making the Biden family look like the victims. I point specifically to the work of chief White House correspondent Mary Bruce and chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl for downplaying the allegations against the Bidens, while tacitly (sometimes overtly) admitting to dubious behavior.
We'd believe Fondacaro's complaint about "weak punishment" more if he and his co-workers didn't labor so hard to defend Donald Trump every time he gets indicted.
WND Claims 'The Left' Is Waging 'Total War On Women' Topic: WorldNetDaily
The June issue of WorldNetDaily's sparsely read Whistleblower magazine carries the theme "The left's total war on women." It's driven by the lead essay from David Kupelian published on June 26, which reads like a far-right parody ofliberal views, in which anything even slightly to the left of Kupelian's far-right Christian nationalism is seen as far-left:
Americans – at least those who are neither hypnotized nor overly intimidated by insane “woke” religious ideology – know their beloved country is in serious trouble. They watch in horror and sadness as it rapidly morphs into a pagan playground for sexual revolutionaries masquerading as freedom fighters.
Thus, today all things corrupt and unholy are celebrated, with the entire month of June officially set aside as “Pride Month” to honor and publicly flaunt immoral, perverted sexual behaviors widely practiced in the ancient biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.
At the same time, everything good, decent, wholesome and moral is, for some strange reason, now demonized. This is the reality Americans have been living with throughout the third term of Barack Obama, half-seriously masquerading as “the Biden administration.”
Quick review: Today, “straight white men” holding to conservative Christian values are routinely condemned by powerful leftist political leaders – utterly without evidence – as “white supremacists,” “violent extremists” and “domestic terrorists.” This is not entirely new, as “the patriarchy” has been vilified by large parts of the leftwing feminist movement for decades, an attack on men that continues into the present day.
Incredibly, even America’s children have become front-and-center targets of the revolutionary left’s transformational agenda. Early sexualization – considered a heinous crime in previous eras – is widespread in the increasingly toxic “public” (government) school system. Young people are also indoctrinated daily with toxic Marxist ideologies like “critical race theory” and taught to hate their own country – all while being scared to death about the imminent end of the world due to out-of-control “climate change.”
So much for the men and the children.
But what about America’s women?
Few are talking about what is, in truth, the ascendant radical left’s complete and total war against women.
Kupelian went on to rant:
Droves of male criminals are now, once convicted, suddenly “identifying as” women so they can be incarcerated with female inmates, resulting predictably in multiple reports of women being raped and sexually assaulted in prison while serving their sentences.
Even though this policy is obviously cruel, criminal and insane, the penal system blithely facilitates it. Why? To do otherwise would be to violate the sacred laws of modern life handed down from on high by the ever-expanding, shape-shifting, cultural god known as “LGBTQIA+.”
After all, as author and talk-host Dennis Prager has correctly observed, “The dominant force in America and many other Western countries today is fear of the left.”
Kupelian's evidence of this is a WND article hyping a claim by the sleazy, untrustworthy James O'Keefe. As far as "fear of the left" goes, isn't that the entire point of Kupelian's essay?
Kupelian went on to complain that women refuse to be subjugated by the Christian patriarchy on matters like abortion:
In reality, one of the cruelest tricks one can play on a woman is to convince her to kill her own child. For decades the abortion industry – staffed and promoted largely by liberal-leftists – has lied to women, telling them their unborn baby is equivalent to a clump of cells, a piece of worthless, disposable tissue like a tumor. If the client realizes it really is a baby – her baby – but cannot raise the child, the obvious solution is adoption. Yet adoption, one of the noblest acts a couple can embrace, is virtually never mentioned in abortion clinics, which are, after all, in the business of selling abortions.
In every previous epoch of Western Civilization, the crowning glory and happiness of a woman – or at least the biblical ideal embraced by most women – has centered around entering into a lifelong marriage partnership with an honorable man, becoming a mother, bringing children into the world, raising a good family and living a righteous, faithful and happy life. If the husband/father is the leader of the family, she is, as wife and mother, in many respects the center of the family.
Yet, her honored and central role in the traditional family, with its strong internal loyalties, religious ties, stability and independence, is hated by the revolutionary left. Even a century ago, when the first communist revolution unfolded in Russia, the Marxist goal of wrecking the family took center stage.
Kupelian concluded by hoping that far-right Christians will once again control society andput those women back in their place:
If there is any positive side to all of this, it is that America still – miraculously – is also filled with millions of good people who, though horrified by what they see happening all around them, and to them, manage to hang onto their sanity, dignity, morals and love of God and neighbor. They know they’re called to walk with God in all things. And they strive in whatever ways are open to them to fight back, to stand tall, to speak out in hopes of one day restoring the nation they love.
But they also remember that historically – long before today’s mass hysteria, wild paganism, growing satanism, government high corruption and rampant “mental illness” – there has always been cruelty, barbarism and madness of one sort or another in this world. They likewise realize, just as their forbears who lived through previous eras of persecution came to realize, that these tribulations, terrible as they are, can be – indeed, are intended by the Creator to serve as – the grist, the catalyst, the “refiner’s fire” that mysteriously serves to help noble souls grow, thrive and walk even closer with their God.
How much of that cruelty, barbarism and madness has been perpetrated by right-wing Christians like Kupelian? He doesn't say.
Newsmax Went Into Trump Defense Mode Yet Again Over His (Third) Indictment Topic: Newsmax
As Newsmax defended Donald Trump against an expanded second indictment, a third indictment was looming. It did a little foreshadowing and complaining early on Aug. 1:
When the indictment dropped later that day, an article by Eric Mack stated that "Special counsel Jack Smith's Washington, D.C., grand jury has delivered a four-count, 45-page indictment against former President Donald Trump and listed six unnamed co-conspirators," adding that "A detailed Trump campaign statement was posted to Truth Social," which Mack reprinted. That was followed by a more detailed wire article on the indictment. After that, Newsmax once again fully activated its Trump defense mode yet again:
Newsmax also published an Aug. 2 article it took from All Israel News highlighting a statement by Trump's campaign complaining that the indictment "is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes" -- though the article also featured the Anti-Defamation League criticizing the comparison.
That's at least 32 pro-Trump articles published by Newsmax in the first two days after the third indictment.
WND Censors Criticism Of 'Expert' Analysis Of Dominion Machines Topic: WorldNetDaily
Peter LaBarbera wrote in a June 19 WorldNetDaily article:
A newly released, 96-page report by a computer expert in election security has found that one model of Dominion voting machines widely used in the 2020 election "suffers from critical vulnerabilities that can be exploited to subvert all of its security mechanisms."
In the unsealed July 1, 2021 report, University of Michigan computer science professor Alex Halderman, with the help of Prof. Drew Springall, conducts a "security analysis" of Dominion Voting System's "ballot marking devices," or BMDs, in particular, the corporation's "ImageCast X (ICX) BMD."
The unsealing of the "Halderman Report" by a federal judge is part of a long-running case brought by citizens attempting to block Georgia from using the Dominion machines. Halderman's deep analysis has led many of the same media who belittled Donald Trump and conservatives who claimed vote fraud in 2020 to switch their attention back to the potential for hacking in Dominion Voting System's voting machines.
"Expert report fuels election doubts as Georgia waits to update voting software: A newly unsealed expert report arguing that Georgia’s Dominion voting machines are vulnerable to hacking is fueling election doubts in Georgia," reads a headline in an NBC News story published Friday.
Noting that Dominion – which recently reached a $787 million settlement with Fox News over what it said were erroneous claims by Fox hosts about its voting machines – has downplayed the potential for hacking into its devices, NBC reported: "But federal authorities have identified the same vulnerabilities, and more than 20 cybersecurity experts rushed to defend Halderman's report this week."
LaBarbera quoted heavily from the NBC article -- but not the part in which other experts pointed out the unlikelihood of those vulnerabilities being successfully exploited:
A second report, also unsealed by the judge, was authored by national security nonprofit MITRE. That group argued the hacks identified by Halderman were “operationally infeasible” based on normal voting practices, scale considerations, and adherence to strict security measures.
It’s a view shared by Georgia officials, who included the MITRE report in a press release that criticized Halderman's report.
"The Halderman report was the result of a computer scientist having complete access to the Dominion equipment and software for three months in a laboratory environment. It identified risks that are theoretical and imaginary. Our security measures are real and mitigate all of them," Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger wrote in a letter to state lawmakers, which Raffensperger's office shared with NBC News.
He continued: "Is it possible for a team of bad actors to break into Georgia’s 2,700 voting precincts, install malware that changes election outcomes on 35,000 pieces of equipment, and sneak back out — all the while being undetected and leaving no trace? I’ll put it this way: It’s more likely that I could win the lottery without buying a ticket."
Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for Raffensperger's office, said Friday that responding to this report all day felt like he was "stuck in a Dumb and Dumber paradox," referencing a character's response to a one in a million likelihood: "So, you're telling me there's a chance?"
The NBC article also added: "There is no evidence that hackers have attempted to exploit any of the identified vulnerabilities, or that any such hack has occurred in previous elections." LaBarbera ignored that too; instead, he resorted to the usual WND dodge when promoting dubious claims -- hyping the person's claimed qualifications. Indeed, the last two paragraphs of LaBarbera's article is simply a copy-and-paste of Halderman stating his own qualificiations, as well as a link to his curriculum vitae.
With News Of Plea Deal, MRC's Hunter Biden Derangement Went Into Overdrive Topic: Media Research Center
June started out as a slow month of Hunter Biden derangement at the Media Research Center, spending much of the early part of the month complaining that his alleged scandals weren't being covered in the non-right-wing media as much as Donald Trump's latest indictment. But with news of a plea deal, the MRC went into Hunter Derangement overdrive. Alex Christy complained in a June 20 post:
MSNBC Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough had a curious reaction to the Tuesday news that Hunter Biden will be pleading guilty to tax and gun-related charges: lash out at Republicans and their “conspiracy theories.” Way Too Early host and Politico White House bureau chief Jonathan Lemire managed to one up Scarborough by adding that developments are “good news” for President Joe Biden.
After legal analyst Joyce Vance ran through the charges, Scarborough focused on what Hunter wasn’t charged with, “Yeah, and Jonathan Lemire, so obviously Republicans-- Trump Republicans have been trying to stir up conspiracy theories left and right. One after another have been disproven. One after another, we found out as the Wall Street Journal editorial page himself said no fire here. A lot of smoke all over the place, no fire.”
In something never said about Robert Mueller and Russia Collusion, Scarborough claimed “Not only have they proven nothing, they have senior members of the Senate saying we don't care whether he's guilty or not, we don’t care whether he did this stuff or not, it's all been a show. Well, that show has just been exposed by Trump's own prosecutor, Trump-appointed prosecutor in Delaware. He's done a deal with him, a plea deal.”
As for Lemire, he also was focused on Republicans and what Hunter wasn’t charged with, “Certainly Republicans have for literally years now accused Hunter Biden of basically everything under the sun, including he's the mastermind behind the Biden Crime Family and corruption and all that, a charge we don’t need to get into now because they were never brought.”
Just because Hunter wasn’t charged with anything corruption-related doesn’t mean what he did wasn’t sleazy and, again, Morning Joe would never say “we don’t need to get into” Russian collusion storylines because no charges of collusion were ever brought.
As Mueller himself pointed out, collusion is not a legal term, meaning that it is impossible for someone to be charged with it, and the Mueller report documented numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives that more than justified an investigation -- something even Senate Republicans admitted.
Nicholas Fondacaro grumbled it was pointed out that the plea deal would be partisan fodder for Republicans:
Hunter Biden got a cushy plea deal from his father’s Justice Department on Tuesday, including the possible drop of a felony gun charge no average America would be afforded. Despite securing the sweetheart deal, one of the immediate reactions from CNN News Central was to whine that congressional Republicans were “not going to let this go” as their investigations into possible corruption from the Biden family and interference in the DOJ’s investigation reported by whistleblowers heated up.
“The political dynamics of this … cannot be understated,” senior Justice correspondent Evan Perez said. He went on to warn that“The Republicans are not going to let this go” as they investigate “what they believe are still some unanswered questions about those financial dealings that Hunter Biden had, other members of the family had overseas, but also just how the Justice Department handled this investigation.”
Fondacaro failed to explain what was supposedly "cushy" about the plea deal.
Christy returned to make the same complaint a couple hours later:
As Republicans reacted to Hunter Biden’s Tuesday plea deal by declaring it to be a “slap on the wrist” and raised concerns about a two-tiered system of justice, the Washington Post’s Leigh Ann Caldwell joined CNN’s Inside Politicsto say that such allegations prove that the GOP tends to “leave out a lot of facts.” In an attempt to prove her point, Caldwell also insisted that the Durham Probe proved the FBI has not been politicized.
Host Dana Bash tried to make the argument that Republicans cannot complain because the prosecutor in the case was appointed by Donald Trump, “And as much as we understand the politics and we’re explaining and giving context around the politics, we also should talk about the facts which are it was a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney in Delaware intentionally kept there by Joe Biden because he knew the investigation was going on, and that these cases are quite different.”
Caldwell naturally agreed, “Yeah, they're absolutely different and when Republicans talk about they leave out a lot of facts in each instance, that kind of walk around and dance around to make it seem like they are similar but these are obviously apple and oranges cases.”
Both Bash and Caldwell are arguing against a straw man. Republicans would agree that the Trump and Hunter cases are apple and oranges, but would say that is exactly the problem. Trump is facing serious accusations related to the retention of classified documents while Hunter avoids serious corruption charges, instead striking a deal on tax misdemeanor that will likely result in him avoiding jail, while the gun felony will likely be dropped as part of a pre-trial diversion agreement.
Like Fondacaro, Christy did not explain exactly how Hunter plea deal was so great.
It’s not just the cast of ABC’s The View that makes fools of themselves on the show, sometimes it’s their guests. Such was the case on Tuesday when ABC chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl joined the cast to report the breaking news that Hunter Biden had agreed to a cushy plea deal with his father’s Justice Department. Karl clownishly claimed “there’s no evidence” to back up GOP claims about the Biden family’s corruption, but he did admit to Hunter’s dubious employment by the Ukraine energy firm, Burisma and the fact he received lavish gifts from China.
Karl’s denial of reality came in an answer to Joy Behar, who wondered: “But doesn't this show, Karl, that Biden is not in the pocket of the DOJ?”
According to Karl, “it depends” on how you look at it. He argued Democrats would say “they prosecuted anyway. His son now has a criminal record.” He began to suggest the prosecution meant there was definitively no interference by the Biden administration but caught himself and hedged his bets. “Yes, that shows – it would seem to show there was no interference,” he said.
As if killing the investigation was the only President Biden could interfere, Karl proclaimed: “He didn't pull the plug on the investigation. He didn't order his attorney general to pull the plug on the investigation.” This didn’t take into account that Hunter would be getting out of a felony gun charge with a rehab program.
[...]
Karl’s hypocrisy didn’t stop him from decrying the “hypocrisy coming from the Republicans” and them “yelling and screaming about Hunter Biden.” “But that hypocrisy doesn't mean there isn't something fundamentally at issue here with Hunter Biden,” he reluctantly added.
Interns Cassandra DeVries and Ana Schau teamed up for their own complaint:
ABC and CBS both featured segments on Tuesday morning to break the news of Hunter Biden’s guilty plea to two federal charges of tax fraud in his current criminal investigation. Both shows then proceeded to praise his father, President Joe Biden, for his closeness to his son Hunter, and bemoaned the investigation’s negative effects on the President because of this close connection.
[...]
Instead of dwelling on Hunter Biden’s illegal actions, which likely would negatively impact Biden’s campaign, ABC and CBS ran a pair of fluff portraying the President as a supportive father, helping his son through a difficult time. Perhaps ABC and CBS should consider a future in political ads.
When one commentator likened the accusations of corruption against Hunter to Trump in-law Jared Kushner getting a $2 billion payoff from Saudi Arabia, Christy lashed out:
Forget about Hunter Biden and any of the corruption or crimes he has been involved in, what really mattered was Jared Kushner. The problem with that whataboutism is that Hunter Biden was given a lucrative position at Burisma while he had no experience or qualifications for it, aside from being close to his father President Biden. Jared Kushner, however, does have significant qualifications from being, as The Times of Israel puts it, “instrumental in negotiating the Abraham Accords.”
Christy has previously insisted that Kushner deserved that Saudi payoff. And if the "Abraham Accords" -- which involved three minor Muslim countries normalizing relations with Israel -- were a factor, shouldn't the money have come from Israel?
And this was all on June 20, the day the plea deal was announced. The MRC continued to whine further over the next couple days -- more soon.
Jack Cashill spent his June 21 WorldNetDaily column complaining about the recent frequency of what he called "Perversely Improbable Events." You will not be surprised to learn that many of them involve things that involve right-wing narratives, such as complaining about crime in San Francisco and the Jussie Smollett crime hoax (though he failed to mention another crime hoax involving a Republican campaign worker). He whined about the idea that LGBT people have rights:
Not even the precociously woke would have predicted 10 years ago that the trans crowd and their media allies would insist that biological men be allowed to compete against women in sports – and get their way.
Nor, 10 years ago, could the most progressive Californian have expected the Los Angeles Dodgers to offer public honor to a crew of blasphemous transvestites parading as nuns.
But Cashill was particularly incensed about COVID -- not the actual pandemic, mind you (which he falsely dismissed as a "flu") , but that government officials tried to slow its spread:
In 2013, even 2019, who'd a thunk that "progressive" officials at all levels of government would conspire to shut down beaches, parks and schools, and compel their lemming-like residents to remain indoors to avoid a flu?
In a particularly perverse move, California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered a "hard close" of state beaches in July 2021, a year after even most equally insane states had opened theirs.
What made this Orwellian lock down so perverse is the residents of California could see that the beachgoers in, say, Florida, were living free, open, American lives and risking no more than sunburn.
The increasingly progressive media had scared their audiences into complying. A year after COVID's onset, for instance, some 41 percent of surveyed Democrats believed that those who caught COVID had a 50 percent chance or better of being hospitalized. The right answer was 1 percent to 5 percent.
Despite the fear in the air, in the early summer of 2020 the medical community gave a temporary COVID dispensation so the mindless could muster in crowds and burn down their cities to honor the memory of a chronic felon.
After a little rioting, the crowds morphed from sheep into Stasi. Now they demanded that their saner fellow citizens vaxx up. As former freedom-loving California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger memorably warned us, "Screw your freedom."
That "chronic felon" is George Floyd, and Cashill has repeatedly defended the police officer who killed him, though he didn't explain why Floyd's alleged criminal status made it perfectly OK to kill him. He also whined about election stuff:
Bizarre as California was, the truly improbable stuff was unfolding in Washington. In 2016, the intelligence community conspired with the Clinton campaign to subvert the presidential ambitions of Donald Trump.
Failing the first time, in 2020 at least 51 members of the unchastened intel community conspired with the Biden campaign to stop Trump, and this time they succeeded. In both cases, the media chose not to notice.
He concluded with this bizarre complaint:
As to the most perversely improbable event in the last 10 years: A man in a Las Vegas hotel room shot nearly 500 concert goers, killing 60, and you don't even know his name.
What happens in Vegas apparently stays in Vegas – at least when the media want it to.
In fact, most news organizations have largely backed away from naming the perpetrators to deny them the notoriety most are seeking in committing their heinous acts. Why does Cashill want to give the man who committed this atrocity the honor of spreading his name?
MRC Melts Down Over Juneteenth Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Kevin Tober complained in a June 19 post:
On MSNBC’s The ReidOut, liberal Republican Charlie Sykes used the occasion of Juneteenth to smear Republicans for declaring America not racist. The insinuation here is that America is still racist and divisive concepts like Critical Race Theory are necessary because America hasn’t changed at all since the days of slavery and segregation.
“What you have from Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley and even Tim Scott is the necessity of checking the box that there is no racism, that we solved that problem, that we had the Civil War and everything is fine,” Sykes claimed.
Sykes insisted it’s ironic that Juneteenth Day is a day "where America remembers this part of history and celebrates it, at the very same time the Republican Party seems very deeply invested in not remembering that history, not going back, taking it out of the schools or downplaying it.”
Tober then bizarrely seemed to insist that the historical ignorance of Americans justified not making it a holiday: "What Sykes failed to mention is that first of all, Juneteenth is a day that many people never heard of until it was made a federal holiday by a bipartisan vote in Congress." Having done that, though, Tober tried to put a Republican spin in Juneteenth:
Sykes then got triggered by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk who took to Twitter to criticize many employees getting the day off: “I was watching Charlie Kirk, who’s a big Trumpist, on social media all day, just melting down how everybody should be at work. This is a CRT inspired holiday.”
The rationale for Juneteenth becoming a big deal out of nowhere (at least at the federal level) is because of the modern day Democratic Party’s obsession with America being a racist country and that America still hasn’t been punished for the evils of slavery. The basis for the holiday is important, especially since it was Republican President Abraham Lincoln being the one who abolished slavery and the Democrats fought him tooth and nail.
That's not quite the full story, though. As actual historians point out, Lincoln was not an explicit abolitionist at the start of his presidency, and part of his motivation for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation (which applied only to Confederate states) was to encourage freed slaves to flee the South and move to the North and fight for the Union. When it came time to pass the 13th Amendment that blocked slavery nationwide, the main argument Democrats put forward against it involved states' rights -- the kind of argument today's Republicans would make. Tober wants you to forget that Republicans and Democrats essentially traded ideologies in the 1960s in the wake of the civil rights movement.
Tober's argument here seems to be that Juneteenth doesn't deserve to be a holiday, but if it's going to be one, Republicans must get credit.
Having labored to defend Ron DeSantis from his botched campaign launch and an NAACP travel advisory for Florida (and even his alleged comedy chops), the Media Research Center's DeSantis Defense Brigade was kept plenty busy. The Brigade was kept busy throughout late May and early June:
Newsmax covered the third indictment of Donald Trump with 
One of the Media Research Center's 
WorldNetDaily columnist Scott Lively's Pride Month of anti-LGBT hate actually began a couple days earlier, with a May 29 
As with the first two days, the Media Research Center spent a good part of its third day covering the Hunter Biden plea deal, June 23, complaining that the Republican obsession with Hunter was commented upon. It was Ana Schau's 
Newsmax's Dick Morris is a massive 
Carole Hornsby Haynes loves 
We've shown how the Media Research Center cranked up its Hunter Biden Derangement the day news of a plea deal was released. On the following day, June 21, the derangement continued. Kevin Tober 
The 
As Newsmax defended Donald Trump against an 
Peter LaBarbera wrote in a June 19 WorldNetDaily 
June started out as a slow month of Hunter Biden derangement at the Media Research Center, spending much of the early part of the month 
Jack Cashill spent his June 21 WorldNetDaily 
The Media Research Center's Kevin Tober complained in a June 19 
