MRC Dishonestly Framed Congressman As Liar For Deviating From Right-Wing Narrative On Archer Testimony Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center spent the days before Devon Archer's closed-door testimony before a Republican-led congressional committee hyping the heck out of it as a yet another attack on Hunter Biden. Afterwards, it labored to frame the contents of Archer's testimony as devastating, even though that wasn't exactly the case. An Aug. 1 post by Curtis Houck whined that one non-right-wing media outlet didn't stick with his preferred right-wing narrative:
After being no-shows on Monday’s NBC Nightly News, NBC arrived via Tuesday morning’s Today to Devon Archer’s damaging remarks behind closed doors to the House Oversight Committee about what he saw in his time as Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner and confidant, including their stint on the infamous Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.
This wasn’t entirely surprising as Today had been the only flagship network morning or evening newscast to allude to the hearing in the run-up to Monday with a seven-second nod on Friday.
[...]
“Ah, we’re following some new developments in the investigations that surround Hunter Biden. His former business partner testifying behind doors on Capitol Hill,” Today co-host Craig Melvin began, tossing to chief White House correspondent Peter Alexander by asking “what did we learn from” what’s leaked out.
Alexander caught viewers up to speed with what’s not in dispute, which was that he was “Hunter Biden’s former business partner” and “answered questions for about four hours”.
Then, the spin games began with Alexander touting the Democratic line that Archer believes Hunter merely “sold the illusion of access to his father” and the elder Biden “was never directly involved in” their shady ventures.
This was despite the fact that “Hunter put his father on speaker phone with clients and former business associates roughly 20 times over ten years”.
But Houck really didn't want the full story of Archer's testimony told; he later complained that another network "gave the other side" by quoting a Democratic congressman, Dan goldman, saying that "he never heard any evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden."
Peter Kotara later complained that Goldman was allowed to appear on TV and offer his take:
Tuesday’s Morning Joe brought on Congressman Dan Goldman (D-NY) and teed him up to play defense for President Biden after the explosive Devon Archer testimony on the Biden family’s bribery and corruption. They contradicted Republican claims about the content of the closed-door testimony, and denied any wrongdoing by then Vice President Biden.
Goldman claimed that despite Archer’s testimony that Biden was on the phone at Hunter’s business meetings, he was only there to merely “say hello” and that Hunter was only selling the “illusion” of influence, as if that didn’t benefit him.
[...]
The problem was, that what Goldman said completely contradicted the Republican statements about Archer’s testimony. Goldman and Comer both were in the room listening to Archer’s testimony, but it was a closed-door session and the transcript currently had not been released to the public. If it is, one side will be exposed as liars.
Kotara didn't explain why the statements from Republicans -- whose goal it is to personally destroy Hunter Biden and his father -- should be trusted. Instead, he unleashed a nasty smear of President Biden and Hunter: "So we were supposed to believe the father who let his son become a crackhead all of a sudden started to care, and they got over Beau’s death by talking with Hunter’s business associates?"
Houck returned for an Aug. 2 post complaining that non-right-wing media was covering actual news instead of Archer:
With Tuesday’s third indictment of former President Trump, the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC had their ticket out of having to acknowledge the scandals surrounding the Biden family, including reasons to continue skipping Burisma bribery claims and no longer probe Monday’s testimony from Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer.
Houck repeated this talking point while guest-hosting the Aug. 2 NewsBusters podcast.
An Aug. 3 post by Kevin Tober tried to frame Goldman as a liar:
On Monday, after Hunter Biden's business associate Devon Archer testified behind closed doors regarding President Joe Biden's involvement with his son, New York Democrat Congressman Dan Goldman went before the assembled cameras and microphones outside the committee room and lied through his teeth about what was said. While at the time we only had his word vs the word of Republican members who were also in the room, based on his track record, all fair minded observers knew he was lying.
When the word for word transcript was released Thursday, everyone who read it now knew for certain he lied. Later that morning, CBS News investigative reporter Catherine Herridge called him out when she went on CBS's streaming network to correct the record.
Host Anne-Marie Green first asked Herridge "Why are Democrats and Republicans disagreeing on the context of the transcripts."
This gave Herridge her chance to correct the lies that were spread by Goldman and others that Hunter Biden had not sought to use his father's influence to shake down foreign governments. "Earlier this week we just had to rely on the characterization from Republicans and Democrats about Devon Archer's testimony," she noted. "But now we can see the full transcript."
"You will recall that Democrat Congressman Dan Goldman said that Archer testified that it was the illusion of access to Joe Biden that Hunter Biden was offering to these clients. But in fact, when you look at the transcript what you see is that phrase, illusion of access, is in Dan Goldman's question. It’s actually not what Devon Archer testified to," she explained.
In fact, the article on the testimony Herridge co-wrote for the CBS website more or less backs up what Goldman said; she didn't accuse Goldman of lying as Tober claimed but, rather, merely claimed that Archer's answers were "more nuanced" than Goldman portrayed them as being:
The transcript shows Goldman used the term "illusion of access" in his line of questioning, and Archer's answers were more nuanced.
He asked Archer, "Is it fair to say that Hunter Biden was selling the illusion of access to his father?"
Archer replied, "Yes."
Goldman followed up, "So, when you talk about selling the brand, it's not about selling access to his father. It's about selling the illusion of access to his father. Is that fair?"
Archer replied, "Is that fair? I mean, yeah, that is — I think that's — that's almost fair."
"Because there are touch points and contact points that I can't deny that happened, but nothing of material was discussed," Archer said.
In short: Tober is lying by accusing Goldman of lying. Neveretheless, Tober concluded his post by declaring, "Good to see there's at least one honest reporter at CBS who is willing to call out the disinformation from the left regarding the massive Biden bribery scandal."
After another coverage count by Houck -- which, like before, omitted Fox News -- and another podcast guest-hosting gig where he repeated those numbers, it was back to dishonestly framing Goldman as a liar. Kotara did thte duty in an Aug. 4 post:
On Friday, MSNBC’s Morning Joe hosts doubled down on their flagrant lies they promoted along with Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman (D-NY) about Hunter Biden’s business partner, Devon Archer.
They claimed that now, with the transcript of the testimony released, that Goldman was correct, and later lamented that other networks were treating the Biden investigation as “equal” to the indictments against Donald Trump.
Co-host Mika Brzezinski opened:
But as we learned from Democratic committee member Dan Goldman, Archer may have actually contradicted [Chairman James] Comer's [R-KY] point. And yesterday, the transcript of that closed door interview was released, confirming Goldman's account. It turns out Archer told the House Oversight Committee that he has no knowledge of Joe Biden altering policy to benefit Hunter. Archer also said he was present for roughly 20 instances of Hunter putting his father on speakerphone in the presence of business associates. Archer said none of the conversations focused on business and that they talked about things like fishing and the weather.
This was one more massive spin to cover up their previous claims about the testimony before the transcript was released. Brzezinski’s dishonesty was shown by the fact that Archer did mention the weather and fishing, but the issue was that he was selling the Biden brand. Archer in the transcript stated that “I think ‘brand’ is the best way to describe it.” This completely dismantled MSNBC’s prior narrative of the “illusion of access” being sold as opposed to actual access to Biden. When the transcript was released, co-host Joe Scarborough and Brzezinski must have panicked and decided the only way to proceed without losing all credibility was to keep up the charade and hope no one noticed any other network’s coverage of the it or read the transcript themselves.
Unfortunately for MSNBC, their perfidiousness was laid bare not only by House Republicans and right-leaning networks like Fox News, but also by their fellow liberal network CBS. Astonishingly, the mainstream left-wing network actually called out Goldman for his lies about the content of the transcript where Archer tells Goldman that his description is “almost fair,” because Hunter is showing off that there is a degree of access.
Despite not actually saying what, exactly, was the "lie" Goldman told, he ranted: "Joe, Mika, and the rest of the MSNBC hosts gave new insight into just how depraved the leftist media really was. In an act of total desperation and terror, they were willing to verifiably lie directly to the world about something as simple as a transcript. For what purpose? To protect the Bidens and by extension, the political success of the Democratic Party. They made it clear that no one interested in honesty can trust them, the media exists solely to spread propaganda for the left." One can more plausibly argue that Kotara and the MRC are spreading lies to benefit right-wing narratives.
An Aug. 9 post by Tober cheered how Fox News and its biased reporters were pushing those very right-wing narratives:
Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy is back from his parental leave and he's already making waves in the media. Late Wednesday afternoon, Doocy had an opportunity to ask President Joe Biden, during an event in New Mexico, about Devon Archer's testimony directly implicating him in his son Hunter's overseas business dealings by saying he was put on the phone with Hunter's partners. As you can expect, the President was not happy with the question. In fact, he snapped at Doocy and said it was a "lousy question."
The exchange did not air live on television but thankfully was caught on camera. Doocy went on Fox during Your World with Neil Cavuto to break the news and let viewers see the exchange.
That, of course, is the media world the MRC wants us all to inhabit: highly biased, with right-wing narratives presented without the faintest criticism.
And none of these posts mentioned that Archer is a convicted criminal who has been sentenced to prison for his role in a scam involving the sale of fraudulent tribal bonds, then lost an appeal on the sentencing earlier this year.
Mark Swanson played dutiful stenographer for an Aug. 27 Newsmax article:
The former Ukrainian prosecutor general at the center of the Hunter Biden-Burisma scandal said he was fired as a result of a pressure campaign brought by the Obama administration, specifically at the “insistence of the then-Vice President Joe Biden.”
Viktor Shokin told Fox News on Saturday night that he was fired “because I was investigating Burisma.”
Shokin, through a translator, dropped the bombshell remarks during an interview on “One Nation.”
Shokin took it one step further, adding that it’s his belief that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden took bribes. It’s only a belief because Shokin was fired before he could investigate further to prove it, he said.
"Had I continued to oversee the Burisma investigation, we would have found the facts about the corrupt activities that they were engaging in," Shokin told Fox News. "That included both Hunter Biden and Devon Archer and others."
[...]
Shokin said he was forced out in March 2016, fired by then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, over pressure from Biden’s office, ostensibly for allowing corruption in the government and his own office with impunity.
Joe Biden made the demand in a December 2015 trip to Ukraine, threatening to withhold $1 billion in aid unless Shokin was fired.
That was followed by more stenography the next day in an article by Nicole Wells:
Former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland told Newsmax on Monday that with former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin speaking out, hopefully "the final shoe has now dropped" on the Bidens.
"I was in the meeting [with] then-Vice President [Joe] Biden at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and he bragged and he said, 'Well, I told the Ukrainian government unless they fired that special investigator they were going to lose a billion dollars in aid,'" McFarland told "The Chris Salcedo Show." "Everybody in the audience went, 'Ha ha ha,' and Biden said, 'And they fired him right away.' And I'm thinking, Really? Is the vice president of the United States really admitting that he interfered with a bribery investigation in Ukraine?"
Speaking through an interpreter, Shokin told Fox News on Saturday night he was fired "because I was investigating Burisma," specifically at the "insistence of the then-Vice President Joe Biden."
[...]
"If you look back at the timeline, the first thing that they said at the 2020 election, when the Hunter Biden laptop came out, the story was well, it was all Russian disinformation," she said. "And then when that turned out not to be the case, well, it was just Hunter Biden. Joe knew nothing about it. Well now, when it turns out that's not the case – Joe Biden was in the meetings, he was on the speakerphone – now their new version is, well, he may have known about it, and Hunter may have taken the money, but it didn't affect policy."
Neither Swanson nor Wells did any fact-checking for their respective articles, and they really should ave, because Shokin can't be trusted. As others have pointed out, there were calls for Shokin to be fired -- not only by Biden but also from top Republicans and the international community -- not because he was investigating corruption but, rather, because he was not investigating it. Further, such demands are in line with how U.S. foreign policy is conducted, which is often conditioned on countries taking certain actions.
Newsmax is not exactly enhancing its reputation as a credible media outlet by uncritically repeating false claims.
Obama Derangement Syndrome Never Stops At WND Topic: WorldNetDaily
Obama Deramgement Syndrome never ended at WorldNetDaily, even though Barack Obama has been out of the White House for years. WND has amply demonstrated that in recent weeks by suggesting that Obama murdered his chef and promoting the bitter rage of his estranged grifter half-brother, but there's so much more. Joe Kovacs devoted an April "news" article to chortling how a "Jeopardy" contestant got Obama's "heritage" wrong:
Barack Obama's mysterious heritage continues to perplex even the smartest of contestants on "Jeopardy."
On Wednesday night's episode, in the category titled, "Our nation of immigration," a photo of Barack Obama was displayed, with host Ken Jennings reading the clue:
"Famous Americans of this heritage include Barack Obama, seen here on a visit to the old country."
The returning champion, Kat Jepson, an artist originally from Virginia Beach, Virginia, responded: "What is Kenya?"
Jennings ruled her incorrect, even though many Americans may sympathize with that answer, since Obama's birthplace and precise family heritage have long been matters of controversy.
Neither of the two other contestants, Ben Chan nor Laura Caton, proffered a guess.
Jennings explained the "correct" response, saying: "You can see the flag, he's actually in Ireland."
A June 27 article was a reprint of the introduction of a new book compiling essays by right-wing anti-Obama authors about how horrible Obama supposedly was:
Barack Obama’s presidency was historic. Pundits said it, celebrities tweeted it, and the community organizer from Chicago was not shy about constantly bringing it up.
And it was true.
Over a decade after his inauguration, we are still living in his shadow. His history of economic decline, racial division, and terrorist appeasement is our present. The third term of his presidency under Biden makes him inescapable even long after leaving office. The Biden administration is extending his fundamental transformation of America. Its open borders, woke military, critical race theory, terrorist appeasement, and wealth redistribution are a continuation of Obama’s war on our national sovereignty, on the middle class, on the family, and on free enterprise. From a new administration staffed with all his old people to the familiar economic misery that Americans thought they had left behind, it is as if the Obama administration never ended. And, as the nation endures a third term of Obama, many wonder if it will ever end.
His legacy of defeat abroad and division at home is all around us. From race riots to defeat in Afghanistan, from the war on the middle class to massive power grabs, we are not only still living out his history, but it’s clear that we will go on living there until we break free. Obama made history, but not the way that the mainstream media would have it. The truly historic elements of his presidency were not his accident of birth and choice of racial identification, which a political establishment obsessed with identity politics told Americans would serve as a national atonement for racism. Now that his third term is taking place under an old, white male figurehead, it is clearer than ever that identity is not history. The true legacy of Obama and Biden lies in the impact of their destructive radicalism on the country, not what box they checked on their census form. The community organizer from Chicago did not heal our racial wounds. Instead, he presided over a historically divisive era that reversed generations of improvements in race relations.
But Obama did not just divide Americans by race (“Punish your enemies”), but by gender (“You know, there’s a reason we haven’t had a woman president before”), by faith (“They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion”), by all the flavors of sexual identity, and by every sort of identity politics. He broke America, and the fractures of our time are the aftershocks of his destruction.
Pointing out that there has never been a woman president is dividing Americans by gender? Weird.
A July 3 column by editor Joseph Farah -- who remains prone to flareups of ODS -- served up out-of-context statements he called "a few choice quotes from Barack Hussein Obama. This is painful, indeed. Our first president who was a "community organizer." This included the "civilian national security force" statement Farah has obsessed about for years, which we documented way back in 2008 was not about the establishment of a paramilitary force under Obama's control, as Farah has long suggested, but about using civilian "soft power" as part of foreign diplomacy.
Farah continued to rage: "Obama was telling us who he was. He is still telling us who he is and hinting toward a destination that is not America. Then came Joe Biden. All it took was one rigged election." He then likened Obama and Biden to "the evil geniuses that came before," like Lenin, Stalin and Hitler. (What was that about WND not liking it when people likened Trump to Hitler?)
Wayne Allyn Root --who is also prone to ODS fits -- ramped up the Obamaphobic rage in his July 21 column:
It's so damn obvious. You'd have to be delusional, naive, a moron or a Democrat not to understand what went down.
You'd have to be delusional, naive, a moron or a Democrat not to understand our country has been sold out.
And you'd have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to understand this wasn't President Joe Biden's plan. Biden has always been former President Barack Obama's "useful idiot."
The answer to every question about who committed the crimes, who sold out our country, who the mastermind is, is always the same ...
IABO: It's Always Been Obama.
[...]
What did Obama know and when did he know it? Obama was president when all this went on. Obama was in charge when Biden was robbing us blind. Obama oversaw all this crime, corruption, extortion and tax fraud.
Obama was president when his vice president's son ran around the world on a one-man crime and sex spree. Hunter Biden acted like he represented the United States government, while snorting coke and smoking crack off prostitutes' backs ... while having sex with possibly underage girls, filming it all and putting it on his laptop – opening the entire United States to blackmail.
And you think Obama didn't know about any of this?
[...]
Folks, either you believe Obama is a fool, the dumbest and most clueless moron to ever occupy the White House ... and Obama knew nothing ... Obama saw nothing ... Obama heard nothing ... Obama is a clone of Sgt. Shultz on "Hogan's Heroes" ...
… or you're starting to understand that Obama was the mastermind. Obama was "the tutti di capo" – the ultimate "Big Guy" – the boss of bosses.
And all this crime, corruption, extortion and treason was carried out with Obama's approval and permission. All these world-class criminals, traitors and useful idiots were working for Obama, were following Obama's plan and carrying out Obama's orders – and were protected by Obama's DOJ and Obama's FBI.
And it's Obama right now still giving the orders. It's clear Biden is a brain-dead puppet with dementia and diapers. Half the time this half-wit doesn't know where he is – or who he is. The CEO of Burisma reportedly said Hunter was dumber than his dog. Where do you think Hunter got that from? He's a chip off the old block. Hunter is as dumb as a box of rocks, simply because his father is as dumb as a box of rocks. Two useful idiots.
You don't have to be a genius, or a brain surgeon, to figure out IABO: "It's Always Been Obama."
Obama was the mastermind then. Obama is the mastermind now.
What did Obama know and when did he know it? He knew everything – because he was the guy giving the orders.
And he still is.
Yep, that's some serious Obama derangement right there.
Obamaobsessive Jack Cashill devoted his Aug. 30 column to gushing over the above-noted anti-Obama book WND touted a couple months earlier:
Having written four books about Barack Obama, I read Jamie Glazov's new book, "Barack Obama's True Legacy," not expecting any surprises. To my surprise, I was pleasantly surprised.
Glazov, the editor, assigned subject matter experts to review Obama's policy decisions as president, with a focus on foreign policy. This strategy provides a depth of reporting not found in other assessments of the Obama presidency, my own included.
It's unlikely that future Obama historians will know more about the Muslim Brotherhood than Robert Spencer, more about communism than Trevor Loudon, more about Benghazi than Clair Lopez, more about Israel than Daniel Greenfield or Dov Lipman, or more about Russia than J.R. Nyquist, just to name a few.
Cashill then quoted from the opening essay:
The opening chapter by John Drew sets the tone for what follows. Drew first met the future president when Obama was a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
The Obama Drew meets is a closeted homosexual and an uncloseted anti-colonialist and wannabe communist revolutionary. "There's going to be a revolution," Drew remembers Obama saying. "We need to be organized and grow the movement."
We've previouslynoted that Drew was never as close to Obama as he has suggested, having actually met him only twice -- at least one of which was a social occasion -- and he had graduated from Occidental before Obama even started school there. So maybe he's not the reliable critic Glazov and Cashill want us to think he is.
The fact that Glazov's book starts out with a guy who spent the Obama years exaggerating his alleged closeness to the guy for right-wing gain doesn't bode well for the book as a whole. Or for Cashill's credibility as well; he eagerly swallows arguments by the book's writers that Obama was "groomed by a communist-Islamist alliance" to be president and touted in the headline of his column that the book portrays Obama as a "real-life Manchurian candidate."
Cashill concluded with a wannabe book blurb: "Future historians would do well to ignore the reporting of the legacy media altogether. For those interested in the real story, 'Barack Obama's True Legacy' would be a much better place to start." He doesn't explain why obsessive Obama-haters should be trusted on anything.
NEW ARTICLE -- The MRC Flips Over Elon Musk, Part 14: Helping Musk Hate Soros Topic: Media Research Center
Elon Musk baselessly smeared George Soros as someone who purportedly "hates humanity," and the Soros-haters at the Media Research Center were there for it. PLUS: The MRC censors the fact that Musk praised the Unabomber. Read more >>
MRC Hypes Alleged Hunter Biden Whistleblower, Downplays That He's A Criminal Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center loves to get mad when the non-right-wing media ignores whistleblowers who promote conservative narratives. (If you're a whistleblower who doesn't advance those narratives, however, the MRC will attack you.) And the MRC had another narrative-friendly whistleblower to tout over the summer. In a July 25 post hyping "FOUR New Biden Scandals on Burisma, Hunter’s Life of Corruption" (which puts the MRC's overheated total of such "scandals" to be well over 60), Curtis Houck hyped how "The Fox News Channel's flagship newscast Special Report led Monday with this development (as would numerous FNC shows after them)" while non-right-wing media ignored it. The hype about Archer's planned testimony continued:
Tim Graham touted it in his July 26 column, declaring that "New scoops are underlining this is a Joe Biden scandal."
Cassandra DeVries gushed in a post the same day: "According to New York Post article by former MRC Bulldog Award winner Miranda Devine, Hunter Biden’s close friend Devon Archer said Hunter used his father’s position as the Vice President to impress foreign executives and win their money. Hunter Biden frequently called his father when meeting with business partners and investors, introducing them to his father or asking his father for advice."
Houck cheered in his writeup of the July 26 White House press briefing that biased reporter Fred Lucas of the right-wing Daily Signal "was the lone reporter to ask former Hunter Biden business associate and friend Devon Archer being slated to testify next week behind closed doors to a House committee."
Houck used a July 28 post to promote that NBC "even made an allusion to next week’s potential bombshell testimony from former longtime Hunter business partner and confidante Devon Archer."
On the day of the planned testimony, July 31, Mark Finkelstein touted Fox News hyping it and bashed MSNBC's "Morning Joe" for not playing along with the approved right-wing narrative:
Meanwhile, over on Morning Joe, the panel trashed Trump for having alleged a corrupt Biden-Ukraine connection. Host Jonathan Lemire andPolitico's Sam Stein suggested that Trump didn't learn from the experience of having been impeached over similar allegations he made.
But incredibly, while dismissing Trump's assertions,they failed to even breathe the name of Devon Archer, and the testimony he was expected to offer.Lemire made a passing, innocuous-sounding mention, of Hunter Biden having "once served on the board" of Burisma. No reference to the fact that, as NBC News has reported, Hunter and his company raked in $11 million from Burisma.
Finkelstein then alluded to a little problem with their newest star whistleblower, but then tried to build a conspiracy theory around it:
Morning Joe also suppressed the news that the Biden Justice Department made a highly unusual Saturday request to the judge overseeing Archer's conviction in an unrelated case to expedite his sentencing and jailing; presumably a tactic intended to pressure Archer to curb his enthusiasm for anti-Biden testimony.
So, according to Finkelstein, the problem with Archer is not that ie's a convicted criminal, it's that he's going to be punished for being one.
Another post that day, by Bill D'Agostino, ranted that non0right-woing cable news channels mentioned Donald Trump too much and Archer not enough:
On the day that Devon Archer, a business associate and longtime friend of Hunter Biden, testified before the House Oversight committee, CNN and MSNBC instead flooded the airwaves with their favorite topic: Donald Trump. Between 6:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. eastern, CNN and MSNBC made a combined 759 mentions of Donald Trump, while at the same time mentioning Devon Archer just 48 times.
During the specified timespan, MSNBC featured 461 mentions of the former President, while CNN supplied the remaining 298. Meanwhile, CNN mentioned Devon Archer only 37 times during the same period, while MSNBC mentioned him just 11 times. That’s a more than 41-to-1 ratio of Trump mentions to Archer mentions for the latter network.
MSNBC’s Morning Joe during the 8:00 a.m. hour somehow managed to bring up the former President by name a jaw-dropping 70 times (212 times across the whole show). Meanwhile, Archer was not discussed at any point during that program’s four-hour runtime.
D'Agostino failed to provide a similar count for Fox News so there would be a point of comparison. On the other hand, his post was translated into Spanish the next day.
Another July 31 post, by Kevin Tober, whined that people on CNN didn't take Archer's testimony seriously:
On Monday afternoon, while Hunter Biden’s business partner Devon Archer was behind closed doors testifying before the House Oversight Committee regarding the Biden family’s corrupt business dealings, CNN host Dana Bash and congressional correspondent Manu Raju wore their profound ignorance on their sleeve with the pants-on-fire claim that Republicans have thus far put forward zero evidence showing Joe Biden’s involvement in his son Hunter’s business dealings.
During a panel discussion on the Archer testimony, Bash claimed that the Archer testimony is all about “whether or not Republicans can find any evidence, which they have yet to put forward, of their repeated accusation that the President, Joe Biden, had knowledge of, or a connection to Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine and China.”
Either Bash doesn’t follow the news, or she’s lying to her audience. Even before Monday’s revelations from Archer detailing how involved Joe Biden was with his son, it’s been heavily reported that Hunter gives his dad a cut of the money he shakes down from foreign governments. In one text message, he referred to the elder Biden as the “Big Guy” and admitted he gives him a ten percent cut.
On Monday, Hunter Biden’s business partner Devon Archer testified behind closed doors before the House Oversight Committee regarding the Biden family’s corrupt business dealings including a bombshell revelation that Hunter put his father Joe Biden on the phone with his business associates over twenty times. This at the very least proves President Biden’s repeated claims that he was unaware of his son’s business activities was a flat-out lie. Despite this, NBC Nightly News had no interest in this story. While ABC’s World News Tonight and CBS Evening News covered the Archer testimony, NBC pretended it never happened.
Instead, the network ran a nearly two-minute-long segment on the U.S. women’s soccer team and an interview with athlete Megan Rapinoe. Clearly, NBC’s priorities were in order.
You mean like it's Tober's priority to attack any non-right-wing outlet who doesn't uncritically parrot right-wing narratives?
In neither post did Tober mention that Archer has a criminal record.
Newsmax and its columnists were quick tostart promoting Robert Kennedy Jr.'s presidential campaign -- not because it actually wants him to win, of course, but out of the hope that it might hurt President Biden's re-election efforts. That promotion -- and amping up of his alleged victimhood over his anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories being fact-checked -- continued over the summer:
Newsmax even uncritically touted Kennedy insisting that Russia has been "acting in good faith" when it comes to ending invasion of Ukraine, even though Newsmax has been a vocal supporter of Ukraine.
Newsmax also played cleanup for Kennedy after he made the bizarre claim that the COVID-19 virus was "ethnically targeted" to spare Jews. After running a wire article critical of Kennedy, it gave him airtime on Newsmax TV to defend himself:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Newsmax on Thursday that he has never been antisemitic and a smear campaign against him is trying to censor him from speaking out about the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and other topics.
"I said this under oath today because I'm so angry at those charges," Kennedy, who testified earlier in the day before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, told "The Record With Greta Van Susteren."
"In my entire life, I have never uttered a single antisemitic phrase, word or anything, or racist [phrase]. Because of my family, and because I've spent a lot of time in Israel, and I have an organization over there, my support for Israel is stronger than anybody on Capitol Hill.
[...]
During the hearing, Democrats grilled Kennedy over reported comments he made that the COVID-19 vaccine was ethnically targeted to affect whites and Blacks and spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. He claimed he was referring to how the U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons and that a 2021 study of the coronavirus showed that COVID-19 appears to disproportionately affect certain races.
"I've been smeared using phrases that were taken completely out of context and attributing meanings to them that I never intended, and it's a way of censoring me," Kennedy said.
The study Kennedy cited, however, said nothing about the virus being "ethnically targeted."The Newsmax article did not explain what, exactly, was purportedly taken out of context. The article also did not mention that Kennedy previously claimed that opponents of vaccine mandates (like himself) had it worse than Anne Frank during the Holocaust; Kennedy eventually apologized for that.
Newsmax did more cleanup for Kennedy after his July 20 congressional appearance, in an article by Solange Reyner:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s 2021 tweet about the death of baseball legend Hank Aaron after he received a COVID-19 vaccine was just "pointing out facts," Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, argued Thursday during a GOP-led hearing on government censorship by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
"When you look at Mr. Kennedy's tweet, there was nothing there that was factually inaccurate. Hank Aaron, real person, great American, passed away after he got the vaccine. Pointing out, just pointing out facts," Jordan said in opening remarks while discussing an email the White House sent to Twitter to request Kennedy's tweet be taken down.
In fact, Aaron died of natural causes, not the vaccine, which means Kennedy was lying by suggesting otherwise.
Newsmax also gave Kennedy space to whine on July 28 that he was not being given Secret Service protection, which is given only to "major" candidates -- something he has not yet proven himself to be. A paywalled Aug. 1 article, though, seemed to admit that Kennedy was pushing this claim "is likely a bid to try to win over voters as he seeks to topple the sitting president in his party's primary, political strategists say."
There were a few instances in which Newsmax treated Kennedy like the Democrat he claims to be. A July 12 article by Nicole Wells repeated an Axios report that Kennedy "is flouting established party customby selling merchandise that is not made in America or by union workers." An Aug. 15 article by Jeffrey Rodack noted confusion over Kennedy's position on abortion after saying he supported government restrictions on it (which warranted a second article as well); his campaign later had to issue a clarification of his stance. An Aug. 30 article by Nick Koutsobinas, however, highlighted one of the few views on which Kennedy is actually like a Democrat, calling for government-subsidized home loans.
MRC Rages At Scientific Study Showing Right-Wing Media To Be Untrustworthy Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Bill D'Agostino grumbled in a July 31 post:
According to NBC News, a “landmark study” by 27 “academic researchers” has concluded that conservatives in America are far more likely than their left-wing counterparts to consume news from untrustworthy sources. We’re all supposed to take this immensely seriously, but even a cursory look at the study reveals a host of embarrassing problems with the methodology.
The fact that the first thing D'Agostino did is attack the NBC article for a small error miscounting the number of researchers involved tells you that he will be doing a lot of partisan ranting and not much serious questioning of the study, which he called "garbage" in his headline. Indeed, his attack on the study's definition of untrustworthy sources is all about partisan narratives:
According to the “overview” section, untrustworthy news sources were defined as those which published two or more articles rated “false” by Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program (3PFC) before February 16, 2021:
[...]
In other words, if Meta’s fact-checkers disagreed with two articles published on any given news site between January 1, 2020 and February 15, 2021, then the researchers condemned that entire site to the “untrustworthy” bin. So strong was their faith in the 3PFC partners’ judgement that they let the validity of their entire dataset hinge upon it.
Meta lists the following organizations as members of its 3PFC program for the U.S.: AFP, Check Your Fact, Factcheck.org, Lead Stories, PolitiFact, Science Feedback, Reuters Fact Check, Televisa Univision, The Associated Press, The Dispatch, and USA TODAY. Of these eleven, only Check Your Fact could be considered reliably right-of-center. One could also make an argument for The Dispatch, though honestly not a very strong one.
It should be obvious just how flimsy this categorization method is. Because only two articles needed to be flagged by any of these organizations in order for an entire news source to be “untrustworthy,” even a couple of biased or misinformed fact checkers had the potential to dramatically skew the data. That’s a bad sign, considering how preposterous the slant is at some of these fact checking organizations. As NewsBusters has documented extensively, PolitiFact alone is more than stilted enough to wreck the dataset.
D'Agostino is effectively whining that fact-checkers fact-check conservatives, a longtime MRC complaint. He also clearly believes in the right-wing canard that any news source or fact-checker that is not explicitly right-wing is "liberal" or "left-wing" because they do not unquestioningly parrot right-wing narratives the way the MRC does. Also, the Dispatch is indisputably a conservative publication, but D'Agostino is basically insisting that it's not right-wing enough because it criticizes Donald Trump.
D'Agostino then moved to whataboutism:
But the issues run deeper than that. Unfortunately for the authors of this study, fact checkers and the corporate media in 2020 were wedded to quite a few narratives that have since proven to be utterly false.
For example, if you’d asked anyone working at a 3PFC member organization in December of 2020, they’d have told you that lab-originated COVID-19 was a conspiracy theory, cloth masks were effective at preventing coronavirus transmission, and Hunter Biden’s laptop was unauthenticated Russian disinformation. A few of them might even suspect that then-President Trump was a puppet of Vladimir Putin.
How many articles discussing these topics did the fact checkers incorrectly flag as false in 2020? And how many of those erroneous flaggings caused researchers to improperly banish entire news sites to the naughty corner? The study did not address these issues, and in fact there is no indication that the researchers even considered them.
As we've noted before, the New York Post -- the right-wing, pro-Trump propaganda outlet that broke the Hunter laptop story -- failed to offer at the time its story was published independent verification of the laptop that would have countered reasonable questions about it being "unauthenticated Russian disinformation" and it being sourced to a such a partisan publication. There also continues to be a lack of direct evidence that the COVID virus was "lab-originated" as D'Agostino insists, and masks do, in fact, slow COVID transmission.
Having effectively proven the study correct by spreading right-wing misinformation, D'Agostino moved on to building a conspiracy theory:
Furthermore, it’s impossible to check which news sources were incorrectly labeled, because the study did not name any of the news sites researchers examined. Instead the authors provided a link to a satellite website run by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) containing replication code, along with a note which stated: “ICPSR will receive and vet all applications for data access.
A jaded cynic might suspect that this secret list of “untrustworthy” news sources was little more than a directory of every right-leaning website with a Facebook account. Such a jaded cynic might further suspect the authors were afraid to make their secret list public because doing so would give the game away.
D'Agostino concluded by ranting that there's no objective definition of truth and that anyone who studies media misinformation is automatically on "the left":
This study represents the left’s latest childish attempt to prove with data that the American right is misinformed, and that therefore some authority must police what information they can access. But the researchers’ efforts are undone in an instant by the same fundamental question which every proponent of censoring misinformation inevitably fails to answer: who gets to decide what’s true and what’s not?
Many academics on the left who claim to study so-called misinformation do it in the hopes of convincing the rest of us that they deserve that power. The reality is that fact checkers funded by the Poynter Institute are no more qualified to be arbiters of the truth than anyone else is, and no amount of politically-motivated research will change that.
So yes, 27 activists are pretending they’ve proven once and for all that the people who disagree with them politically are a bunch of dupes who read fake news. That tells us next to nothing about America’s “news ecosystem,” but it does speak volumes about how thoroughly the social sciences have been infested by overt political actors.
A jaded cynic may also suspect that D'Agostino is attacking this study so fiercely because he knows that right-wing media is, in fact, unreliable and must try to smear anyone who points out that inconvenient fact as untrustworthy and partisan (like him). The MRC has used this same tactic in itsrepeatedattacks on website-ratings service NewsGuard. And it's quite rich for D'Agostino to accuse researchers of being "overt political actors" when he gets paid quite well by the MRC to be an overt political actor parroting a defined narrative. Meanwhile, D'Agostino and the MRC never discuss the one thing that would keep right-wing media from being dismissed as low-quality: improving the quality of right-wing media. Remember, the MRC killed its "news" division CNSNews.com rather than try to improve it, slapping the nameplate on a right-wing blog thatfollow even fewer journalistic standards than CNS did.
Desoite his history of partisanship, D'Agostino wants you to believe he's no less qualified to be an "arbiter of the truth" than someone who has academic training in research, and that anyone who does have such training is presumed to be an "activist" on "the left" and an "overt political actor." Who's pushing embarassing garbage now?
WorldNetDaily has been resorting to ridiculously biased and omission-laden stories from the notoriously unreliable Gateway Pundit to try and manufacture sympathy for participants in the Capitol riot, and it happened again with a republished Aug. 17 article written by Gateway Pundit chief Jim Hoft:
January 6 political prisoner Ryan Samsel has been held in prison without trial now since January 2021.
During his two-and-a-half years without trial Ryan has been moved around to 17 different facilities. Ryan has been beaten, abused, tortured, and neglected since his arrest in January 2021.
Earlier this week The Gateway Pundit received exclusive photos from Ryan Samsel’s prison cell at the FDC in Philadelphia. The cell was a size of a closet with a light on all of the time. The cell had a thin blue mattress, no sheets or blankets, no clothing, and he was kept here for five months straight.
The photos are just shocking. This is taking place in America today. This is who we are.
[...]
Ryan believes the government tortured him for months so he would rat out the Proud Boys. They even beat Ryan numerous times and kept him locked down so he couldn’t communicate with anyone.
This torture is taking place in America today.
Where is the Republican Party?
Where is the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch?
Missing from Hoft's manufactured pity piece is any substantiation of the claims he makes about Samsel, as well as any mention of what Samsel did. The latter was summarized by the Department of Justice when he was indicted:
According to court documents, Samsel was captured in publicly available video taken of a crowd pushing and pulling on barricades on the west side of the Capitol. In the process of pushing the barricades to the ground, Samsel and others knocked over a U.S. Capitol Police officer, causing a head injury as the officer’s head hit the ground. In another confrontation, according to court documents, Samsel attempted to pull a riot shield from a uniformed U.S. Capitol Police officer.
We thought right-wingers didn't like it when police officers were assaulted. But that's not all; he had quite the criminal record even before the Capitol riot. As a more fact-based news outlet reported, Samsel has been accused of attacking other people, usually women, at least six times, and he had at least four prior convictions for crimes that sometimes left his victims fearing for their lives. At the time of the riot, he had an open warrant regarding accusations that he broke into a woman’s house to attack her and was on parole for brutally assaulting his pregnant girlfriend.
And we're still not done. Last year, Samsel reportedly wrote a letter talking about getting rid of politicians with a woodchipper, and he has previoiusly made several statements about stabbing or punching FBI agents.
Samsel claims to have been beaten by jail guards after an argument over toilet paper escalated. But it does appear that he's getting back what he did to other people.
There's a reason Hoft censored that information -- he wants to falsely portray Samsel as a martyr when he's really nothing more than a thug who apparently can't take what he's been dishing out for years. And it raises even more question sabout WND's desire to remain in business that it considers Hoft and the Gateway Pundit -- who, again, are being sued for defamation for falsely accusing a pair of Georgia election workers of fraud -- to be a reliable news source worth republishing without question.
MRC Repeats Bogus Biden 'No Comment' Claim On Maui Wildfires Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Kevin Tober was in full manufactured-outrage mode in an Aug. 14 post:
On Sunday, President Joe Biden spent another weekend on vacation on the beach in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware while the country literally and figuratively burned. While Biden was getting into his presidential limo, he was asked by two reporters for his thoughts on the rapidly rising death toll due to the out-of-control wildfires in Hawaii. Biden’s callous response of “no comment” led to outrage on Twitter and elsewhere throughout the country. Despite the newsworthiness of Biden’s dismissal response to the death and destruction, all three evening news broadcasts ignored it.
[...]
Meanwhile, on Fox News Channel’s Special Report, anchor Bret Baier spoke to White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich about the latest Biden controversy.
“The President spent several hours on the beach at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware yesterday,” Baier said. “And when he was leaving, after that, reporters asked him about the rising death toll in Hawaii, specifically Maui, those wildfires.”
After airing Biden’s dismissive comments toward those killed or injured, Baier responded: “He said 'no, no comment.' And that got a lot of criticism online and elsewhere.”
From there, Heinrich confirmed that “It did get a lot of criticism.”
“He ran for office on his own empathy. The White House was asked today in the briefing if he had been instructed, you know, not to comment on this or if he planned to comment about it in the future,” Heinrich noted.
But Tober -- and, apparently, Fox News -- censored one important fact: Nobody actually heard Biden say that. As we documented, the claim that Biden said "no comment" comes from a White House press corps pool report by Rob Crilly of the right-wing, anti-Biden British newspaper Daily Mail, who admitted he never actually heard those words but claimed that "lip readers in the pool" claimed he said it. Tober's fake outrage came as he hypocritically criticized network news for "bias by omission."
Then again, facts don't matter much at the MRC but advancing right-wing narratives do -- which is why Tober spent so much space praising Fox News for repeating this unsubstantiated attack. So the MRC continued to push this bogus narrative. It published an Aug. 25 column by Ben Shapiro citing the alleged incident to declare Biden to be an "narcissist":
This week, Biden visited Maui. He did so nearly two weeks after the worst wildfire in modern American history killed hundreds of Americans. Meanwhile, Biden vacationed in Delaware on the beach, telling reporters he had "no comment" on the situation; he then jet-set off to Lake Tahoe before finally heading to Lahaina.
Rich Noyes dutifully pushed the narrative again in an Aug. 26 post, quoting Tober in doing so:
The August 8 firestorm on the Hawaiian island of Maui took at least 115 lives, with another 388 officially listed as missing more than two weeks later. Five days after the devastation, a vacationing President Biden was asked about the horrifying death toll. “No comment,” he said.
[...]
Instead of pouncing on Biden’s blunders, the media politely hid them from viewers. After Biden’s inexplicable “no comment,” MRC’s Kevin Tober found none of the three evening newscasts mentioned it amid their otherwise heavy coverage of the Maui disaster.
Nicholas Fondacaro uncritically repeated the claim in an Aug. 31 post:
While communities in Maui were being incinerated and the list of the dead continued to grow (surpassing 100 as of the writing of this piece), President Biden was publicly flaunting his storied callousness as he continued his vacation and gave a firm “no comment” when asked about the wildfires. It being election season, CNN News Center knew they needed to do something to distract people. So, on Thursday morning, they took White House talking points and claimed it was Republicans who didn’t care about the people. But at no point did they provide any evidence.
Fondacaro didn't explain how Biden's alleged comment could be "firm" when nobody actually heard him say it.
WND's Root Still Fearmongering About COVID Vaccines Topic: WorldNetDaily
Wayne Allyn Root just can'tstopspreading falsehoods and misinformation about COVID and its vaccines (or COVID itself). He went on another fearmongering bender in his Aug. 13 WorldNetDaily column:
There is a silent tragedy of epic proportions going on in our country. It's silent because the media refuse to connect the dots.
Have you noticed the tsunami of recent headlines about high-profile Americans who "died suddenly" or suffered heart attacks, strokes or blood clots at young ages. Celebrities, athletes, entertainers and CEOs are dropping dead or having heart attacks.
Still, the media whistle past the graveyard.
There are always a thousand excuses. Anything and everything, EXCEPT blaming the COVID-19 vaccine. It can never be the vaccine.
Strange thing though: Virtually every one of these dead, crippled, disabled or seriously ill people have one thing in common: they were vaccinated. What a wild coincidence!
He then started spreading stories:
I'll soon write a column about 65 friends, acquaintances and business associates of mine, people I personally know, who have died or suffered serious illness since being vaccinated. The numbers are piling up. These are not coincidences. It's a pattern. Studying a pattern like this used to be called "science."
In the meantime, I have one up-close and personal story that every American needs to hear. Last week I went out to dinner with one of my best friends (let's call him Mike). He told me the story of his own sister, who was badly injured and disabled by the COVID-19 vaccine. He then informed me she's a big fan of mine and watches my Real America's Voice TV show every Saturday. He said she'd like to talk to me and share her story.
We spoke yesterday. Here's her story.
Let's call her Jane. She is an accomplished female CEO. Jane runs a medical organization that helps children. She wanted to stress to me how healthy she'd been before getting the vaccine. She traveled the world on business and lugged her own luggage everywhere. She biked 15 miles a day. She took one-hour spin classes. She ate healthy. She was on no medications.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jane never got COVID-19. She continued biking 15 miles several times per week. She walked 3 miles a day.
Then her doctor pressured her to take the COVID-19 vaccine. She was worried and skeptical, but eventually she relented. She took one Pfizer jab. One. No second jab. No booster. Just one.
That's all it took to ruin her life. Jane will never be the same.
Within four hours she felt extreme nerve pain. Pain the likes of which she'd never felt in her life. Mind-numbing pain.
Then came the racing heart. Heart palpitations. Severe muscle twitching. Severe muscle weakness. Shortness of breath. Horrible fatigue. Brain fog so bad she could no longer focus, or deal with even basic tasks.
Next came blurred vision. Sensitivity to light and sound. Dry eyes and dry mouth. Dizziness. Ringing in her ears so loud she couldn't think. Hair loss in clumps. Severe heartburn. Circulation problems: Her feet turned purple. She could barely walk. Internal tremors so bad, it felt like a cellphone was vibrating inside her body. She is in so much pain at night that she can't sleep.
Jane also suffered from menstrual problems after getting the vaccine. She hemorrhaged so severely this past February that she was hospitalized and eventually required emergency surgery.
By March it was a new issue requiring hospitalization. Her heart was beating so fast it felt like it was going to explode. It went from 60 beats per minute to 165 within seconds. Her heart condition is so serious that she fears she could "die suddenly" at any time.
This is Jane's new normal. She was perfectly healthy all her life. Then she took the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Her life instantly changed after that one vaccine. Now it's difficult to walk to the bathroom.
You will not be surprised that no documentation was provided for any of this. His misinformation continued:
The facts are out. The CDC's own internal report shows over 117,000 excess deaths among American children since the vaccine. CHILDREN. That's more excess dead children in two years than all the U.S. soldiers killed in the Vietnam War in a decade.
Life insurance companies report more excess deaths among working-age Americans since 2021 (the year the COVID-19 vaccine began) than at any time in history. What do working-age Americans have in common? The Biden administration forced them to take the vaccine or lose their jobs.
Ed Dowd, the former Blackrock money manager, who analyzes numbers for a living, says the disability rolls have grown by millions since the vaccine. MILLIONS. That's why there is such a severe shortage of employees.
We've previously debunked claims about using insurance information to claim people are being killed by COVID vaccines, and his claim about "CDC's own internal report" showing that the vaccine has killed children has also been discredited. He closed with more fearmongering:
We know this is happening. The next victim could be you, your spouse, your children.
To do nothing now; to make believe this isn't happening; to hope it goes away; to try to cover it up; is no longer about ignorance, or delusion, or even greed.
At this point, to do nothing, to refuse to act, is a combination of pure evil, mass murder and crimes against humanity.
Actually, the evil one here is Root, who believes he must continsally spread proven lies to stay relevant in the righ-wing media bubble.
The son of a prominent conservative activist has been convicted of charges that he stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan, 6, 2021, bashed in a window, chased a police officer, invaded the Senate floor and helped a mob disrupt the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential election victory.
Leo Brent Bozell IV, 44, of Palmyra, Pennsylvania, was found guilty Friday of 10 charges, including five felony offenses, after a trial decided by a federal judge, according to the Justice Department.
Bozell’s father is Brent Bozell III, who founded the Media Research Center, Parents Television Council and other conservative media organizations.
[...]
Prosecutors said that before the riot, Bozell helped plan and coordinate events in Washington in support of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement. They said that after Trump’s rally near the White House on Jan. 6, Bozell marched to the Capitol and joined a mob in breaking through a police line. He smashed a window next to the Senate Wing Door, creating an entry point for hundreds of rioters, according to prosecutors.
After climbing through the smashed window, Bozell joined other rioters in chasing a Capitol Police officer, Eugene Goodman, up a staircase to an area where other officers confronted the group.
Later, Bozell was captured on video entering office of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. He appeared to have something in his hand when he left, prosecutors said.
Entering the Senate gallery, Bozell moved a C-SPAN camera to face the ground so it could not record rioters ransacking the chamber on a live video feed. He also spent several minutes on the Senate floor.
Bozell roamed thorough the Capitol for nearly an hour, reaching more than a dozen different parts of the building and passing through at least seven police lines before police escorted him out, prosecutors said.
Where won't you find news about Bozell's conviction? On any website controlled by his father. The Media Research Center's two main sites -- NewsBusters and MRCTV -- censored all mention of it, as they have eversince his arrest.
Bozell pere, however, did make a euphemistic statement on his Twitter account: "We're terribly disappointed in the decision. This isn't the time to say all I want to say. We love our son and thank you for your prayers." Sounds a bitlike President Biden talking about his son, doesn't it? Ironically, Bozell's employees routinelymock Joe for standing by his son. Since those employees appear to be sufficiently afraid of their boss to tell the truth, don't expect them to provide consistency here.
NEW ARTICLE: Trump Indictment Theater At WND Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily followed the rest of the ConWeb on Donald Trump's first indictment in playing the George Soros card on prosecutor Alvin Bragg and serving up Trump stenography. But editor Joseph Farah also accused Bragg of "shucking and jiving." Read more >>
MRC Cheers Musk Threatening ADL For Noting Rise of Anti-Semitism On Twitter, Calls In Scott Adams (!) To Help Defend Topic: Media Research Center
Elon Musk had a bit of an anti-Semtic meltdown, lashing out at the Anti-Defamation League for pointing out how anti-Semitism has increased on Twitter since he took it over (while, of course, insisting that he's "against anti-Semitism of any kind") -- even bizarrely claiming that the ADL promotes anti-Semitism -- and threatening to sue the ADL over it. This, of course, is not a surprise to anyone who has seen Musk similarly attack George Soros, portraying him as the Jew right-wingers are allowed to hate. Needless to say, the Media Research Center -- which also hates Soros and anyone who points out how hate has increased on Twitter since Musk's takeover, helped Musk attack Soros and also argued that anti-Semitism isn't hate speech -- absolutely loved this. Luis Cornelio gushed in a Sept. 5 post:
The Anti-Defamation League may be in deep trouble as social media platform owner Elon Musk has threatened to take legal action against the group’s latest anti-free speech activism.
Musk, the owner of X (formerly known as Twitter), announced on Monday his intent to slap ADL with a whopping “$22 billion” defamation lawsuit following the group’s dubious claims that X allows anti-Semitic content. Musk’s threats follow ADL Director Jonathan Greenblatt's dual tirade against podcast host Tucker Carlson and ad revenues on X.
According to Musk, ADL “has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.” The X owner also drew attention to ADL's aggressive work to drive advertisers away from X. “Our US advertising revenue is still down 60%, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!” Musk added, before admitting that a lawsuit could ensue.
Cornelio made sure not to mention that there is plenty of documentation to support the ADL's contention that anti-Semitism has increased on Twitter since Musk's takeover. He also failed to note that Musk has yet to prove evidence to the contrary, or that he was roundlymocked for his lawsuit threat. Instead, Corneilo pushed the idea that Tucker Carlson should join Musk's would-be lawsuit:
In a June 9 tweet, Greenblatt shared an op-ed he wrote for Forward in which he advocated for X to deplatform Carlson and called for more censorship of free speech. “Twitter should not give those who promote extremism and conspiracy theories a free platform to amplify their inflammatory views,” he claimed in the op-ed, before accusing Carlson of spreading alleged hate and “offline violence.” In a separate tweet, Greenblatt echoed his op-ed and took a jab at X’s ad revenues. “If @lindayacc wants to attract Fortune 500 advertisers and @elonmusk wants to create a genuine public square, it might be wise not to give this obvious antisemite such a huge megaphone. Let Tucker and his ilk push their hate somewhere else.”
Musk responded to those tweets, saying, “Tucker is welcome to join our suit.” Musk also hinted that if the lawsuit is successful, he will demand that the ADL drops the “anti” from its name. “If this continues, we will have no choice but to file a defamation suit against, ironically, the ‘Anti-Defamation’ League,” he alleged. “If they lose the defamation suit, we will insist that they drop the the ‘anti’ part of their name, since obviously ….”
Note that Cornelio avoided the details Greenblatt cited in his Forward op-ed, where he wrote:
If you happened to miss the first episode [of Carlson's Twitter videos], consider yourself lucky. The show was rife with antisemitism, conspiracy theories about 9/11 and UFOs, and truly revolting rhetoric sprinkled with antisemitic tropes about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Carlson referred to the Jewish head of state as “sweaty and rat-like” and a “persecutor of Christians.”
These remarks are antisemitic, vile lies. And they come at a time of rising antisemitic incidents and attitudes worldwide, making them all the more problematic and dangerous.
For years, Carlson slyly wove anti-Jewish conspiracy theories into his show on Fox News – attacking billionaire philanthropist George Soros, slandering Paul Singer, and promoting white supremacist ideas like the “great replacement theory.” ADL wrote to the network on numerous occasions calling for Carlson’s ouster for the offenses listed above and much more.
[...]
In January 2021, Carlson offered his viewers a full-throated defense of the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory. Just days after the mass shooting attack in August 2019 at an El Paso Walmart at the hands of an avowed white supremacist, Carlson suggested that white supremacy in America was “not a real problem.” In December 2018, Carlson suggested immigrants make the U.S. “dirtier.”
Since Cornelio censored this information, he was also silent about whether he endorses Carlson's views. The MRC has previously gone on record defending replacement theory and insisting it isn't racist or a conspiracy theory.
(In June, MRC intern Peter Kotara raged against the ADL as "a partisan organization dedicated to demonizing right-wingers and labeling them “anti-semites” based solely on their opposition to woke ideology." You wil not be surprised that no evidence was presented to support that hyperbolic description or why opposing anti-Semitism is apparently "woke ideology.")
Afterward, Musk retweetedan account that touted an old screed attacking the ADL from a publication put out by anti-Semiti-adjacent conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche; the MRC censored that, as well as white supremacist Nick Fuentes cheering Musk's anti-ADL campaign. Instead, a Sept. 8 post by Cornelio and Catherine Salgado touted "prominent Jewish voices" endorsing Musk's attack on the ADL:
Prominent authors are chiming in on the growing criticism embroiling the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) amid the group’s latest assault on free speech.
Mark Levin and Scott Adams, both pro-free speech authors and podcast hosts, minced no words when each responded to ADL’s accusation that Elon Musk’s promotion of free speech is antisemitic. “If the ADL takes down X, free speech is gone,” Adams said. Levin echoed Adams’s remarks, directly slamming a Los Angeles Times op-ed that dubiously claimed Musk was attacking Jews. “No, Musk did not blame the Jews, assh*le,” Levin added.
In recent months, Musk has accused ADL of attacking X for its promise to protect the First Amendment. But Musk had had enough. He announced earlier this week his intent to file a potentially “$22 billion” defamation lawsuit against the ADL. As expected, the news triggered the radical left into a frenzy, with ADL Director Jonathan Greenblatt taking to CNN to whitewash his reputation.
But Adams didn’t buy Greenblatt’s excuses. “A promoter of the Fine People Hoax tries to rehabilitate the most destructive organization in America,” Adams said about Greenblatt’s softball interview. “If the ADL takes down X, free speech is gone. You'd only have regime liars like CNN and the ADL. An end to free speech is an existential threat to civilization. We're treating it like a disagreement.”
Wait. Scott Adams? The guy who blew up his cartooning career earlier this year after going on a racist tirade? Yep -- that's who Cornelio and Salgado think is a good character witness for Musk. The MRC was a longtime fan of Adams' increasing right-wing tilt but has been silent about his racist tirade (though Musk effectively approved).
Salgado and Cornelio went on to cite more "prominent Jewish voices" who are at least less racist than Adams:
Another Jewish legal expert, America First Legal founder Stephen Miller, agreed that the ADL is in the wrong. “Speaking as a Jew: ADL is NOT a Jewish organization. It is an ultra-left activist org,” he posted. He added that ADL “pushes radical transgenderism, border erasure, police dismantlement, and the demolition of free speech—deploying rank slander, bullying and character assassination to achieve its aims.”
Rabbi Michael Barclay chimed in, “Thank you Stephen for making it clear that the ADL does not represent most Jews.”
Miller, of course, is the notoriously anti-immigrant former Trump adviser. Barclay is a right-wing pastor who fought against COVID-era restrictions on large gatherings. Salgado and Cornelio made no attempt to fact-check anything any of these people said.
What's Mychal Massie Melting Down Over Now? Topic: WorldNetDaily
Of the many things that disgust me about Democrats, the one thing I find most contemptible is the shameless sincerity with which they lie. It's as if they believe all they need do is tell one lie after another and the public will immediately suspend all common sense and remembrance of their dishonesty. With the able-bodied loyal-lapdog assistance of the apparatchiks in the media, it's easier to catch and hold greased pigs than any of them. Pun intended.
I argue that liberal Democrats are the most depraved forms of humanity. Personally, I would rather have the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) living next door to me than I would a Democrat. At least the KKK member would be honest. I would always know where I stood with him.
Take the Clintons. There are few greater examples of duplicitous double standards as it pertains to criminality on a global scale than the Clintons. And yet they still walk free amongst us, lauded as worthy of honor.
[...]
The Obama woman is indefensibly uncouth and hideously unattractive, but her reported to be backseat-limousine-and-Chicago-bathhouse homosexual husband is responsible for the murder of more of his so-called own people than late Ugandan sociopath president Idi Amin Dada, aka the "Butcher of Uganda."
It's believed that Amin was responsible for killing of some 300,000 of his people during his presidency, which office he held from 1971-1979. Obama bests that record by supporting, funding and even invoking God's praise and worthiness upon Planned Parenthood – the organization responsible for industrialized extermination of some 20 million babies who are referenced as "black." In fact, Obama more than doubled the number of his own people slaughtered in a two-year period over the number Amin slaughtered in eight years.
[...]
But then, this has been the way of Democrats since their inception. Truly, they are the quintessential proof that Satan exists and has children.
This is my objection with the idea of skin color. It's a lie from the pit of hell. Any doctor who is truthful and honest will admit that skin color doesn't exist. They will admit that melanin is neither a color nor a race.
The deceptively Satanic dishonesty of crayon skin colors allows, encourages and rewards acrimony and promotes inferiority as a damning psychological condition that's viewed as normality for the so-called blacks. Those who are the so-called whites are inundated with example after example of anti-social, abnormal and heathen behavior.
Those who practice said aberrant behavior as a lifestyle argue their behavior to be cultural – as if boorishness and reducing oneself to the lowest level of behavior is an acceptable cultural norm. Those who are miscast as "white people" are often accused of being racist ad nauseam because they challenge the normalcy of aberrant social behavior.
Both groups are wrong on every quantifiable level starting with perceptions, unless one is a cultural Marxist, in which case they're gleefully celebrative of the perceptions. It reinforces the Cloward-Piven Strategy and institutionalizes systematic Hegelian Dialectics.
For all of those who have been in an informational blackout that surpasses the blackness of carbon nanotubes, June is the co-opted month of sexual perversion and societal deconstruction. Sexual perversion has – not surprisingly, based upon demonology – seized ownership of the month, with those possessed by blind allegiance to a demonically conceived lie of supposed skin color following in hot pursuit.
As a born-again Christian, ordained minister and Bible teacher as well as student of Scripture, I can tell you without fear of doing injustice to the Word of God, they're both demonic from the pit of hell and both groups are driven and committed to accomplish the same purposes: the destruction of the Bride of Christ (i.e., the Church) and the death of mankind.
Advocates and those who embrace sexual perversion aren't interested in simply not being institutionalized in wards for the emotional and psychologically unbalanced. They insist upon mandated acceptance of their perversion, specifically in the Church, home and school. Those people who are possessed with the manic predisposition to embrace the fallacious heterodoxy that ascribes value, substance and self-worth to melanin demand all dysfunction and anti-social behavior be ignored based solely upon their argument that not to do same is to deny their culture and is racist.
The one group has chosen the month of June to celebrate the rankest forms of sexual deviancy as normal, and reinforce penalties upon those who refuse to embrace that which God condemns. The other group places material, social and spiritual value on melanin as if it were a theology and holy Eucharist.
However, they fail to answer the questions: When did not subscribing to what heretofore has historically been identified as mental illness become a criminal act? When did refusing to disobey the tenets of one's personal faith/religion become a criminal act? When did it become normal to persuade preschool little boys and little girls that they are something other than they were born?
Shame is the industrial counterpart of probable cause. It's brought about by the self-awareness that some aspect of guilt or crime exists in one's life. Shame is a boundary fencing that sets limits on inappropriate behavior in normal people. True sociopaths, however, suffer from no such limits regarding the godless lengths they will exceed in the blink of an eye as mercenary for themselves. This is the dictionary definition of "politician" and specifically a cognitively impaired, slobbering, dead-from-the-neck-up stuttering and stammering embarrassment like Joe Biden.
[...]
The money poured into the mainstream media, and the mainstream media laundered it through their banks and sent it bank to Democrats, specifically the Bidens, in the form of campaign donations, donations to Biden foundations and causes he and his crime family support. It's as close to a perfect crime as one can get. And it works every time.
The only thing required is that the person in charge be a sociopath, i.e., that is be completely without care, concern or remorse for everyone you crap on and destroy in the pursuit of your gain. That renders one free of the capacity for shame or embarrassment.
[...]
It's not that these people, specifically Biden and his family, aren't guilty as sin for everything they're accused and in many instances flagrantly guilty. It's a question of who dares bring them to justice? This is another reason they hate President Trump as they do. They know: 1) He will drain the swamp, and 2) There's nothing on him, or they wouldn't be inventing mickey-mouse crimes.
MRC Miffed Again That Trump Described As Acting Like A Mafia Boss Topic: Media Research Center
We've highlighted how the Media Research Center just hates it when it's pointed out that Donald Trump acts and talks like a mafia boss. Mark Finkelstein grumbled about this again in an Aug. 3 post:
The liberal media has been having a field day accusing Donald Trump of acting like a Mafia boss in connection with allegations that he ordered aides to delete Mar-a-Lago surveillance tapes. We& caught Morning Joedoing just that last week.
Appearing on CNN's State of the UnionSunday morning, Chris Christie piled on. Christie claimed that Trump's team that, allegedly, helped him hide documents and was ordered to delete surveillance tape were "the Corleones without experience." Adding insult to injury, Christie called Trump aide Walter Nauta the "Fredo" of the gang.
Hey, we thought "Fredo" was a moniker reserved for one of CNN's former own: Chris Cuomo And as you'll see, guest host Kasi Hunt couldn't stifle a snorting laugh, and fought for several ensuing seconds not to smile again!
Finkelstein didn't dispute the accuracy of the claim, which means he's whining about it being said.And it's highly ironic given the MRC's own predeliction for making mafia references.As Finkelstein alluded to, his employer loves mocking Cuomo with the "Fredo" smear, and you will find many descriptions of LGBT activists as the "rainbow mafia" despite the fact that they do nothing remotely like any actual mafia member.
The real problem, it appears, is that the MRC doesn't like it when anyone else uses their tactics.
The Media Research Center spent the days before Devon Archer's closed-door testimony before a Republican-led congressional committee hyping the heck out of it as a yet another attack on Hunter Biden. Afterwards, it labored to frame the contents of Archer's testimony as devastating, even though that wasn't exactly the case. An Aug. 1 post by Curtis Houck whined that one non-right-wing media outlet didn't stick with his preferred right-wing narrative:
Mark Swanson played dutiful stenographer for an Aug. 27 Newsmax 
Obama Deramgement Syndrome never ended at WorldNetDaily, even though Barack Obama has been out of the White House for years. WND has amply demonstrated that in recent weeks by 
The Media Research Center 
Newsmax and its columnists were 
The Media Research Center's Bill D'Agostino grumbled in a July 31 
WorldNetDaily has been resorting to 
The Media Research Center's Kevin Tober was in full manufactured-outrage mode in an Aug. 14 
Wayne Allyn Root just 
Actual news outlets 
Elon Musk had a bit of an 
Of the many things that disgust me about Democrats, the one thing I find most contemptible is the shameless sincerity with which they lie. It's as if they believe all they need do is tell one lie after another and the public will immediately suspend all common sense and remembrance of their dishonesty. With the able-bodied loyal-lapdog assistance of the apparatchiks in the media, it's easier to catch and hold greased pigs than any of them. Pun intended.
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