WND Columnist Cites Fake-News Site To Push Idea of 'Deep State' Coup Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily columnist James Zumwalt has a definitelove for fake news. He demostrates that once again in his June 13 column, in which he responds to former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens' idea the the Second Amendment is a relic of another time. Zumwalt argues that there are times when citizens may need to lead a coup against the government, speculating on two recent examples. The first was the Watergate scandal, in which "the abuse of power during Watergate could well have led to a coup." He then writes:
The second incident during Stevens’ lifetime involves an actual attempted coup, evidence of which we see unfolding today. It is clear, 19 months after the 2016 presidential election, that high-level U.S. government players worked to manipulate events to secure the election of Hillary Clinton and, failing to do so, manipulate the ouster of President Donald Trump. The dust has yet to settle from all the activity involved, but when it does the American public will be shocked to learn how a coup attempt may well have been imposed upon it by the Deep State. Had it succeeded, it may have been an armed citizenry left to restore liberty.
Zumwalt's source for the "attempted coup" claim is a pro-Russia conspiracy website called WhatDoesItMean.com. It a notorious fake-news promoter that's been busted repeatedly. The website even admits that a significant portion of its content is fake: "Some events depicted in certain articles on this website are fictitious and any similarity to any person living or dead is merely coincidental. Some other articles may be based on actual events but which in certain cases incidents, characters and timelines have been changed for dramatic purposes. Certain characters may be composites, or entirely fictitious."
In addition to the conspiratorial ranting, the WhatDoesItMean.com article to which Zumwalt links contains a blatant bit of fake news, by including a graphic claiming that CNN used pictures of "the same girl in 3 different Refugee Crisis pictures being saved by 3 different men." In fact, all the images are from a single incident, and there's no evidence CNN ever portrayed them as representing anything else.
Zumwalt's embrace of fake news simply further WND's longstanding reputation as being a promoter of such.
CNS Gives Platform to Heritage Columnist to Cheer Authoritarian Hungarian Leader Topic: CNSNews.com
We've previously noted CNSNews.com's love for right-wing authoritarian Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, painting him as merely a Trump-esque "populist" while whitewashing his racist and xenophobic traits. The whitewashing continued in a May 23 CNS column by the Heritage Foundation's Mike Gonzalez:
Hungary’s maverick prime minister, Viktor Orban, is once again stirring the pot of goulash.
Four years ago, Orban gave his critics ammunition when he said he was constructing an “illiberal democracy.” This month he doubled down, declaring liberal democracy dead and urging other European leaders to stop trying to revive the corpse.
Instead, Orban exhorted them to get busy invoking a new democracy based on Christian principles.
[...]
For many reasons, Orban deserves our attention when he says his ambition—“now we want to hunt really big game” is precisely how he put it—is to change the course of Europe.
He is flushed with an electoral victory in which his party last month captured more votes than all of the opposition combined. He has defeated German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the important philosophical debate over immigration (Orban says it should be lowered). And he has vanquished the leftist billionaire George Soros, who just announced his NGO is leaving Hungary.
Most importantly, the question of values is the fundamental issue confronting the continent. Unlike the United States, modern European states are not founded upon creedal documents that lay out the constituting character and culture of the nation, and how to preserve them.
Gonzalez didn't mention Orban's history of removing governmental checks and balances, turning public broadcasating into propaganda outlets and the whiff of anti-Semitism surrounding his Soros-bashing obsession (despite the fact that a Soros-funded scholarship paid for Orban's college education).
Gonzalez waits until the 12th paragraph to concede that Orban is perhaps not an American ideal, though he whitewashes Orban's ultra-nationalism in the process:
But first it is important to note obvious downsides. Orban is no Thomas Jefferson, and his emphasis on ethnicity, not civic nationalism contained within borders, is sui generis.
If you believe that all men are created equal, are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that governments are instituted “to secure these rights” and “the blessings of liberty,” then the type of state that Orban wants to build is likely not your bag.
[...]
Most important, securing individuals’ liberties is most assuredly not the central purpose of the state he is busy creating. As he said, again, in the 2014 speech:
“The new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. It does not reject the fundamental principles of liberalism such as freedom, and I could list a few more, but it does not make this ideology the central element of state organization, but instead includes a different, special, national approach.” (Emphasis added.)
There is good reason why ethnic, rather than civic, nationalism gives us pause. Though ethnic nationalism is unassailable from a natural rights perspective, it does de-emphasize the individual’s agency by making citizenship (belonging) non-volitional.
Still, Gonzalez is not terribly bothered by all this, declaring that "this is less of an indictment of Orban than one would think" because "he’s building a state for Hungarians, not Americans—and we must remember that even though safeguarding freedom must be our central animating spirit, to do that, we too, must preserve America’s unique culture."
And Gonzalez concludes with a more full-throated endorsement of the authoritarian: "By attempting to reintroduce the Judeo-Christian ethic into a secularized Europe, Orban arguably is giving Europe a chance to do just that. Even if the ethnic model he and his electorate may be pursuing is irreplicable in America or most of Western Europe, the values model could have a lot to offer."
Gonzalez -- and, thus, CNS -- has to overlook a clear history of authoritarianism and anti-Semitism to reach this gushy conclusion.
WND's Massie Clings To His Obama Derangement Topic: WorldNetDaily
President Obama has been out of office for well over a year, but WorldNetDaily columnist Mychal Massie is still clinging to hoary, nasty, never-proven Obama conspiracies.
In his June 11 column, Massie reference "Obama’s alleged immoral behavior in the seamy underbelly of Chicago’s bathhouses." He offered no proof of this, of course -- after all, if there was actual proof, it almost certainly would have surfaced by now. Massie reference the same bogus claim a few months back, using the utterly discredited Larry Sinclair as a backup and falsely asserting that Sinclair had died.
Massie went on to rant about another Obama conspiracy theory: "What has Obama ever accomplished or built? We are told that Bill Ayers – the radical communist and anarchist whose wife spent time on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List – ghostwrote Obama’s book(s)." In fact, not even gossipy biographer Christopher Andersen backed away from any assertion that Ayers "ghostwrote" Obama's book(s).
Massie's Obama derangement continued:
The facts cannot be denied; Obama was a disaster as president.
Obama didn’t build anything or run anything before taking office. He was a community organizer, which is tantamount to being a “mobster.” Community organizers promise they won’t destroy your property or stir up disturbances in exchange for a company or property owner succumbing to their extortion threats.
It can be argued that the only promise Obama kept was that he would “fundamentally change America” – and that he did. It is not ipse dixit to say his health-care program was an unmitigated disaster. His international dealings were pleasing to the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran and other terrorist Muslim groups, but they weren’t favorable to Israel or to America. Was forcing public facilities and schools to allow men to use women’s bathrooms an accomplishment? He stirred the caldron of skin-color discord on a level not witnessed since white Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan.
[...]
It is clear to all who are honest that Obama accomplished next to nothing for the good of America as a whole, and the facts support my assertion.
Yet Massie offered no facts to support said assertion.
MRC's Graham Finally Finds A Fact-Check He Likes -- When It Goes After Bill Clinton Topic: Media Research Center
The point of the Media Research Center's "fact-checking the fact-checkers" campaign, as we'vedocumented, is nothing more than a politically motivated attack on fact-checkers for pointing the falsehoods and outright lies of President Trump and his administration.
The MRC's Tim Graham demonstrates that grudge once again in a June 5 post, which begins by huffing that "Washington Post 'Fact Checker' Glenn Kessler has concentrated most of his firepower on Donald Trump. A June 1 blog posttouted 'President Trump has made 3,251 false or misleading claims in 497 days.'" Graham doesn't dispute this; he's simply complaining that this particular truth has been made public.
Graham then changed his tune, cheering "a tiny nod toward balance" because the Post fact-checked Bill Clinton about his claims of deep debt upon leaving the presidency and finding them wanting. For no other apparently reason than that it engages in some right-wing-friendly Clinton-bashing, Graham proclaims that "We have rated this Washington Post 'fact check' as The Real Deal."
Which further exposes the agenda of Graham's fact-check-bashing enterprise. Only facts that support the MRC's right-wing, pro-Trump agenda are accepted; any media outlet who writes something negative about Trump -- no matter how true it is -- cannot be trusted.
As we've said before: Real journalists check facts; partisan activists attack the fact-checkers.
WND Columnist Pretends That Ranting About 'Transanity' Isn't Intended To Demean Transgenders Topic: WorldNetDaily
Longtime trans-basher Michael Brown writes in his June 15 WorldNetDaily column:
We’ve been saying for years that there will be a pushback against LGBTQ extremism. And it’s not because people are uncaring. Or intolerant. Or bigoted. Or unfair. Instead, the pushback comes as a rational reaction to the rising tide of transanity.
For those not familiar with my use of the term “transanity,” I’m not demeaning the struggles of those who believe they are trapped in the wrong body. Rather, I use the term to describe the denial of biological verities, the idea that reality is whatever you perceive it to be, and the extremist agenda that flows from this mindset.
So, while I have compassion on those who struggle, I stand against the extremist agenda.
Brown is not telling the truth: he does not have compassion for transgender people. We've noted how Brown loves to portray transgenders as cross-dressing boys whose goal is to perv on girls in the bathroom and sneered that "Caitlyn Jenner is just a man in a dress."
And tossing around the term "transanity" is inherently demaning, no matter how Brown tries to spin it.
This particular column by Brown cheers the "pushback against transanity" by refusing to let people use bathrooms by their gender identity,huffing that "girls would just have to overcome the discomfort of seeing male genitalia in their bathrooms and locker rooms. Transanity indeed." Brown offered no evidence that transgender females are eager to display their "male genitalia" in a bathroom.
Brown concluded his column by stating: "May the opposition rise up and do the right thing. And may we continue to study the question of transgender identity, working for a compassionate solution to help people find wholeness from the inside out." Again: If you're rooting for anti-trans "opposition" to "do the right thing" by shutting down any public expression of transgender behavior, you're seeking the opposite of a "compassionate solution."
CNS Does 13 Articles On IG Report, None of Which Report Finding of Anti-Hillary Bias Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com can cover stories when it feels like it (and when doing so advances its right-wing, pro-Trump editorial agenda). Upon the release of the Department of Justice inspector general's report on the FBI investigation of events regarding the 2016 election, CNS churned out a whopping 13 articles over the following day or so:
So dedicated was CNS to putting a pro-Trump spin on the IG report that none of these 13 articles reported that report also uncovered the fact that Comey acted in a biased manner that helped Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton before the election. The report specifically stated that then-FBI director James Comey made a "serious error of judgment" by announcing shortly before the election that he was reopening the email investigation against Clinton.
CNS claims in its mission statement it "endeavors to fairly present all legitimate sides of a story." That apparently doesn't apply if your last name is Clinton.
MRC Desperate To Tar New Facebook Shows As 'Left-Wing' Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Ashley Rae Goldenberg spent an entire June 8 post lashing out at programming Facebook plans to air: "This summer, Facebook is debuting its own slate of original programming, funded by the tech giant. Out of the seven original shows announced, five have clear left-wing agendas." But Goldenberg's definition of "left-wing agenda" is dubious at best.
For instance, among the evidence she cited to claim that an ABC News program would be "left-wing" is ... JoyBehar's comments about "accusing Vice President Mike Pence of being mentally ill for hearing the voice of G-d." Behar is on "The View," which for most of its history was a product of the entertainment side of ABC but moved to a production company under the ABC News umbrella in 2014. Goldenberg also attacked an ABC News reporter as "explicitly political" for reporting that Democratic women were running for office.
Goldenberg then complained that a CNN-related show will 'explicitly feature liberal anchor Anderson Cooper." Among her evidence to back that up: that Cooper "praised former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for her yoga routine."No, reallly.
Goldenberg went on to grouse about a show to be made by viral video producer ATTN:, huffing that "ATTN: has an entire series dedicated to “America Vs,” which is intended to show how much worse off America is than other places around the world" and "even just bluntly 'America should do more to protect its children.'" So protecting children is a "left-wing" position now?
Goldenberg did, however, find a couple shows she didn't find abhorrently "left-wing":
There are only two channels slated to appear on the new Facebook-funded Facebook Watch feature that do not necessarily promote liberal politics. Fox News’ show will be hosted by Carley Shimkus during the weekday morning, Shepard Smith during the weekday afternoon, and Abby Huntsman on the weekends.
Advance Local’s show will be led by the Alabama Media Group, which has brands such as AL.com and It’s a Southern Thing. John Archibald, a writer for AL.com, won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for writing about the U.S. Senate race between Democrat Doug Jones and Roy Moore.
Goldenberg couldn't quite bring herself to admit that Fox News is reflexively conservative (at least when Shep isn't on, anyway). And she doesn't seem aware that Alabama Media Group publishes three major newspapers in Alabama, which under MRC rules makes it hopelessly "liberal" by definition.
We'vedocumented how WorldNetDaily has played stenographer for the right-wing American Center for Law and Justice in trying to turn a molehill of a story into a bogus, Obama-bashing mountain. They're still at it.
An anonymously written June 12 WND article is the latest stab at this:
The U.S. government was informed of the overtly political agenda of OneVoice Israel and OneVoice Palestine – to defeat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – but gave the groups American taxpayer money anyway.
The report from the American Center for Law and Justice comes in its ongoing Freedom of Information Action case against the government over the Obama administration’s granting of taxpayer funds to groups trying to intervene in the election of a close U.S. ally.
[...]
“These are the nonprofit organizations that used digital infrastructure built with U.S. government funds to orchestrate an attempt to unseat the government of Israel in 2015,” ACLJ explained. “The records we obtained include further confirmation of the bias of the OneVoice organizational leadership against Israel and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and in favor of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.”
First: The ACLJ is engaging in some serious fallacious bias by portraying criticism of Netanyahu as being "against Israel."
Second: Any political position OneVoice had for the purposes of the money it received is irrelevant, since that project was unrelated to the Israeli election.
Third: WND and the ACLJ continue to gloss over the fact that a congressional investigationfound that OneVoice fully complied with the terms of the original grant, no grant money was used in the election, and the State Department placed no limitations on the post-grant use of those resources. (The ACLJ's manufactured outrage involves the fact that resources paid for in the original grant were later used in an anti-Netanyahu campaign.)
Fourth: WND and the ACLJ continue to whine about the fact that the son of Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas was an official with OneVoice -- something the ACLJ has portrayed as a recent revelation but has been publicly known since 2003 -- even though the group also included members of Netanyahu's Likud party.
Obama left office nearly two years ago, guys. Time to give up the obsessive hate.
MRC's Double Standard on Pedantry Topic: NewsBusters
In a June 7 MRC NewsBusters post, P.J. Gladnick bashed CNN's Jim Acosta as "a pedant on steroids" for pointing out that President Trump didn't get his facts quite correct when he said to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that Canadians burned down the White House during the War of 1812. Gladnick was quick to declare that "Trump was right" -- even though he also conceded that Canada was not an independent country at the time and the White House was burned by British-led troops. Still, he felt the need to rail against "over-zealous fact-checkers."
Speaking of pedantic, overzealous fact-checkers, Gladnick appears not to have noticed that his NewsBusters colleague, Tom Blumer, was exactly that a couple days earlier. First, he complained that the Associated Press said the Supreme Court "narrowly" ruled in the case of a Colorado baker who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex marraige, asserting that, since the vote was 7-2 and not 5-4, "the justification for this characterization is thin"-- even though the ruling applied only in this particular case and refused to address the larger issue of discrimination for religious reasons.
Blumer then went even more pedantic by attacking the AP for describing said narrowness by writing that ""the big issue in the case, whether a business can refuse to serve gay and lesbian people," has not been decided:
The AP wants readers to believe, based on its use of "whether," that it's likely that future courts will rule that providers of good and services can never refuse to serve gays and lesbians under any circumstances. The Court has clearly stated that "religious and philosophical objections" represent clear and legitimate exceptions to that otherwise true statement, allaying fears that its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges same-sex marriage ruling might be used to banish any right to exercise those objections, or even express them, out of the public square.
The AP should have written that "the big issue in the case, when (i.e., under what circumstances) a business can refuse to serve gay and lesbian people on religious and philosophical grounds," remains undecided. It appears that the degree to which those objections can be "limited" is far smaller than state and local so-called "civil-rights" enforcers had assumed.
Blumer apparently won't admit that discrimination on religious and philosophical grounds is still discrimination, and that the AP's wording, while a little too broad for Blumer's taste, is accurate.
So it seems pedantry is perfectly fine at the MRC -- as long as it's done in service to its ideological agenda.
CNS Dismisses Legal Argument That Contradicts Its Pro-Trump, Pro-Levin Agenda Topic: CNSNews.com
We've detailed how CNSNews.com ran with right-wing radio host Mark Levin's declaration that the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate President Trump is unconstitutional, as if the CNS and its Media Research Center had a business deal with Levin to do so. We overlooked one item from the initial blitz -- a June 4 article by Susan Jones that touted a Trump tweet echoing Levin's argument, then rehashed the entire argument.
Meanwhile, George Conway -- as it happens, the husband of Trump White House adviser Kellyanne Conway -- posted an article that effectively dismantles the argument made by Levin and conservative attorney Stephen Calebresi that Mueller's appointment is unconstitutional.
You'd think that given the amount of space CNS had devoted to advancing Levin's argument -- a whopping nine articles and columns -- it would want to give a fair and balanced airing to an opposing argument. Nope.
A June 14 article by Jones rehashed Trump's 10-day-old tweet before pivoting to an interview Fox News' Laura Ingraham did with Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani to further Levin and Calebresi's argument.It's not until the ninth paragraph that Conway's rebuttal is mentioned -- but only for the purpose of giving Giuliani the opportunity to shoot it down without specifically addressing anything Conway wrote:
In her Wednesday night interview with Giuliani, Ingraham noted that Kellyanne Conway's husband George has written an article debunking arguments that Mueller's appointment as special counsel is unconstitutional.
"Is there any concern about that at the White House?" Ingraham asked Giuliani.
"No concern about it," Giuliani said. "That is not as clear an argument as, let's say, their inability to indict, even their inability to subpoena," he added. "However, I would think it's an undecided question. So how can Conway decide the question?" Giuliani asked. "Maybe he wants to be on the Supreme Court, but I don't think he's going to get the appointment."
Neither Jones nor Giuliani address any specific points made by Conway; Jones simply regurgitates Giuliani's outright dismissal. Jones then concluded her article by repeating yet again specific arguments Calebresi made in support of his view.
CNS' mission statement claims that it puts "a higher premium on balance than spin" and "endeavors to fairly present all legitimate sides of a story." It seems to be doing all it can to violate that mission with a very unfair and unbalanced presentation of a legitimate point of view that interferes with its pro-Trump, pro-Levin agenda.
NEW ARTICLE: The Great Black Kool-Aid Drinker Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily columnist Jesse Lee Peterson is so ridiculously pro-Trump that he calls the president "the Great White Hope" -- apparently oblivious to its original as an racist, anti-black insult. He also bought into the Pizzagate hoax. Read more >>
MRC's Graham Seems OK With Jon Stewart Calling Out The MRC's M.O. Topic: Media Research Center
Jon Stewart called out the right-wing outrage machine as best personified by the Media Research Center, and the MRC's Tim Graham is, surprisingly, only mildly annoyed at the exposure.
In a June 4 post, Graham quotes from a Daily Beast article on Stewart reacting to Samantha Bee's vulgar criticism of Ivanka Trump:
“Please understand that a lot of what the right does, and it’s maybe their greatest genius, is they’ve created a code of conduct that they police, that they themselves don’t have to, in any way, abide,” Stewart said.
The right described him as a “tool of the Obama presidency,” because he made two visits to the White House. Meanwhile, Trump “spoke to the head of Fox [News] and strategized with him on a weekly basis and uses their on-air talent as advisers.” He told liberals, “Don’t get caught in a trap of thinking you can live up to a code of integrity that will be enough for the propagandist right. There isn’t. And so, create your own moral code to live by, but don’t be fooled into trying to make concessions that you think will mollify them.”
[...]
Seeming to imply that Bee shouldn’t have apologized, Stewart said there is nothing anyone can do to “make them give up this ‘We’re the real victims’ game,” because, “it’s a game, it’s a strategy, and it’s working.”
Interestingly, Graham responded only to the last comment with only lame whataboutism: "So if someone insulted Jon Stewart's wife as a feckless (fill in the blank), it would be a 'game' or a 'strategy' for him to object?"
Graham says nothing about Stewart's statement that the right holds liberals to standards they can't be bothered to follow themselves -- perhaps because he knows it's true. After all, the MRC's "news" division CNSNews.com would be much more than a pro-Trump stenographyservice and PR agency for Mark Levin and Judicial Watch if it was forced to follow the same standards regarding bias that the MRC demands from the so-called "liberal media."
And, really, we'velostcountofthenumberoftimes we've caught the MRC in blatant double standards -- excoriating a media person or outlet for something it does itself.
So, yeah, it's probably best that Graham doesn't challenge Stewart on that particular point.
WND Declines Chance To Correct The Record On Lie It Spread About Soros Topic: WorldNetDaily
The idea that George Soros was a Nazi collaborator or sympathizer is a lie that WorldNetDaily hasregularlyforwarded over the years. WND had a chance to correct the record -- but chose not to.
An anonymously written June 9 WND article is a highly selective rewrite of a Washington Post article about Soros during the Trump administration (to which WND curiously fails to link), highlighting his "left-wing agenda" and claiming he spoke from "his plush hotel suite by Lake Zurich."In fact, the Post article described his agenda as "liberal," not "left-wing," and it did not describe Soros' hotel suite in a way that WND could have divined that it was "plush."
The WND article states at one point:
He also admits the barrage of attacks he has faced from his opposition, especially those that have portrayed him as a global puppet master, have blunted his effectiveness.
“It makes it very difficult for me to speak effectively because it can be taken out of context and used against me,” Soros said.
In fact, the full statement in the Post included a reference to the Nazi lie, which WND studiously avoided putting in its own article:
Soros’s willingness to remain in the fray comes as he faces renewed vilification from a wide-ranging group of opponents that includes actress Roseanne Barr and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has been accused of being an all-powerful puppet master, a Nazi sympathizer and the person controlling the Democratic Party.
He acknowledges that the attacks can blunt his impact.
“It makes it very difficult for me to speak effectively because it can be taken out of context and used against me,” Soros said.
[...]
Last month, Soros’s name went viral again when [Roseanne] Barr tweeted that he is “a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews to be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth.”
Among those who retweeted her was the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.
Soros, who said he used false papers at age 13 to survive the Nazi occupation of Hungary, calls such claims “a total fabrication,” adding that they “annoy me greatly.”
If WND was ever interested in addressing the fake news and conspiracy theories that have been a hallmark of its so-called journalism and played a major role in its recent near-death experience, this was an opportunity to try and turn that image around. That it refuses to do so tells us that it still doesn't care about real journalism -- and that WND will likely be facing another extinction-level event in the not-too-distant future.
CNS Pushes Trump White House Spin on Disinvited Eagles Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com treated the controversy over the Super Bowl winner Philadelphia Eagles not visiting the White House the way it treats everything regarding President Trump: with a heavy pro-Trump spin that fudges or completely ignores inconvenient facts.
A June 4 article by Craig Bannister noted how the "planned White House reception for the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles has been canceled and replaced with an event design to celebrate America and honor its heroes" after several Eagles players planned to boycott it "in protest of President Donald Trump’s comments denouncing player protests during the playing of the National Anthem before games." Bannister added that "During the 2017 season, some Eagles players, led by safety Malcolm Jenkins, protested during the playing of the National Anthem."
Bannister is suggesting that Eagles players took a knee, but all he offers as evidence is a blog post he wrote last fall compiling one week of protests, in which he noted that "Safety Malcolm Jenkins and Safety Rodney McLeod raised a fist. Defensive end Chris Long placed an arm around Jenkins." (In fact, no Eagles players kneeled last season.)
The next day, a "news" article by Susan Jones had more information on the revised event, though she did concede that "Press reports noted that none of the Eagles kneeled when the anthem played last season, although Safetys Malcolm Jenkins and Rodney McLeod raised a fist."
Bannister touted the event itself in a June 5 post:
President Donald Trump hosted a “Celebration of America” at the White House Tuesday, replacing the originally-scheduled reception honoring the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles after team told the White House at the last minute that most of the players would not attend.
In place of the reception, Trump delivered remarks to the one thousand fans, who had been invited to the original reception. Military bands and choirs offered renditions of patriotic songs, such as The National Anthem and “God Bless America” as the crowd joined Trump in singing along.
Unmentioned by Bannister: Trump had trouble singing "God Bless America" and simply gave up on it at one point.
Melanie Arter, meanwhile, dutifully transcribed White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders accusing the Eagles of pulling a "political stunt." Arter also dutifully transcribed Trump's blather at the event while also noting that a man attending it kneeled during the National Anthem.
Obama (And Gay, And Netflix) Derangement Syndrome Topic: WorldNetDaily
About a week or so ago, I received an irate email from one of my readers stating that they were going to cancel their subscription to the streaming TV service Netflix due to that network recently signing a $50 million production deal with none other than former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle. As reported in WND, the agreement will have the Obamas producing various content, including at least one scripted series, as well as various documentaries and other features.
Although I certainly understand my reader’s disgust, I was a little surprised. One reason for this is because I had heard about the Netflix deal with the Obamas about a week prior to the deal having been inked and reported.
I was also surprised that my reader and fellow Netflix binger was so taken aback by the move. Although – as I’ve indicated before here – I do enjoy certain programming on that particular network, it’s always been pretty clear to me that Netflix has no problem presenting much of the same leftist, pop-culture social engineering as broadcast networks.
[...]
For example, “Orange is the New Black” may be Netflix’s most popular original series. It’s a comedy-drama that features the exploits of female inmates in a minimum-security federal prison. Like most of the network’s original shows, it is very well-produced, but it’s difficult to get around the offering being little more than a platform for lesbianism. As one might imagine, since these are convicted criminals we’re talking about, they make for some really skeevy lesbians too.
[...]
Netflix also streams most of the most popular broadcast TV series as well. These have become abject propaganda, whether dramas, comedies, or action features. At this point I’ve lost count of the veiled slurs against Donald Trump that are contained within the scripting. Add to this the inclusion of homosexual characters having homosexual problems with no context whatsoever (like in a superhero series, for example), the routine validation of Black Lives Matter and the summary worship of all that pays homage to far left orthodoxy, and it’s easy to see how anyone uninitiated into leftist doctrine could grow disgusted.
As far as lining the pockets of two people who should be languishing in a federal penitentiary, such nepotistic sleazery should be expected between the Obamas and media types. For a veritable compendium of our former president’s crimes, one need only examine my archive.
WorldNetDaily columnist James Zumwalt has a definite love for fake news. He demostrates that once again in his June 13 column, in which he responds to former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens' idea the the Second Amendment is a relic of another time. Zumwalt argues that there are times when citizens may need to lead a coup against the government, speculating on two recent examples. The first was the Watergate scandal, in which "the abuse of power during Watergate could well have led to a coup." He then writes:
We've 
President Obama has been out of office for well over a year, but WorldNetDaily columnist Mychal Massie is still clinging to hoary, nasty, never-proven Obama conspiracies.
The point of the Media Research Center's "fact-checking the fact-checkers" campaign, as 
Longtime trans-basher Michael Brown writes in his June 15 WorldNetDaily 
CNSNews.com can cover stories when it feels like it (and when doing so advances its right-wing, pro-Trump editorial agenda). Upon the release of the Department of Justice inspector general's report on the FBI investigation of events regarding the 2016 election, CNS churned out a whopping 13 articles over the following day or so:
The Media Research Center's Ashley Rae Goldenberg spent an entire June 8 
We've
In a June 7 MRC NewsBusters 
We've 
Jon Stewart called out the right-wing outrage machine as best personified by the Media Research Center, and the MRC's Tim Graham is, surprisingly, only mildly annoyed at the exposure. 
The idea that George Soros was a Nazi collaborator or sympathizer is 
CNSNews.com treated the controversy over the Super Bowl winner Philadelphia Eagles not visiting the White House the way it treats everything regarding President Trump: with a heavy pro-Trump spin that fudges or completely ignores inconvenient facts.
About a week or so ago, I received an irate email from one of my readers stating that they were going to cancel their subscription to the streaming TV service Netflix due to that network recently signing a $50 million production deal with none other than former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle. As reported in WND, the agreement will have the Obamas producing various content, including at least one scripted series, as well as various documentaries and other features.
