MRC Loves It When Media Conform To Its Pro-Trump Agenda Topic: Media Research Center
We already know the Media Research Center attacks any media outlet that lacks a sufficiently pro-Trump bias. Butit also hands out gold stars on occasion to news stories told in a way that supports the MRC's pro-Trump agenda.
In a July 27 post, Julia Seymour was delighted that some outlets properly, in her view -- credited Trump for a high GDP increase last quarter:
CNBC’s Squawk on the Street and Bloomberg.com viewed the latest U.S. GDP report as good news for the Trump administration.
The 4.1 percent second-quarter GDP estimate announced July 27, was the best quarterly pace in almost four years. Bloomberg.com called it a “Win for Trump” that same day.
Squawk on the Streetco-anchor Sara Eisen said, “Though, look, he is right to take a victory lap here because there are places in this GDP report he can point to to show that his policy is working.”
Seymour was disappointed, however, that it "remained a question for CNBC" that the economy would achieve the 3 percent annual growth Trump has predicted.
In an Aug. 9 post, Nicholas Fondacaro ranted that NBC covered the story of Melania Trump's parents becoming citizens, having "speculated that they received special treatment in the process and possibly used chain migration, a program the President opposes, even though the process still exists and still legal."Fondacaro pretended he could divine the purported emotions and agenda of the reporter and anchor involved, calling anchor Lester Hold "seemingly offended" by the story and insisting that the reporter"gloated" while reporting it and is "often resentful."
Fondacaro then described another network's coverage to show how NBC should have behaved:
In sharp contrast,CBS Evening News was congratulatory to the First Lady’s parents. “Melania Trump's parents became U.S. citizen today! Viktor and Amalija Knavs, natives of Slovenia took the oath at a ceremony in New York City. They had been living in the U.S permanent residents,” reported anchor Jeff Glor.
Not only was CBS welcoming to the Knavses but they completely separated them from their story on Trump’s immigration policy. They kicked off the broadcast by reporting on a federal judge who blocked the administration from deporting asylum seekers who were already in the judicial process. The news brief on Melania’s parents was the second-to-last story they covered that evening.
So that's what the MRC wants -- uncritical praise of Trump. Remember that the next time it offers what it claims to be "media research."
CNS Columnist Freaks Out Over Gay Content in 'Anne of Green Gables' Remake Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com columnist Eric Metaxas has an anti-gay freakout over the idea of gay characters in "Anne With an E," Netflix's revisionist take on "Anne of Green Gables," in his Aug. 7 column:
It’s been filmed a number of times over the years. And given the non-stop campaign to normalize the LGBT lifestyle, it should come as no surprise that the most recent version introduces several homosexual characters.
The Netflix series, titled “Anne with an E,” just began its second season. The episodes are charming—until you get to episode three, in which Anne, her friend Diana Berry, and a boy named Cole attend a gathering at the home of Diana’s great-Aunt Josephine. It turns out the party is a “queer soiree,” featuring men dressed as women, and wearing heavy makeup, and women dressed as men. They are there to honor the memory of Josephine’s departed “partner,” Gertrude.
Looking around her, Anne exclaims to Diana, “Isn’t this the most amazing group of people!” Well, I can’t help thinking that if a sheltered young girl like Anne actually encountered cross-dressing men and women in 1908, she would be shocked and probably frightened—not delighted.
[...]
Diana—who is nonplussed by her discovery of her aunt’s relationship with Gertrude, tells Anne their love affair was “unnatural.”
But the boy Cole—a character who is invented for the TV series—soon straightens her out. “If your aunt lived her life feeling … that she was broken, defective, or unnatural, and one day she met someone that made her realize that wasn’t true … shouldn’t we be happy for her?”
Cole later confesses to Aunt Josephine that he thinks he is “like you and Gertrude.” Josephine tells him, “You have a life of such joy before you.”
And in case you missed the gay-is-good point of the episode, the writers have Anne asking another character: “How can there be anything wrong with a life if it’s spent with a person you love?”
To answer Anne’s question: Plenty. People have suffered greatly through inappropriate “love”: For instance, a child whose father decided to love someone other than his wife, or a child who is loved, in an erotic way, by an adult.
It’s unlikely that Anne would ever have heard a sermon about homosexuality in her day and age. If she had, she would have known what scripture teaches about homosexual relationships: that they run counter to God’s plan for human flourishing.
Note how quickly Metaxas likens being gay to pedophilia. What he doesn't note, of course, that the seeds for this interpretation of Aunt Josephine appear in the original story, according to series creator Moira Walley-Beckett: "Upon reading [the novel] again as an adult, I was wondering about Aunt Jo. ... In the book, she’s a spinster and she’s just a bit of a curmudgeon, and that’s kind of it. So I’m like, ‘Well, she coming to the Barrys for a month and she’s grieving,’ that’s why I decided to justify why she’s there: Who is she grieving?"
Another WND-Linked Author Turns Anti-Semitic Topic: WorldNetDaily
Earlier this year, WorldNetDaily ever-so-slowly backed away from Paul Nehlen -- a candidate it heavily hyped and whose book WND published -- after he heavily embraced anti-Semitism and white nationalism (though WND has yet to make a public statement about the status of its relationship with him). Now another WND-linked author has gone down a similar path.
Walid Shoebat was a rock star at WND in the early 2000s. As we documented, WND loved the right-wing-friendly story he told about being a Palestinian terrorist who became a "Christian Zionist" (never mind the scant evidence that his terrorist past ever actually happened) -- not only did WND editor Joseph Farah write a fawning profile of him and touting his new self-proclaimed mission "to go to Americans and churches and anywhere I can go and explain God’s plan for the state of Israel, and how God intended Israel to be a light unto the nations, and how all of our hatred toward Israel is really evil." Shoebat was also the star attraction in the 2008 WND-published anthology "Why We Left Islam," one of the few contributors who was given a full bio.
Well, Shoebat appears to have soured on the whole "Christian Zionist" thing to the point where he's gone full-blown anti-Semitic. Israel National News reports:
Walid Shoebat’s foundation has a website, Shoebat.com that would expose persecution of Christians and Jews in the War on Terror. I hadn’t looked at the site in a while but when I went there I was greeted by a headline that read, “Judaism is Satanic”. It also featured a strange trailer from either the Arab miniseries A Horseman Without A Horse which is based on the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and was used to foment pogroms since the 19th century on Jews or else from Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ which is just as bad.
When I scrolled down on the website I was besieged with all manner of mendacious lecturing by Walid’s son, Theodore, describing the Talmud and Judaism as Satanic devices, also spewing out attacks on gays. The messages were the same as those on militant Islamist websites or those of Neo-Nazis, yet declared to be true representations of Christian doctrine and “telling it like it is” about the Jews who “killed God.” Some readers even carried on further: The Jews in Israel aren’t real Jews; The Talmud teaches ideas from the Devil; The Church revealed the devil worship of the Jews and on and on. Readers can see all this by visiting the website. I recommend viewing it on the Internet Archive here in case it has been removed by the time you read this article, but it was up at this writing.
At first, I thought maybe the site was hacked or that Walid wasn’t aware of what his son, Theodore was doing; the attacks on Judaism and Jews, the attacks on gays, his militant and almost persecutorial representations of Christianity that were Taliban-like behavior. But Walid told me everything was right, or so he said, and followed his 27 year-old son’s ideas. Now, the Shoebats say the Jews, not the Romans, killed Christ, and how Judaism is a Satanic cult. Walid and son described me as a “money grubbing Jew.”
Walid asked me if I wanted to do an interview with his son. But when his son called me he began insulting me with obscenity-laced accusations and nonsense.. The Palestinian militant came out, it seems, in both Walid and his son. This wasn’t a misunderstanding of Judaism, this was every bit as anti-Semitic as Hamas.
WND hasn't written much about Shoebat in recent years. The last time appears to be 2015, when WND soured on him itself after he attacked Farah's favorite messianic rabbi and meal ticket, Jonathan Cahn, by claiming his Shemitah theory linking stock market crashes to biblically defined cycles was somehow supportive of Adolf Hitler. The article, by Leo Hohmann, is pretty much a reversal of WND's earlier praise for Shoebat, dismissiing the origin story it one touted by stating that Shoebat was "claiming to be a former Palestinian terrorist turned Christian" who wrote an "angry rant."
Hohmann didn't report how Shoebat was a onetime WND star featured in a book it published, but it did quote Farah lamenting Shoebat's attack: "I have always considered Walid a good friend. Normally good friends call one another when they have a problem with the other. That’s what Matthew 18 is all about. Instead, he seems to be lashing out in anger and rage at both friends and at people like Jonathan and Mark Biltz whose only offense is bringing people to the Lord and to repentance and to the Bible. You expect anger and rage from people hostile to the Gospel, but not from friends who profess to be believers." Farah gave no indication that he or anyone else at WND reached out to Shoebat for this article.
Meanwhile, "Why We Left Islam" is still for sale at the WND online store at this writing, albeit heavily discounted to $2.99.
MRC Does Damage-Control Work For Makers of Right-Wing Roe v. Wade Film Topic: Media Research Center
Last month, Newsmax's James Hirsen tried to do damage control over reports of production problems on a right-wing film purporting to tell the "untold story "of the Roe v. Wade court case that legalized abortion across the U.S. Now the damage-control baton has passed to the Media Research Center.
In an Aug. 10 post, the MRC's Gabriel Hays attacked the "fake news" that the "liberal media" has been spreading about the in-porudiction film. But Hays never identifies anything that's "fake" about the reporting, just repeats director Nick Loeb's assertions that everything is fine. Most outlets that reported on the film's problems got a dismissive label by Hays: the Daily Beast is "lefty," Jezebel is "radical feminist," and apparently even the Hollywood Reporter is "liberal" by implication. By contrast, he quoted from a Washington Times article about the film but never labeled it as conservative.
Hays portrayed Loeb and his associates involved in the film's production as depicting "what's really going on," as if they don't have a vested interest in spinning things to their benefit:
In terms of what’s really going on with “Roe V. Wade,” the director and several other members of the team stated that it is running smoothly and that the bad press covering the production is just that. In terms of the reports of graphic abortion imagery present in the film, Loeb seemed surprised that anyone claimed to have that kind of information, asking “How do you know what’s in a film until it’s done?”
The Hollywood Reporter’s claims that the movie presented the typical, debunked anti-abortion talking points. She stated that “The filmmakers based the story on 40 research books on the subject and used ‘two sources for every fact we stated.’”
[...]
Those who are actually working on this controversial film see this as a concentrated attack by the fake news media to cripple their work. Mr. Loeb stated, “The ‘fake news’ is incredible. They’re falling all over themselves to lie and spin the truth.”
Hays doesn't bother to note any evidence Loeb has supplied to prove his claim that everybody but him is spreading "fake news" about the production, let alone consider the possibility that Loeb himself is the one spreading "fake news" in order to counter a mounting PR disaster.
Farah Tries Emotion To Sell This Year's WND Holy Land Tour Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily has a bit of a checkered record regarding its recent annual tours to the Holy Land -- it repeatedly pushed back deadlines for the 2016 tour to get enough people to show up (and then Joseph Farah and Jonathan Cahn staged a publicity stunt at the Temple Mount), and last year WND all but promised meetings between tour-goers and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman (neither of which ultimately happened, as far as we know).
This year, Farah is going for the shamelessly emotional appeal. One column he wrote promoting the tour, first published Aug. 13, starts with a brief explanation of how he moved from thinking "as a teenager during the 1967 Six-Day War, I found myself scouring the news reports for hope that the Arab powers would put an end to this “neo-colonial” intrusion into a region that rightfully belonged to the Arabs" (if the birth date on his Wikipedia page is correct, he would have been 13 at that time, making him unually precocious, if not Zelig-like, about poliltics) to going to "Jesus directing my life."
Farah then ramped up the shamelessness while segueing into a hard sell:
Is God tugging at your heart to visit His land? If so, I want to tell you about two opportunities to come with me and my wife, Elizabeth, to Israel to answer that calling in obedience. I promise you it will change your life, strengthen your faith, inspire you and provide you with an unforgettable spiritual experience of a lifetime.
Option No. 1: The first opportunity is coming up this November, and you will need to act fast. It’s your chance to get to Israel in this biblically historic 70th anniversary year of 2018.
Here’s just some of what you will get to experience under the direction of the most unlikely of tour leaders, plus the assistance of the greatest Israeli guides and the logistical support of the best tour company in the Jewish state:
[...]
The theme of this tour in “restoration,” and that’s what those on the tour will experience personally while seeing the undeniable evidence of the Kingdom restoration already taking place in Israel today.
You will never be quite the same after this trip. It’s a refreshing of the spirit. It’s a connection with your Savior that will never be broken.
And that’s option No. 1, but you better act fast to secure the best airline fares available. If this sounds like the trip for you, visit the WND Israel Tour website now and call Coral Tours at 866-267-2511 today. Time is of the essence. Don’t put it off for another day.
After describing the second tour WND is also offering, Farah added "In fact, why choose? Why not do both?"
Strange how Farah has the money to go on all these Holy Land tours when the website he runs is circling the drain (again).
CNS Ignored Report On Catholic Sex Abuse Scandals Until Bill Donohue Attacked It Topic: CNSNews.com
The leaders of CNSNews.com -- specifically, editor in chief Terry Jeffrey and managing editor Michael W. Chapman -- are so Catholic, they feel they can use the "news" operation they run to lecture the pope on religious priniciples. So when a grand jury report was released last week detailing sexual abuse cases involving Catholic clergy in Pennsylvania, you'd thinkg that Jeffrey and Chapman -- being the double-plus-good Catholics they are -- would want to treat this report seriously and report on it journalistically (or, at least, what passes for that at CNS).
Well, not so much. The report was released on Aug. 14; for three days, CNS reported nothing whatsoever about it -- and, to date, it has yet to run a "news" article about the report.
The first mention of the report of any kind at CNS was three long days later, when it published a lengthy screed by its favorite Catholic, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League (on whose board of advisors Jeffrey and Chapman's boss, Brent Bozell, sits), purporting to "debunk many of the myths, and indeed lies, that mar the report and/or interpretations of it" and insist that "it's been a homosexual scandal all along."
Donohue also desperately repeated his fallacious attacks on the John Jay College report for previously shutting down his anti-gay argument by pointing out the fact that even though many of the priests' victims were boys and young men, that does not equate to the priests being gay since one does not need a homosexualidentity to commit homosexual acts:
It won't help to say that the John Jay report did not conclude that homosexuals committed most of the offenses, even though their own data undercut their interpretation. The professors played the self-identity game: they said that many of the men who had sex with adolescent males did not identify as gay. So what?
If a straight priest who abused a teenage girl said he thinks of himself as gay, would the researchers list him as such? Self-identification that does not square with the truth is a lie. I recently spoke to a person in the media about this. I told him that I consider myself to be a Chinese dwarf—even though it is obvious that I am a big Irishman—and asked if he would describe me that way in his story. He got my point.
Donohue is playing a game as well, and it's called homophobia.
The only other article CNS has run regarding the scandal is a blog post by Chapman the same day featuring Cardinal Raymond Burke -- a right-wing cleric who was removed by Pope Francis as the head of the Vatican's high court -- attacking the "homosexual culture" in the church that purportedly led to the scandal and repeating Donohue's talking points about blaming gays for it.
There are other things CNS hasn't done besides not run an fair and objective "news" article on the scandal despite the fact that it calls itself a "news" operation. It has not published a voice on the scandal that is not right-wing and anti-gay, let alone allow that voice to rebut the homophobia of Donohue and Burke. It did not disclose in Donohue's post that Bozell is on the board of the organization Donohue runs. violating conflict-of-interest guidelines. It did not mention that the pope removed Burked from a Vatican post.
And the same day CNS published Dononue's screed, his Catholic League issued a wildly insensitive tweet attacking "conservative Catholics" (isn't that what Donohue is?) for allegedly being "singularly incapable of making a cogent argument, so all they do is vent like little boys." CNS hasn't said a thing about that.
WND Touts Jordan Witness Flip, Doesn't Mention Pressure Campaign To Flip Them Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's Art Moore writes in an Aug. 9 article:
A former Ohio State University wrestling coach says comments attributed to him regarding Rep. Jim Jordan were not accurate or were misconstrued by media, distancing himself from the Ohio Republican’s chief accuser, who maintains the congressman ignored claims of sexual abuse while serving as an assistant coach more than two decades ago.
Mark Coleman, who wrestled at OSU and later served as an assistant wrestling coach, said that “at no time did I ever say or have any direct knowledge that Jim Jordan knew of Dr. Richard Strauss’s inappropriate behavior.”
“I have nothing but respect for Jim Jordan as I have known him for more than 30 years and know him to be of impeccable character,” said Coleman, a former UFC champion.
[...]
Coleman made it clear he is distancing himself from the primary accuser in the case, Mike DiSabato, who has brought several lawsuits against OSU in recent years.
“Mike DiSabato and his PR representative have released information and made statements publicly without my authorization and, in my opinion, are using them to exploit and embarrass The Ohio State University,” said Coleman.
DiSabato, he said, “is not my manager and does not speak for me.”
But Moore is not telling the full story about Coleman's flip. First, as TPM reports, Coleman's revised claims were released from the PR firm that is working for Jordan to counter the charges.
Second, Moore doesn't report Coleman's original comments so readers can examine how they were allegedly not accurate or "misconstrued." TPM reports:
This stands in stark contrast to Coleman’s statement to the Wall Street Journal in early July.
Coleman had been one of the nine wrestlers who asserted that then-assistant coach Jordan definitely knew about the widespread culture of sexual abuse on the team, especially at the hands of team doctor Richard Strauss, took no action at the time and later lied about his knowledge.
“There’s no way unless he’s got dementia or something that he’s got no recollection of what was going on at Ohio State,” Coleman said in July. “I have nothing but respect for this man, I love this man, but he knew as far as I’m concerned.”
There seems to be little room for misconstruing there.
Third, TPM also reports -- where Moore didn't -- that there is apparently a pressure campaign against Jordan's accusers:
The rumors of a pressure campaign have long been swirling around this case, as reports surfaced in early August that [former Ohio State couch Russ] Hellickson, at Jordan’s behest, was using his power over and relationship to his former wrestlers to push them to recant their accusations against the congressman.
All of that would seem to be relevant information -- information that Moore should have reported but chose not to. But Jordan is a key ally of President Trump and right-wing senators, and WND has apparently decided it must protect him.
MRC Continues To Be Callous About The Lives of Journalists Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's callous attitude toward the safety of journalists has been notorious, and it hasn't stopped. Typical is an Aug. 1 post by Scott Whitlock:
According to Chuck Todd, booing and nasty language towards reporters could well lead to the killing of journalists. Specifically, he compared a Trump rally this week to the 2017 horrific car killing (and injuring of multiple others) by a racist white nationalist in Charlottesville. Todd began by lecturing hisMTP Dailyviewers on Wednesday: “Tonight, I'm obsessed with how we're no longer obsessed over the things President Trump says.”
The MSNBC journalist then made his vile comparison. First, he played a clip of the President talking about fake news. Todd sneered: “But when you ignore this, you get this... And this kind of unfocused visceral anger at the other side of really neutral people like folks in the press corps, it can lead to this.” Then, he played 2017 footage of accused white nationalist James Alex Fields Jr., who was charged with murdering Heather Heyer via his car.
Todd concluded by huffing: “This is not normal. We shouldn't be in the business of just shrugging our shoulders and normalizing it.”
Whitlock then played the ol' whataboutism card: "We shouldn’t be normalizing violence. That's true. Then why did Todd in 2017 by bringing on Antifa supporter Mark Bray to promote the violent organization. Todd oozed at the time: 'Mark Bray, you are writing this book Antifa, the Anti-Fascist Handbook. Explain this movement and its roots.'"
Whitlock seems to have overlooked the word "explain." Bray is a scholar, not an activist, and his explanation of why antifa protesters may resort to violence is often presented by right-wingers as an endorsement of it.
The same day, Nicholas Fondacaro took yet another shot at the MRC's favorite enemy, CNN's Jim Acosta, for being "worried that one day, one of those Trump supporters would snap and try to hurt a journalist, or worse. 'I think it's been dangerous for some time. I was worried during the campaign that a journalist was going to get hurt and it has been building,' he opined. 'But when you refer to members of the press as the enemy of the people, you're essentially putting targets on our backs.'" Fondacaro then dismissed Acosta and his CNN ilk by trotting out the old canard of denouncing non-conservatives as "elitists" who "look down their noses at Trump supporters in the heartland."
Curtis Houck then mocked reporter April Ryan for allegedly having "dismissed the harassment and threats against the White House Press Secretary and melodramatically surmised that Jim Acosta’s 'life...was in jeopardy' at Tuesday’s Trump rally." Houck then ratcheted up his dismissive attitude: "Later, she also showed a visceral disdain for conservatives and Second Amendment supporters by brushing aside that part of the Constitution in favor of the First Amendment which many journalists seem to think only concerns them."
And Ryan Foley complained that "During Sunday’s edition of MSNBC Live With Alex Witt, the panel engaged in some serious hyperbole while discussing President Trump’s most recent tweet declaring the press the enemy of the people with two predicting that his “incendiary” rhetoric towards the press will lead to someone in the media to “get injured or possibly killed.” He added : "As always, the liberal media will never cease to disappoint when it comes to predicting that, when push comes to shove, they make things about themselves."
Well, yeah, people do tend to get a tad self-centered when the think their lives are in danger for simply doing their jobs -- as Foley undoubtedly would if he ever felt his life was threatened because he worked for the MRC.
And a separate post by Fondacaro showed just how self-centered he and the MRC are acting: "All weekend, the liberal media had been decrying Trump’s attacks on the press and suggested it would lead to violence against them. Clearly, they only care for themselves because what do they think will come from their own anti-Trump and anti-conservative 'hate movement'? This is just another way to delegitamize perfectly reasonable criticism of the the media." Fondacaro didn't how Trump denouncing the media as the "enemy of the people" -- or even the MRC's war on Acosta -- is "perfectly reasonable."
It seems that a little violence, real or threatened, shouldn't be allowed to get in the way of the MRC's anti-media mission.
Meanwhile, April Ryan now has a bodyguard due to death threats, and a caller to C-SPAN said of CNN's Brian Stelter and Don Lemon, both also frequent targets of the MRC: "If I see them, I'm going to shoot them." The MRC has yet to weigh in on either incident, let alone explain if those things are "perfectly reasonable."
WND Columnists Return to Fretting About South Africa, 'White Genocide' Topic: WorldNetDaily
A couple days ago, we noted the interest from Newsmax columnists in the purported "white genocide" of white farmers in South Africa -- completely ignoring the fact that blacks in Sough Africa are murdered at a much higher rate, making them the real "genocide." Well, the usual WorldNetDaily writers have been on the case as well, having first obsessed about it last year.
Ilana Mercer -- a South African native who still misses apartheid -- launched into a tirade of Obama derangement, railing against the "modern day messiah" and the "estrogen-oozing amoebas of mainstream media" who liked him. She asserted that Obama, in a recent visit to South Africa where he allegedly "laud[ed] genial thug Cyril Ramaphosa," was "silent about the systematic ethnic cleansing and extermination, in ways that beggar belief, of South African farmers in particular, and whites in general. Does the barefaced Barack care that white men, women and children are being butchered like animals, their bodies often displayed like trophies by their proud black assassins?" She also asserted that 3,000 white farmers have been "slaughtered" since 2011,
That's a highly dubious number. Australia's ABC found that less than 80 murders annually took place on farms since 2011 -- and that number includes whites and blacks. Also, as we previously noted, Ramaphosa is a moderate who has tried to slow down the rush by extremists to forced land redistribution.
Mercer, needless to say, is silent about the thousands of blacks murdered every year in South Africa. Instead, she praises Russian leader Vladimir Putin for having "purportedly offered to give shelter to 15,000 white South African farmers, so far, recognizing them for the true refugees they are." She added: "It should be news to no one that American refugee policies favor the Bantu peoples of Africa over its Boers. ... Whichever way you slice it, on matters South Africa, Russia is the virtuous one."
Jane Chastain, meanwhile, stayed away from the "genocide" claims and focused on the current attempt by the black-led South African government to take the land of white farmers without what they consider just compensation to spin an alternative history of apartheid:
South Africa’s early settlers were a racial mix. They included black tribes, primarily Xhosa and Zulus, who had migrated from the north; Europeans from Portugal, who arrived in the 1400s, and the Dutch and the English who arrived in the 1600s.
The blacks were organized by tribes and preferred the bush country where game was plentiful, while the white settlers took to farming and gradually created towns and cities. After some time, blacks began migrating to the cities and began to adapt to the advances that had taken place there.
In the 20th century, other black tribesmen began to travel and see the progress their relatives had made in the cities. This trickle of migration soon turned into a flood. Legislation then was enacted to control the flow of people into the cities. In 1948, the white-led government instituted a system of racial segregation known as apartheid to protect its minority.
By the time our country began to beat up on South Africa, this segregation practice – while still on the books – existed in name only and was mostly economic, as it has been in our country.
But as the Smithsonian points out, how strictly apartheid was practiced in the final hears before its repealed doesn't mean that the economic effects were not significant or went away at apartheid's end: At apartheid's end, whites made up of 10 percent of South Africa's population but owned 90 percent of its land. As we noted, such inequity remains a key contention in the land redistribution: whites own or control as much as three-fourths of South Africa's farmland, while blacks own just over 1 percent.
Chastain also argued that apartheid wasn't so bad because "black citizens already had the vote in all but the national elections." That was actually meaningless because blacks were not considered full citizens of South Africa but, rather, of "homelands," supposedly autonomous nation-states inside the country. Even the Tricameral Parliament established in 1983 and lasting until apartheid's demise excluded representation from the black majority, restricting that to whites, native indians and the multi-ethnic "coloured" population.
Simpson then complained that "We forced South Africa into holding premature “universal” elections and now the rest is history – a history the liberal media is unwilling to tell." If only Simpson was as eager to tell the full history of apartheid.
CNS Yet Again Puts Pro-Trump Stenography Before Fact-Checking Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com's Jonathan Mizrahi lets more false Trump White House stenography go unchallenged in an Aug. 1 article:
In a press briefing on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that, “while we certainly support freedom of the press, we also support freedom of speech, and we think that those things go hand in hand.”
On Tuesday night, CNN reporter Jim Acosta was heckled by Trump supporters at the president’s rally in Tampa Bay, Fla., chanting things such as “fake news” and “CNN sucks.”
“When it comes to the media, the president does think that the media holds a responsibility,” Sanders said in response to a question about the treatment of Acosta. “We fully support a free press, but there also comes a high level of responsibility with that.”
Sanders continued to explain that the media has reported classified information that has been harmful to the United States on numerous occasions, citing an instance when it was reported that the United States was able to listen to Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone in the late 90’s, reporting that ultimately caused the loss of valuable intelligence.
In fact, as the Washington Post explained, the claim that the U.S. was monitoring bin Laden's satellite phone had been reported in the media as early as 1996 -- well before a 1998 Washington Times article that Sanders and others have blamed as the "leak" that purportedly stopped bin Laden's use of his satellite phone -- meaning the information was already in the public domain. Needless to say, (Sanders did not mention that the "the media" she's attacking over this supposed leak is a right-leaning newspaper.) It's more likely that bin Laden stopped using the phone as a reaction to a 1998 U.S. cruise missile attack on his traning camps.
Meanwhile, over at the Washington Times, highly biased pro-Trump writer Ronald Kessler offered his own spin, blaming a Washington Post story that ran four days before the Times story did and citing anonymous "CIA officials" as supporting the claim that the article caused bin Laden to stop using his satellite phone. Kessler didn't specifically contradict any of the claims the Post made, instead insisting that Sanders' claim was "accurate."
This is just the latest example of CNS putting pro-Trump stenography before basic journalistic functions like fact-checking.
On a July night in 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and their five children were brutally murdered by Bolshevik assassins at the direct order of Vladimir Lenin or at least with his complicity. Those who agreed to accompany the tsar and his family into imprisonment were also killed. All were shot, bayoneted and clubbed to death and the bodies taken to the Koptyoki forest where they were stripped and mutilated. The bodies were first thrown down a mine shaft, but later hastily buried in unmarked graves in several locations.
By virtue of both accident and search over the years, most of the bodies have been found. On July 18, 1998, the bodies of the tsar, his wife and all but two children were laid to rest amid great pomp and ceremony in St. Petersburg. Bodies of son Alexei and daughter Marie were never found.
Now, this is a very telling beginning to the communist revolution in Russia and a harbinger of things to come. A group of barely human and hate-consumed thugs burst into the Alexander Palace and brutally murdered one of the most beautiful and most photographed families in history. This was not just a political assassination where the goal is simply to eliminate enemies; it was a bloody celebration of the great and all-consuming sin of envy. This is what Marxism is all about – first envy, then hate, then protest, and then destroy and replace with communism.
That's a highly simplistic view of those events -- starting with the claim that "barely human" communists "burst into the Alexander Palace and brutally murdered" the tsar and his family. As the Wikipedia page to which Bailey links points out, Tsar Nicholas and his family were held under protective custody at Alexander Palace starting in March 1917 after Nicholas' abdication -- following the first revolution in Russia, the February Revolution, which was not communist-directed. The October Revolution later that year was led by Lenin; the Romanovs were not executed until July 1918.
Bailey's suggestion that the Romanovs deserved to live because they were "one of the most beautiful and most photographed families in history" ignores that numerous events led to that revolution that were generally blamed on tsarist leadership -- military failures, governmental corruption, failure to respond to popular demand for modernization and mismanagement of the economy.
That's a much more historically accurate of the causes of the Russian Revolution than "envy," and it helps to explain why the Bolsheviks executed the Romanovs with such viciousness better than Baily's kneejerk blaming of it on the purported nature of communism.
Bailey does sort of get that right later in his column, admitting that "Tsar Nicholas was hated because he was a spoiled elitist, a dictator coming from a family of dictators, an oppressor of the poor, and he did little to combat the cultural backwardness of Russia in comparison to Europe and America. And, yes, there was the envy factor." But he then turns that into gushing praise for his favorite president, citing none other than far-right activist Wayne Allyn Root, last seen here hypocritically fretting about "white genocide" in South Africa:
But none of these factors hold true for Donald Trump – except for envy of his monumental business success, his unadulterated masculinity and, I think, of his “beautiful” family as well. Townhall writer Wayne Allyn Root wryly says that “everyone hates Trump,” but just look at what he has accomplished in his first two years. The economy is humming like never before with a 4.1 percent growth in GDP; his poll numbers are steadily increasing; major diplomatic inroads have been made with both Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin; and, as Root says, Trump is on his way to a Nobel Peace Prize.
But Bailey concludes his column by getting it wrong again: "As with Tsar Nicholas, Trump’s great sin was to stand in the way of 'progress' as defined by the leftist elite, and for that he and his family have been given the 'death penalty' in the hearts, minds and souls of the Marxist masses."
MRC Attacks 'Social Justice Warrior' NFL Hall of Fame Inductee, Gives Suspected Murderer Inductee A Pass Topic: Media Research Center
Jay Maxson, the mysterious Media Research Center sports blogger, spent an Aug. 5 post complaining about Randy Moss' induction speech at the NFL Hall of Fame. Maxson huffed that "just another high-profile forum for political statements, like the Oscars, the Grammys, the ESPYs and other programs used by leftists to promote their controversial views," singling out Moss for wearing "a tie bearing the names of a dozen black men and women killed in altercations with police or citizens. Call it the opening shot of protest for the 2018 NFL season."
Maxson went on to whine: "Media also seem to have amnesia about the pattern of disrespectful behavior that made Moss a controversial figure throughout his football career. In 2002, he bumped a female traffic control agent for half a block, until she fell down, with his SUV. Moss, who had marijuana in his vehicle, was arrested on suspicion of a felony assault charge. Since he's now officially a social justice warrior, none of that needs attention from the media though.
By contrast, Maxson wrote, "Legendary Baltimore linebacker and new Hal [sic] of Famer Ray Lewis took a more positive approach as he invoked the late Dr. Martin Luther King and extolled the audience to look at what unites us, as opposed to the divisive protests marring NFL games (and Hall of Fame ceremonies)." Maxson added an excerpt from Lewis' speech: "Are you living every day to make this world better? Think what we can do if we work together as a country ... teaching our nation to love each other again."
Maxson seems to have amnesia about Lewis' pattern disrespectful behavior that made Moss a controversial figure throughout his football career -- specifically, as we noted when MRC "news" division CNSNews.com exhibited a similar amnesia, the fact that Lewis was charged with murderin the deaths of two people allegedly stabbed to death by Lewis and/or members of his entourage following a Super Bowl party in 2000. Lewis managed to plea bargain down to a charge of mere obstruction of justice, and he paid undisclosed sums to the families of the deceased.
But Lewis is all about family and love now, so Maxson and the MRC aren't so gauche as to bring up his criminal record from a time when he was less loving -- and Moss becomes the bad guy for bringing up uncomfortable subjects.
There is a genocide going on in South Africa as its leaders are set to change their constitution to legally steal white farmers’ lands and throw them out of the country.
[...]
Unfortunately, the African people have not learned from history and they're repeating this travesty because they're kicking the whites off the land in South Africa. Behind this movement is a prominent and close associate of none other than the great Nelson Mandela, the god of gods to the liberal class.
Murders are increasing as they're slaughtering men, women, children, and infants in front of the mothers and mothers in front of infants. These criminals are raping the women in front of their fathers on the farms.
Now of course, you haven't heard any of this from CNN or MSNBC. Not even Fox News will run it, but I'll bring it to light because this is a genocide occurring in front of our eyes.
Wayne Allyn Root followed up in an Aug. 9 column by demonstrating just how afflicted by Obama Derangement Syndrome he remains. After a recitation of the fraudulent assertion that "over 90 percent of President Trump’s coverage by the U.S. mainstream media is negative" and short detour to rant about how "Obama's IRS tried to destroy my life," Root huffed:
This time it’s blatant discrimination, racism, and hate crimes by the black majority. This time it’s legal for blacks to steal the land of whites. This time it’s blacks murdering whites with impunity.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and his ruling ANC (African National Congress) have made it legal to forcibly take land from white farmers and property owners. That was the first step.
Now comes the next radical step. The president and his Congress are changing the Constitution to allow the South African government to forcibly take any white person’s land, this time without any compensation. Pure theft. Because of the color of their skin, white families are left in poverty. Left homeless. Left without a livelihood.
Worse, the president and several of his political allies have threatened to murder white property owners who refuse to hand over their property. They actually said they have no plans at the moment for a “genocide.” The inference being that if white farmers and property owners put up a fight, the next step will be a genocide.
An emboldened citizenry is already taking matters into its own hands. A UK newspaper reports one white farmer is murdered every five days in South Africa. Hundreds of white land owners have been killed or badly injured in mob attacks since 2016.
Yet the world says nothing. The media says nothing. Politicians say nothing. Hollywood celebrities say nothing. There are no protests, or calls for boycotts. Hard to believe.
Enter Obama. The former U.S. President recently accepted a speech in South Africa. He undoubtedly collected a fortune for that speech. That's called "blood money." Obama was paid with money tainted by racism, theft, and murder. How badly does an ex-president need money? Why would he accept this money?
Worse, he didn’t use that platform to say a word about the new apartheid.
Worse yet, he stood on that stage next to the president of South Africa, lending him credibility.
Then, worst of all, he praised the president who presides over a country stealing white owned land, murdering whites and threatening genocide.
[...]
Obama praises the president of a nation murdering and robbing white people because of their race. No one says a word.
What Obama did in South Africa should the biggest news in America. The fact that you never even heard about it, tells you everything about the fraud, deceit and fake news of the mainstream media.
Let's unpack this. Yes, South Africa is seizing farmland from white farmers, but they point to the fact that white farmers own or control between 23 percent and 73 percent of farmland in the country, depending on how you count it, compared to 1.2 percent for black farmers. Is that seizure a problem? Yes, especially since it's being done without what white farmers claim is adequate compensation.
Contrary to Root's wild assertions, Ramaphosa is seen as a moderate who is trying to slow down the rush by more radical political forces pushing accelerated land seizures without compensation.
From here, Savage and Root let their Obama derangement and sympathy for one particular race get the better of them. While Root baselessly speculates that Obama was paid a hefty sum of "blood money" for his speech, we could find nothing indicating what, if anything, he was paid.
Further, the whole "white genocide" appears to be severely overplayed. South Africa's largest commercial farmers union says there were only 47 white farmers murdered in the past year (an Afrikaner lobbying group claims 84). But as long as we're throwing around the "genocide" claim, that word appears to apply much more aptly to the black popuation in South Africa, as Australia's ABC reports:
No-one claims that there were more than 100 farm murders in 2017, a year in which the South African police recorded more than 19,000 murders in the country as a whole. Most of those victims, of course, are black.
According to Gareth Newham, head of Justice and Violence Prevention at the internationally-respected Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, there has been a 40 per cent increase in all kinds of armed attacks since 2012 — hold-ups of armoured security vans, home and business invasions, street muggings.
"We have a real problem with violence," Newham says.
"And so for us, sitting in South Africa looking at these 19,000 murders — suddenly there's international attention on the murders of white farmers, it just seems completely disproportionate.
"There is evidence that attacks on white farmers in South Africa are largely driven by criminal intent, greed."
Strange that neither Savage nor Root mention the fact that murders of blacks in South Africa are a much greater problem than that of white farmers.
NEW ARTICLE: CNS Still Flips for Trump on Employment Data Topic: CNSNews.com
The contrast between CNSNews.com's relentlessly negative reporting on unemployment numbers under President Obama and its relentlessly rah-rah reporting on them under Trump becomes more glaring than ever. Read more >>
WND Columnist Is Sad Tax Cheats Can't Flee The Country Topic: WorldNetDaily
The last time we checked in with Lowell Ponte,he was in permanent meltdown mode over Democrats in general and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in particular. He seems to have gotten better -- only now he's a columnist for WorldNetDaily and co-author of a book with former WND columnist and onetime dubious WND advertiser and business partner Craig R. Smith.
Ponte's July 29 WND column is a weird lament that tax cheats have trouble fleeing the country -- and, thus, their tax debts -- because the IRS can revoke their passports:
A new wall against emigrants has just been erected on America’s borders, but few citizens are aware of this invisible barrier.
This is not the wall President Donald Trump promised. This new wall does nothing to keep illegal aliens out. It also does nothing to prevent invading illegals from collecting social benefits virtually from the moment they arrive – thereby picking the pockets of American taxpayers.
This new wall is a barrier not to immigrants but to emigrants, designed to stop wealthy targeted taxpaying citizens from departing the United States.
President Barack Obama authorized the Internal Revenue Service to revoke the passport of any taxpayer whom the IRS arbitrarily deems to have “seriously delinquent tax debt.”
In our analysis of 19 little-noticed government traps designed to loot American citizens, Craig R. Smith and I in our book “Money, Morality & The Machine” warn the IRS now has the power to capriciously shut off anyone’s passport at the push of a computer button.
Citizens targeted “would not be permitted to leave the United States,” we write. “These citizens would be required to pay the demanded tax and penalties to exit, or live out their lives without leaving the United States under a kind of nationwide house arrest.”
This is not President Trump’s Great American Wall to stop invaders. It is more like the Berlin Wall that the East German government erected to prevent its serf taxpayers from escaping Communism.
It also resembles Communist Cuba, which claims that its citizens are free to leave … IF they reimburse what the Marxist government has paid for their healthcare, housing, food, education and more.
[...]
The IRS has just announced it is about to revoke the passports of 362,000 U.S. citizens it claims owe $50,000 or more in back taxes and penalties. Millions more could soon be denied freedom to travel outside the U.S. over much smaller purported tax debts.
This IRS power, opines ZeroHedge, “shows that you’re not even really a citizen. You’re just renting your citizenship from the government. And when they believe (in their sole discretion) that you owe them income tax, they’ll take it away from you.”
The IRS can now, in effect, confiscate your right to leave the U.S. by claiming you owe taxes. You are guilty unless you can meet the burden of proving your innocence.
Silicon Valley billionaires bought ranches in New Zealand, assuming they could escape there if our society broke down. Did they know President Obama gave the IRS the power to shake them down by instantly turning off their passports and then demanding a huge “exit fee”?
Ponte never explains why tax cheats shouldn't just pay off that "seriously delinquent tax debt" before they leave the country, nor does he prove that the IRS' process is applied "capriciously" or "arbitrarily."
We already know the Media Research Center attacks any media outlet that lacks a sufficiently pro-Trump bias. Butit also hands out gold stars on occasion to news stories told in a way that supports the MRC's pro-Trump agenda.
CNSNews.com columnist Eric Metaxas has an anti-gay freakout over the idea of gay characters in "Anne With an E," Netflix's revisionist take on "Anne of Green Gables," in his Aug. 7 
Earlier this year, WorldNetDaily 
Last month, Newsmax's James Hirsen 
WorldNetDaily has a bit of a checkered record regarding its recent annual tours to the Holy Land -- it repeatedly 
The leaders of CNSNews.com -- specifically, editor in chief Terry Jeffrey and managing editor Michael W. Chapman -- are so Catholic, they feel they can use the "news" operation they run to 
WorldNetDaily's Art Moore writes in an Aug. 9 
The Media Research Center's 
A couple days ago, we 
CNSNews.com's Jonathan Mizrahi lets more false Trump White House stenography go unchallenged in an Aug. 1 
Kent Bailey, head of the 
Jay Maxson, the mysterious Media Research Center sports blogger, spent an Aug. 5 
Michael Savage asserted in an Aug. 2 
The last time we checked in with Lowell Ponte,he was in 
