WND Spreads False Rumor Linking Boxer's Death To COVID Vaccine Topic: WorldNetDaily
David Kupelian keeps insisting that WorldNetDaily cares only about "truth." So why does it spend so much editorial space spreading highly dubious rumors? Joe Kovacs wrote in a March 14 article:
oxing legend Marvelous Marvin Hagler died at the age of 66 Saturday night, and an online battle has erupted over reports his death was a direct result of getting "the vaccine."
Hours before the undisputed middleweight champion died, his fellow boxing great Thomas "Hit Man" Hearns noted Hagler was "fighting the after effects of the vaccine" before the former undisputed middleweight ultimately passed away.
Hearns' full message on Instagram stated: "A real true warrior Pray for the king and his family.. he's in ICU fighting the after effects of the vaccine! He'll be just fine but we could use the positive energy and Prayer for his Full Recovery !"
[...]
A post on Hagler's website stated: "We are very sad to report that Marvelous Marvin Hagler died on March 13 of natural causes near his home in New Hampshire. He was a champion until the end. His family asks for privacy at this time of sorrow."
Social media erupted, with one commenter stating: "Im proper gutted!! the Great Marvin Hagler dies after taking the vaccine! Please do your own research before making a decision on putting something in your body that has not been tested properly & we r being used as the guinea pigs & not told the #Truth about #vaccine."
That's right -- Kovacs is taking the word of a random Twitter user and a fellow former boxer with no apparent detailed knowledge of Hagler's medical history as evidence that the vaccine killed Hagler.
Kovacs' story was accompanied by a reader poll asking, "Did Marvin Hagler die as a direct result of being vaccinated?" Unsurprisingly given WND's readership, 88 percent voted yes.
What you're not going to learn from Kovacs or anyone else at WND is that the story is false. Hagler's widow shot down the rumors about the vaccine causing his death and confirmed that he died of natural causes, adding, "My baby left in peace with his [usual] smile and now is not the time to talk nonsense."
But irresponsible nonsense is what WND traffics in. Don't expect a correction.
How Is The MRC Freaking Out About LGBT Folks In Entertainment Now? Topic: Media Research Center
It's been a while since we checked in on the Media Research Center's abjecthatred of anyone in the LGBTQ community, real or fictional. Let's tally up the recent hate, shall we?
A corollary to the MRC's hatred for non-heteronormative people is love for anyone who hates them as much as they do, hence its flip-flop on J.K. Rowling from bashing her for the witchcraft in her "Harry Potter" books and having Dumbledore be gay to treating her as a victim because she doesn't like transgender people. The MRC revived Rowling's victim status as talk of a "Harry Potter" TV series picked up. Tierin-Rose Mandelberg wrote:
Fans are embodying the typically selfish desires of the left. They want the Harry Potter series but they don’t want Rowling involved. Giving money to a “transphobe” seems barbaric so they’re conflicted and feeding off of other leftists to figure out what the heck they actually stand for. MRC had a great day witnessing again how “the left has completely sold out to this lunacy and the fact that someone as previously woke as Rowling is getting heat for this speaks volumes.” Their mob mentality is not new.
[...]
Conservatives are just sitting out and watching the heat as leftists attack one of their own yet again. Tuesday afternoon comedic relief.
Mandelberg forgot to mention that her employer used to hate Rowling because Dumbledore was gay.
Mandelberg followed up a couple days later, unironically writing, "Holding a grudge is one area the left thrives. This week’s 'peaceful' protest includes attacks at J.K. Rowling yet again." Again, she forgot where she works, where grudges are legendary.
Lindsay Kornick complained about a fictional character who is transgender:
Here I thought cop dramas were the only shows under leftist scrutiny. Before it’s even aired, CBS’s new Silence of the Lambs drama Clarice is drawing attention from transgender activists. So much so, the series now has a token transgender character to discuss the “complicated legacy” of the original film. Liberals should just put out a list of things that aren’t “complicated” at this point.
Kornick is complaining that the trans character is meant to sort of undo the character of Buffalo Bill in the original movie: "Considering The Silence of the Lambs is one of only three movies to win all of the top five Oscar categories, I don’t think anyone on this show is qualified to lecture it, much less a trans activist." We thought the MRC believed award shows like the Oscars were worthless.
Alexa Moutevelis lashed out against more fictional transgender people:
ABC’s The Good Doctor might want to change its name to The Woke Doctor. After previous episodes this season supported Black Lives Matter and abortion, Monday night’s episode, “Irresponsible Salad Bar Practices,” offered the double whammy of a pregnant trans man and systemic racism in medicine.
The episode began with trans man Rio Gutierrez (played by trans actor Emmett Preciado) at the hospital to receive treatment for a pituitary tumor. Rio tells the doctors about being engaged to a man, while the doctors bemoan the “messed-up software” that correctly records Rio’s gender as female.
Elise Ehrhard lost it over "Blue's Clues" refusing to hate people who aren't like Ehrhard:
The past few years have seen a plethora of LGBTQIABCDEFG targeting of preschool, kindergarten, and elementary school audiences.
Cross-dressing actor Billy Porter appeared in a gown on the show Sesame Street. Ru Paul's Drag Race star Nina West created a kids' ABC song using drag terminology. The classic children's cartoon Arthur had a same-sex wedding and PBS Kids sang about two dads and a baby. My Little Pony introduced a lesbian couple. Nickelodeon, alongside regularly promoting LGBTQIA+ propaganda on its children's shows, outed SpongeBob.
So, it is no surprise that Blue's Clues & You, Nickelodeon's reboot of the beloved children's classic, would insert sexual identitarianism into its programming.
On the show's official YouTube channel, it introduced the song ABC Song with Blue! Guess what the letter 'P' stands for? Pride, of course. A perfectly fine word on its own, but the imagery surrounding the letter leaves no doubt of the political and social messaging.
"The letter is also surrounded by multiple other flags representing specific communities. Those include flags for the Trans community, asexual community, pansexual community, intersex community, gender-fluid community, and more," explains an article in Deadline praising the song.
Because, of course, every parent wants their preschooler to be introduced to the symbolism of the asexual, pansexual, intersex and gender-fluid communities. Who doesn't want their toddler up-to-date on the latest in pansexual imagery?
[...]
Some may call the song harmless because 3-year-olds cannot understand the larger sexual politics behind the imagery. But it is part of a bigger pattern of programming children early by inculcating them with loaded symbols so they will be good little left-wing sexual identitarians as they grow.
Ehrhard, presumably, wants her children to grow up hating LGBTQ people the way she does.
And, echoing its freakouts over Dr. Seuss and the Muppets, the MRC's Gabriel Hays served up a dumb rant over Mr. Potato Head losing his honorific:
Oh well isn’t that just so appropriate for our deranged and increasingly sterile society? The AP characterized the disturbing and unnecessary change as an update done in order to appeal to the perspective of current children. They wrote, “Many toymakers have been updating their classic brands in recent years, hoping to relate to kids today and to reflect more modern families.”
Of course, the implication there is horrifying. Kids young enough to enjoy Mr. Potato Head really shouldn’t not be having serious, obsessive questions about gender or sex. If anything this seems like insidious programming aimed at sensitive kids with far-left parents than a mere reflection of current toy users’ perspectives.
[...]
It seems the breakdown of the family in modern society won’t fail to be represented in every stupid bit of our culture. And what about Toy Story now? Will the fifth movie now do away with the stirring romance between Mr. & Mrs. Potato Head? What are we going to see next? A polyamorous, non-binary "throuple" of spuds helping Woody (who has since been changed into a gender-neutral Native American toy,) with his latest scheme? Next time we see him, will Andy have undergone a sex change which prompts all his toys to question their own gender realities? Knowing Disney, they’ll take that story idea.
Hays is what happens when the MRC pays someone solely to spew hate of people he thinks aren't like him.
WND Columnists Still Pushing Bogus Claims of Election Fraud Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's columnists, it seems, are not going to easily give up the idea that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election -- it generates too many column ideas, apparently. Andy Schlafly wrote in his March 2 column of Republicans who were allegedly insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump:
No boat is big enough to salvage the careers of Republicans who tried to impeach Trump, or who stand in the way of reforms to fix what went wrong in 2020. Those Republicans have not only defied Trump; they never lifted a finger to protect the integrity of our elections.
Instead, they echo false Democratic talking points by pretending there was no evidence of election fraud in 2020. These anti-Trump Republicans likewise fail to see how strongly opposed they are now by Americans who once voted for them.
Why did Democrats cheat in the 2020 elections? For control. Saul Alinsky: the end justifies the means. This was their only chance to stop the America First movement of Trump, to take control of the Senate, to "cancel" those who oppose them, to rewrite history – just as all totalitarian governments do. So Democrats cheated.
The 2020 election was their only chance to stack the deck against average working Americans. Statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico to gain four more Democrat senators; pack the Supreme Court by expanding its size; pass election laws that guarantee more and more Democrats get elected; use stimulus money to bail out cities mismanaged by Democrats for the last 40 years; citizenship for illegal immigrants; more immigrants pouring over the border; increase government workers and families who then join SEIU and NEA and are dependent on government paychecks (now one-quarter of all American workers).
How could the GOP be so stupid to allow the cheating to happen unchallenged? The cheating brought about the defeat of Trump, two GOP senators from Georgia and Republican John James in Michigan. Why did total voting across the USA increase 20% in 2020? Election fraud, ballot harvesting, electronic ballot box stuffing, voting machine manipulations. What will ever reverse what Democrats do now?
European countries banned mail-in voting while the U.S. allows it. Even during COVID. Because it affords fraud.
A couple of things here. First, "the end justifies the means"is not an Alinsky invention; he actually has a serires of rules about ends vs. means, one of which is that "Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical." If Master had offered any actual evidence that Democrats cheated -- let alone "electronic ballot box stuffing" or "voting machine manipulations," he might have a point. But he doesn't.
It is dumbfounding to me that any politician on the right would spend more than a second entertaining the notion of recapturing the House in 2022 and telling us so, given the means by which we lost the presidency continue to be the means we use to decide elections. Did we not learn from that monumental loss followed by the two subsequent Republican Senate seats turned over in Georgia that the liberal left are holding our nation hostage through the voting mechanisms they presently have in place?
It stuns me and 73 million-plus Americans that any further conversation regarding the success of future elections is happening when the culprit damning the outcome of the most recent one has yet to be eliminated. Frankly, it doesn't matter how incredible any future Republican candidates are if the process of voting and, in that, the calculation of votes is corrupt. It could be Jesus himself who runs. He still wouldn't win.
Our voices have been stolen, and the only way to get them back is to embark upon an entirely new process that ensures almost no mistakes can be made. We should demand it from those who serve the people! We should also demand a do-over of the Trump-Biden election in conjunction with the new process laid out, putting the questions to bed, finally, as to who really won. It is the only way any type of national unity will be struck between the Trump voters and the Biden voters.
Wellington then advocated no early voting, no absentee ballots and hand counting only.
James Zumwalt -- who may still get sued for falsely defaming an official with election-tech company Dominion -- was still pushing never-proven claims of election fraud in his March 17 column:
The 2020 election triggered numerous lawsuits and claims of voting fraud. Since all the cases to date have been dismissed, Democrats see no evil, despite the fact no case has yet been heard on the fraud evidence but were decided on procedural grounds.
The 2020 presidential election, due to the numerous substantive discrepancies Democratic leaders ignore, has shaken voter confidence to the core (39%) – not only among Republicans but Democrats as well. This should cause responsible legislators to investigate what happened in order to fix and re-instill voter confidence in the system.
Of course, one reason voter confidence might be "shaken" is that right-wingers like Zumwalt and his fellow WND columnists can't stop spreading lies about the election.
Newsmax Still Running Touchy Disclaimers In Stories on Dominion Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax, it appears, remains a little touchy about its legal exposure regarding bogus claims it promoted accusing voting-tech companies like Dominion of changing votes to make Donald Trump lose the presidential election. In a Feb. 22 article on Dominion suing MyPillow guy Mike Lindell for spreading lies about the company, Newsmax inserted a familiar disclaimer:
Newsmax received a letter from Dominion in late December threatening litigation.
While Newsmax covered and reported on allegations made by President Trump and his attorneys, it never claimed such allegations were true. Newsmax published and aired several stories and reports sharing Dominion’s response to the President’s allegations.
To further clarify its position, and before any legal action was threatened against it, Newsmax stated that it had had found no evidence that Dominion manipulated voting software during the 2020 election.
As we've noted, that's not the whole story -- Newsmax presented those claims uncritically, and without noting that the claims were false, until Dominion sent that letter to it. The double "had" in the final paragraph was repeated in an article five days earlier, showing that someone just copied and pasted it while not copy-editing it.
Newsmax repeated its disclaimer (though not the same exact language) in a March 26 article on Dominion filing a defamation suit against Fox News for doing essentially the same thing Newsmax did. But it also tried to play whataboutism with the Mueller investigation into Trump:
Conservative critics of the suits claim the litigation has been an attempt to squelch dissent about the election results that emanated from then-President Donald Trump and his lawyers.
They also noted that major media and networks published and broadcast multiple stories relating to claims of a conspiracy between the Russian government and Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Exhaustive investigations by Congress and Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence such allegations were true.
In fact, there were numerous contacts between Russias and the Trump campaign, but the evidence did not rise to a criminal level.
Last month, we caught CNS reporter Patrick Goodenough nitpicking a speech by President Biden, complaining that he made "3 errors in 12 seconds" -- but gave Donald Trump a pass on numerous falsehoods a few days later at his CPAC speech, instead gushing over how "fired-up" he was. Well, he did it again. On March 26, Goodenough wrote an article headlined "On Afghanistan, Biden Makes Three Gaffes in 30 Seconds":
During his first press conference on Thursday, President Biden within the space of 30 seconds made three gaffes when responding to a question about Afghanistan.
He got a name wrong; he implicitly questioned the status of an elected U.S. ally who is Afghanistan’s head of state and commander-in-chief of the armed forces; and he corrected himself on “if” troops leave to “when we leave.”
When asked about one of the three gaffes, Biden reversed himself. The other two raised no comment.
But on the same day, Trump called into Fox News and, well, this happened:
Former President Donald Trump on Thursday attempted to whitewash the history of the January 6 Capitol riot by pushing the false suggestion that his supporters were "hugging and kissing" police officers and posed "zero threat" despite widespread violence, injuries to law enforcement officers and five deaths.
It's an outrageous attempt by Trump to rewrite the history of the insurrection, which he stoked by repeatedly and falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him. There is no evidence of widespread fraud, but Trump and many of his conservative allies in the media and on Capitol Hill have continued to push the "big lie" regardless.
Calling into Fox News on Thursday night, Trump was asked if he was concerned about the US Capitol's beefed up security, including razor-wire fencing, which he derided as "disgraceful" and a "political maneuver."
"It was zero threat, right from the start, it was zero threat. Look, they went in, they shouldn't have done it. Some of them went in, and they are hugging and kissing the police and the guards, you know, they had great relationships," Trump told Fox News' Laura Ingraham. "A lot of the people were waved in, and then they walked in and they walked out."
Trump's latest whitewash attempt comes after the world has been presented with reams of video evidence of the violence that broke out on January 6, criminal charges filed against participants, law enforcement officials testimony, police officers' accounts of the violence, and lawmakers' descriptions of the fear they experienced that day.
Goodenough didn't whitewash this -- he ignored it completely, as did every other CNS employee. There's no mention of Trumps Fox News appearance that we could find at CNS.
It's clear that CNS is holding Biden to a different standard that it holds Trump. It's as if there's a pronounced ideological bias there.
MRC Drools Over Proposed Social Media Platforms From Trump, Lindell Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center is quite excited about its favorite right-wingers potentially starting their own social-media platforms. Alexander Hall took a certain ex-president's promotional blather seriously in a Feb. 19 post:
Former President Donald Trump has reportedly been in talks with donors about his much anticipated return to social media.
After years of censorship, and with politicians refusing to solve it, Trump may once again take action where others have failed. “Former President Donald Trump has told friends he has hundreds of millions of dollars in backing for a new social media venture that would give him an online presence and protect conservatives from being shut down online,” the Washington Examiner reported on Thursday. Two sources reportedly familiar with the matter said investors included Silicon Valley leaders spurred by concerns regarding censorship and “cancel culture.”
On March 10, Kayla Sargent promoted another right-winger's would-be platform:
Many dream of a world without the constant barrage of Big Tech censorship. Soon, a new censorship-free platform may not be confined to their dreams while resting on a MyPillow.
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell announced plans to launch his own social media platform because “we’ve got to get our voices back,” he said during an interview with Charlie Kirk on The Charlie Kirk Show.
Sargent went on to play the victim card for Lindell:
Lindell has been an avid supporter of former President Donald Trump, and an outspoken critic of the 2020 election. Twitter banned Lindell from its platform in January for “repeated violations of our Civic Integrity Policy,” a Twitter spokesperson told MRC TechWatch.
YouTube and Vimeo censored Lindell’s docu-movie Absolute Proof, which called the results of the 2020 presidential election into question. Dominion Voting Systems has also filed a lawsuit against Lindell for defamation per se and “deceptive trade practices.” Facebook has allowed Lindell to post the video, but added a label to the bottom of the post that said: “Partly False Information. The same information was checked in another post by independent fact-checkers.”
Sargent failed to acknowledge that if Lindell and other right-wingers want to live in "a world without the constant barrage of Big Tech censorship," they should stop telling lies and respect the terms of service of social media platforms. She also didn't mention, as the MRC failed to do the last time they painted Lindell a a victim, that "Absolute Proof" is absolutely filled with lies -- so much so that when Lindell bought time on One America News to repeatedly air the video, OAN added a massive disclaimer stating that it doesn't endorse the video's claims in general or regarding specific people and companies like Dominion and Smartmatic, which have not been shy about suing right-wingers who lie about them.The disclaimer also added that the video is "not intended to be taken or interpreted by the viewer as established fact."
Hall returned to gush even more over Trump's less-than-concrete talk about a social media platform:
Former President Donald Trump has declared institutional independence by starting his own platform! Both Trump and his adviser Jason Miller have given hints about Trump’s upcoming platform in recent days.
Trump’s grand re-entry to social media will be with his own platform, and it may occur within the next few months. “I’m doing things having to do with putting our own platform out there that you’ll be hearing about soon,” Trump explained to Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe in the debut episode of her “The Truth” podcast on March 22. Trump’s adviser Jason Miller also made an announcement during a Fox News interview that delivered on Trump’s hints: “I do think that we’re gonna see President Trump returning to social media, in probably about two or three months here, with his own platform.”
Miller elaborated that the new Trump platform will be a game changer for the internet:
This is all blather without any substance behind it, but Hall doesn't care -- he's eating it up. So much so, in fact, that he spread a lie: "Multiple Big Tech platforms cracked down on Trump’s account following then-president Trump's call for peace amid political unrest in D.C., which saw rioters storm the U.S. Capitol building Jan. 6." As Hall very well knows, the "call for peace" had nothing to do with platforms suspending Trump -- it was the weeks and months of spreading lies about the presidential election he lost, which instigated that "political unrest in D.C." better known as the Capitol riot, that prompted the platforms to act.
Spreading such blatant lies does not make anyone want to take the MRC seriously as a "media research" organization.
CNS Goes To The WND Well Again To Add Ilana Mercer As A Columnist Topic: CNSNews.com
After publishing such folks like the Benham brothers and Jesse Lee Peterson, CNSNews.com is trying out another WorldNetDaily coumnist a spin. This time it's Ilana Mercer, the paleolibertarian with an oddnostalgia for apartheid.
Mercer's first column to be published at CNS was a March 5 piece in which she attacked emotional appeals made by Democrats during Donald Trump's second impeachment trial. She sneered of impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin: "His (privileged) daughter expressed fear of visiting the Capitol again, presumably because of the Jan. 6 fracas. That made Jamie cry. And when Jamie Raskin cries, normies outside Rome-on-the-Potomac laugh. Uproariously." (No mention, of course, of the fact that Raskin might be also be a tad emotional because his son committed suicide a month or so earlier; of course, Mercer would probably just smear him as a soy boy because he was a vegan who cared about animal rights.) By the way, Mercer had previously cheered the "Jan. 6 fracas" because it was property run by the supposedly oppressive government that was destroyed.
She quoted herself in huffing that "the Left’s 'empaneled witches and their housebroken boys are guided more by the spirit of Madame Defarge than by lady justice.'" She also nastily mocked right-wing punching bag Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezfor talking about her experience during the Jan. 6 riot: "Almost charming in her childish, exclusively lower-order thinking—what makes AOC’s beguiling, baby-like behavior dangerous is that she uses the idiom of emotional anguish to derive legislative leverage."
In her March 12 column, Mercer defended Dr. Seuss by insisting that "actual racism in the targeted literature should be a peripheral issue, or no issue at all" and that her favorite Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, failed in defending Dr. Seuss because he made a case for banning books when true libertarianism does not censor.
In her March 26 column, Mercer cheered right-wing authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban because they hate gays and George Soros as much as she does:
The Russian president patiently tolerates America’s demented, anti-Russia monomania. And, as America sinks into the quicksands of Cultural Marxism, Putin’s inclinations are decidedly reactionary and traditionalist.
He prohibited sexual evangelizing by LGBTQ activists. He comes down squarely on the side of the Russian Orthodox church, such as when vandals, the Pussy Riot feral females, obscenely desecrated the cathedral of Christ the Savior. The Russian leader has also welcomed as refugees persecuted white South Africans, where America’s successive governments won’t even officially acknowledge that they’re under threat of extermination. Policies to stimulate Russian birthrates have been put in place by the conservative leader.
Hungary is oh-so happy in its homogeneity and wants to keep it. But not if Washington can help it. Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s motto is, “Procreation, not immigration.” Orban plumps for closed borders, and pro-Western, Christian, Hungarian-families-first policies. Yet his ongoing campaign against George Soros, an agitator for global government, was met by Donald Trump’s State Department with a stern rebuke to Hungary that its anti-Soros law will cost the country dearly.
Americans on the Right could only dream that, like Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic—the U.S. would “shut its border to Islamic migrants to keep potential terrorists out.”
On April 2, Mercer insisted that the death of George Floyd was not racism, and even if it was, that in itself is not a crime because "racism amounts to a thought “crime.” Thought crimes are the prerogative of a free people."
Mercer spent her April 9 column ranting about the idea of "vaccine passports," complaining that "not one TV ego in an anchor’s chair has inquired about longitudinal safety studies of the quickly-issued COVID vaccines and the relatively new mRNA technology" and concluding by asking, "Do vaccine resisters risk being WACOed?"
Um, weren't the folks at Waco so in thrall to a cult leader that the didn't have the sense to flee a burining building?
NEW ARTICLE: Fake News At WND, Capitol Riot Edition Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily is clinging to the notion that the Capitol riot was instigated by Antifa -- not far-right pro-Trump extremists -- and it's (mostly) not letting the truth get in the way. Read more >>
MRC Demands Biden Response On Cuomo, Then Dismisses It As 'Lame' Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has been hypocritically hammering on sexual harassment allegations against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo despite its record ignoring or mocking similar claims made against President Trump. It even tried to drag President Biden into the story -- then deemed his response not good enough, as detailed in a March 15 item by Scott Whitlock:
Joe Biden late on Sunday was finally forced to offer an opinion on the Andrew Cuomo scandal as it spirals out of control. But the networks on Monday allowed mere seconds to his lame, calculated reply, one that really said nothing. ABC, CBS and NBC devoted just 51 seconds total (within larger stories on the Democrat) to Biden’s take on his scandal-ridden friend.
Here’s the sum total of the President’s comments on Sunday: “I think the investigation is underway, and we should see what it brings us.” Rather than call that a slimy non-answer, Good Morning America allowed a scant eight seconds on Biden in their 43 second total story on Cuomo. Reporter Stephanie Ramos sounded like a Democratic operative: “President Biden asked over the weekend whether Cuomo should resign, and he agreed we should wait to see the investigation's outcome.”
Of course, the MRC was sounding like a Republican operative in attacking Biden and the media. The MRC is an arm of the Republican Party, after all, not a legitimate "media research" organization.
Needless to say, Whitlock didn't explain exactly why Biden needed to comment on Biden in the first place, or what he thought would have been an appropriate response. (We don't recall Whitlock having any problem with the many "slimy" things Donald Trump has said.) His only goal was to attack Biden and try to link him to Cuomo.
CNSNews.com loved to quote Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, because he's so eminently quotable in pushing right-wing talking points. Some examples over the past year:
That last article appeared on March 25, a few days before it was revealed that the Department of Justice is investigating whether Gaetz had an inappropriate relationship with a 17-year-old giril and whether it constituted sex trafficking.CNS was initially quick to defend Gaetz, with a March 31 article by Susan Jones that uncritically recounted Gaetz defending himself in an appearance on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show:
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), an outspoken conservative and a supporter of President Donald Trump, says he's being smeared by The New York Times and extorted by a former Justice Department official over what he calls a false allegation of sex trafficking.
"It is a horrible allegation and it is a lie," Gaetz told Fox News's Tucker Carlson Tuesday night:
But Jones buried the odd exchange in which Gaetz brought up a dinner he attended with Carlson and "a friend of mine, you'll remember her, and she was actually threatened by the F.B.I., told that if she wouldn't cop to the fact that somehow I was involved in some pay-for-play scheme, that she could face trouble."
And that's the last time Gaetz has been mentioned in a CNS article. That means CNS readers don't know that the DOJ official has denied Gaetz's extortion claims, about reports that Gaetz showed photos of nude women he claims to have slept with, or that the House Ethics Committed has launched an investigation into Gaetz.
It appears that if it's bad news about a conservative, it's not news at CNS.
MRC's Graham Still Trying To Insist Trump Had A Vaccine Distribution Plan Topic: Media Research Center
Two months after Donald Trump left the White House, the Media Research Center was still defending him and his dubious behavior.
We've already documented how the MRC rushed to Trump's defense when the Biden administration accurately pointed out that the Trump administration had no plan forcoronavirus vaccine distribution beyond shipping the vaccines to state. Yet Tim Graham dedicated his March 17 column to attacking Vice President Kamala Harris for pointing that out. "Team Biden has a persistent lying problem when it comes to the Trump administration’s supposedly terrible record on vaccines," he asserted, then acted as the second coming odf Kayleigh McEnany:
Were vaccines “moving at a snail’s pace”? On January 15, the week before Biden was sworn in, 10.6 million Americans had received a COVID vaccine under Trump, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Did they fail to order enough vaccines? The federal government, as of last December 31, had contracted to buy at least 800 million COVID-19 vaccine doses with delivery by July 31.
Was there “no real plan” for vaccine distribution? Last September 16, the Department of Health and Human Services released a report to Congress, outlining a strategy for vaccine distribution and a playbook for states and localities “on how to plan and operationalize a vaccination response.”
The Trump administration encouraged a flexible and federalist approach to coronavirus restrictions, and also to coronavirus vaccines. Leftists would say letting states control anything instead of the federal government equals “no national strategy.”
Graham lept from that to rehash the MRC's old arguments:
The Democrats and the media have decried Trump for "politicizing" the pandemic, which is a bad joke, since they were clearly politicizing it soon after their first impeachment attempt fizzled. Trump called their political exploitation a "hoax," and then they claimed he called the virus a "hoax." Even today, Team Biden is relentlessly slamming Trump as the scapegoat for everything that's ever gone wrong.
Um, didn't Trump blame Obama for everything that went wrong under his administration>
Remember: For Graham and the MRC, the narrative is everything, facts less so.
Farah's Biden Derangement Syndrome Leads To Rant Against Biden Speech Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah has a raging case of Biden Derangement syndrome, and he served up a concentrated example of it in his March 12 column, in which he ranted about a speech Biden gave on the coronavirus pandemic. Farah purported to highlight the "lies and errors" in the speech, but instead just served up another anti-Biden rant, with a lot of declaring "Stop the tape!" to inject more ranting and petty personal attacks -- and serving up his own lies and errors in the process. Let's break it down, shall we?
"A year ago, we were hit with a virus that was met with silence and spread unchecked, denials for days, weeks, then months."
Stop the tape! It was not met with silence nor spread unchecked (except in New York) nor denials for days, weeks, then months. What you left out was where it originated. Not with Donald Trump, but with China.
[...]
"While it was different for everyone, we all lost something – a collective suffering, a collective sacrifice, a year filled with the loss of life and the loss of living for all of us. But in the loss, we saw how much there was to gain in appreciation, respect, and gratitude. Finding light in the darkness is a very American thing to do."
Stop the tape! I know what you lost: Your mind! You have done everything humanly possible to make it worse, including stealing the election.
[...]
"The first date, the family reunions, the Sunday night rituals. It all has exacted a terrible cost on the psyche of so many of us. For we are fundamentally a people who want to be with others, to talk, to laugh, to hug, to hold one another. But this virus has kept us apart. Grandparents haven't seen their children or grandchildren. Parents haven't seen their kids. Kids haven't seen their friends."
Stop the tape: Yes, all these things made people depressed. There has been an epidemic of suicides as a result – among children! Who's to blame? You and your Democratic friends and the teachers unions.
"At this very moment, so many of them, our fellow Americans, they're on the front lines of this pandemic trying to save lives, and still, still, they are forced to live in fear for their lives, just walking down streets in America. It's wrong, it's un-American, and it must stop."
Stop the tape! Vicious hate cries against whom? Where did you get that? It's a lie. You mean Americans chased down Asian Americans because COVID was started in China? Please share the details of this fantasy.
"We continue to work on making at-home testing available, and we've been focused on serving people in the hardest hit communities of this pandemic, Black, Latino, Native American, and rural communities. So what does all of this add up to? When I took office 50 days ago, only 8% of Americans after months, only 8% of those over the age of 65 had gotten their first vaccination. Today that number is 65%."
Stop the tape: Must everything be about race with you?
(When people of color have been the hardest hit by the pandemic, why not?)
"Secondly, at the time every adult is eligible in May we will launch with our partners new tools to make it easier for you to find the vaccine and where to get the shot including a new website that will help you first find the place to get vaccinated and the one nearest you. No more searching day and night for an appointment for you and your loved ones. Thirdly, with the passage of the American Rescue Plan, and I thank, again, the House and Senate for passing it, and my announcement last month of a plan to vaccinate teachers and school staff, including bus drivers, we can accelerate massive nationwide effort to reopen our schools safely. And meet my goal that I stated at the same time about 100 million shots of opening the majority of K-8 schools in my first 100 days in office. This is going to be the No. 1 priority of my new secretary of education, Miguel Cardona."
Stop the tape: Was that the American Rescue Plan that was full of pork and foreign aid? Was it the one that had only 9 percent for COVID relief?
(In fact, more than 20 percent went toward coronavirus-related public health efforts, and that "foreign aid" is targeted toward coronavirus relief efforts internationally.)
"I say it to foreign leaders and domestic alike. It's never, ever a good bet to bet against the American people. America is coming back. The development, manufacturing, and distribution of vaccines in record time is a true miracle of science. It's one of the most extraordinary achievements any country has ever accomplished. And we all just saw the Perseverance Rover land on Mars. Stunning images of our dreams that are now reality."
Stop the tape: Yes, Joe, and it was Donald Trump's triumph getting those vaccines out. YOU HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT!
"This is the United States of America and there's nothing, I believe this from the bottom of my heart, nothing we can't do when we do it together.
"God bless you all and please, God, give solace to all those people who lost someone. And may God protect our troops. Thank you for taking the time and listening. I look forward to seeing you."
Stop the tape: God help America survive the Biden presidency.
Well, at least Farah is acknowledging that Biden is president, which is a step up from him falsely claiming that Biden stole the election.
MRC Lies Again About What Harris Said About Vaccines Before The Election Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Reserarch Center can't stop lying about Vice President Kamala Harris and what she said about the coronavirus vaccine before the election.
IN a March 16 post, Kristine Marsh ranted that "Kamala Harris and other Democrats spent months leading up to the November election spreading dangerous vaccine misinformation with the media’s help," adding:
In September, the big three networks touted Kamala Harris sowing doubt about the safety of a “Trump vaccine.” The journalists at ABC, NBC and CBS failed to hold the VP candidate accountable for trying to ruin public trust over the important vaccine effort.
In fact, the networks aided Democrats' message you couldn't trust a vaccine with Trump in office. On September 17's GMA, ABC's White House correspondent Cecilia Vega was aghast at the President's correct prediction we’d have a vaccine by end of the year: “Now people in this country are forced to choose whether to believe the President or the nation’s top health experts!” Vega vented. She also touted Joe Biden politicizing the vaccine while Good Morning America co-anchor George Stephanopoulos claimed Trump was “pressuring” the CDC to come up with an unsafe vaccine in record time: “Can Americans still trust what they're hearing from the CDC?” he asked.
Marsh is being dishonest. As we'vedocumented, Trump was cynically using the promise of a vaccine as a re-election ploy, an given Trump indisputable record of telling lies, there was ample reason to doubt him. Marsh also censored what Harris said at the time: that she "would not trust Donald Trump" given his reputation for muzzling health officials who spoke publicly about inconvenient facts, and that she would require "a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability" of a vaccine.
In other words, Marsh is lying when she claimed Harris and other Democrats spread "dangerous vaccine misinformation"; they pointed out that Fauci and other actual medical experts were the ones to be trusted on a vaccine, not Trump.
Further: If Harris and Democrats really did spread "dangerous vaccine misinformation," why is the group most likely to reject getting a vaccine white Republicans? Were they listening to Harris? Unlikely.
Harris was telling the truth; Marsh is not. That makes the MRC look like partisan hacks.
Back in January, WorldNetDaily spread fake news by falsely trying to link a drop in a company's stock price to a boycott. Joe Kovacs tried something similar in a March 9 WND article, under the headline: "Massive layoffs at Huffington Post after it pushed to deplatform right":
After having pushed for the deplatforming of conservative voices, the left-leaning Huffington Post announced massive layoffs of its workforce on Tuesday – 47 U.S. writers including eight in management – and entirely shuttering its Canadian operation.
The decision was made to "fast-track the path to profitability," enabling the company to break even this year and eventually turn a profit, according to Jonah Peretti, the CEO of BuzzFeed which acquired HuffPost from Verizon Media just three weeks ago.
[...]
ome opinion writers at HuffPost have been extremely vocal against those on the political right.
Last summer, commentary writer Imran Ahmed wrote a piece indicating "Deplatforming Works," with a subtitle stating: "Some deride deplatforming as a sign of an emerging 'cancel culture' and an attack on free speech. But inaction is dangerous too."
Kovacs seemed to concede that there's no link between some HuffPost writers' calls for "deplatforming" others and the layoffs, but he stuck with that framing anyway.
Of course, Kovacs wasn't going to mention that his own employer underwent massive layoffs at the start of its current ongoing financial crisis.
Back in May 2017, CNSNews.com reporter Susan Jones got quite the charge out of Donald Trump's "covfefe" tweet. "With six words – only five that make sense – President Donald Trump’s midnight tweet took the Internet by storm early Wednesday morning, even though no one is sure what he meant," she wrote, adding: "Before the tweet was removed, Twitter users had fun with 'covfefe,' some joking it's Russian for “I resign”; and others suggesting it may be the nuclear code."
But on March 15, an anonymous CNS writer felt the need to devote an entire article to highlighting a typo in a tweet by Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar:
Rep. Ilhan Omar made an obvious mistake in basic English grammar in a tweet she sent out on Monday afternoon.
She used the noun “abolition,” when she should have used the verb “abolish.”
Shortly after she sent the tweet with the grammatical error, Omar tweeted out a correction—apparently lamenting that Twitter did not allow her to correct her mistaken tweet.
The anonymous CNS reporter then felt the need to mock Omar's education, which it didn't do to Trump:
Omar earned a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Studies from North Dakota State University. In a question-and-answer sheet posted on the North Dakota State University website, Omar was asked: “How did NDSU prepare you?” She responded: “NDSU provided an open and tolerant learning environment in which I was able to form my own independent and informed opinions with the help of a great faculty, student body and curriculum.”
CNS has previously given disproportionately negative attention to Omar before, hyping controversial remarks she made while downplaying similarly controversial remarks by a Republican congressman. It even put an inflammatory, negative headline on an article that was surprisingly fair to Omar.
David Kupelian keeps insisting that WorldNetDaily cares only about "truth." So why does it spend so much editorial space spreading highly dubious rumors? Joe Kovacs wrote in a March 14 article:
It's 
WorldNetDaily's columnists, it seems, are 
Newsmax, it appears, remains a little touchy about its legal exposure regarding bogus claims it promoted accusing voting-tech companies like Dominion of changing votes to make Donald Trump lose the presidential election. In a Feb. 22 
Last month, 
The Media Research Center is quite excited about its favorite right-wingers potentially starting their own social-media platforms. Alexander Hall took a certain ex-president's promotional blather seriously in a Feb. 19 
After publishing such folks like the 
The Media Research Center has been 
CNSNews.com loved to quote Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, because he's so eminently quotable in pushing right-wing talking points. Some examples over the past year:
Two months after Donald Trump left the White House, the Media Research Center was still defending him and his dubious behavior.
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah has a 
The Media Reserarch Center can't stop lying about Vice President Kamala Harris and what she said about the coronavirus vaccine before the election.
Back in January, WorldNetDaily 
Call it a tale of two typos.
