MRC Pretends Tucker Carlson's Replacement Theory Isn't About Race
Topic: Media Research Center

Acting like it's contractually obligated to defend everything Fox News does, the Media Research Center has rushed to the defense of Fox News Tucker Carlson over his promotion of the "replacement theory," in which he accuses liberals of supporting immigration to replace supposedly "real" Americans at the polls.

In an April 11 post, Duncan Schroeder bashed CNN's Don Lemon for pointing out the racist nature of Carlson's argument, insisting we shoujld take Carlson's denial at face value:

Lemon is lying about Carlson making his argument about race, as Carlson explicitly stated in the segment in question that his point about Democrats wanting mass immigration has nothing to do with race but that it is instead “a voting rights question.”

Lemon is also lying about Carlson’s argument being “complete nonsense” because Democrats have acknowledged that winning elections is part of why they support mass immigration. In a 2013 interview with CBS, former Obama cabinet member and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro predicted that Texas will turn blue due to “the population growth of folks from outside of Texas.”

You know what else is "outside of Texas"? 49 other states filled with Americans from which people could move to Texas. In the link Schroeder supplied to back up this claim, there's no evidence Castro was talking about immigration from other countries.

The next day, MRC executive Tim Graham spent a podcast complaining about CNN's Brian Stelter -- a longtime MRC obsession -- highlighting Carlson's argument, attcking guest Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League as an arm of the Democratic Party for doing so. Graham then played whataboutism on Carlson: "You can't actually say the Democrats are very eager to be pro-immigrant -- and not just on behalf of the people who are immigrating now, but certainly on behalf of the people who immigrated 10 years ago. This is one of the reasons they're so hot to always say there's no widespread voter fraud because they don't want to suggest illegal immigrants are voting."

On April 14, Curtis Houck devoted an entire post to whining that the Washington Post was covering the story:

In a bit so obvious that they couldn’t have denied it if they even tried, The Washington Post has spent the past week going into overdrive in favor of censorship. The Post has called for removing Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson from the air to the tune of at least 11 items over the past six days, attacking the highly-influential primetime show.

The Post played its role as a cog in the hate movement against Fox and insisting Carlson is a white supremacist. The effort has recently added the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to its ranks and a conveniently-timed interview with head Jonathan Greenblatt on CNN’s Reliable Sources over Carlson's opposition to mass, unfettered immigration.

Houck didn't deny Carlson's remarks were racist, but he reframed them as Carlson would, insisting they were merely "about immigration and liberals wanting to create a system in which new immigrants would become dependent upon the state and the Democratic Party for their well being."

An April 17 column by Jeffrey Lord cheered Carlson, declaring that "Tucker had drawn the wrath of the mob for pointing to the obvious. Which is to say the American left is deliberately creating and using the chaos at the US southern border as a way of re-populating the US, in this case with poor illegal immigrants who would presumably be the political pawns of the Democratic Party." Lord also didn't deny that Carlson was repeating a white supremacist argument.

Tucker may well be pushing a racist argument, but conservatives believe he's generally good at owning the libs, and in the end that's all the MRC cares about.

WND's Lively Blames The Germans For Everything
Topic: WorldNetDaily

In a recent article, I noted that my boomer generation was the last to experience normalcy in our childhood years – in the sense that normalcy equates to things operating according to their nature as opposed to being artificially manipulated. At the start of our generation, in 1946, we had intact natural families, protected by the institution of marriage, bolstered by the active culture-wide discouragement of promiscuity and adultery. Boys were boys and girls were girls, and we celebrated that existential delight with the French exclamation "viva la difference!" We cherished babies as a gift from God and respected Him as a matter of cultural consensus. Our churches were full, and our jails were empty.

[...]

By the final year of the boomer babies, 1964, all that had changed, and for reasons most don't realize and won't discuss today for fear of "Woke" backlash.

The chief culprits were German communist immigrants who had fled Hitler's rising "fascist" National Socialism by the tens of thousands in the 1920s and '30s. Through the war years (in cooperation with homegrown Marxists), they gained ideological control of Hollywood, much of the news media, the Democratic Party and many other culture-shaping institutions because they served America's anti-Nazi interests. Post-war, they shifted their focus to overthrowing our Judeo-Christian culture. The "Red Scare" of the 1950s was an authentic and serious crisis now revised/erased from the history books by the Marxist winners.

Germany had been the chief exporter of Marxism since its native son Karl Marx launched it in the mid-1800s. Germany was the birthplace of "higher criticism" in Christian theology, which created the modern "religious left," and exported its Bible-diluting heresies to America, corrupting nearly every mainstream seminary. Germany was the homeland of the highly manipulable and manipulative "soft sciences" like Freud's psychology.

Germany (along with London and New York) was a world capital of eugenics long before Hitler. And it was the birthplace of "Cultural Marxism" at the Frankfurt School, whose founder Herbert Marcuse was the evil genius behind the rise in America of the left's ultimate weapon, the "sexual revolution," and its LGBT activist armies. Marcuse began his American take-down campaign as an employee of the OSS (forerunner to the CIA), and then a high luminary of academia who sowed the seeds of the 1960s cultural revolution in one after another of the elite universities.

[...]

How did Germany become such a center of evil in the world? I contend in my book "Dynasty of Darkness" that it was related to the excavation and acquisition by Germany of the Pergamum Altar, identified in Revelation 2 as the "Seat of Satan … where Satan dwells." I have chronicled how Kaiser (Caesar) Wilhelm II, the final emperor of Second Reich, considered his reconstruction of the Pergamum Altar in Berlin as his highest achievement, and how the process precisely tracks Germany's descent into great evil, including Fredrich Nietzsche's infamous declaration that "God is dead," escalating through the German instigation of both World Wars, and the rise of the demonic European Union (the model for the one-world government of the Antichrist) upon the reunification of Berlin (after the collapse of the Soviet "Evil Empire," which possessed the altar as a property in East Berlin from 1961 to 1990).

I also show how the United States' possession of it from 1945 to 1961 (as the dominant Allied power occupying Germany) tracks precisely with the two landmark SCOTUS rulings that officially shifted America off its biblical foundation onto the quicksand of Secular Humanism, and empowered militant atheists to purge Christianity from public life. During that same short window we also established the United Nations' global headquarters in Manhattan on land donated by the Rockefellers.

I wrote this column to convey three truths. First, that our national collapse into depravity and delusion is entirely orchestrated by wicked men whose actions can be tracked historically if one dares to do so. Second, that what we are experiencing today is literally the rise of the last-days Antichrist Kingdom, meaning our duty of evangelism has never been more urgent. And third, that America's "normalcy" before the 1960s was a reflection of our collective conformity to "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God." That witness of the natural world is our bridge to evangelize the lost post-boomer generations (and many of our own peers) who have been thoroughly conditioned to reject and even mock traditional evangelistic methods.

-- Scott Lively, March 15 WorldNetDaily column

NEW ARTICLE: Mainstreaming Extremism At CNS
Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com promoted Marjorie Taylor Greene even before she became a Republican congressional candidate and then a House member -- but it hid her extreme far-right views from readers until they finally became politically inconvenient. Read more >>

MRC Censors The Lies That Got Va. Lawmaker's Facebook Page Removed
Topic: Media Research Center

Embracing right-wing extremists to own the libs is a tradition with the Media Research Center's "Free Speech America" operation. That happened again in a March 23 post by Alexander Hall:

Facebook has obliterated GOP gubernatorial candidate Amanda Chase’s state Senate page as a critical Virginia election approaches.

“Facebook appears to have permanently removed State Sen. Amanda Chase’s official state Senate page, according to email communications provided by the campaign,” Virginia Business reported March 22. “After multiple unsuccessful attempts by her campaign to get her public page reinstated as recently as last week, Chase, R-Chesterfield, said Sunday that she is considering a national class action lawsuit against the social media giant on behalf of herself and others whose pages were restricted because of content related to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.”

Chase reportedly condemned Facebook for “[adopting] un-American policies” and speculated: “This is all a target on conservative Republicans. This has lit a fire under me. I will put Facebook out of business.” Censoring Chase’s official campaign page was no small case of deplatforming.  Chase stated that she had “144,000 followers on the public page, where she frequently posted live videos and photos from events,” according to Virginia Business.

[...]

Facebook responded to inquiry from the MRC by explaining "We’ve removed Senator Chase’s Page for repeatedly violating our Community Standards and placed her profile in a feature block meaning she will lose the ability to post on Facebook during this time.” How long this punishment is expected to last remains unclear. 

but Hall censored the fact that in that Virginia Business article, it's noted that a Facebook officlal "explained in an email to Chase’s campaign that Facebook restricts and disables pages that are tied to violent groups, including U.S.-based militias and QAnon followers, and limits other content that includes 'praise and support of the storming of the U.S. Capitol, calls to bring weapons to locations across the U.S. — not just in Washington but anywhere in the U.S. — including protests, incitement or encouragement of the events at the Capitol, including videos and photos from the protestors.'"

Meanwhile, an actual news outlet reported that in December, Chase declared that Donald Trump should hang on to power by declaring martial law, and that her original suspension was driven in part because she "praised rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 as 'patriots' while also suggesting that left-wing 'antifa or BLM agents of destruction' were really to blame." As the MRC surely knows, Antifa and Black Lives Matter played no role in the riot, meaning that Chase was lying.

Is this the kind of extremist activist the MRC really wants as governor of Virginia? Apparently so. Of course, it's not "meddling" to remove false and inflammatory content -- it's a private company enforcing its terms of service, which is something the MRC doesn't believe private companies have a right to do.

Hall also repeated the lie that Trump was removed from social media for calling for peace after the Jan. 6 riot (that he instigated), stating that "Multiple Big Tech platforms cracked down on Trump’s account following the former president’s call for peace amid political unrest in D.C., which saw rioters storm the U.S. Capitol building Jan. 6."

UPDATE: Chase wasn't done being offensive, later declaring that ex-police officer Derek Chauvin's guilty conviction in the death of George Floyd "makes me sick."

MRC Writer: It's Not Cancel Culture When Christians Do It
Topic: CNSNews.com

Some among the cancel culture crowd have accused Christian families of having been the perfectors of cancel culture. But is that an accurate characterization?

Cancel culture has come to entail retailers, providers, employers, media and others refusing to carry products, not permit services, fire employees and/or censor content, among other things. In fact, cancel culture has even come after some of the very things that Christian families have sought to protect their children from.

[...]

But in truth, there is a significant difference between those in the cancel culture crowd and institutions like the Christian family determining not to partake in certain things.

The latter is like going to a store to buy an apple and deciding you don't want to buy a certain kind of apple because you don't think it tastes as good, you don't prefer the way it was picked, how or where the apple company spends its money, etc. (Such preference provides choices and competitive options for individuals.) The former, however, is like going to a store to buy an apple and the store telling you, “We refuse to carry that apple anymore because we found out you liked it,” or we cancelled it “because we disagreed with it.” (Cancel culture limits choices and competitive options for individuals.)

In hypothetical one in the previous paragraph, where the individual gets to determine what apple he or she wishes to buy, the consumer has more options and can choose not to purchase apples for any number of reasons, but ultimately has the freedom to choose. In hypothetical two, where the store cancels a type of apple or all apples, the consumer’s choices are instead limited by the provider. The individual no longer has the freedom to choose and is instead compelled to conform to buying from the limited options available, or go without entirely.

So the choice is clear, America: you can take a stand and continue the fight of our Founding Fathers, or you can take the easy route and bow to the cancel culture crowd. One is the opportunity to live in a nation where you have the ability to choose and live in freedom. The other is a downward spiral toward ultimate tyranny.

-- "Michael B. Morris, Esq.," MRC Free Speech & MRC Business Associate Editor (and onetime CNSNews.com commentary editor), March 23 CNS commentary

Newsmax Columnist: Mexican Immigrants Will Turn U.S. Into Mexico
Topic: Newsmax

Indeed in my recent "De-Americanizing America," I wrote that for well over the last half-century, the United States has arguably been the most remarkable — and certainly the most powerful and prosperous — country globally — a magnet for immigrants around the world, wishing to partake in the material plenty and political and intellectual liberty it can provide.

[...]

However, immigrants can only contribute beneficially to American society if they absorb and internalize its values and they themselves become absorbed and integrated into the overarching socio-cultural fabric of the host nation — otherwise they will, almost inevitably, become an onerous and disruptive element.

But when immigrants arrive in unrestricted, unregulated masses, such integration and absorption are liable to be very difficult, indeed, virtually impossible.

Thus, the social values and mores to which they are liable to be exposed and in which they remain immersed, are those of their country of origin, which they left, rather than those of the country of destination, in which they reside.

As the presence of such immigrant inflows increase, the environment in which they live will inevitably begin to resemble that which they left.

Thus, for example, instead of a Mexican immigrant becoming Americanized, more and more of America will be transformed into Mexico.

Accordingly, the inevitable outcome of the sustained application of the emerging mode of governance adopted by the Biden administration will be to transform America into an unrecognizable remnant of its former self, increasingly reminiscent of realities in South and Central America.

This will induce accelerating emigration, with increasing portions of the more mobile and successful population fleeing higher taxes, socio-cultural alienation, and economic decline.

Increasingly unable to compete in international markets, the U.S. will fall into steep decline, reeling ever closer to the status of a third-world nation — with a decaying nuclear arsenal — unable to keep up with more virile rivals.

Soon it will begin to resemble the lands the immigrants left behind far more than the land to which they flocked — and with that, jeopardizing the very Union which, for over two centuries, held it together so successfully.

-- Martin Sherman, March 20 Newsmax column

Dubious WND/AAPS Doc Goes On A Rant Against Fauci
Topic: WorldNetDaily

The last time we checked in on WorldNetDaily columnist and fringe-right Association of American Physicians and Surgeons member Marilyn Singleton, she was lying about being "censored" for talking about dubious treatments for coronavirus. In her March 29 column, she lashes out at the "federal medical bureaucracy" for its response to the pandemic, claiming that it "has resulted in a wasteland of lost economic and educational opportunities, psychologically damaged children, terminally lonely nursing home residents and lives lost to suicide, illicit drug overdoses and missed diagnoses." Actually, suicide rates in the U.S. declined over the past year.

Singleton then asserted: "So why were children barred from attending school? To protect Grandma. Even if children were found to be transmitters of disease – they haven't been – a sensible alternative to depriving all students of a proper education and social life would have been to ask children whether elders lived in their homes. If so, that group could have been provided with educational accommodations. But the way of bureaucracy is all or none with no room for individual considerations." Actually, children are much more likely than older adults to infect other family members.

Singleton went on to play into the longtime right-wing obsession with attacking Anthony Fauci -- and, of course, invoked her favorite dubious coronavirus treatments in the process:

With the media's help, the public health gurus waged a campaign of fear to keep us in line while we waited for Dr. Fauci's solution: vaccines. One of the medical bureaucracy's biggest (intentional) missteps was the failure to support early treatment of COVID. They told us to stay home until we couldn't breathe. Of course, at that point the virus has overwhelmed the body. The scientific elite maligned study after study and thousands of clinical successes with early treatment with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in favor of unproven high-priced drugs. Despite the CDC and FDA previously acknowledging the 60-year safety record of hydroxychloroquine, it miraculously became harmful in 2020.

It is as if the medical bureaucrats are making up the ever-changing rules as they go along. They claimed they were "following the science." Why haven't we heard from these politically driven experts as hundreds of illegal migrants are released into the United States without COVID tests while U.S. citizens are being fined for not wearing useless masks?

Shameless non-clinician bureaucrats have stolen our lives, stolen the smiles from children's faces and bullied a segment of the population into paralyzing fear. Those hiding behind masks (including our precious children) no longer see people as people, but as 170-pound nests of germs and certain death.

Dr. Fauci remains the highest paid federal government employee, and Dr. Birx has moved on to her private air purifier consulting job. Meanwhile, we are left in the wasteland with their legacy: boarded up shops, needless lost lives, and the death of common sense, scientific discourse and medical freedom that we may never regain. And why?

Well, in no small part because of right-wing, AAPS-affiliated agitators like Singleton who have no problem politicizing a pandemic to push a political agenda that casdts doubt on legitimate medicine. Not that she'll ever admit that, of course.

WND vs. Education
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Rewriting history is a popular pastime among leftists – often right in front of our eyes. (Witness what's happening with the Capitol riots less than two months ago.) History becomes nothing more than a political tool.

This is why history is so important.

In fact, the left knows precisely how important the teaching of accurate history is. That's why they're not permitting it in public schools and universities. The current lies taught in American public schools – the joys of socialism, the absolute refusal to acknowledge its legacy of horrors and economic tragedy – means generations of schoolchildren are being taught propaganda purely for political gain. Y'know, just like what happened in Soviet Russia. Oh wait, that's not taught in school either.

-- Patrice Lewis, Feb. 26 WorldNetDaily column

I have been telling parents for decades that sending a child to almost any college is playing Russian roulette with his or her values.

But it is a different version of Russian roulette. In the traditional version, only one of the gun's six chambers contains a bullet. In the college version of Russian roulette, five of the six chambers contain a bullet. If your child attends almost any university in America (or Canada or anywhere else in the English-speaking world), the odds are that your child's decency, intellectual acuity, faculty of reason, character and moral compass will be damaged, perhaps permanently.

The worse news is that sending your child to almost any elementary school or high school – public or private – is fast becoming equally toxic. More and more schools are being taken over by left-wing ideologues and by nonideologues who lack the courage to confront the ideologues.

[...]

Why would you send your young child to a school that sponsors a "Drag Queen Story Hour" or that dwells on "nonbinary" gender identity? Do you think such things do not damage your child's innocence? Do you want your child to be challenged about his or her sexual identity?

Why would you send your child to any school that teaches The New York Times' "1619 Project"? This project holds that America was not founded in 1776 but in 1619, with the arrival of the first black slaves in North America, and that the Revolutionary War was fought not to gain independence from Britain but to preserve slavery. Virtually every leading historian specializing in American history – most of whom are liberals and Democrats, and some of whom were anti-Trump activists – have labeled "The 1619 Project" a lie.

-- Dennis Prager, March 8 WND column

Putting aside the ethics of turning math into a racist subject, a practical question remains: Why aren't children being taught math? How will they function as adults if they're unable to add two and two? How will they balance their checkbooks, handle a bank loan, calculate a tip, or make change at a store? Why are children deliberately being kept stupid?

Schools are banishing lessons about World War I and II, the Holocaust, the Civil War and other historical milestones. New priorities include LGBTA+ "awareness" and "systemic racism." Educators are deliberately cultivating the stupidest generation in the history of America. What other explanation is there when children are not permitted to know the sum of two and two?

Why does public education exist at all if its only goal is to keep children ignorant? That is not a rhetorical question; I honestly want to know. What is the purpose of school if no one will be taught that 2+2=4? Or worse, that the correct answer to 2+2 is racist? The answer is obvious: school is to indoctrinate, not teach.

[...]

The only thing modern college degrees are good for is getting jobs as Diversity Nazis at a variety of woke companies, creating yet more wokeness. And if no such job comes available, that's OK. BLM and Antifa are always hiring. There are cities to trash! Businesses to burn! Law enforcement officers to torment! And so the downward spiral continues.

-- Patrice Lewis, March 12 WND column

Most disturbing of all, however, is what is occurring in America’s schools. The next generation is literally at stake. Picking up the Marxist “virus” from the nation’s colleges and universities, today’s government schools – from pre-school through high school – are infecting millions of children with hatred and guilt toward their own country. This is happening right now.

In “1984,” the “Party” controls everything in the mythical state of Oceania – from its politics to its culture to its economy. But what the ruling oligarchy most craves, which enables it to exercise full totalitarian control of its citizens, is shaping and taking control of the people’s thoughts, feelings, emotions, attitudes, beliefs, guilts, comforts, and particularly their sense of moral self-worth. This is precisely what today’s “woke” “progressive” “left” (all Marxist code words) is engaged in doing in every corner of society – but nowhere more consequentially than in education.

Remember Abraham Lincoln’s chilling observation: “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.”

-- David Kupelian, March 21 WND column

MRC Repeatedly Lies That Trump Was Banned From Social Media Because He Called For Peace
Topic: Media Research Center

We noted that a post last month at the Media Research Center's Free Speech America project that Alexander Hall falsely claimed "Big Tech platforms cracked down on [Donald] Trump’s account following then-president Trump's call for peace amid political unrest in D.C." -- the lie being the implication that Trump's call for peace was the reason for the crackdown and not, you know, the previous months in which he spread the lie that he won the election and encouraged that "political unrest." But that's far from the only time the MRC has done this.

Hall first forwarded this victimization lie on Jan. 6, in a post headlined "Twitter Suspends Trump As He Calls for 'Peace'" in which he declared that "Trump’s call for order was restricted by Twitter, as chaos erupted in the nation’s capital" -- and Hall was also silent then on the fact that Trump instigated the chaos he was now trying to defuse. Hall and others have spread this same dishonest lie linking the call for "peace" with suspensions in other MRC posts as well -- not just immediately after the Capitol riot but weeks afterward:

• Other tech platforms including Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok and even Shopify have followed suit in blaming the sitting president for the actions of the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, even as he made a call for “peace.” -- Hall, Jan. 8
• Twitter patted itself on the back after suspending Trump for 12 hours for posting a video in which he called for “peace” amid the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol building. -- Kayla Sargent, Jan. 8
• Twitter began a censorship apocalypse in recent days after it purged Trump. Multiple Big Tech platforms even cracked down on Trump’s call for peace amid the D.C. chaos, which saw rioters storm the U.S. Capitol building. -- Hall, Jan. 12 and Jan. 13
• Before he was banned, Twitter targeted Trump with more than a year of unprecedented restriction of his tweets, including a 12-hour suspension for posting a video in which he called for “peace” amid the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol building. -- Alexa Moutevelis, Jan. 14
• Trump’s urgent warning that free speech must be protected at all costs is especially salient after he was censored by Big Tech companies. Multiple Big Tech platforms even cracked down on Trump’s call for peace amid political unrest in D.C., which saw rioters storm the U.S. Capitol building. -- Hall, Jan. 20
• Facebook had suspended then-President Trump indefinitely, even as he called for peace amidst the U.S. Capitol riots. -- Hall, Jan. 21
• Multiple Big Tech platforms cracked down on Trump’s account following hte former president's call for peace amid political unrest in D.C., which saw rioters storm the U.S. Capitol building.  -- Hall, March 23 and March 24
• At least 17 Big Tech platforms cracked down on the former president’s accounts following his call for peace amid political unrest when rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. -- Hall, March 31
• Facebook banned the former President after he called for peace following the Capitol riot on January 6. -- Casey Ryan, April 13
• YouTube was one of at least 10 Big Tech platforms that cracked down on the former president’s accounts following his call for peace amid political unrest when rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. -- Hall, April 19

Spreading such lies does not help boost the MRC's credibility.

Newsmax Columnist Goes Godwin on Masks
Topic: Newsmax

It's time for America to remove its chains and realize that there's nothing ''normal'' about the so-called ''new normal'' of extreme lockdowns and mask mandates — especially now that three variants of the Trump vaccine are being distributed at record rates.

[...]

It's now apparent that it's less about safety than it is control.

American psychologist G.M. Gilbert interviewed Hermann Göering, the highest-ranked Nazi official tried at Nuremberg. Goering reportedly told Gilbert that the masses can always be controlled with the right messaging.

''The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders,'' Goering supposedly said, according to Gilbert's ''Nuremberg Diary.''

''That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country.''

In the same manner, Americans are told that it's necessary and even ''patriotic'' to sit in your car alone while wearing a mask, avoiding human contact, closing businesses until they go bankrupt, and shuttering schools.

In the early stages of the pandemic, all these precautions appeared necessary, because we were dealing with the unknown. Now that we have a better understanding, it's time to make America free again.

-- Michael Dorstewitz, March 24 Newsmax column

 

A Tale of Two Shootings, As Reported By CNS
Topic: CNSNews.com

The first reaction CNSNews.com had to the March 16 shootings at Atlanta-area massage parlors that killed eight people -- six of them of Asian descent -- was to try and shoot down the narrative that the shooter was targeting Asians.

The first article came early on March 17 from Patrick Goodenough, who declared it was too soon to declare what the motivation was, though he did concede most of the victims were Asian:

Reports of deadly shootings at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area on Tuesday sparked snap judgments on social media, with some posters not waiting for evidence of motive before declaring the killings to be hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.

Some critics sought to lay blame on former President Trump, linking the shooting to Trump’s criticism of China over the coronavirus pandemic.

[...]

There was little sign of such caution on Twitter, where although investigators have yet to establish a motive, the assumption was that Asians were deliberately targeted for their ethnicity.

Goodenough also conceded that "Hate crimes against Asian Americans have risen through 2020, according to an advocacy group called Stop AAPI Hate," though he waited until the second-to-last paragraph of his article to note that.

Goodenough returned later that day to tout statements relayed by local police that the alleged shooter said he wasn't motiviated by race:

Despite a rush to judgment by some, the man in custody in connection with a deadly shooting at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area told investigators he was motivated not by anti-Asian sentiment but sex addiction, police in Georgia reported on Wednesday.

Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Captain Jay Baker told a press briefing that 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long said he viewed the businesses as “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.”

The shootings at the three parlors cost the lives of eight people – six of them described by police as Asian women. The remaining two fatalities were a white woman and a white man, while a Hispanic man was injured in one of the three incidents.

CNS has largely ignored the shootings ever since, beyond columns complaining about anti-Asian bias being called out -- which means there's no reference to the fundamentalist Christian sect the alleged shooter belonged to, which may have warped his views about sex and may have led him to treat normal sexual desire as "sex addiction."

The following week, there was another mass shooting, at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., in which 10 people were killed. CNS published several articles related to that shooting -- but focused almost entirely on gun control efforts, with emphasis on shouting down anyone advocating for them:

• Rep. Ilhan Omar: ‘Our Communities Are Living in Terror’
• Cruz: Disarming Law-Abiding Citizens Would Make Crime Worse
• Biden on Colorado Shooting: ‘I Don’t Need to Wait Another Minute’ to Call for Assault Weapons Ban
• Rep. Hice: 'These Tragedies Reveal That We Have a Spiritual Problem in This Country'
• Sen. John Kennedy on Gun Control: ‘You Don’t Stop Drunk Drivers by Getting Rid of All Sober Drivers’

There were no articles advocating against rushing to judgment on the shooter's motivation.

The Christian religion of the Atlanta shooter finally got mention in an anoymously written March 24 article -- a week after the incident -- when "Rep. Ilhan Omar (D.-Minn.) sent out a tweet on Tuesday drawing attention to what she thinks is the disproportionate attention paid to the religious affiliation of the Boulder, Colo., mass shooter as opposed to the religious affiliation of the Atlanta, Ga., mass shooter. “So ‘he’s Muslim’ is trending, did I miss ‘he’s Christian’ trending for last week’s Atlanta mass murderer?” Omar said in her tweet."

Those diverging focus on coverage in these two shooting stories shows us where CNS' priorities lie.

MRC Loves Judge's Wacky Anti-Media Rant
Topic: Media Research Center

Whenever someone in government parrots right-wing attacks on the "liberal media," the Media Research Center loves it -- after all, it's been seeding that narrative for three decades. So when a semi-retired judge ranted against libel protections for the media, and it was criticized by actual journalists, Tim Graham was on hand to love it:

Liberal journalists were upset on Friday when Laurence Silberman, a Reagan-appointed judge who's now in senior status (semi-retired) ripped into the partisan and censorious behavior of the liberal media and Big Tech. 

At Politico, Josh Gerstein used the passionate words: "Silberman’s diatribe, contained in his dissent in a libel case, amounted to a withering, frontal assault on the 1964 Supreme Court decision that set the framework for modern defamation law —New York Times v. Sullivan." Later, he added it was a "blistering judicial rant." Let's guess Politico never used words like this for Ruth Bader Ginsburg's opinions.

Even worse, Silberman praised Clarence Thomas: “Justice Thomas has already persuasively demonstrated that New York Times was a policy-driven decision masquerading as constitutional law.” Making a libel plaintiff have to prove "actual malice" in abusing the truth is almost insurmountable. You'd have to probe their inner thoughts, or maybe find them now in their social media posts.

[...]

“The increased power of the press is so dangerous today because we are very close to one-party control of these institutions,” the judge declared. “Although the bias against the Republican Party—not just controversial individuals—is rather shocking today, this is not new; it is a long-term, secular trend going back at least to the ’70s….One-party control of the press and media is a threat to a viable democracy.”

He said "The New York Times and The Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets. And the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction. The orientation of these three papers is followed by The Associated Press and most large papers across the country (such as the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Boston Globe). Nearly all television—network and cable—is a Democratic Party trumpet. Even the government-supported National Public Radio follows along."

Since Silberman adhered so closely to the MRC's talking points, Graham isn't going to tell you the logical holes in his argument -- and another eason Silberman's opinion may not be all that trustworthy. TPM writes:

In his doomsday narrative of left-wing media authoritarianism, Silberman briefly concedes that Fox News, generally the most-watched cable channel in the country, is a “notable exception.” However, he fails to acknowledge that in addition to Fox News, conservative radio spawned the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, who saturated the airwaves for decades.

The fact that then-President Donald Trump regularly used Fox News as both a bullhorn and a policy adviser (Fox host Tucker Carlson was one of his top media consultants) for four years also went unmentioned in the judge’s tirade.

Silberman, you may recall, was the judge who got utterly whipped by a Black clerk last year when he tried to argue that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery as he was railing against the growing push to remove tributes to Confederate soldiers from government property.

But for ideologues and true believers like Graham, the truth doesn't matter -- only the narrative does.

CNS Plays Gotcha With Kerry (Briefly) Not Wearing A Mask On A Plane
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com likes to play gotcha with Democratic politicians (but never Republican ones). This happened again in a March 18 article by Patrick Goodenough:

President Biden's special climate envoy John Kerry dismissed as “malarkey” a social media kerfuffle sparked by a photo showing him not wearing a mask while on an American Airlines domestic flight on Wednesday.

“Feels like there’s some St. Patrick’s day ‘malarkey’ afoot on Twitter,” Kerry tweeted on Wednesday night. “Let’s be clear: If I dropped my mask to one ear on a flight, it was momentary. I wear my mask because it saves lives and stops the spread. It’s what the science tells us to do.”

Goodenough then followed with five paragraphs of criticism of Kerry, plus two more paragraphs consisting of a statement from "the passenger who purportedly took the photo" -- but all he did for the sake of balance is note in passing that "Other Twitter users defended President Biden’s climate czar, suggesting that he may have been about to eat or drink." (Could Goodenough not be bothered to verify that information?) That was follwed with several paragraphs of Goodenough rehashing airline and Biden administration policies on masks.

Goodenough did concede, however, that "Scientists say that masks, correctly warn, capture coronavirus-containing droplets that are emitted when a person speaks, sneezes or coughs, and that wearing one reduces the chances of transmitting and catching COVID-19." But he didn't mention that his employer has been claiming the opposite -- eight days earlier, CNS published a fringe doctor's claim that "healthy people should not be wearing surgical or cloth masks." So there's a mixed message here.

This is not "news" -- it's a political hatchet job. CNS did not treat the Trump administration's disdain of masks with the same derision.

NEW ARTICLE: The MRC's War on Trump Fact-Checkers
Topic: Media Research Center
Led by Tim Graham, the Media Research Center spent much of the Trump presidency complaining that Trump was being fact-checked, eager to smear fact-checkers as biased and "liberal" for doing so. Read more >>

WND's Brown Back To Hating LGBT People Again
Topic: WorldNetDaily

With his feelings about Donald Trump settled at last, WorldNetDaily columnist Michael Brown has been able to get back to what he does best: hating LGBTQ people.

In his Feb. 26 column, Brown complained about a poll showing that one in six Generation Z adults identified as LGBT, trying to put most of the blame on people "being influenced by the society around them, and so they perceive themselves to be gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender at a much higher rate. This would suggest that LGBT identity is not simply inborn and innate. It can simply be a matter of perception." Brown went on to blame the existence of non-hateful portrayals of LGBT people in the media:

Instead, this spike should be seen as the result of the constant, pro-LGBT bombardment of children, beginning with the school system literally brainwashing children from their earliest days regarding LGBT identity. Put another way, do you really think that kids who were exposed to drag queens when they were toddlers might not be more inclined to wonder if they themselves might want to be drag queens too?

[...]

Among those 18-29, the estimate was put at 29.9%, meaning that this age group thought that almost 1 in 3 Americans were gay or lesbian. And where, pray tell, did they get such an idea?

Perhaps the disproportionate representation of (and celebration of) LGBT characters on TV and Hollywood and comic books, not to mention the talking points in children's schools, contributed to this misperception?

[...]

When we also recognize the "cool" factor, meaning, that it's often considered trendy and cool today to identify as something beyond (or different than) heterosexual, Gallup's latest poll is not surprising in the least.

All the more, then, do we need to hold fast to solid, biblically based, sexual and family values, also showing greater compassion to those whom the culture has so strongly (and wrongly) influenced.

On March 3, Brown attacked a Christian adoption agency for working with LGBT parents: "Please reconsider your decision to provide services for gay and lesbian couples wanting to adopt. Please ask yourselves again: Is this decision truly honoring to the Lord in whose name you work? Is it truly in the best interest of the children whose lives you seek to better?" He then hufffed: "We all know that there are many, deeply devoted, caring same-sex couples. But that does not mean for a second that placing a child under their care is the best choice for that child, let alone what God would desire."

Brown ranted in his March 19 column:

This week, a Canadian father, Robert Hoogland, was jailed for the crime of referring to his 14-year-old daughter as his daughter. That's right. Because this concerned father referred to his daughter as female, thereby violating a court order, he has been arrested and put behind bars.

You say, "Obviously, there's something missing from this story. Did he abduct her? Is she not really his daughter? What else happened?"

In reality, the story is worse than you can imagine.

Actually, it's not. Hoogland was under court order not to discuss anything about his child's case in public -- not just talking about the child's gender -- and he violated that order. Nevertheless, Brown went on to rant about "infamous, truly detestable drag queen events," gboing on to declare: "I will always grieve over the pain that has been experienced by those who identify as transgender. But I will not collaborate with child abuse. This is madness. This must stop."

For his March 31 column -- with the reality-defying headline "No, trans-identifying kids are not 'under attack'" -- Brown attacked actress Sophia Bush for defending transgender youths, declaring the children are too stupid to know what they feel: "But do kids really know who they are? Is that the reality of human life?"

First, this is now how life works. The children do not inform the parents about what is real and what is not. (And again, I'm not talking about a child experiencing physical pain or sickness.)

[...]

The reality is that the kids do not, in fact, get to tell us who they are so we can support them. If that were the case, they would be the parents and we would be under their supervision. They would be the ones driving the cars and we would be in car seats in the back. They would be the ones teaching and we would be doing the homework. They would be the doctors and we would be their patients.

Sadly, when children are allowed to tell their parents who they are, as in, "I'm really a boy, not a girl," and when the parents support these sentiments, this only reinforces the child's gender confusion. As a leading psychologist explained at a lecture I attended, if you start dressing a boy in girl's clothes at a young age, affirming him as female, it will be much harder to free him from those misconceptions when he is older.

So, by trying to help, the parents only make things worse. And shall we ignore the high suicide rates among those who have had sex-change surgery? Do their problems suddenly disappear?

Brown went on to cite "Dr. Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins fame" calling helping transgender teens transition "child abuse," while not mentioning that (as we've noted) McHugh's anti-trans work has been widely discredited.