Newsmax Keeps Flooding The Zone With Fawning Trump Coverage Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax just loves serving as Donald Trump's publicity agent, flooding the zone whenever he does an interview with a Newsmax personality. That happened again on June 25, when Trump appeared on Newsmax's morning show, "Wake Up America" (telling us that some Newsmax employees have experience writing outraged letters to the editor of newspapers). Newsmax generated a whopping eight articles out of that interview:
Now, this was not an interview that deserved eight articles -- who thinks that, say, what Trump says about his wife is worthy of a headline? But if you're a "news" organization that's effectively Trump's PR agent, you get your client's name out there as much as you can, and that's exactly what Newsmax did here.
And that's not even the end of the fawning, uncritical coverage Newsmax gave Trump that day. Jeffrey Rodack wrote in a separate article:
Former President Donald Trump is suggesting that Georgia residents sue the state for running "a corrupt and rigged 2020 presidential election."
His comments came in a statement released Friday after Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Justice Department is filing a lawsuit against the state of Georgia to try and overturn a new voting law that Democrats allege discriminates against minorities.
[...]
Trump, in his statement said: "Biden’s Department of Justice just announced that they are suing the Great State of Georgia over its Election Integrity Act. Actually, it should be the other way around! The PEOPLE of Georgia should SUE the State, and their elected officials, for running a CORRUPT AND RIGGED 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION — and for trying to suppress the VOTE of the AMERICAN PEOPLE in Georgia. If we don’t address these issues from the 2020 Election head on, and we allow the Radical Left Democrats to continue to politicize the DOJ and Law Enforcement, we will lose our Country. SAVE AMERICA!"
A real reporter would have also noted that no credible evidence has been found to back up Trump's claim of a "CORRUPT AND RIGGED" election in Georgia. But Rodack didn't -- he's part of the Trump PR team at Newsmax.
Failing Downward: Eric Bolling Ends Up At Newsmax Topic: Newsmax
An anonymously written June 28 Newsmax article put the best possible spin on the development:
Newsmax, America’s fastest growing cable news network, announced today that it is adding acclaimed television host and best-selling author Eric Bolling to its impressive talent roster.
Chris Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax, said: “Eric Bolling is a consummate media professional who isn’t afraid to ask tough questions, get provocative answers and challenge establishment thinking. His background in business and politics separates him from the competition.”
Bolling will begin as a guest host for shows on Monday, June 27, and is slated to host a new show in July with details to be announced soon.
Bolling said, “Like myself, Newsmax is concerned with the direction that Big Tech and Big Corporate Media have taken journalism and our nation. I’m excited to join an organization that delivers programming you can trust.”
[...]
Most recently, Bolling hosted a popular talk show called “America This Week With Eric Bolling.”
The show aired weekly across the Sinclair broadcast platform of 200 stations.
At Fox News, Bolling was its most visible and popular guest host, sitting in for Bill O’Reilly more than 200 times and guest hosting for top-rated “Hannity” more than 70 times.
Needless to say, Newsmax didn't tell readers why Bolling is no longer employed at those previous jobs. He was fired from Fox News in 2017 after allegations of sexual harassment surfaced in the form of sending lewd photos to colleagues, part of a wave of allegations against Fox News hosts and executives. He was fired from Sinclair Broadcast Group earlier this year after repeatedly getting busted for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic.
Newsmax did not provide an explanation of why it has chosen to hire a man with such a dubious track record.
Newsmax Massages Ratings Numbers To Claim Trump Speech Was Popular Topic: Newsmax
Anthony Rizzo enthused in a June 8 Newsmax article:
Former President Donald Trump's speech to the North Carolina Republican Convention last Saturday drew more than 1.8 million viewers to Newsmax as the network beat Fox News in a key demo rating.
Newsmax reported Trump's 8 p.m. ET speech, his second major address since leaving the White House, drew a total audience reach of 1.1 million viewers across traditional cable platforms, according to Nielsen.
But Newsmax also drew a massive OTT audience as well, with the company reporting its streaming audience exceeded 700,000 total viewers during Trump's speech.
"OTT" stands for "over the top," TV industry parlance for streaming platforms (because they go "over the top" of cable boxes).
But Newsmax's version of the speech's ratings may be more corporate puffery than actual reality. The Associated Press reported:
Former President Donald Trump reached less than a million measurable television viewers over the weekend in his return to the public stage at a North Carolina political event.
Newsmax averaged just under 700,000 viewers between 8 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Saturday when Trump spoke, the Nielsen company said. His speech was also carried live on One America News Network and C-SPAN, but their audience is not measured by Nielsen.
Fox News Channel did not carry the speech by the former president beloved by many of its viewers. The network averaged more than 1.5 million viewers for its typical Saturday night fare of Jesse Watters and Jeanine Pirro.
Although Trump couldn't eclipse Fox's regular lineup, at least for Newsmax, showing the former president live appeared to be a good business decision for the network. So far this year, Newsmax has averaged 202,000 viewers in prime time, including the more heavily trafficked weeknights, Nielsen said.
Later on Saturday, Fox's debut hour with conservative media personality Dan Bongino reached 1.8 million people, making it the most-watched cable news show of the weekend.
Rizzo seemed to be conceding Fox News' overall ratings victory during the speech, because he selectively reported on an alleged demographic win: "Nielsen reports Newsmax beat Fox in the coverage rating for the key 35-64 demo, taking a .56 to Fox News' .46 during the speech." He did admit that "Newsmax drew a .58 for total P2 audience, close to Fox News' .77 for the same time period," then immediately tried to qualify that victory by complaining that "Fox News is available in 56% more television homes than Newsmax. The coverage rating shows audience penetration against total households available for a network."
Newsmax Columnist Likens Trump To John The Baptist Topic: Newsmax
Until today thugs like Antonio Gramsci and Saul Alinsky and so many have invaded schools and colleges with a dark program to undermine the American legacy whoring word games like original sin and systemic racism, designed to shift power to them!
On the contrary, The Trump Phenomenon was more significant than the left or right or even the conservatives and RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). RINOs were the same old Establishment first enriching themselves.
[...]
Trump, as I explain in my new book, "Citizen Trump," is not a Jesus but more like a John the Baptist. We don't like him eating locusts and lives in the desert, but to paraphrase Jesus, "what did you expect a reed tossed by the sea?" So you ask him to do the dirty work but complain it got dirty?
The Far Left (not traditional liberals) has forfeited its place in our free society and shown its true colors. They have become cancer in the political body in need of severe radiation treatments.
Cancer has created slow leprosy for the innocent and creeping blindness in our children.
[...]
Jesus spoke in metaphors and parables. John the Baptist called his greatest enemies whitewashed sepulchers — in other words, phonies, frauds and fakes!
Yes, Trump performed his role as candidate and president; that's why he succeeded but just ran out of TV time.
Forget heaven. You're in a white noise reality.
Winning an election is one battle, but winning back your country from the media's control is all-out war!
Like fellow Newsmax columnist Conrad Black, Bernard Kerik was graced with a pardon from President Trump for the felonies that sent him to prison for years. And like Black, Kerik is sucking up to Trump in an apparent effort to continue to justify that pardon.
In a June 7 appearance on Newsmax TV, Kerik defended the highly partisan "audits" of election ballots in Arizona and attempts to do them in other states:
"I'm telling you: The president is right," Kerik told Monday's "John Bachman Now" about former President Donald Trump's speech Saturday which levied claims of criminal voter fraud to be revealed in the coming months.
"Those investigations that are continuing to go on today are going to reveal overwhelming evidence of fraud, criminality, and other things that resulted in Joe Biden being put in the White House.
"It just takes time. This stuff doesn't happen overnight.
The media and Democrat narrative that those seeking to investigate fraud and audit elections are merely doing so to "overthrow" or "overturn" Biden's election is a smokescreen for the important work of protecting the integrity of honest elections, Kerik added to host John Bachman.
"Anybody that pushes against the president or pushes back against the president, or me, or [Rudy] Giuliani, or anybody else who was there, they basically say, 'you're trying to overthrow the election, overturn the election,'" Kerik said. "No, no, that's not what we're trying to do. What we're trying to do is get to the bottom of the election. We're trying to identify what really happened.
"And what really happened is not what was suppose to happen, and I have probably 2,000 or 3,000 sworn affidavits, sworn under the penalty of perjury – no different than walking into a federal grand jury – there's 2,000 to 3,000 sworn affidavits of people that witnessed criminal conduct in these voting polls in different states: Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and elsewhere."
Kerik then devoted his June 15 column to defending the Arizona audit by claiming how good its security supposedly is:
Democrats and the mainstream media have been aggressively denouncing the Maricopa County, Arizona election audit from the beginning.
At, first I didn’t understand why.
I thought that it was because they were afraid of what the results would be, but I now believe it’s something far worse.
The Democrats aren’t “just” afraid of the outcome – but they’re afraid that the audit results will be irrefutable and unimpeachable. They know that their efforts to discredit the audit process in Arizona will not stand up to scrutiny and here’s why.
The Arizona audit is being run impeccably, utilizing security and surveillance procedures with a longstanding track record of effectiveness.
To say that I was impressed after viewing the audit process for myself would be a massive understatement. I’ve spent decades working in security and law enforcement at the highest levels, and this is exactly the level of conscientiousness and attention to detail that I would demand for a sensitive or high-profile investigation.
They’re not trying to reinvent the wheel; they’re using the same methods casinos have used for decades to catch cheaters.
Kerik is actually lying to you. Therehave been many security issues with the audit -- to the point that Maricopa County will replace all the county's voting machines at a cost of millions of dollars because the machines' chain of custody has been violated by the folks conducting the audit. The head of the company conducting the audit, Cyber Ninjas -- which has no experience working in the elections space -- has promoted pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the eleciton, and there's every reason to believe the audit is being conducted in a similarly biased manner.
Kerik also tried to discredit anyone who pointed out those security lapses:
After being briefed, visitors must forfeit cell phones, cameras, and any writing implements they might be carrying before they can be escorted to the audit floor. That’s why the Democrats’ claims of seeing auditors wielding blue and black pens are so implausible.
Actually, they're completely plausible. Observers found at least two instances of black pens on the conuting floor -- an issue because black or blue pens can be used to alter ballots. If Cyber Ninjas had experience working with elections, it would have known that.
Kerik continued his denial or reality:
If every state performed an audit like this one after every election, public faith in our democracy would be absolute and unshakable.
The audit process being used in Arizona has accuracy, integrity, and accountability, and there’s no way to cheat because everything is captured on film.
What Kerik didn't tell you: The livestream video of the audit is controlled by right-wing outlet One America News -- where reporters are fund-raising for the audit, a clear conflict of interest. That's yet another reason not to trust the audit.
But Kerik continues to support the audit becuase he thinks it will generate the biased result he wants -- which, of course, is yet another reason not to trust it.
Newsmax's Black Tries To Rewrite History of Capitol Riot Again Topic: Newsmax
The sheer amount of slobberingsycophancy Conrad Black feels he must do in an apparent effort to show Donald Trump that pardoning him for his financial crimes was worth it is amazing. In his June 2 Newsmax column, Black once again tries to justify the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and blame it on anyone else but Trump, as part of a rant against fellow conservative George Will because he likened the riot to 9/11:
On Jan. 6 of this year, some members of a crowd of over 200,000, attending an address by President Trump — who detailed the questionable aspects of the apparent result of the presidential election — marched on to the U.S. Capitol and some hundreds of them penetrated the building and caused relatively minor damage to it.
Five people died, but only one, a Trump supporter, died of unnatural causes — shot in the neck by a still unidentified Capitol Police officer.
There were many vivid photographs of the occasion including the spectacle of some of America’s leading legislators hiding under their desks wearing tinfoil protective gear.
In their desperation to represent the episode as an attempt by the outgoing president to incite an insurrection, (which requires taking over the armed forces, police, and media outlets as happens in countries that have coups d’état), the media falsely represented the death of one Capitol policeman as a result of having been beaten over the head by Trump supporters with a fire extinguisher, a complete fabrication.
Legislative buildings are attacked fairly often, as in Paris in 1934; smashing into some of the world’s most famous buildings with hijacked airliners has only happened once.
Trump did not incite anything, except a peaceful demonstration after a very questionable election result. None of the 18 lawsuits that directly challenged the constitutional or legal integrity of the vote or the vote-counting system were adjudicated.
Black seems to have forgotten that Trump also said, "We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore." But Black has some more history to rewrite:
The 2020 election, next to that of 1876 which was resolved by an agreement between the candidates after a partisan vote in a congressional commission, was the most dubious presidential result in American history.
The real issue here is that the Trump-haters, like George Will, want to charge Trump falsely with seeking an insurrection after losing an unexceptionable election, when he was merely expressing the anger of his partisans over a dubious vote-counting process, aggravated by the abdication of the judiciary from its constitutional co-equal role with the legislative and executive branches.
[...]
A man of Will’s influence has an ethical and professional obligation to avoid the willful propagation of defamatory nonsense. He said on the same program that for the first time in American history many members of Congress are afraid of their own voters.
They were elected because those same voters agreed with what they said: they all found Trump the preferable candidate.
Black then ventures into outright lying:
A presidential election result that was highly questionable, despite the frenzied efforts of an air-tight media pretense that all the late drops of unverifiable heavy Biden votes in a few key states were squeaky clean, and which the judicial system at every level refuses to judge for process reasons (a divided Wisconsin Supreme Court said the challenge in that state had to start at the lower courts and work up — impossible given those deadlines), naturally leaves the 75 million voters who supported the ostensibly losing candidate upset. That they would demonstrate is understandable, and when the speaker of the House and mayor of Washington refused the capitol police chief’s request for reinforcements, some hooliganism was predictable.
There were no "late drops of unverifiable heavy Biden votes in a few key states." Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House Black is trying to impugn without using her name, is not in charge of the Capitol police and. therefore, could not have blocked any request for reinforcments during the riot. And it was not DC Mayor Muriel Bowser who delayed deployment of National Guard troops to quell the riot, it was the Defense Department.
Newsmax Columnist Wants More Cancel Culture (Of Non-Conservatives) Topic: Newsmax
Pedro Gonzalez kicked off his May 26 Newsmax column by ranting about the Nikole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project, which he declared is an "anti-white, anti-American project that is somewhere between a grift and an intellectual welfare program, following by a call to destroy Hannah-Jones professionally: "Hannah-Jones should not be allowed to teach, educate, write, or publish in a professional capacity anywhere. In other words, she and those in the 1619 camp ought to be canceled wherever and whenever it is possible to do so." Gonzalez then ranted that conservatives aren't destroying the lives of enough of the people they hate:
The conservative preoccupation with cancel culture has blinded them to the fact that some people should actually be canceled, and what matters, in reality, is who is in charge of the canceling and that the only way to conserve anything is to cancel those toppling civilization.
That may seem reactionary, but reaction, as the late Mel Bradford wrote, "is a necessary term in the intellectual context we inhabit in the twentieth century because merely to conserve is sometimes to perpetuate what is outrageous."
In the twenty-first century, too many conservatives naively committed to conserving all sorts of new outrages and, most importantly, the power of their enemies, are convinced that forceless facts, logic, and truth can prevail on merit.
By contrast, progressives have no qualms fighting dirty in the war of ideas—and that’s why they have effectively routed their opposition. Reflecting on the cancellation of Lou Dobbs' show, CNN's Brian Stelter reframed cancel culture as "consequence culture."
"What are the consequences for riling up people with reckless lies?" Stelter asked.
That's a good question, one that the conservative commentariat loves to ponder but never come down from the clouds to act upon.
[...]
If conservatives and the right-liberals with whom they overlap are not willing to cancel the architects, peddlers, and profiteers of our national demise, then they cannot complain about the walls tumbling down. Nor should not be surprised that everyday Americans care increasingly little for their calls for Queensberry Rules.
NEW ARTICLE: Newsmax's 'Non-Clinician' Blues Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax has felt compelled to make sure readers know that several columns -- mostly making dubious claims about the coronavirus pandemic -- were written by a "non-clinician." Read more >>
Nick Koutsobinas wrote in a May 18 Newsmax article:
Nearly 37 percent of Democrats say they would "absolutely" vote for President Joe Biden in the 2024 primaries while 20.7 percent say they would “likely” vote for the incumbent, totaling 57.4 percent, according to a poll released Tuesday by the Trafalgar Group.
Comparitavely, 49.1 percent of GOP voters say they would "absolutely" support former President Donald Trump in a Republican primary in 2024 if he chooses to run and 34.9 percent say they would vote for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis if No. 45 sits out.
Koutsobinas didn't tell you, however, that the Trafalgar Group has a pro-Trump bias and a less-than-stellar record; as we've noted, Trafalgar "weights its polls to account for a 'social desirability bias,' or the so-called shy Trump voters who are embarrassed to tell pollsters they support his candidacy," and Trafalgar's polling gets a C-minus rating from FiveThirtyEight.
That's not the only dubious poll Newsmax has touted. The apparently unironicaly named Charlie McCarthy wrote in a May 19 article:
Former President Donald Trump defeats Vice President Kamala Harris head-to-head, something made more significant by nearly two-thirds of voters saying they don’t think President Joe Biden will finish his current term, according to a new poll.
When asked if Harris will be president before the end of Biden’s 4-year term, 64% of likely voters in the McLaughlin monthly May poll said she would.
Even among Biden voters (51%) and Democrats (50%), many said it’s likely Harris will be president.
In a presidential contest pitting Trump against Harris, the former president leads 49% to 45%.
Trump leads Harris among independents (48% - 42%) and suburban voters (52% - 42%), but also takes 39% of Hispanics and 17% of African Americans.
McCarthy didn't mention that McLaughlin was the pollster for Trump's re-election campaign, making these results look less than objective. McLaughlin has also been wrong in the past, most notoriously so in 2014 when it claimed polls showing Republican Eric Cantor ahead of his primary rival, Dave Brat, by 34 points; in the actual election, Brat beat Cantor by 11 points.
But principals John and Jim McLaughlin have their own Newsmax column, so the management is less than eager to call them out. And in their column that came out the same day as McCarthy's fluffing of its poll results, the McLaughlins reminded us of just how in the tank they are for Trump:
In 2016, we had the privilege of advising then-candidate Donald J. Trump from the primaries through election day.
The Republican establishment didn’t think he would win. He beat them for the Republican nomination. The Washington, D.C. establishment didn’t think he could win in November 2016.
The establishment media created the "Hillary electoral lock." He beat them again.
Then, for four years, they tried every means possible to delegitimize him.
[...]
The Democratic party won the 2020 election with the help of Big Tech and the mainstream media, who all covered for candidate Joe Biden who rarely had to campaign, or even leave his Delaware basement. His voters said he was too old. Trump voters said he was senile with dementia.
Either way President Biden isn’t releasing any cognitive tests for public consumption that could precipitate a national security crisis. They even covered up the lucrative Hunter Biden corruption with foreign businesses in Russia and China just to beat President Trump.
[...]
As we have seen in previous months the impeachment, relentless media attacks, censorship and persecution of President Trump have backfired among Republican primary voters.
Three quarters, 73%, of all Republican primary voters, which includes independents who vote in GOP primaries, want to see Donald Trump run again in 2024.
That’s an amazing statistic.
If Donald Trump runs again Republican primary voters would support him 82%-13% and they would vote for him in the general election 83%-11%.
President Trump has near unanimous support in the base.
[...]
It’s early to look at 2024, but with the Democrats and liberal media apologizing for their polling failures of 2020, if they take a poll based on the actual 2020 turnout, they are not going to like what they see. Donald Trump is leading Kamala Harris for President.
Boom!
The McLaughlins don't seem like the kind of folks who can be trusted to conduct truly objective polling.
Former President Donald Trump will appear on Newsmax's "Cortes & Pellegrino" at 9 p.m. on Tuesday for a face-to-face interview.
The President will do a sit-down with co-host Steve Cortes, a former top advisor to Trump's 2020 presidential campaign.
Trump's conversation with Cortes will take place in New York's Trump Tower and cover major topics like China's role in the COVID virus, President Biden's spending plans, the January 6 Commission, rising anti-Semitism, the crisis at the southern border, and more.
Cortes and Jenn Pellegrino co-host the new prime-time show on Newsmax TV, now the 4th highest-rated cable news channel in America.
Since Newsmax is such a supporter of Trump that it parroted his lies about election fraud -- which resulted in some walkbacks in order to get out of defamation lawsuits -- and given that interviewer Cortes has served as a media surrogate for Trump, this would not be a hard-hitting interview. And indeed, it wasn't-- the main article, by Eric Mack, let Trump prattle on about his election fraud cponspriacy theories:
Big Tech and media Democrat allies effectively aided a rigged election by silencing stories on Hunter Biden and election fraud, President Donald Trump told Newsmax on Tuesday night in an exclusive interview.
"That's when you first saw silence," Trump told Steve Cortes on Tuesday's "Cortes & Pellegrino" of social media's blocking of the New York Post's reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop. "They silenced a newspaper. It's the oldest newspaper in our country, I believe, and it's a big one, but they silenced a newspaper in our country because they were talking about Hunter Biden.
"The other thing that they don't want to talk about – when you hear this whole culture of keeping things quiet, let's not talk about – is the election fraud."
Not only did the media rebuke attempts to investigate election fraud after the November election, the media is remaining quiet on the ongoing election audits in Arizona and more states, Trump lamented.
Since Mack didn't note it, we can assume that Cortes never bothered to confront Trump with the cobious evidence that his election conspiracy theories are lies.
Other articles from the interview simply quote Trump ranting and praising himself, again with no apparent pushback from Cortes:
And that wasn't even the full extent of Newsmax slobbering over Trump on May 25. Earlier in the day, Sandy Fitzgerald touted how Trumpo "slammed MSNBC "Morning Joe" anchor Joe Scarborough and his wife and co-host Mika Brzezinski, accusing them of launching attacks on him because their show rankings are dropping." That was followed an hour later by an article from the apparently unironically named Charlie McCarthy gushing that Trump "issued a statement offering condolences to Rob Carson following the death of the Newsmax host’s mother."
Those kind of quid pro quos are the things that get Newsmax things like a fluffy sit-down with Trump.
Then, four days later, it happened again -- Trump did another Newsmax interview, this time with host Dick Morris. Mack sycophantically wrote: "In a wide-ranging phone interview, Trump delivered his America First, MAGA views as only he can, ripping Fox News, lamenting the Democrats-led turn against Israel, a softened approach to China allowing it to 'get away with murder,' defunding the police movements leading to massive crime increases in the U.S., and the destruction of women's rights." Newsmax squeezed a bunch more articles out of this interview as well:
Newsmax Touts Disgraced Ex-Governor Running For Missouri Senate Topic: Newsmax
We've already noted how Newsmax columnist Bernard Kerik endorsed a fellow disgraced politician, Eric Greitens, for a Missouri Senate seat. Greitens, if you'll recall, was forced to resign as Missouri governor after allegations of an abusive sexual affair and campaign improprieties. But Newsmax has tried to rehabilitate Greitens during this campaign (ironically, not unlike the way it tried to rehabilitate Kerik after the improprieties that sent him to prison came to light).
Kerik also wrote a Feb. 26 column declaring Greitens had been "fully exonerated" (he wasn't) and that he "earned enemies by doing the right thing" (ask the woman with whom he was in an abusive relationship about that).
An April 12 article by Marisa Herman gushed that Greitens "sprang into action to help save the life of a man who collapsed near the Navy SEAL at Mar-a-Lago’s beach club," adding that "In July, he helped provide first aid to two men who were shot near St. Louis University." Herman curiously made no mention of the numerous scandals that cost him his job as governor.
An anonymously written April 19 article touted how "Kimberly Guilfoyle — the former prosecutor, Trump campaign adviser, and television personality — was tapped as national chair of former Missouri governor Eric Greitens’ newly launched Senate campaign." That was followed four days later by a column from Guilfoyle carrying the headline "Kimberly Guilfoyle Endorses Eric Greitens for Missouri Senate Seat" -- but didn't disclose until the very end that she works for his campaign. She spun Greitens' corruption by blaming "a crooked prosecutor, financed with PAC money by liberal billionaire George Soros," for trying to "tear down a man who was willing to expose the Missouri establishment and liberal mob."
Newsmax also gave Greitens space for a May 15 commentary in which he declared that "it was disgusting to see what happened to President Donald J. Trump during the 2020 elections" -- though he cited no evidence of fraud -- and praised the GOP-led audit of ballots in Arizona. He asserted that "in what appears to be a brazen attempt to undermine this audit, election officials deleted entire databases days before handing over computer drives. The files deleted include one labeled, “Results Tally and Reporting.” If there’s an explanation, let’s hear it. If not, there should be significant consequences for this obstruction." As we've documented, there is an explanation: audit investigators screwed up, and the databases were never deleted. Newsmax has yet to correct Greitens' work.
Surprisingly, the most balanced coverage of Greitens has come from Newsmax writer John Gizzi. In an April 2 article, Gizzi admitted that Greitens is "highly controversial." And in a May 24 article, Gizzi pointed out that Greitens has not been as "fully exonerated" as he claims, noting that the Missouri Ethics Commission required Greitens' campaign to pay a $178,000 fine for improprieties, qutoing a newspaper editorial noting that it's "an eye-popping dollar figure from a body more accustomed to levying penalties in the $100 range." Gizzi also got other opinions beyond Greitens regarding his abusive affair with a hairdresser:
Newsmax spoke to 3 Republican House Members who served on the committee. They stood by their report, saying that Greitens' criticism of the committee was groundless.
"The witness [the hairdresser] testified under oath," said a House member who requested anonymity. "Gov. Greitens never appeared before our committee to testify under oath."
That's an unusual break from the right-wing propaganda Newsmax is largely known for.
Newsmax's Black Lashes Out At Liz Cheney, Likens Her To Brutus Topic: Newsmax
With his slobbering Trump sycophancy, Conrad Black apparently still thinks he needs to earn the pardon Donald trump gave him after committing fraud. So we have his May 18 Newsmax column, in which goes on an epic rant against Liz Cheney
The apparent suicide plunge of United States Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., appears to be the psychopathic backlash of NeverTrumpers who are starting to realize Donald Trump’s defeat in November and the allegations he was attempting to overturn the election by provoking an "insurrection" at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 do not bring back the Republican Party of the Bushes and McCain and Romney, as those families seem to imagine.
This is only the first shoe dropping.
It will soon be followed by the realization of the role the NeverTrumpers have played in shackling the country and the Western world to the unfolding disaster of the Biden presidency.
Like Brutus charging out of the Roman Senate on the Ides of March, 44 B.C., holding up two bloodied knives and expecting to be applauded after proudly shouting to a distracted group of observers that they had assassinated the tyrant, Cheney acknowledges she voted in support of the Trump administration over 90% of the time, but that her reverence for the rule of law requires her to oppose the "Big Lie."
This lie, she insists, is that there is some question about the legitimacy of the election result. She also holds that there can be no question that Trump attempted to launch a violent assault on the vital processes of the U.S. electoral process by inciting the invasion and vandalization of the U.S. Capitol on Jan 6.
Cheney endlessly repeats her faith in the rule of law as the justification for her mortal opposition to the president whom she claims to have voted for just six months ago.
This faith in law did not propel her to object to the lawless assault upon Trump by the authors of the Trump-Russia collusion fraud or the first spurious impeachment of him.
It's rather the last refuge of someone willfully sacrificing a congressional leadership position to be a useful idiot for the Democrats as they seek, through their iron-fisted control of the national political media, to maintain the Real Big Lie — namely, that the November election’s results have been carefully and impartially reviewed by the courts, and that the ex-president incited an insurrection on Jan. 6.
Since — as with Brutus, who shortly had to flee Rome never to return—the majority of Republican voters are not persuaded of the fairness of the election or the effective and dispositive performance of the judiciary, or the anti-Trump take on Jan. 6, Cheney is reduced to taking comfort from the efforts of the cheerleading choristers like Peggy Noonan, telling Cheney and Noonan’s readers that Trump really doesn’t represent many people and is fading quickly.
There isn’t much evidence of this and, in any case, it should not be counted upon in the face of Joe Biden’s crumbling regime.
Black went on to gush about the cultish status Trump current ly occupies in the Republican Party: "Long before serious consideration needs to be given to the next presidential nominee, however, Trump will flex his muscles in the midterm elections next year. He will demonstrate that he is the only person in the country for whom 50,000 Americans will stand outdoors in raw weather to wait for the chance to see and listen to him."
That's how the sycophantic Black earned his pardon.
Newsmax Host Embraces Dubious Kerry-Iran Story Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax TV host John Bachman wrote in an April 27 Newsmax column:
Let's talk about Climate Czar John Kerry and his friends.
Kerry appears to be a lot more comfortable with people like Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif than people like Donald Trump.
Kerry's now in a bit of trouble after a three-hour conversation between Zarif and an Iranian economist Leaked out to the press.
A recording of that conversation - reportedly includes Zarif saying Kerry told him about roughly 200 Israeli attacks on Iranian interests in Syria.
As we've documented, this story is highly dubious, since Israel attacking Iranian assets has been public knowledge for years and it's unclear when, exactly, this conversation took place, given that Zarif appears to mostly be whining about being out of the loop in Iranian affairs.
Bachman went on to rant about Kerry once calling the Vietnam War "the biggest nothing in history," but this story that Bachman has embraced despite its lack of veracity -- for no other apparent reason than to engage in some lazy Kerry-bashing -- would also seem to be right up there.Indeed, nothing has c ome from the story since, telling us there's nothing to see here.
Will Bachman apologize to his viewers for getting them worked up over a bogus story? Doubtful.
Newsmax Columnist Trying To Gin Up Census Conspiracies Topic: Newsmax
The lasttime we checked in on Newsmax columnist Mark Schulte, he was spreading coronavirus conspiracy theories so wacky that Newsmax felt compelled to add a disclaimer to his columns that he is a "non-clinician." Perhaps Newsmax also needs to note that Schulte is also not a statistician, because he's now trying to develop conspiracy theories about census numbers.
In his April 29 column, Schulte declared that "Tallies for five heavily populated, Democratic-controlled states – New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Jersey - are worthy of scrutiny for several reasons" -- which mainly come down to Schulte believing that the populations of those "dystopian" states have supposedly increased too much.He also pronounced the census statistics to be "egregiously flawed."
Schulte huffed further in his May 4 column (needless bolding and italics in original):
By contrast, the combined population of four heavily-populated, thriving Republican states —Texas, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina — leaped from 59,874,000 in 2010 to 68,241,000 in 2019. This is an 8,367,000 gain, or 14% over nine years, or 1.6% yearly.
But the Census Bureau is preposterously claiming that these Republican mega-states only increased by a combined microscopic 126,000residents between July 1, 2019 and April 1, 2020: from 68,241,000 to 68,367,000, ortwo-tenths of 1%.
This improbably feeble growth, over nine months, extrapolates to 168,000 for one year, or two-tenths of 1%.
[...]
To summarize: The 2020 Census tallies for the 50 states are not only suspiciously high for five Democratic-controlled mega-states, but also anomalously low for four Republican ones.
Schulte seems to be overlooking a couple things: First ,that the census is conducted only every 10 years, and that numbers in between those official census counts are just estimates, and second, Republican scare tactics may have led Hispanics to avoid census counts, leading to an apparent undercount in Republican-led states with a large Hispanic population.
Even though several Republican-led states are already getting additional congressional seats based on the preliminary census numbers, Schulte spent his May 12 column demanding even more:
But how does Texas, whose population soared by 4.04 million residents, receive only two more House seats?
And how does Florida, whose population jumped by 2.77 million, receive only one more seat?
[...]
Arizona is the third Republican mega-state that should have been awarded one more seat in the highly suspicious 2021 reapportionment. Between April 1, 2010, and July 1, 2019, its population soared by 887,000 residents: from 6,392,000 to 7,279,000, or 97,000 annually.
Calculating this 97,000-yearly increase for the nine months between July 1, 2019, and April 1, 2020, yields 73,000.
If we add these missing Arizonians, to the 7,279,000 counted in July 2019, the sum is 7,352,000, which if divided by 761,000, yields 9.7 seats, which rounds up to 10 seats, and not the allotted 9 seats.
However, the demographically-inept Census Bureau is reporting that Arizona’s population dropped by 120,000, from 7,279,000 to 7,159,000, between July 2019 and April 2020.
Again, Schulte is ignoring that between-census numbers are estimates and GOP scare tactics, showing that he's the one who's "demographically inept."
And on May 17, Schulte ranted that sparsely populated states have too much congressional represenatation:
But the nation's highest court has not ruled on the constitutionality of the colossal disparities in the number of residents per seat among the 50 states, which flagrantly discriminates against the mega-populated states.
Moreover, America's most populous states are already monumentally underrepresented by the constitutional mandate that every state has two seats in the U.S. Senate.
Wyoming, whose 578,000 residents are the nation's smallest population, has 289,000 per U.S. Senate seat. California, with 39,577,000 people, has 19,789,000 per Senate seat, or 68 times that of Wyoming.
Indeed, the 26 states with the smallest populations, which range from Wyoming's 578,000 to Louisiana's 4,661,000, have a total population of only 58 million, or just 17.5% of the nation's 331 million people.
Of course, if the proportion was more accurately reflective of the U.S. population, it's likely that Democrats would have more congressional representation. We presume Schulte doesn't actually want that.
Newsmax Columnist Pardoned By Trump Keeps Up The Trump-Fluffing Topic: Newsmax
President Trump pardoned Conrad Black of fraud charges after he wrote a sycophantic book about Trump, so it's perhaps no surprise that the Newsmax columnist has gone all in on propping up Trump, to the point of rewriting the history of the Capitol riot. It's also not a surprise that Black is going all in on election fraud conspiracy theories in his May 11 column:
The question is whether the NeverTrumpers, abetted by the Democrats, can kill Trump’s chances of a political resurrection.
Success will be impossible unless they can both stamp out the belief of approximately half the voters that 2020 was a tainted election, and keep alive the fiction that Trump was actively promoting an insurrection on Jan. 6.
This is bunk and the cornerstone of what is really the Big Lie — the Trump-haters’ theory that he is just a hooligan and a sore loser of a fair election. In truth, the only reason that has any traction at all is due to the failure of the judiciary to address the constitutional and electoral controversies Trump raised.
Trump warned of the dangers of ballot harvesting, but his campaign wasn’t ready on the ground or in the courts to tackle the issue when it presented itself. And he didn’t help his case with his nonsense about having won the popular vote. In these respects, he is not blameless.
[...]
McConnell and most of the wiser anti-Trump elements in the Republican Party leaped back into their trenches and presumably will return to the comparative discretion most of them observed while Trump was president.
Those unable to contain their Trump-hate will bite the dust if they have to deal with a primary opponent — e.g., Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska. Sens. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, Ben Sasse, R-Neb., and one or two others can grumble, but presumably even they realize that being useful idiots for the Democrats is not what they were sent to Washington to accomplish.
Trump’s enemies are going to have to face the facts: They defeated him with a tainted election — assisted by the abdication of the judiciary from its constitutional status as a coequal branch of government with the executive and the legislature, and with a sandbag job from almost the entire media.
The attempt to hang Jan. 6, around his neck has been a complete fiasco, led, appropriately, by the director of the much-diminished FBI, Christopher Wray.
The dawning awareness that Trump or a candidate approved by him can only be kept out of the White House in 2024 will, on past form, lead his enemies to an even more frenzied assault. It won’t fly.
This is an incompetent administration seriously mismanaging the most dubious mandate any president has ever had.
Newsmax just loves serving as Donald Trump's publicity agent, flooding the zone whenever he does an interview with a Newsmax personality. That happened again on June 25, when Trump appeared on Newsmax's morning show, "Wake Up America" (telling us that some Newsmax employees have experience writing outraged letters to the editor of newspapers). Newsmax generated a whopping eight articles out of that interview:
An anonymously written June 28 Newsmax 
Anthony Rizzo enthused in a June 8 Newsmax 
Like fellow Newsmax columnist 
The sheer 
Nick Koutsobinas wrote in a May 18 Newsmax 
A May 25 Newsmax 
We've already 
Newsmax TV host John Bachman wrote in an April 27 Newsmax 
