WND Columnists Cheer Cosby's Release From Prison
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily columnists have long had a soft spot for Bill Cosby, even after he was tried and convicted on charges of sexual assault. Now that Cosby's conviction has been overturned on a technicality, their defense of him has ramped up again.

Ilana Mercer used her July 1 column to cheer the overturning:

The same myopic, malfunctioning media are currently choosing to focus on how the Cosby verdict was overturned on a procedural or technical matter. A prosecutor, Pennsylvania Republican Bruce Castor, had struck a "non-prosecution agreement" with Mr. Cosby in 2005. Lack of admissible evidence notwithstanding, this prior agreement with Castor barred the case from going to trial.

[...]

The Cosby prosecution, as I pointed out at the time, rested on he-said, she-said hearsay evidence, on facts that can't possibly meet the rules of evidence (the ones the United States once respected), or be corroborated for the purposes of a just prosecution, in accordance with the legal standards of Western law (of blessed memory).

The tainted evidence was solicited decades too late, with utter disregard for the statute of limitations. It came from unverified "prior bad act" women ("witnesses") – unhinged #MeToo hysterics loosed in a court of law – who acted and sounded as though they were demented. Why, even the date of "the crime" could not be established.

On July 5, Scott Lively -- who devoted a 2014 column to complaining about "lynch mob justice" against Cosby (despite having created a few lynch mobs of his own over the years) and declaringthat "It seems awfully suspicious that the bravest black man in America on the issue of irresponsible black youth and their adult enablers was suddenly re-ensnared in an old scandal just when President Obama and his Marxist fellow-travelers were ginning up a race war in Ferguson, Missouri, by inflaming racial hatred among irresponsible black youths and their adult enablers" -- rehashed his conspiracy theory:

I knew in my bones that Cosby was being deliberately taken down by Obama (whom I believe is the "Shadow President" behind Biden). The Marxist race-cult Black Lives Matter had been in existence since 2012 and was going national after Ferguson.

But America's Dad's mature, fatherly take on Ferguson was a big problem for Obama and BLM: "I think that color is not what we're talking about. … We have to vote and make sure that the person we're voting for is going to carry out that which a public servant is supposed to do. There are people of all colors, all ethnicities, who are honest. These are the people you have to find."

Eerily similar to the message that got President Trump vilified over Charlottesville a few years later, isn't it? And directly contradictory to the false "systemic racism" narrative the BLM movement and the Critical Race Theory agenda now depends upon.

So why did they just let Bill Cosby out of jail? Because he's obviously not a threat to them anymore now that the BLM/CRT agenda has been institutionalized by the federal government. It's grown beyond his ability to influence in any substantial way. At the same time, they need to scale back the rage and violence in the inner cities now that Democrats instead of Trump will get the blame for rioting. I predict there will be a limited leftist rehabilitation of Mr. Cosby to serve that end – whether or not he knows that he's being used. In my view, he's been a pawn all along – just as most of the rest of us have become to varying degrees in this evil grand conspiracy of Marxist conquest.

For good measure, Live also offred up a pre-emptive defense of conspiracy theories and blaming it all on (of course) Marxists:

Lots of people run from the "conspiracy theory" label as if there really are no conspiracies and the official narratives about things are almost always correct. I contend that this phenomenon is itself the fruit of conspiracy, and in a healthy society plausible theories that challenge the official version on any important public policy issue should be given fair consideration commensurate with the evidence, the people and/or organizations involved, and the logic of the theory. Considering that "conspiracy" is such a common activity in society that it represents its own major category in criminal law everywhere, it is absurd to suggest that it isn't at least as common among the money-and-power-hungry elites as is among the hoi polloi.

This would be a rational argument in any normal and healthy society like ours used to be. But we no longer enjoy that blessing, because the ultimate conspirators – the Marxists, whose end goal always justifies any means necessary to achieve it – have taken it over and are remaking it to conform to their insane fantasies.

Lively needs an enemy, and Marxists are certainly convenient ones for him.

CNS Gives COVID Misinformer Another Platform
Topic: CNSNews.com

In April, CNSNews.com writer Melanie Arter gave Dr. Marty Makary a platform to downplay the severity of the coronavirus epidemic, touting how there were more tuberculosis cases than COVID cases and repeated his claim that "the U.S. would reach herd immunity by April." Both claims ended up being wildly wrong -- we're now seeing record COVID cases due to the Delta variant, which demonstrated that the "herd immunity" Makary predicted didn't happen in April and is certainly not happening now.

Nevertheless, Arter brought  Makary back to misinform further on COVID in an Aug. 5 article:

People who are unvaccinated and not immune to COVID-19 have been demonized, “and it’s unfounded,” according to Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health, because “those who are unvaccinated pose no risk to the vaccinated beyond that of a common cold.

Makary said he’s concerned that there may be another year of virtual learning in schools, “because Delta is projected to peak in late August and early September.”

“As schools are starting to open up you'll see the incline that will be interpreted as the beginning of a larger wave, but this is not a stock price. This is the number of cases. It only captures the cases reported, not home cases, and it doesn't recognize it's in a younger population and hospitalizations are disproportionately much lower,” he told Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom” on Thursday.

“I wish we would change the lexicon and stop talking about the vaccinated and unvaccinated and just talk about the immune and non-immune. There’s been this demonization of those who are not immune, not vaccinated, and it’s unfounded. Those who are unvaccinated pose no risk to the vaccinated beyond that of a common cold,” Makary said.

He said the Delta variant spread quicker, “but there’s no evidence that it’s more virulent and dangerous in kids.”

Well, Makary was wrong about that too -- the Delta variant is sending more children to the hospital than the original outbreak did. It has also turned out that the COVID vaccines are not as effective against the Delta variant than they were against the original strain, so the unvaccinated do pose a higher risk to the vaccinated than Makary claimed -- and, of course, COVID and the common cold are two very different things.

Makary is also missating the issue, which is really about the risk careless unvaccinated people pose to other unvaccinated people, like children. The Delta variant surge is primarily one of the unvaccinated, with the vast majority of the infections occurring with them. People who can be vaccinated but refuse to do so do, in fact, deserve some level of demonization.

Note that Makary made those stdatements on Fox News. He is very much a Fox favorite to a near-hackish extent. A few days ago, he wrote a commentary for the Fox News website accusing the Biden administrration of using COVID to distract from the situation in Afghanistan. In o ther words, he's the kind of "expert" Fox News -- and, thus, CNS -- absolutely loves.

MRC Lashes Out At 1619 Project Author Over Tenure Debate
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center has long attacked the 1619 Project, spearheaded by researcher Nikole Hannah-Jones as racist, false, and anti-American, working hand-in-hand with critical race theory. So, unsurprisingly, the MRC's discussion of Hannah-Jolnes' attempt to find a  tenured university position was just as bile-filled. Curtis Houck whined on May 21:

MSNBC’s ReidOut host Joy Reid joined the chorus of defenders on Thursday of the racist, America-hating 1619 Project and creator Nikole Hannah-Jones in light of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's decision to deny her immediate tenure as part of a professorship.

Reid blasted the move as an “chill[ing]” act of “cancel culture” against a (factually-challenged) series of essays that teach “a clear-eyed, factual understanding of our history.”

Houck went on to claim that "thesis that America was founded on the basis of and preserving slavery has been widely debunked." Houck's idea of "widely debunked" was to link to an article from the right-wing Federalist.

On May 23, Alex Christy worked hard to denigrate the awards the 1619 project received:

Leftists got upset at the recent news that the University of North Carolina's board of trustees decided not to give New York Times Magazine writer and 1619 Project organizer Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure, but despite this, she will still be teaching at UNC starting in July. Still, MSNBC's Ali Velshi used his Saturday show to accuse conservatives of silencing and cancelling her, because they don't support free speech.

Velshi alleged that "the UNC’s board of trustees denied Hannah-Jones tenure, reportedly bowing to conservative criticism of her most prominent work: The 1619 Project, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize." Winning the Pulitzer is just a left-wing credential, as is the McArthur "genius" grant, which Velshi also threw in.

When Hannah-Jones was ultimately granted tenure at UNC, Gabriel Hays melted down:

The world was a much better place when Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, wasn’t given institutional street cred. But good things never last.

Not only has Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer for her dubious, divisive and frankly malignant critical race theory reinterpretation of American history, she has been given tenure at an actual big name university. The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill actually granted her tenure on June 30, after being denied following complaints from conservative groups. In the school of journalism. Really.

Well, yeah. It is a travesty that a journalist with such a dishonest and resentful attitude toward American history would get a top tier intellectual profession. Conservatives were right to complain, and now that Hannah-Jones has received tenure, our country’s standards of higher education have suffered another major net loss.

He concluded by huffing; "The fact that UNC is elevating an activist journalist like Nikole Hannah-Jones to a tenured position proves that higher education is a joke." Se suspect Hays will not be rushing to renounced his own college degree in protest.

And when Hannah-Jones ultimately rejected UNC's belated tenure offer as tainted and chose to join Howard University instead, Hays melted down about that too:

1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones has employed her victimhood status to devastating effect in her professional career. Now, her recent suckering of UNC into giving her tenure - and then ultimately rejecting it - shows us all how race-baiters have been playing the American public for fools.

According to Slate, Hannah-Jones just rejected University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s offer of tenure after weeks of demanding the school give it to her. After finally guilting the school’s board of trustees into granting her tenure along with a teaching position they gave her in May, the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist said she wasn’t interested anymore and instead took a tenured position at Howard University, a Historically Black College.

And for the nice cherry on top, the 1619 Project author claimed she thought racism was at play in UNC dragging their feet. Checkmate. Great job, UNC, you let the professional wokester castrate you.

Hays did concede that UNC initial decision not to grant her tenure "may have hinged on complaints brought up by multiple North Carolina conservative groups, which demanded Hannah-Jones not receive tenure," but he seemed cool with that -- the opposite reaction he would have if liberals tried to stop a conservative from getting a job. He mocked the idea that Hannah-Jones was denied tenue because of racism, even though every single person who held the job she was seeking for the previous 40 years was automatically granted tenure: "Oh, it was because of race - and not the fact that Hannah-Jones’ contribution to journalism is a bit of historical fanfiction that takes the founding principles of America out of context for the sake of promoting racial resentment."

On July 8, Kyle Drennen lashed out at an interview with Hannah-Jones and the UNC journalism dean:

During a gushing interview with left-wing New York Times staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones on CNN’s New DayWednesday morning, co-host John Berman also brought on University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Media Dean Susan King to hail Hannah-Jones as “an important voice in our time and in journalism” and lament that the leftist was leaving UNC. In addition, King pledged to indoctrinate her students with the radical ideas preached by Hannah-Jones.

[...]

The most important priority for the leftist media is to make sure the radical ideology they espouse gets passed on to the next generation of political activists masquerading as journalists.

Doesn't the MRC run on the radical ideology that journalists are "enemies of the people" and must be destroyed? What college professor indoctrinated Drennen and his co-workers to that idea?

WND Promoted Anti-COVID Vaccine Conference
Topic: WorldNetDaily

An anonymously written Aug. 3 WorldNetdaily article touted:

Information the media are withholding or distorting about the COVID-19 vaccine, masks and other controversial topics is the subject of an online townhall conference that took place Wednesday and can be viewed via Rumble.

Hosted by LifeSiteNews, it featured prominent scientists, religious leaders, attorneys and physicians, including Drs. Peter McCullough and Michael Yeadon.

Others included Attorney Thomas Renz, Sister Deidre Byrne, Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet and Dr. Jose Trasancos.

The conference, hosted along with The Truth for Health Foundation, is titled "Stop the Shot … The Rest of the Story."

WND won't tell you,  but this is a rogue's gallery of COVID misinformers. The host, LifeSiteNews, was suspended and later removed from Facebook for spreading COVID misinformation. McCullough is a WND favorite, publishing his dangerous misinformation as if it was the truth. The other attendees have a hsitory of COVID misinformaton and denialism as well.

Yeadon is a former scientist and executive at Pfizer, which co-developed one of the COVID vaccines, who helped spread thet never-proven claim that the vaccines cause infertility in women. (You know what else is affecting pregnant women? COVID.)

Byrne is a pro-Trump nun and former surgeon who has promoted the use of dubious medicines such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to treat COVID and has pushed the idea that people should refuse COVID vaccines because they were developed using fetal tissue descended from an abortion. In fact, the anti-Abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute has stated that most COVID vaccines do not use fetal cell lines in their production, though some were used during testing of some vaccines.

Trasancos heads an anti-abortion group that purports to delve into bioethical issues who, like Byrne, has advocated against COVID vaccines because of their alleged links to fetal cell lines.

Renz is a highly litiigious anti-vaxxer who WND touted last month alleging a "massive government cover-up of vaccination-related U.S. deaths" --which deliberately misuses federal data on vaccine side effects.

And Vliet, of course, is a longtime medical misinformer and WND favorite affiliated with the fringe-right Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. She has been heavily pushing hydroxychloroquine, citing questionable studies to boost its credibility.

Also: it's quite funny that the article is illustrated with a picture of President Biden, even though the vaccines all of these right-wingers are railing against were developed under President Trump.

NEW ARTICLE: The MRC's War on Jen Psaki (And Man-Crush On Peter Doocy), Part 4
Topic: Media Research Center
In May, Media Research Center writer Curtis Houck demonstrated beyond a doubt that he sees Jen Paski's White House briefings only as a source of entertainment and a way to degrade Psaki (and, yes, slobber over Fox News' Doocy). Read more >>

CNS' Jeffrey Still Quick To Blame Biden -- And Give Trump A Pass -- For Deficit Spending
Topic: CNSNews.com

We've documented how CNSNews.com editor and supposed deficit hawk Terry Jeffrey had no interest in blaming Donald Trump or a Republican-controllwed Senate for growing deficits through 2020, but now that a Democrat holds the presidency, he's way too happy about highlighting deficits being added under their watch. He complained in a July 13 article:

The federal government set new records for taxing and spending through the first nine months of fiscal 2021 (October through June), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement.

Federal taxes hit a record $3,056,078,000,000 while federal spending climbed to a record $5,294,027,000,000.

The resulting deficit of $2,237,949,000,000 was the second highest ever for the first nine months of the year, falling below the $2,892,260,760,000 deficit (in constant June 2021 dollars) that the federal government ran in the first nine months of fiscal 2020.

There was no metion of Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate that played a key role in racking up deficits from 2017 to 2020, or of the pandemic that has required such expenditures.But Jeffrey made sure to illustrate his article with a file photo of President Biden and Nancy Pelosi.

Jeffrey used his July 15 column to complain about how much money the federal government has been spending per capita over the past century, serving up snapshots of each decade. For the 2000 budget, Jeffrey was loath to credit Bill Clinton, who was president at the time, for a reduction in per capita spending, so he made sure to also that "Republicans controlled both houses of Congress." For his summary of spending in 2020, Jeffrey acknowledged Trump but refused to explicitly blame him, instead making the pandemic the villain -- and then, of course, explicitly blame Biden and Pelosi for additional deficit spending:

In 2020, when Donald Trump was president and the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the federal government, according to the OMB, spent $6,550,396,000,000 (or $6,837,699,370,000 in June 2021 dollars). That equaled $19,762.89 in unadjusted dollars and $20,629.70 in constant June 2021 dollars for each of the 331,449,281 in the United States, according to the Census Bureau.

It can be argued that the particularly large increase in per capita federal spending from 2010 to 2020 is a one-time anomaly caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, in fiscal 2019, federal spending was $4,446,956,000,000 (or $4,705,658,450,000 in constant June 2021 dollars), which worked out to $14,336.05 for each of the 328,239,523 people the Census Bureau estimated were in the United States that year.

But the $14,336.05 in real per capita federal spending in fiscal 2019 is still more than 18 times larger than the $779.58 per capita spending of 1920.

The latest Congressional Budget Office analysis of the economic outlook estimated that, "if current laws governing taxes and spending remained unchanged," federal spending would hit $7,415,000,000,000 in fiscal 2030.

Given that the Census Bureau estimates the national population will be 355,101,000 in that year, per capita federal spending would then hit $20,881.38 — without COVID-19 or any new spending programs from President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Jeffrey's Aug. 11 article on the latest federal spending numbers followed July's pattern:

The federal government set a new record for the amount of taxes it collected through the first ten months of fiscal 2021 (October through July), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement.

Total federal tax receipts were $3,318,078,000,000 for the period.

[...]

Federal spending in the first ten months of this fiscal year was the second highest it has ever been (in constant July 2021 dollars).

However, this year’s October-through-July spending of $5,858,078,000,000 was not only the second highest in the nation’s history, it was $1,892,368,690,000 higher—or 47.7 percent higher—than the then-record $3,965,709,310,000 (in constant July 2021 dollars) that the federal government spent in the first ten months of fiscal 2019, which was the last full fiscal year before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Again, as usual, no mention of Trump or Republicans, and Jeffrey as found a different file photo of Biden and Pelosi to illustrate it.

MRC Freaks Out When Axios Blows Up Its 'Big Tech' Victimization Narrative
Topic: Media Research Center

As part of its promotion of Donald Trump's lawsuit against social media outlets for banning him, the Media Research Center also found time for a temper tantrum. When Axios blew up the MRC's narrative by pointing out in an article on Trump's lawsuit that "To date, Trump and other conservative critics have not presented any substantial evidence that either platform is biased against conservatives in its policies or implementation of them," MRC chief Brent Bozell had a meltdown, as described in a July 7 item by Alexander Hall:

Bozell raked Axios over the coals by describing its coverage as “[b]latant lies from the leftist media.”

Free Speech America also scorched Axios for denying Big Tech censorship by summarizing some of the most infamous examples:

• Facebook and Twitter censored the Hunter Biden story and interfered in the 2020 election 
• Trump’s banned on 10 Big Tech sites. 
• Our http://CensorTrack.org database has already amassed more than 2,500 examples of censorship.

What Axios didn’t tell readers is that Facebook and Twitter don’t reveal how their algorithms work. So that restricts how conservatives can respond. But it is undeniable that both Facebook and Twitter did indeed censor the Hunter Biden story in the lead up to the 2020 election.

[...]

A post-election poll from the Media Research Center, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, also sheds light on how censorship impacted our nation. The poll showed that 36 percent of Biden voters were NOT aware of the evidence linking then-presidential candidate Joe Biden to potentially corrupt financial dealings with China through his son Hunter. Thirteen percent of these voters (or 4.6 percent of Biden’s total vote) said that had they known these facts, they would not have voted for the former Vice President.

The MRC won't tell you that the Hunter Biden laptop story still has yet to be authortatively substantiated, and it has been pushed by biased right-wing outlets like the MRC with a vested interest in personally destroying Hunter Biden and his father. Even Hall doesn't buy the veracity of the story, admitting that the laptop contained "purported emails" that "reportedly exposed the alleged corrupt dealings" of Hunter.

The MRC also won't tell you that the poll it paid for was done by Trump's own pollster -- raising questions about its honesty and accuracy -- or that its CensorTrack database is highly selective, choosing only instances of "censorship" that advance the MRC's victimhood narrative and is in no way a comprehensive examination that proves social media "censors" conservarive content solely and exclusively.

Hall also rehashed the MRC's bogus talking points: "Twitter alone censored Trump 625 times between May 31, 2018 and January 4, 2021 before he was kicked off of the platform. It has since refused to allow him back on the platform. Twitter did not censor Biden at all during the same period of time. Trump was banned from at least nine other platforms after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, during which the former President called for 'peace.'" The more accurate way to say it is that Trump violated Twitter's terms of service 625 times while Biden did not violate them at all, and it's an absolute lie for Hall to claim that Trump was kicked off social for calling for "peace" at the riot he helped instigate.

The ultimate evidence that the MRC knows its talking point is bogus is that it sent out an email in April bragging about how well its content does on Facebook. Would it be making such extentive use of Facebook -- and bragging about its reach there -- if the "censorship" narrative was at all true? Doubtful.

As with the rest of its promotion of Trump's lawsuit, this is all just partisan blathering not meant to be taken seriously outside the MRC's ideological bubble.

CNS Lets Texas AG's Dubious Claims About Voter Fraud Stand Uncorrected
Topic: CNSNews.com

Craig Bannister wrote in a July 12 CNSNews.com article:

Despite Democrats’ claims that voter fraud isn’t a concern, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton says that the over 500 voter fraud cases pending in his state is evidence that voter fraud is, indeed, a serious problem.

In order to counter the false narrative promoted by Democrats through the media, Republicans need to “keep talking about the truth, which is there is real voter fraud,” AG Paxton said Monday in an interview with Fox & Friends First Host Todd Piro.

“We have more voter fraud cases that we have ever had. That’s just a fact,” Paxton said, noting that his office has more than 500 voter fraud cases waiting to go to trial and over 300 investigations currently underway. The election-reform legislation that Democrats are blocking is crucial to ensuring that citizens have confidence that election results are accurate and true, Paxton said.

As it turns out -- but Bannister won't tell you -- Paxton's numbers on voter fraud aren't quite true. As an actual news outlet reported a month before Paxton told his spiel, the Texas Attorney General's office did report 534 cases of voter fraud kn which people were charged -- but they date back to 2004. By contrast, nearly 94 million votes were cast in Texas elections since 2004, making the 534 cases of voter fraud an infintesimal issue. While there were also 510 cases being investigated at the time of the report, only one involved the 2020 election.

Because Paxton's narrative meshes tightly with CNS' right-wing mission, Bannister has no incentive to fact-check Paxton to see if he's telling the truth. After all, he's being paid to be a stenographer, not a reporter.

Trump Buddy Ruddy Runs To Defense of Trump Organization
Topic: Newsmax

We know Newsmax is doing what it can to stay in the good graces of Donald Trump, and CEO Christopher Ruddy's July 6 column, complaining about charges of corruption against officials in the Trump Organization, is a reminder that this comes straight from the top:

Many in the liberal press seemed to be gloating and gleeful. Trump is finally being held accountable, they say!

The establishment angst over the iconoclastic Trump has been palpable for some time, even before he took the oath of office in 2017.

Almost from Day One, liberal New York prosecutors have been determined to “get Trump.”

It is highly unusual – unprecedented, actually – for a former U.S. president or his business to be charged for alleged crimes before he became president, largely as a result of politically motivated investigations.

Any fair-minded person has to admit the investigations into Trump and his businesses are political.

For example, the state claimed the Trump Organization violated federal law, but the feds are not prosecuting. And James ran her successful 2018 campaign for attorney general on a single issue: “Get Trump.”

She claimed “that man in the White House ... can’t go a day without threatening our fundamental rights,” referring to Trump as an “illegitimate president.”

This from the leader of a website that had trouble admitting that Barack Obama was legitimately elected in 2008, pushed birther conspiracy theories, and published a columnist who called for a military coup to resolve the "Obama problem." We also don't recall anyone at Newsmax complaining about the repeated politically motivatedRepublican investigations into Benghazi, which Kevin McCarthy has admitted were designed to hurt Hillary Clinton's presidential chances. So Ruddy has little room to complain about Trump being targeted by allegedly politically motivated investigations.

Ruddy went on to offer a veiled threat of prosecution of Hunter Biden for the alleged crime of being Joe Biden's son if New York prosecutors don't lay off Trump:

This past week I was in New York and I spoke to two well-connected Democrats.

One told me New York prosecutors “just hate Trump so much” they are blind to the implications of what they are doing.

Another, a business leader, said that the biggest loser in the indictments was, in fact, President Joe Biden.

“The precedent has now been set, you can criminally prosecute a president and his associates,” the person said, pointing out the legal vulnerabilities of the president's son, Hunter Biden.

I personally do not believe Hunter Biden should be prosecuted as a result of his father becoming president.

But a number of pundits have said that the flimsy New York state prosecutions represent clear evidence that our nation has become a banana republic and that anyone will be fair game under the new standard, including Hunter, future presidents and their families.

Thanks, Chris, for admitting that right-wing attention on Hunter Biden is completely driven by politics, not the law. And does he really think Republicans will stop targeting Hunter no matter what happens to Trump?

WND Misses Jackie Mason And His Hateful Humor
Topic: WorldNetDaily

When comedian Jackie Mason died last month, WorldNetDaily's Joe Kovacs served up the expected gushy obit, and he detailed the real reason WND is mourning Mason:

[WND editor Joseph] Farah also wondered why Mason was at one point in recent years accused of racism because he referred to Barack Obama as a "schwartza" – a Yiddish word for "black."

Mason, who wrote occasional columns for WND, was fearless in mocking the biggest names in politics and media.

During a radio interview with former WND Jerusalem Bureau Chief Aaron Klein, Mason targeted Hillary Clinton, slamming her as the "biggest faker in the whole history of politics. And how she became such a hot candidate for president makes as much sense to me as Al Capone becoming the biggest crime fighter in America."

Referring to her as "this yenta," Mason said Mrs. Clinton "made her whole life stealing money from everybody everywhere in the world. The fact alone that she is still a free person out of jail is unbelievable."

As we documented, Mason spent his final years being a hateful right-winger with a particular animus against Obama, spreading bile and lies about him -- Farah was hiding the fact that "schwarze" has a well-documented history as a derogatory and borderline racist insult. He spent a few years making cheap-looking videos of his rants for WND.

Farah, meanwhile, devoted his July 26 column to similarly mourning Mason:

I considered him the funniest man of my lifetime. A genius of comedy – that was Jackie Mason.

I had the privilege to be a guest on his radio program regularly on WABC.

We pretty much agreed on everything politically.

Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton. Bill Clinton. Oh, and his lovely wife, Jyll, a real sweetheart.

He also wrote a column for WND for many years. It was my honor to give him that – for which he graciously charged me a pittance.

My wife, Elizabeth, had a wonderful dinner with Jackie and Jyll. We eat clean because we are commanded to do so. Jackie got a kick out of that, and the fact that we believe the dietary laws are for everyone. It says so in the Bible – Old Testament and New Testament. That's because God is the same today, yesterday and tomorrow.

Farah rehashed much of what was in Kovacs' article, then played dumb about Mason's insult of Obama: "Later, during the Obama years, Jackie was an early victim of Critical Race Theory when he was accused of racism for using the Yiddish word for black – "schwartza" – during a skit. Hypersensitivity. No sense of humor."

Like Mason didn't, Farah doesn't understand that humor ceases to be funny when it devolves into mindless hate.

MRC Continued To Root Against America, Non-Heterosexual Olympic Athletes
Topic: Media Research Center

We've documented how the Media Research Center has spewed hate at athletes who aren't heterosexual and even rooted against America when those athletes performed in the Olympics. That continued throughout the rest of the Olympics.

On July 26, Jay Maxson cheered that Olympic viewership was relatively low, which he (or she) blamed on athletes not being heterosexual or right-wing:

Friday’s opening ceremonies for the Tokyo Olympics provided more painful truth for Big Sports. The U.S. television audience for the event was the lowest it’s been in the 21st century, further indicating how badly Americans are rejecting woke sports.

[...]

The Tokyo Olympics were delayed for a year because of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic last year. During those 12 months, social justice warriors in sports have only given fans fewer reasons to watch when the Games finally arrived this summer.

For many fans, they’d seen enough outrageous behavior to determine they wouldn’t tolerate any more of the same. Last Tuesday’s kneeling by the U.S. and other national soccer teams may have just reinforced fans’ decisions for tuning out of the opening ceremonies.

The MRC's hatred for athletes who don't adhere to right-wing politics extends to those from other countries. Abigail Streetman whined in a July 28 post:

The Olympic games will now be adding a category for ‘best virtue signaler’ after Costa Rican gymnast Luciana Alvarado decided to throw up a fist at the end of performance in support of the Marxist organization Black Lives Matter. The 18 year old athlete defied the International Olympic Committee’s guidelines in a selfish attempt to make the games political and divisive instead of a unifying event. 

The Olympic games is supposed to be a ‘safe space’ free from “political, religious or racial propaganda” according to IOC Rule 50. The committee released these new guidelines as a result of the violence and destruction that has been caused by BLM groups and riots around the world.

Maxson returned to root against America again by lodging a similar complaint agianst an American athlete:

American shot putter Raven Saunders defied the International Olympic Committee Sunday by protesting on a victory podium in Tokyo. She claimed the Silver Medal, then broke the IOC’s Rule 50 banning victory stand protests. Saunders crossed her arms in an X symbol to protest oppression.

Radical left media like Deadspin implored the IOC to leave Saunders alone instead of punishing her. As of this morning, the organization that runs the Olympics had not taken any kind of action against her. It was looking into the highest level of protest yet seen in the Tokyo Games. Whether the protest will stand unchallenged, and whether the IOC is just a cowardly organization that doesn’t enforce its own rules, remains to be seen.

[...]

So the Olympics have come down an opportunity to speak up for the oppressed. Like the politically powerful LGBT juggernaut doesn’t have much of a voice? Come on, get real! And whose platform is it anyway? It belongs to the Olympics, not agenda-driven social justice warriors.

Nicholas Fondacaro served up whataboutism in his rooting against America in a Aug. 2 post:

On Monday, NBC Nightly News showed that they would take any opportunity to smear America on the world stage. As part of their so-called “Inspiring America” series, anchor Lester "fairness is overrated" Holt highlighted U.S. Olympic sprinter Noah Lyles as he suggested America didn’t want him as a black man and that the country was trying to kill him. Meanwhile, Holt ignored Belarusian sprinter Kristina Timanovskaya who defected to Poland to escape the oppression of communism and protect her life.

Actually, Fondacaro is the one who's smearing America by trashing an athlete whose political views he doesn't agree with.

Maxson rehashed his (or her) seething hatred for transgender athietes in deciding that the IOC was suddently clueless after lauding its stances on athlete protests:

Following the Tokyo Summer Games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) plans to revise “outdated” rules governing transgender athletes. During a roundtable discussion with reporters, the IOC invoked numerous references to science that indicate it has no clue on what sound science even looks like pertaining to gender.

Richard Budgett, the IOC’s medical and scientific director, said it’s important to remember that “transgender women are women. So you’ll include all women, if you possibly can.” Surely, he must have skipped biology classes.

[...]

So now, enabling a male’s gender confusion and reducing his endurance just so he can compete in female sports is supposed to be honoring and inclusive? In the upside down world of the IOC, our old, outdated determinants of gender need to be set aside. We should no longer look at Hubbard and see Gavin (his birth name) or his brawn. It’s the hidden things we cannot see, like testosterone and hemoglobin levels, that make a man a woman.

The IOC also stressed the need for more science. To which we will add its need for objective scientists.

On Aug. 6, Matt Philbin praised a member of the U.S. women's soccer team for not kneeling with the other players "to protest racism, or sexism, or whatever was Thursday’s gripe du jour," declaring that she "finished her games (and perhaps her career) standing, with dignity and humility. Bravo." He still found a way to root against America by complaining that "perennially pissed-off Megan Rapinoe" scored two goals in the team's bronze medal-winning performance and lamenting that this showed that "cosmic justice" didn't prevail.

Philbin concluded the MRC's Olympics coverage by once again rooting against America by joining Maxson in cheering the allegedly low ratings, which he baselessly blamed on "the politics": "All the talk in the weeks leading up to the games about whether the IOC would allow political protests and what kind drove away viewers -- just as NBA and NFL fans have been repulsed by the Black Lives Matter grandstanding. "

Meanwhile, Gabriel Hays dedicated a post to the only athletes the MRC deems American enough to be worth cheering for -- right-wing Christians:

Going by the media coverage, it may seem like the 2021 Tokyo Olympics is all about the Megan Rapinoes, trans weightlifters, and non-binary gymnasts. But if you dig a little deeper into the competition’s rosters and medal winners, you’ll find that there are many humble and gracious Christians who are giving glory to God with their victories.

Hays gushed over how these athletes thanked God for their victories, even though that's as much virtue-signaling as the ant-racist activism his MRC buddies are trashing other athletes for engaging in.

WND's Kupelian Dishonestly Promotes Dishonest Magazine Issue About COVID
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Despite the fact that it came from the June issue of its sparsely read Whistleblower magazine, WorldNetDaily didn't reprint managing editor David Kupelian's introductory essay from it until Aug. 16.

Much of it is a repetition of what was used to promote the issue more than a month ago -- which, as we noted, contains numerous articles that had been discredited before the issue was published. But he has added more conspiratorial claims this time around:

Then, just recently, most Americans finally learned that what Democrats, Big Tech, Big Media, Big Medicine and Big Fact-checkers had censored and mercilessly ridiculed for more than a year as a rightwing, racist, Trumpian conspiracy theory – namely, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was actually created in a U.S.-funded level-4 biolab in Wuhan, China staffed with Chinese military personnel, and didn’t spontaneously jump species from a bat in a nearby “wet market” – turned out to be true.

Actually, there's no credible evidence that the virus was "created" in the Wuhan lab. Even U.S. intelligence officials still haven't been able to determine whether the virus accidentially escaped from the lab or naturally jumped from animal to human.Kupelian went on to fearmonger:

If that isn’t surreal enough, there’s the elite class’s maniacal obsession with forcing every living human being to be injected with an experimental messenger-RNA gene therapy, which they call a “vaccination,” despite an unprecedented lack of safety data and – as of this writing – more than 12,000 American deaths reported after receiving the mRNA jab. Also 1,381 miscarriages, 5,236 heart attacks, 4,044 cases of Bell's Palsy, 4,759 cases of anaphylaxis, 3,728 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis, 14,251 people permanently disabled, and over 200,000 trips to the hospital, urgent care of doctors' offices as a result. Other than that, as Biden has assured Americans regarding the COVID jabs: “The bottom line is this – I promise you: They are safe. They are safe. And even more importantly, they’re extremely effective.”

It gets more surreal by the day: Pregnant women, who normally are advised not to put anything even possibly pathogenic into their bodies during their first trimester – even to refrain from drinking wine or eating certain soft cheeses – are now being advised by the head of the CDC to inject a powerful, experimental, little-understood and potentially gene-altering drug into their bodies and that of their developing babies. And 2- and 3-year-olds are now forced to wear masks when it is established beyond doubt that they have essentially zero risk of either contracting or transmitting COVID, yet are damaged physically, mentally and emotionally by being forced to wear a mask all day long in school.

Kupelian is lying: the mRNA vaccines are not gene therapy. He's also lying by citing VAERS data to claim the vaccine has caused "more than 12,000 American deaths" or any of the other scary things he cites -- aswe've repeatedly reported, a report of an adverse effect to the federal VAERS database does not constitute absolute proof of a connection. The vaccine is safe for pregnant women, no matter how much Kupelian wants to spread fear over it. And he's clearly not bothered by the fact that the Delta variant has led to record numbers of children being hospitalized.

Kupelian continued to rant:

Instead of treating COVID-19 early, when it is by far the most manageable, the entire thrust of the elites’ COVID policy has been to quarantine/lockdown everybody and everything in the country – actually the whole world – a surefire recipe for economic and social disintegration of societies (making them ripe for “fundamental transformation,” aka “The Great Reset”) while waiting for a vaccine. Unfortunately, as most people now realize, the mRNA vaccines are extremely flawed – a reality that is becoming more and more painfully evident with every passing week. Yet, despite the huge numbers of reported adverse events and deaths following mRNA vaccination, authorities are still maniacally pushing for everyone to get the jab.

Fortunately, there is an entire underground of frontline medical doctors across the U.S. who are daily treating those infected with SARS-CoV-2 and also prescribing prophylaxis – medicines like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as well as over-the-counter supplements, taken to prevent infection in the first place. Indeed, taking these meds and supplements is precisely how many frontline doctors who treat COVID-19 patients daily avoid becoming infected themselves.

The pushers of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin tend to be right-wing quacks who lack credibility and put their political agenda before medical reality.

Kupelian concluded with a dishonest plug for his magazine:

A recent issue of Whistleblower magazine, which I have edited monthly for over two decades, offers real hope, as well as practical, vital and life-saving information to Americans who have been forced to live in fear, isolation and hardship – and subject to nonstop disinformation – throughout the pandemic, and who are looking for some real light at the end of this long dark tunnel. I urge you to check it out.

Don't bother -- it's a dishonest, medically inaccurate mess.

Newsmax Won't Fact-Check Trump Speech's Election Claims
Topic: Newsmax

Eric Mack cheerfully wrote in a July 24 Newsmax article:

Delivering a speech on election integrity in the battleground state of Arizona amid a forensic audit, former President Donald Trump told supporters Democrats cannot "win elections without cheating; there's no way."

"The preliminary numbers are a total disaster, and we're going to go over those numbers," Trump said Saturday night at the Turning Point Action conference in Phoenix, Arizona, which aired live on Newsmax.

"The facts are coming out. The truth is being uncovered and the crime of the century is being fully exposed."

[...]

Trump picked up his rebuke of the mail-in ballot boxes that were disproportionately used in Democrat strongholds throughout the country in the 2020 presidential election under the guise of COVID-19, and in many cases not approved by the state legislatures.

"How about those drop boxes," Trump said. "Where they were coming in? And Biden was getting 97% of the vote? No, I don't think so."

Trump outlined many of the audit allegations of examples of election fraud, or at least irregularities that require answers and information from Maricopa County, Arizona.

Note how Mack has written this in a way that made Trump's allegations vague so he doesn't have to fact-check them. Heeck, he won't even tell readers that Trump has a history of pushing false claims about the election, which ought to be standard reporting for any Trump claim.Mack didn't even acknowledge what most observers have in pointing out that the Republican-led Arizona ballot audit is a total mess.

By contrast, an actual news outlet did fact-check the election-related claims in Trump's speech and, unsurprisingly, found numerous false and misleading claims. But Mack's job here is not actual reporting, it's Trump stenography. He wrote another article on the speech in which Trump ranted about various other things -- again, with no fact-check in sight.

Meanwhile, Trump did an interview with Newsmax before his speech, which generated three more articles:

• Trump to Newsmax: Immigrants Will 'Destroy Our Country' With Biden in White House
• Trump to Newsmax: Woke Is 'Losers' Philosophy'
• Trump to Newsmax: Press 'Enemy' for Way It Treats Conservatives

Again, no fact-check of anything, even though Trump referred to his never-proven claims of a "rigged election." Perhaps that's because Newsmax's real target here is not its readers but a certain one-man audience. Which would seem to explain a July 27 article by Bill Hoffmann touting its ratings for the  Trump speech:

Newsmax’s live coverage of former President Donald Trump’s Phoenix rally Saturday was a solid ratings smash — beating every other major cable news network in America.

New Nielsen data shows that Newsmax was No. 1 in key coverage ratings, winning in all demos and easily walloping Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, Fox Business Network and CNBC in the 7-9pm ET time slot.

According to media analytics giant Nielsen, Newsmax drew a total household coverage rating of 1.31, with Fox News taking a lackluster second place with just 1.02.

In terms of total viewers, Newsmax drew a coverage rating of .71, compared to Fox’s .49.

[...]

But the Nielsen data tells only half the story. Newsmax estimates that an additional million-plus viewers tuned in to watch Trump’s rally through OTT streaming devices and its smartphone app.

Unlike Fox, Newsmax is free on most major OTT platforms.

Interestingly, Nielsen’s figures for the Phoenix rally’s pre-show coverage from 5-7 pm ET, show Fox with a slight lead over Newsmax — 0.83 vs. 0.65. That indicates that once the actual rally began, audiences abandoned Fox and flocked to Newsmax.

Newsmax is still trying to present itself as the Trumpiest news channel, with some not-so-good consequences -- and even as overall ratings for Newsmax have tanked since peaking earlier this year.

Newsmax clearly does not want to admit that -- or that its insistence on treating Trump as a golden calf who can't be criticized or even fact-checked might be playing a role in its ratings dive.

At CNS, Old News Is New 'News'
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com, which calls itself a "news" organziation, has had a penchant for old news lately. An anonymously written July 15 article, for example, felt the need to rehash a congressional speech from last October:

Rep. David Cicilline (D.-R.I.)--who was one of the managers in the first impeachment of President Donald Trump--took to the House floor on Oct. 2, 2020 to express his support for a congressional resolution condemning the conspiracy-mongering group QAnon and debunking, among other things, the notion that Trump was “fighting a secret war against a Satanic, child-molesting network of politicians.”

Why did CNS suddenly report on a nine-month-old speech? We don't know -- nether Cicilline nor QAnon were in the news at the time that we're aware of. And it's not like CNS had much to do with QAnon, usually only complaining when then-President Trump was asked about it or when a certain female Democratic congresswoman talked about it.

The other trip back in time actually had something of a purpose: to give CNS something resembling original content related to the Olympics. It was highly tailored, though, focused solely on the Catholicism of Olympic star swimmer Katie Ledecky. It first reposted a 2016 article by Mark Judge in which Ledecky talked about how she "prays before she races."

(You might remember Judge as the employee who quietly disappeared from the MRC after his name came up as Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's prep-school buddy who wrote a memoir of those days that appeared to feature a thinly veiled and very drunk Kavanaugh. In its write-ups over the Kavanaugh controversy, the MRC never admitted that Judge was an MRC employee.)

This was followed by an anonymously written Aug. 2 article that rehashed a 2016 interview with Ledecky talking about "the beauty of Catholicism."

If CNS has to dig up old stories to present as "news," what good does it do as a "news" operation?

MRC Learns To Love The UFC
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center is slowly becoming fans of the brutal sport known as the Ultimate Fighting Championship -- if only because its fellow right-wingers are hanging out at its events and its officials are forward right-wing anti-media narratives.

Back in April, Veronica Hays praised how UFC president Dana White "doesn’t back down from any fights, especially not with the media," when he declared that "Most of these people are full of s--- and have no place writing or talking about anything." Hays went on to gush:

White’s hostility towards the media comes as no surprise. He has been targeted by ill intentioned new outlets on many occasions. White caught heat from New York Magazine because of his positive relationship with President Trump and especially during the initial Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020. White continued to schedule fights contrary to CDC recommendations and completely disregarded directions from federal and state governments, even amidst an onslaught of negative media attention. Clearly the man does what he wants. 

[...]

White’s fearless confrontation with journalists is commendable, especially now that they have become more emboldened in their efforts to manipulate and misinform the public. 

Donald Trump popped up at a UFC event in July, and systerious sports blogger Jay Maxson channeled right-wing sports guy Jason Whitlock in being upset that this didn't get played up in the media while having yet another episode of ESPN Derangement Syndrome:

ESPN’s television coverage of Saturday’s UFC fight between Connor McGregor and Dustin Poirier blacked out former President Donald Trump’s arrival to a rousing reception by fans. Jason Whitlock says it has everything to do with ESPN waging a “cold war” with traditional sports fans.

[...]

UFC fans are the people who don't look down on Trump as a pariah like Big Media and Big Tech do. They don't buy into the Jan. 6 "insurrection" narrative created by CNN, MSNBC and the Democrats. ESPN is a big part of the left-stream crowd, despite hollow denials that it is not a political organization.

Trump friend and UFC president Dana White is the antithesis of the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball, whose commissioners “would run from Trump as if he were a pack of Wuhan bats,” Whitlock added. He’s more like former NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, who marketed the league in support of traditional American values. Now, though, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell guides the league in a polar-opposite direction.

ESPN is one of many U.S. corporations bent on antagonizing the customers. Whitlock criticized the network’s “zero concern” for giving customers what they want. Everyone knows Barack Obama would have been highlighted to the hilt if he had attended UFC 264. Unlike Trump’s actual appearance there, Obama would have been interviewed by ESPN.

Hays returned to salute another celebrity guest at the the UFC event:

Two alphas met both inside and outside of the ring at Saturday’s UFC match. 

UFC 264, Connor McGregor vs. Dustin Poirier was the place to be Saturday night. The star-studded event drew massive attention on social media especially with President Trump making a grand entrance to the sold-out arena. Upon Trump’s arrival alongside UFC President Dana White, the crowd went wild and broke out in chants, “USA USA.” One viral moment captured on video shows actor-director Mel Gibson saluting the President in greeting as he walks by. The novelty of such an exchange was not lost on the public.

Shortly after, sour Twitter users who have too much time on their hands with too little senses of humor, dragged Gibson for having the audacity to show deference to a former President. Old accusations of antisemitism and racism were reprised to insult the Oscar-winner.

Weird how accusastions of bad behavior get dismissed by the MRC as "old" when they involve right-wingers. By contrast, the MRC is still attacking Dan Rather over his story on then-President George W. Bush in 2004 -- even older than the anti-Semitism and racism accusations against Gibson. No MRC employee who wants to keep his or her job will ever dismiss the Rather story as "old" and thus no longer worthy of attack.