MRC Parroted Secret Facebook Attacks On TikTok Topic: Media Research Center
In March, the Washington Post reported that Facebook's owner, Meta, paid a Republican consulting firm called Targeted Victory to manufacture fear about competitor TikTok as a Chinese-owned app that is endangering teenage users, which included "placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor," as well as emphasizing TikTok's foreign ownership.
The Media Research Center didn't tell its readers about this developement -- probably because it was dancing to Facebook's tune. Here are some of the attacks on TikTok that the MRC issued in the months and years before the Post story came out -- stories that hewed close to Facebook's anti-TikTok narrative:
The MRC also enthusiastically shilled for the Trump administration'sattempts to ban TikTok in the U.S. or force its sale to a non-Chinese firm., which apaprently came in response to a campaign organized by TikTok users to snap up free tickets to a Trump rally in Oklahoma, which ended up being sparsely attended (which the MRC hated):
When a federal judge blocked Trump's TikTok ban in September 2020, Kayla Sargent lamented it but optimistically claimed it was "thankfully, only temporarily." The Trump administration abandoned the ban completely after the presidential election Trump lost, Sargent returned to complain that it did so despite "serious national security concerns."
The MRC, by the way, is not unfamiliar with Targeted Victory. Both MRC chief Brent Bozell and Targeted Victory co-founder Zac Moffatt were among the attendees at a 2016 meeting between consercvative activists and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg, which took place after allegations that Facebook's news feed was biased against conservatives (which turned out to be overblown). But bozell and his right-wingers got what they wanted: to have Facebook afraid of doing anything that might anger them, even if it harmed Facebook's overall quality.
The MRC has never told is readers about how Facebook fed TikTok attacks to a GOP strategy firm, but it did keep up the attacks. An April 17 item by Autumn Johnson hyped how "The Department of Homeland Security reportedly investigated how TikTok handled material that detailed the sexual abuse of children," making sure to add that "The platform is designed to be popular among teenagers." Johnson failed to mention the Facebook smear campaign against TikTok.
This is the second time the MRC has been caught playing both sides of the war on "big tech" and secretly promoting Facebook talking points. We've already documented how the MRC attacked Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen at the same time that Facebook as a purported liberal activist (whose criticism of Facebook, not coincientially, got a lot more traction that the MRC's war on Facebook has) as Facebook was working behind the scenes to feed thosevery same attacks on Haugen to conservative groups.
The MRC has never public admitted that Facebook wrote its anti-Haugen script -- and it's certainly not going to admit that it was taking dictation from Facebook in attacking TikTok -- but the parallels are too obvious to dismiss.
NEW ARTICLE -- WND Profiles In COVID Misinformation: Robert Malone Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily not only loves to amplify Malone's misinformation about COVID vaccines, it also likes to inflate his role in developing the technology behind the mRNA vaccines. Read more >>
MRC Got Mad When Truth Was Told About Double Standard For Ukraine Refugees Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center really hates it when it'spointed out that the white and Christian refugees of Ukraine are getting much more love in the U.S, particularly from conservatives, than brown-skinned ones from elsewhere. Kevin Tober huffed in a March 7 post:
On Monday night's The ReidOut on MSNBC, host Joy Reid used the last segment of her prime-time show to exploit the war in Ukraine in order to play racial politics. Reid claimed that the reason the United States and the rest of the world care so much about Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that their population is "white and largely Christian."
Reid started off by stating the obvious that "what we’re seeing in Ukraine is absolutely the worst humanitarian crisis that Europe has seen in decades." Of course, with Reid there is always a catch: "but we haven't witnessed the same type of solidarity for the Yeminies as we do for the Ukrainians," Reid whined.
Tober went on to misleadingly defend the disparity:
Contrary to Reid's hate-fueled ranting, we do see an outpouring of support and compassion for the Uyghurs (a group that is neither white nor Christian) in China as they have a genocide carried out against them. Although, the economic entanglements here are more serious than with Russia, thus making them harder to break.
But Reid didn't mention the Uyghurs (or at least did not quote her doing so), and Tober said nothing about the Yemeni refugees that Reid did reference.
Curtis Houck kept up the whine, with his own version of defense, the next day:
On Tuesday’s CBS Mornings, co-host and Democratic Party donor Gayle King channeled MSNBC’s ReidOut host Joy Reid by playing the race card concerning the ongoing plight of the millions of Ukrainian refugees, lamenting that those who’ve come to the United States from El Salvador, Haiti, and Honduras “were not welcome” nor “received very well.”
In other words, the west has shown its racist bones by showing unity for displaced white people while scoffing at similarly innocent black and brown people.
King conveniently ignored the facts separating the two with Ukrainians given permission to cross the border to neighboring countries due to Russia’s unprovoked war while the latter group has flooded and crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.
Houck wasn't done reframing right-wing discrimination against refugees:
In essence, what Reid did was what RedState referred to as “whataboutism with the ongoing brutality against the Ukrainian people,” while ignoring what Ian Miles Cheong pointed out as a long track record of the west being “the most compassionate donors of developing nations in their times of need,” including earthquakes in Haiti.
We could restate the point about how flooding the U.S. southern border and expecting amnesty and welfare is entirely different from Ukrainians being shot at and shelled as part of a war by a nuclear state, but it’s safe to say it wouldn’t make a difference for King.
Houck didn't explain why, exactly, one class of refugee deserves to be treated worse than another simply because they're not "being shot at and shelled." And Ukrainian refugees are technically "illegal" too.
Meanwhile, Scott Whitlock whined in another March 8 post that Rep. Ilhan Omar -- who right-wingers like the MRC love to hate for being an outspoken liberal who's not a Christian -- pointed out the disparity:
Radical Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is at it again. The Democrat on Sunday called the U.S. hypocritical in terms how it deals with Ukrainian refugees vs. countries like Syria and Central America. She also appeared way out of step with most Republicans and Democrats, decrying “disastrous” military aide to Ukraine.
Yet on the networks? Crickets from them as they ignore the potentially embarrassing comments from the hard-left Democrat. But this is a pattern for ABC, CBS and NBC. Omar’s past hateful, bigoted and anti-Semitic comments get buried by the same journalists who initially promoted her.
Indeed, most of Whitlock's post is about attacking her for previous thing she said and nothing about rebutting the comments that prompted his little screed.
Alex Christy took up the complaint baton in a March 12 post:
As ordinary Ukrainians flee the country in order to escape from the Russian invaders, CBS Saturday Morning declared that, unlike other refugees, they benefit from their race.
As part of a video report, anchor Jericka Duncan interviewed historian Kimberly St. Julian Varnon on the racial aspect of the evacuations. St. Julian Varnon declared, “You know, it's—it’s-- one of those things where if you are a person of color and you work in Eastern Europe and research Eastern Europe, racism isn't new. I mean, the racial discrimination is not new, but to see it on display and being exacerbated by war, it was just really heart-wrenching.”
Christy had his own defense as well, regarding the claim about Syrian refugees at the border were treated:
While there were Syrians at the border in November and December, it is wrong to claim that crisis was a refugee crisis. There were also several non-refugee economic migrants from Iraq and they were victimized and all used as political pawns by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who lied to them by promising they would be granted asylum there, to destabilize the E.U.
Tober returned on March 15 to parrot Christy blaming Lukashenko for creating a Syrian refugee crisis in Europe in criticizing MSNBC's Chris Hayes for bringing up Poland disparate treatment of refugees:
Hayes seemed to bemoan the fact that " Poland's right-wing Prime Minister along with the PMs from Slovenia and the Czech Republic met with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in Kyiv" as a sign of solidarity with Ukraine. The leftist host seemed stunned that Hungary and Poland who believe in strong borders and opposed "Syrian refugees are together accepting millions of people displaced from Ukraine."
This also ignored the fact that Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko manufactured the latest migrant crisis by lying to desperate refugees about them being allowed to enter those countries in an effort to destabilize the region. Hayes also didn't have the honesty to ask why other Middle Eastern countries didn't take in those refugees.
Ending his race-obsessed rant, he claimed that "there's a lingering question that’s been surrounding this war pushed by bad faith actors on the American right. You know why should I care? Who cares what happens in Ukraine? What do I have to do with Vladimir Putin?"
Aside from Hayes' usual knee-jerk reaction to make everything about race, it is clear that he needs to understand that Poland and Hungary are eager to help Ukrainians because they know what it is like to be victimized by Russian aggression. It should also be noted that Ukraine neighbors Poland. Neighbors help neighbors.
Clay Waters used an April 24 post to complaing that the New York Times published an article about Republicans' anti-immigrant strategy that includes demonizing (non-white and non-Christian) refugees, complaining that the reporters "were unable to make the obvious distinctions between war refugees flying in from Ukraine and random people crossing the southern border." And Ukrainian refugees aren't "random"?
Of course, one doesn't even need to leave the MRC headquarters for examples of disparate treatment. As we've documented, the MRC's "news" division CNSNews.com hasn't fretted a bit about Ukrainian refugees coming to the U.S. even though it complained loudly that refugees coming to the U.S. from Afghanistan were supposed not sufficiently vetted.
The double standard is real, but the MRC wants you to think either that it doesn't exist or that it's completely justified.
CNSNews.com columnists have been hidingtheirsupport for Russia's invasion of Ukraine by disguising it as anti-NATO, pro-isolationism sentiment. Let's see how they have been doing lately, shall we?
Doug Bandow devoted a May 3 column to complaining about U.S. financial support for Ukraine and demanded that Europeans do it instead:
Why the U.S.? Americans have spent nearly eight decades protecting Europe. European governments, after shamelessly leeching off U.S. taxpayers for the entire Cold War and beyond, should take the lead on underwriting their neighbor under assault from Russia.
[...]
Aid to Ukraine is a worthy cause, but the U.S. already has provided some $3.5 billion in military assistance to Kyiv and another $1 billion for nervous NATO members. More important, Washington is not the only rich industrialized country in the world. It is not the industrialized nation with the most at stake in Ukraine’s defense. And it has not spent decades relying on other nations to protect it. The Europeans are all those and should step up.
Bandow went on to go fully into isolationism:
For America, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a human tragedy, not a military threat. Through most of U.S. history, Ukraine was ruled by someone else, which bothered Americans not at all. Washington treated Ukraine as a "captive nation" for propaganda purposes during the Cold War, but President George H.W. Bush discouraged Ukrainian independence. Ironically, over the last decade, Russia’s Vladimir Putin did more than anyone else to spur a sense of Ukrainian nationhood.
As a victim of unjustified aggression, Kyiv warrants U.S. support, but the U.S. role should be secondary. Washington’s highest duty remains to the American people. That especially means avoiding pressure to escalate militarily and risk war with Russia, which has become an increasing possibility. Treating Ukraine as a proxy war against Moscow increases the cost to Ukrainians and risks accidentally triggering World War III.
[...]
Europe should take the lead in dealing with both Ukraine and Russia. The U.S. government is broke, while European governments have more reason to give. After decades of defending so many other countries and peoples, Americans deserve a break. Now.
Ted Galen Carpenter's April 28 column dismissed Ukraine as "an appalling corrupt and increasingly authoritarian country" and insisted that it is "utterly irresponsible" for the U.S. to aid it, adding: "Corrupt and increasingly authoritarian Ukraine is not worth the life of a single American. Risking war with a nuclear-armed Russia that could take the lives of millions of Americans is beyond shameful. The Biden Administration needs to take several firm steps back from the abyss."
In his May 4 column, Carpenter blamed Russia's invasion on NATO and not, you know, Russia:
In one of the great foreign policy blunders of modern times, U.S. and European leaders repeatedly disregarded Vladimir Putin’s warnings that Russia would never tolerate Ukraine becoming a NATO military asset. Because of resistance from the French and German governments (which had as much to do with Ukraine’s chronic corruption as with concerns about Russia’s reaction), the Alliance delayed offering Kyiv a Membership Action Plan – an essential step toward membership. Nevertheless, at the 2008 summit in Bucharest, NATO’s existing members ostentatiously insisted that "someday" Ukraine would join the Alliance, and they repeated that pledge on numerous occasions thereafter.
[...]
Western officials implicitly assumed that Russia could be intimidated and eventually compelled to accept Ukraine as part of NATO. They dismissed the Kremlin’s increasingly pointed warnings that efforts to make Kyiv an Alliance asset would cross a red line that violated Russia’s security. Their assumption that Moscow would tamely accept a NATO presence inside Russia’s core security zone proved to be spectacularly wrong, and Ukraine is now paying a very high price in treasure and blood for their miscalculation.
One might hope that NATO leaders would have learned an important lesson from such a costly mistake. However, they are stubbornly ignoring a new set of ominous warnings from Moscow, and this time, the price of such tone-deaf arrogance could be utterly catastrophic. Indeed, it is creating the risk of a nuclear clash between Russia and the United States.
[...]
Western officials and members of the foreign policy establishments in the United States and Europe speak openly of helping Ukraine win its war and inflict a humiliating defeat on Russia. What such individuals do not seem to comprehend is that Ukraine is a vital Russian security interest, and the Kremlin will do whatever is necessary – probably even the use of tactical nuclear weapons – to prevent a defeat. The failure to understand just how important Ukraine is to Russia caused Western leaders to disregard Moscow’s warnings over more than a decade against making Kyiv a military ally.
Ryan McMaken used a March 21 column to insisting that the "lesson of 1938" learned about trying to appease Hitler does not apply to Russia: "But it is not, in fact, the case that every act of diplomacy or compromise designed to avoid war is appeasement. Moreover, we can find countless examples in which nonintervention and a refusal to escalate a situation was — or would have been — the better choice." He claimed that the "lesson of 1914," in which countries decided to "rush to war, immediately escalate, and confront "enemies" with military force in the name of countering aggression" is the proper lesson to apply, though nobody but Russia is escalating things.
Meanwhile, CNS edidtor Terry Jeffrey's pet columnist, Pat Buchanan, continued to serve up calls for U.S. isolationismm that benefits Russia:
On April 22, he endorsed letting Ukraine be dstroyed by Russia if it meant keeping U.S. troops out: "To avoid war with Russia, President Harry Truman refused to breach Joseph Stalin's Berlin Blockade. Eisenhower let the Hungarian revolution be drowned in blood and told the Brits, French and Israelis to get out of Egypt. President John F. Kennedy let the Berlin Wall go up. President Lyndon B. Johnson let the Prague Spring be crushed by the Warsaw Pact. The sooner this war ends, the better for all."
He used his April 29 column to complain that "the new, or newly revealed, goal of U.S. policy in Ukraine is not just the defeat and retreat of the invading Russian army but the crippling of Russia as a world power," insisting that "the more we destroy Russian conventional power, the more we force Moscow to fall back onto its ace in the hole — nuclear weapons" and adding: "When he warns of military action, Putin has some credibility."
He fretted on May 10: "By bragging publicly that we helped engineer the killing of Russian generals and the sinking of the cruiser Moskva, we taunt Russian President Vladimir Putin. We provoke him into retaliating in kind against us, thereby raising the possibility of a wider U.S.-Russia war that could escalate into World War III."
He spent his May 17 column huffing that Finland might be allowed to join NATO : "But why would the United States consent to go to war with Russia, the largest nuclear power on earth, for violating Finland's frontiers? ... By welcoming Finland into NATO, Biden is offering Helsinki the kind of war guarantee Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave to Poland in the spring of 1939, which led to Britain's having to declare war on Sept. 3, 1939, two days after Germany invaded Poland. How did that work out for Britain and the empire?
He gushed inhis May 20 column that even with its failures in Ukraine, "Russia today remains a great power. The largest nation on earth with twice the territory of the U.S., Russia has the world's largest nuclear arsenal and exceeds the U.S. and China in tactical nuclear weapons. It has vast tracks of land and sits on huge deposits of minerals, coal, oil and gas." He did graciously concede that "Russia also has glaring weaknesses and growing vulnerabilities, though he didn't identify the invasion of Ukraine as one of them. He ended on an isolationist note: "In 230 years, the United States has never gone to war with Russia. Not with the Romanovs nor with the Stalinists, not with the Cold War Communists nor with the Putinists. U.S. vital interests dictate that we maintain that tradition."
Buchanan offered no solution beyond apparent appeasement.
MRC Still Fretting Over Injured Fox News Reporter, Ignoring Dead Non-Right-Wing Reporter Topic: Media Research Center
We've documented how the Media Research Center expended much expressive public weeping over the deaths of two Fox News correspondents and the injury of another while covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine -- while almost completely ignoring the death of another reporter covering the same conflict, Brent Renaud, who was effectively expendable because he didn't work for Fox News. That even made the MRC's regular Jen Psaki-bashing sessions, when Kevin Tober cheered how Fox correspondent Jacqui Heinrich "who, in light of the news her Fox colleague Benjamin Hall had been injured, wanted to know how the Biden administration would respond now that it appears that Russia is now shooting at American journalists," then whinined that "Psaki didn’t give an adequate response to Heinrich’s question other than reminding her what actions Biden has already taken towards Russia." Needless to say, Heinrich didn't ask about Renaud.
In an April 7 post, lead mourner Nicholas Fondacaro returned for an update on the wounded Fox News reporter:
In a series of now-deleted tweets Thursday night, Fox News State Department correspondent and war reporter Benjamin Hall spoke out for the first time publically about his condition after his crew was attacked by Russian artillery outside of Kyiv, Ukraine (leaving 2 others dead). And before getting to how banged up he was (including the loss of body parts), Hall made a point to first pay tribute to his colleagues who lost their lives in the attack.
“Its [sic] been over three weeks since the attack in Ukraine and I wanted to start sharing it all. But first I need to pay tribute to my colleagues Pierre and Sasha who didn’t [sic] make it that day. Pierre and I traveled the world together, working was his joy and his joy was infectious. RIP,” he wrote on Twitter.
[...]
And while many in the media had enough class to know when not to take cheap shots at a rival during a time of crisis, there were some who made sure to use reports of the initial incident to score grotesque political points.
As if Fondacaro isn't making a grotesque political point by censoring mention of Renaud simply because he didn't work for Fox News. To him, reporters' lives matter only if they are right-wingers like him; otherwise, they deserve to die in obscurity.
WND's Farah Can't Stop Blaming Big Tech Instead Of Himself For WND's Impending Failure Topic: WorldNetDaily
A key part of Joseph Farah's money begs to keep his flailing WorldNetDaily alive is portraying himself and WND as victims of Google and "big tech" while refusing to concede that the real cause of WND's impending demise is Farah himself for his editorial agenda of fake news and conspiracy theories. Frah cheered in his March 25 column that the Heritage Foundation declared that "Big Tech is an enemy of the American people" then ramped up his own victimhood:
I've been screaming from the rafters since 2017 about it. It caused me so much anxiety that it gave me five strokes – the last one being a major one.
It cost me so much lost revenue in that period that, from 2016 through 2022, I can conservatively estimate it at $100 million.
That's how much this news site, WND.com, been devalued, demonetized and dehumanized in the last several years.
That's what countless other conservative, Christian news sites have experienced.
But I coexisted with Google, Amazon, Facebook and the rest through most of the history of the internet – almost 20 years. Perhaps I'm a slow learner. We at WND were doing all right. We were growing. We were making a real difference. We weren't being compromised. We weren't being blackballed. We weren't being canceled.
All of that ended in 2016.
Why?
Because we took a strong stand for one presidential candidate – perhaps stronger than any stand we had ever taken: Donald J. Trump. In America, we had that right, and everyone knew it – but Google, Amazon, Facebook and the rest began denying that right. It's just that simple.
They didn't care what I said about them, like when I called Google "evil" years before. Amazon didn't smear or not order the books I published or the videos I made before 2016. Facebook didn't restrict the reach to readers we'd developed through our use of the social site before 2016.
That's because in 2016 we were playing for all the marbles – the presidency of the United States. And we won.
Farah "won" in 2016 because he didn't care about the truth. It spread bogus stories about Hillary Clinton's health, and then-WND reporter Jerome Corsi aligned himself with the pheomenally sleazy right-wing political operative Roger Stone to smear Clinton, and published other fake-news stories during and after the campaign.
In his April 1 column, Farah asserted that Google "hasn't faced any government investigations into its monopolistic trailblazing efforts" because "just pays off the government 'watchdogs'" -- a claim for which he provided no evidence. He then regurgitated his victimization narrative again:
Google controls it all.
And this is the world WND lives in and has to navigate through. We can't use Google's search engine. We're prevented from using the one and only major ad platform, Google Ad Manager. And most of the rest of the media operate in a state of constant intimidation and fear – of this TYRANT.
WND is now DEMONETIZED PERMANENTLY! That's official. You simply can't do what we do – tell the truth about the 2020 election, tell the truth about the pandemic, tell the truth about the southern border, tell the truth about the transgender agenda and so on – while Google is running the media!
WND wasn't "demonetized" by Google -- as we explained, Google made the sensible business decision to no longer associate its ad service with the unreliable, conspiratorial content of WND. As if to prove Google's decision to decouple from WND was indeed a sensible one, Farah continued spewing claims he doesn't support:
Google and Big Tech are a BEAST. It may be the No. 1 existential threat to the USA. I know it is to WND and what little is left of America's truly free press.
Google uses all of its tricks to slant the news to the left and in support of the official Joe Biden positions. It's not even funny. It's more than a 20-1 ratio in their news feed, and the more "fake" the news, the more play it gets on Google.
This column, like the other, ends in a money beg.
Such nonsensical ranting from Farah and his deputy, David Kupelian, only serve to reinforce the decision of normal business not to have anything to do with WND, and his counterfactual insistence on blaming everyonebut himself for WND's current situation and absolute refusal to seek repentence for his self-inflicted wounds seems to indicate that WND does not deserve to live.
MRC Psaki-Bashing, Doocy-Fluffing Watch Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Curtis Houck got over his pouting that he couldn't smear White House press secretary because she was out with COVID just in time to mock her for preparing to leave for a job at MSNBC. For the April 4 briefing, Houck gave his man-crush Peter Doocy a cookie for staying on message by pestering Psaki with biased questions on the sex-obsessed right-wing outrage du jour:
Monday on The Psaki Show, Fox’s Peter Doocy made what could be one of his final cracks at White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki before her rumored move to MSNBC and he made it count with a tense exchange on transgenderism, the Florida parental rights in education law, and whether the White House thinks children at age six should learn sex ed.
Doocy pivoted from question about Russia’s war against Ukraine (more on that later) to one White House reporters had refused to ask: “A question about college sports. In some places like the Ivy League now, there are biological males competing against women. Does the White House think that is fair?”
Psaki began by saying the White House isn’t “the governing body for the NCAA or any other [sports] system out there” and, after acknowledging his question was in reference to transgender Penn swimmer Lia Thomas, she framed the need to endorse transgenderism as a way of “protect[ing] the dignity and identity of all Americans” as it relates to their mental health.
After she said the administration “hope[s] all leaders” join them, Doocy brought up Florida’s education bill that forbids sex education for children from pre-K through third grade: “At what age does the White House think that students should be taught about sexual orientation and gender identity?”
As we’ve learned, the left has shown that it indeed wants children that young to be exposed to such topics and Psaki was no exception as she said the law’s“a reflection of...politicians in Florida propagating misinformed, hateful policies that do absolutely nothing to address the real issues.”
Remember, for Houck it's all about Doocy staying on message and Psaki being purportedly destroyed by it (note the "Kaboom" in Houck's headline); it's not about whether Doocy's talking points are actually true.
Houck served up more Doocy-gushing for the April 5 briefing, this time over the right-wing (and MRC) Hunter Bidenobsession:
Tuesday during a late-afternoon Psaki Show, Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy questioned the White House press secretary over calls for Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to give full independence from the Biden White House to investigate First Son Hunter Biden and his life of corruption. Predictably, Psaki wanted nothing to do with this.
“A lot of stories about Hunter Biden surfacing this week. So, to ensure the independence of the investigation, would the President support the appointment of a special counsel,” Doocy asked.
Along with insisting the Department of Justice (DOJ) would make that call as they “make...decisions independently,” Psaki insisted the President has “abide[d] by” his campaign promise to not interfere with the DOJ and thus “has never had a conversation with [them] about any investigations into any member of his family.”
Houck then hyped Doocy still pushing the old right-wing narrative about U.S. sanctions against Russia being ineffective because they didn't stop Vladimir Putin frominvading Ukraine:
Prior to his Hunter Biden questions, Doocy followed up on what CBS’s Weijia Jiang had astutely observed, which was whether, in Jiang’s words, “anything...can be done to stop Putin now, in the immediate” given the White House’s insistence that sanctions take time to reach their intended affect.
When Psaki gave an answer of nothingness, Doocy followed up in wanting to know “how much time do you guys think that these innocent Ukrainians have” until Russia’s economy is so crippled it hampers their war efforts.
Psaki cited the levels of inflation and projected economic contraction hitting Russia and the “historic...military and security assistance” to Ukraine, so Doocy cut deeper in his second Russia question: “But do you guys assess that anything you’ve done so far has prevented a war crime from happening?”
for the April 6 briefing, Houck again praised Doocy for staying on right-wing talking points about Hunter biden and scary immigrants while actual reporters inquired about actual news (though that's not how Houck viewed it):
Wednesday’s Psaki Show marked a contrast between the constructive and the absurd as Fox’s Peter Doocy engaged the White House press secretary on questions surrounding President Biden’s son Hunter and brother Jim and, as other reporters would as well, immigration. But in contrast, others expressed discomfort with a lack of COVID restrictions, raised concerns about right-wing terrorism, and pleaded for more January 6 indictments.
Starting with the constructive, Doocy led with what one could call Bidenphones (following in the footsteps of Obamaphones “Our team in Texas is saying that you guys are starting to give smartphones to border crossers, hoping that they’ll use the phones to check in or to be tracked. I — which part of that is supposed to deter people from crossing illegally into the states?”
Psaki argued “you of all people” should “recognize that we need to take steps to ensure that we know where individuals are and we can track...them” as one of the “alternatives to detention programs” with phones allowing for facial and voice recognition and GPS tracking.
Doocy followed up: “With the telephonic, though, any concern by folks around here that these migrants will take the phones and just toss them?”
When Psaki countered with a question as to whether he knows of “people throwing phones away,” Doocy hit back that he was merely asking a question.
[...]
On a second matter, Doocy wanted to know whether it was accurate that, as per emails (from Hunter’s laptop), Joe “was officemates with Hunter and his brother Jim here in D.C.” during Hunter and Jim’s business venture with a Chinese energy company.
Psaki insisted three times that it wasn’t “accurate” and “they were not officemates” despite Doocy noting the fact that Hunter had emailed the landlord asking for keys to be made for Jim as well as the then-former Vice President and wife Jill.
Houck then uniroinically whined about "four fear-mongering COVID-19 questions from The New York Times’s Katie Rogers" regarding the COVID pandemic. He didn't complain about Doocy scaremongering about "illegals" carrying "Obamaphones" -- which, as we documented way back in 2012, never was a thing beyond right-wing narratives.
WND's Brown Praises Orban's 'Pro-Family' Leanings, Whitewashes His Hate And Authoritarianism Topic: WorldNetDaily
Michael Brown devoted his April 6 WorldNetDaily column to gushing over the re-election of Hungary's authoritarian leader Viktor Orban:
Judging by reports from the left-leaning media, the people of Hungary showed their true colors by electing Prime Minister Viktor Orban to an unprecedented fourth consecutive term. If these reports are to be trusted, Orban is a dangerously nationalistic, far right-wing, anti-gay, anti-Muslim bigot, a friend of Russia's Putin and an adversary of Ukraine's Zelensky.
If this description is accurate, what does this say about the people of Hungary?
Orban was expected to have an especially tough challenge this time because all six opposition parties united against him. Instead, he won by his largest margin to date, with his party now looking to take 135 seats and the six-party opposition alliance taking only 56 seats.
As we pointed out when Newsmax's John Gizzi similiarly gushed over Orban's win, Orban used his years in pwer to rig the country's election process to undercut any opposition; voting districts have been gerrymandered to the point that while Orban won only 53 percent of the vote, he won 83 percent of the districts.
So committed to this narrative was Brown actually quoted from Gizzi's whitewashing of Orban's win:
But Orban's relationship with Putin is not the primary reason for his great popularity. Instead, as explained by John Gizzi on Newsmax, "With the economic growth rate at 7.1% in 2021 and unemployment at roughly 3%, the economy was clearly on the side of Orban."
Gizzi also notes that "Orban also got high marks from voters for his policy of 'support for responsible child bearing' – notably that mothers who have four children are exempt from federal income taxes for life.
"The fruits of this pro-family policy (in which the government invests 5% of Hungary's Gross Domestic Product for family support) includes an increase in the fertility rate of 24% in the last decade – 'the largest in Europe,' Minister of Families Katalin Novak told Newsmax last October.
Brown then did some whitewashing of his own, trying to justify Orban's anti-Muslimand anti-LGBT agendas:
As for Orban being anti-Muslim, the truth is that Hungary largely closed its doors to Muslim refugees when the government found that, by and large, they were not trying to integrate into society but were instead living off government support, often while remaining hostile to Hungary itself. (Orban actually styled them "Muslim invaders.")
And the people of Hungary have not forgotten that they were under Ottoman (Muslim) rule for 145 years, from 1541-1699. This, too, affects their views on having open borders to large numbers of Muslim immigrants.
As for Orban being anti-LGBTQ, the reality is that Orban upholds Christian moral values when it comes to marriage, family and the sexualizing of children.
Accordingly, in 2020, the government altered "the constitutional definition of families to exclude transgender adults and same-sex couples, asserting that the 'foundation of the family is marriage and the parent-child relationship.'"
Then, in 2021, "Hungary's parliament … passed a law banning gay people from featuring in school educational materials or TV shows for under-18s."
And the majority of the Hungarian people supported these changes, which is another reason they voted again for Orban. Can you imagine?
After writing all that, Brown laughably denied he was defending Orban's hate:
Yet in saying all this, my intent is not to be an apologist for Orban, to minimize the suffering of the Ukrainians, or, in particular, to defend his relationship with Putin.
It is simply to say that, to the best of my knowledge, being informed by well-connected, mature Christian sources within Hungary, Prime Minister Orban is not the man the left-leaning West is making him out to be. He has done much good and stood for many noble causes, and in turn, his nation has shown its support.
If those "well-connected, mature Christian sources within Hungary" are willing to be apologists for Orban's hate and authoriterianism, how Christian are they really?
CNS Tries To Shame Biden Again For Not Giving Enough To Charity Topic: CNSNews.com
Back in 2014, CNS tried to shame then-Vice President Biden by attacking him for not giving enough money to charity: "Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, reported an adjusted gross income of $407,009 in 2013, from which they contributed 5% to charity, or a total of $20,523, according to their 2013 income tax return, which was released by the White House on Friday." CNS went to the same well of attempted shame again in an anonymously written April 19 article:
President Joe Biden and his wife Jill have released their 2021 federal income tax return, which shows that they had a total income of $610,702 for the year and that they gave $3,400 of that—or 0.55 percent—to Catholic Churches and a Catholic charity.
According to the first page of their tax return, the Bidens had a total income of $610,702. With itemized deductions worth $42,290, they were able to reduce their taxable income to $568,412.
Those $42,290 in itemized deductions included a $10,000 deduction for state and local taxes, $14,896 for home mortgage interest payments, and $17,394 for deductible contributions.
This total of $17,394 in deductible contributions was itemized on Statement 5 of the Bidens’ tax return and included $5,000 to the Beau Biden Foundation; $3,194 to Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors; $2,000 for NoVa, $1,000 for Cranston Heights Fire Company, $1,000 for Ministry of Caring.
The anonymous CNS writer didn't explain how much, exactly, would have been a suitable donation to Catholic charities, or why the Bidens' donations to other charities didn't make the headline. The writer also didn't mention that CNS was not able to do this story between 2017 and 2021 because Donald Trmp refused to make his income taxes public, unlike every other president and presidential candidate in the past 40 years.And when Trump's taxes were leaked, CNS complained that one liberal congresswoman used a "vulgar" word in noting that Trump paid only $750 in taxes one year, which CNS defended because it "does not include the millions Trump paid in the form of the [alternative minimum tax] over the seven-year period reported."
NEW ARTICLE -- The MRC War on Ketanji Brown Jackson, Part 3: The Gotcha Question Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center dutifully amplified a malicious Republican question demanding that the Supreme Court nominee define what a woman is -- but censored the fact that most Americans hated Republicans' hostile treatment of Jackson. Read more >>
MRC Keeps Launching Heavy Fire At Lorenz For Reporting Facts Topic: Media Research Center
We showed how the Media Research Center's hate campaign against Washington post reporter Taylor Lorenz for accurately reporting the identify of the woman behind the anti-LGBT Libs of TikTok Twitter account got started, but it was just getting warmed up. Nicholas Fondacaro howled that the Post defended Lorenz's story:
In a statement penned Tuesday, Washington Post senior managing editor Cameron Barr stepped up to defend hypocritical malefactor Taylor Lorenz after she doxed the owner of the Libs of TikTok Twitter account, including her identity and address, all because she exposed the lunatics, groomers, and general extremists of the left. And rightfully, there was a great public outcry against the paper.
Laughably calling Lorenz an“accomplished and diligent journalist,” Barr said her “reporting methods comport entirely with The Washington Post’s professional standards.”
[...]
In addition to writing about how the user once lived in New York City and moved to Los Angeles, Lorenz noted the account holder was a real estate agent and a member of the Orthodox Jewish community. And she did, in fact, link to personal information before the paper was called out and silently deleted the link without an editor’s note or admission of guilt.
NewsBusters has confirmed (though we won’t share methods) that the link led to information tied to the user’s real estate license. The information included her full name, address, county, her employer, and her license number.
In fact, Lorenz doxxed nobody. Raichik's personal information was found on publicly available websites; a link to one of them was quickly deleted. Fondacaro then demonstrated his ignorance of how journalism works by portraying standard reporting methods like going to someone's hous eand talking to them or confirming someone's identity as dangerous:
Lorenz even bragged about harassing her target’s family at their homes. “A woman at the address listed to Raichik’s name in Los Angeles declined to identify herself. On Monday night, a tweet from Glenn Greenwald confirmed the house that was visited belonged to [Chaya] Raichik’s family,” she wrote.
She even threatened someone with a similar name as her victim. “You’ve been mentioned as the administrator of the ‘Libs of TikTok’ account (…) you’re being implicated as starting a hate campaign against LGBTQ people…” she wrote to them in a direct message on Twitter demanding comment.
Fondacaro then gloated that Lorenz was feeling "reap what you sow" by noting that people (like Fondacaro) angry with her story were engaged in actual doxxing of her, her familyand "any random friend I've tagged" on Instagram.
Kevin Tober touted how Raichik ran to the Fox News show of Tucker Carlson to play victim about being exposed by "leftist sleazebag" Lorenz. She also let her homophobic flag fly by smearing the LBGT people she posts on her account as "psychopaths." Tober then huffed: "What Taylor Lorenz did was not journalism, it was intimidation with the purpose of making Raichik go away and shut her account down. There’s no other possible explanation for publishing her personal information online. " Again: Lorenz did not "publish" Raichik's personal information.
Tim Graham's April 20 podcast also lashed out at Lorenz as well, whining that she and the Post are part of a "left-wing outrage machine" for exposing Raichik, whining that the story is a "very one-sided pile of propaganda, loaded with LGBTQ media monitors and ACLU activists" and insisting that all Libs of TikTok does is posts videos of LGBTQ people "obviously prosteletyzing and propagandizing" and who are feeding their children "gender identify propaganda." Graham repeated the MRC talking point that Lorenz doxxed Raichik, and ranted that Lorenz engaged in basic reporting behavior: "Talyor Lorenz was not Woodward and Bernstein.... Look, a lot of people don't like it. They don't like a reporter coming and knocking on your door."
Graham then played whataboutism, huffing that the Post felt it "simply must rip the veil of anonymity from a popular Twitter accountw hen the Washington Post, for the last few decades, thas lived and thrived on anonymous sources that get to establish narratives and feed that left-wing outrage machine without anyone knowing who they are."
Fondacaro returned to lash out at frequent MRC target Brian Stelter, complaining that the CNN host "refused to address the 'roiling debate' and 'ethics' of the Washington Post and hypocritical malefactor Taylor Lorenz releasing the name and address of the Libs of TikTok account owner. Instead, he brought on a radical liberal teacher to rail against the account and concerned parents." Rob Shimshock accused the Internet Archive of allegedly having "apparently excluded from its database screenshots of the Twitter account of Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz, after Lorenz doxxed the identity and location of an individual who poked fun at leftists on Twitter." Yes apprently destroying people's lives by posting out-of-context clips of them is merely "poking fun" in the eyes of the MRC.
P.J. Gladnick, meanwhile, fixated on doxxing semantics:
The Atlantic magazine has come up with a creative but laughable way to defend the extreme doxxing by Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz, who once was a staff writer at their periodical. Their tactic is to broaden the definition of "doxxing" to make it fluid enough to serve the purposes of liberals. Therefore, according to the Atlantic's semantics game, what the Libs of Tik Tok did by presenting unedited videos uploaded by liberals to the very public TikTok platform was somehow "doxxing;" but when Lorenz exposed the name and other personal information of the creator of Libs of TikTok that wasn't really doxxing at all.
If you are scratching your heads at the absurdity of that stance, at least Atlantic admits it in the title of their article by Kaitlyn Tiffany on Friday, "Doxxing Means Whatever You Want It To." The subtitle submerges even deeper into the realm of the surreal with "The word once defined a category of behaviors. Now it expresses an emotion."
Gladnick didn't explain what was "extreme" about Lorenz's "doxxing"; he also didn't rebut the Atlantic writer;'s argument that "Raichik’s identity is in the public interest, given the account’s political goals; it was also easily discovered via a domain-registration website." Instead, he complained aout the argument that Raichik was guilty of doxxing by posting videos of people she hated for purposes of riducule and harassmesnt: "Creative definitions of 'doxxing' make Libs of TikTok guilty of that practice while Lorenz gets a free pass if you so desire thanks to very convenient semantic tricks."
Kevin Tober was still whining about the whole doxxing thing in an April 24 post, nearly a week after Lorenz's story came out, ready to heap more abuse on Lorenz:
On Sunday, leftist sleazebag and professional victim Taylor Lorenz of The Washington Post appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources to double down on her lie that she never doxxed the woman behind the popular Twitter account Libs of TikTok. Which is a bald-faced lie.
Despite the fact that Chaya Raichik of Libs of Tiktok is more of a journalist than she will ever be, Lorenz proceeded to trash the account as hateful and that it “is targeting LGBTQ folks.” She claimed that “the entire goal of the account is to direct hate to trans and LGBTQ people. She said she doesn't believe gay people who come out should be allowed to teach children.”
Tober did not dispute Lorenz's depiction of Libs of TikTok and its mission. Still the whining continued:
Lorenz’s next denial was claiming that she “absolutely did not reveal any personal information” about Raichik and thumbed her nose at critics by claiming “reporting practices can seem foreign to people that are not familiar with journalism.”
She proceeded to attack conservative media by claiming they lie and spin up narratives with the goal to “sow doubt and to discredit journalism.”
Lorenz has done much discredit journalism. So, it’s ironic that she is accusing anyone else of lying when that is all she did during her entire interview. It is a fact that she revealed or “doxxed” the woman behind Libs of TikTok. In her original story for The Washington Post, she linked to her home address before it was subsequently removed.
Again: Her address was only in a link, not in the article, and the link -- to publicly available information -- was dropped shortly after the article was posted.
Nowhere in these posts did the MRC mention that Raichik deleted thousands of posts from the Libs of TikTok account before and after her identify was revealed, and that more of her homophobia was revealed in falsely smearing the suicide prevntion organization The Trevor Project as a "grooming organization." Ironically, it was also revealed that Raichick engaged in actual doxxing, posting a woman's name, address, workplace and phone number, then boasted of having people call her employer -- debunking any claim by the MRC that the account is only about"poking fun." Raichik was also busted for posting a false claim, directing readers exactly where to lash out at the false claim, then tried to keep the story alive after it was proven false.
Alex Pareene wrote an excellent summary of the exceedingly hostile response of the MRC and other right-wing activists to Lorenz's story:
These people on this ascendant right don't just have different ideas about the role and function of journalism; they don't just believe journalists are biased liberals; they don't just believe the media is too hostile to conservatives; they are hostile to the concept of journalism itself. As in, uncovering things dutifully and carefully and attempting to convey your findings to the public honestly.
[...]
This new right fundamentally doesn’t want "newsgathering" to happen. They want a chaotic information stream of unverifiable bullshit and context collapse and propaganda. Their backers, the people behind the whole project, are philosophically and materially opposed to the idea that true things should be uncovered and verified and disseminated publicly about, well, them, and their projects. This may have started as a politically opportunistic war against particular outlets and stories, but it has quickly blossomed into a worldview. It’s an ideologically coherent opposition to the liberal precepts of verifiability and transparency, and the holders of those precepts are too invested in them to understand what their enemy is doing. The creep’s account, everyone in the press should understand, is the model for what they will be replaced with.
The MRC wants more of the hate that Libs of TikTok dishes out, and it doesn't want the haters to be held accountable. That's not "media research" -- that's political activism, deliberate sabotage and personal destruction.
David Kupelian's Biden Derangement Syndrome Topic: WorldNetDaily
David Kupelian's writings for WorldNetDaily these days are just angryscreeds against President Biden and Democats in general for the offense of not being as far-right as he is and not being as corrupt and grifty as Donald Trump. Since Kupelian controls WND's sparsely read Whistleblower magazine, that attitude is reflected in the magazine's monthly theme, joined by a Kupelian screed on said themes.
The theme for the March issues was "The Looting of America," and of course Kupelian and crew gave a pass to Trump for all the looting he did while in office. No, it's all about Biden as the sole cause of inflation. Kupelian's essay began with a rant about government spending with no mention of the fact thatthe federal debt grew by nearly $8 billion during the Trump years. Kupelian quickly went conspiratorial after that:
Let’s go a little deeper and ask why all this is happening. If inflation is viewed only through an economic lens – citing the various contributing economic and monetary factors, from government spending and low interest rates to supply-chain issues and pandemic lockdowns – the larger and deeper truth gets lost.
What is occurring in America’s economy today must be viewed in the context of the ruling Democrats’ total obsession with, and addiction to, permanent power, as well as the larger globalist dream they share of “the great reset” and the radical “green” agenda. In short, to America’s Democratic Party leadership, which has largely been taken over by the hard-core revolutionary Left, everything is about power and privilege for themselves and the unattainable and impossible (not to mention totalitarian and tyrannical) utopia they dream of leading.
[...]
If stripped down to the naked truth, America’s ruling elites are inextricably intertwined in a vast money-and-power machine of self-interest among the political, cultural and technological elite. They are today’s aristocrats, looking down contemptuously on the deplorable peasants.
But instead of Marie Antoinette saying, “Let them eat cake,” they cry, “Let them drive Teslas.” The contempt, however, is the same.
Moreover, since it is their core operating system to lie, steal and break the law – after all, to render their political power permanent they are willing to engineer a full-scale foreign invasion of the United States of America by millions of illegal aliens who will one day vote for them in return – they think nothing of financing their dreams by imposing the hidden, and ultimate, tax of inflation.
Every right-thinking person recognizes that today’s Democratic leadership class lies spectacularly and continually. Ultimately that’s because, on some level, their deceit is intended to enable them to take something that doesn’t rightfully belong to them. That’s called stealing.
Stealing your wealth. Stealing your elections. Stealing and repurposing your government and vital institutions. Stealing your country. And if necessary – as the sad fate of the Jan. 6 political prisoners has made clear – stealing your life.
Never mind of course, that Kupelian and WND are the ones on the record as liars -- about election fraud, COVID and the Capitol riot, among many other things.
Kupelian was in such an anti-Biden froth that he cranked out an April 11 column ranting about him some more:
As you read these words, the Biden White House is wildly championing the cause of amputating healthy body parts of children who have been groomed and manipulated into believing they are the opposite sex from what God made them. Team Biden even wants America’s taxpayers to pay for these mutilating surgeries. At the same time, a new Colorado law explicitly permits the slaughter of perfect, viable human babies, for any reason, right up to the very moment they emerge from their mother.
All of this new madness joins the ongoing madness – Team Biden’s engineering of a full-scale foreign invasion of America from the south, its intentional destruction of our nation’s oil, coal and natural gas industries, the ruinous runaway inflation it has inflicted on the whole country, and its apparent obliviousness to the dangers of plunging the U.S. into World War III.
Many names are being used to try to describe what is currently happening to America – “Marxism,” “communism,” “totalitarianism,” “globalism,” “the Great Reset.” Or how about, “total insanity and evil”?
Whatever you want to call it, America – the greatest and most blessed nation on earth – is at war. And our main adversary is not Vladimir Putin.
I’m talking about the full-fledged Marxist revolution exploding right here in America – from the halls of Congress to the White House to our nation’s southern border to our classrooms to our streets to Big Tech to Big Media to “woke corporations” like Disney.
This ultimately evolved into a money beg for WND:
REAL journalists are professional Truth-tellers – their job is literally to tell the truth, no matter what, to shout it from the rooftops so to speak, without fear or favor. Because without Truth, liberty and prosperity in a nation quickly wither and die. That’s what’s happening in America right now.
Of course, today’s “news media” consists almost entirely of lying, corrupt, self-serving, cravenly obedient cheerleaders for the revolution, for Marxist indoctrination like “critical race theory,” for the “Great Reset,” for men having babies, and for innocent children being groomed and channeled into desperate and hopeless lifestyles.
As a result, the number one target of today’s Big Tech totalitarians, who have become gatekeepers of all information, is that tiny part of the news media not extoling the virtues of the ascendent Democrats’ insane, delusional and fantastically destructive agenda, but rather, committed to reporting the TRUTH … no matter the cost or consequences.
Now a few words about WND, whose motto for 25 years has been “A FREE PRESS FOR A FREE PEOPLE.” Right now, WND is paying a great price and is suffering major consequences for reporting truthfully.
Wrong -- WND is suffering major consequences for its years of fake news and conspiracy theories. Google demonetized WND for that very reason, not because it's trying to take down WND. Its wounds are self-inflicted -- real news organizations do not face this problem -- and Kupelian is too arrogant and deluded to admit that inconvenient fact.Heck, Kupelian can't even be bothered to serve up credible evidence to back up his anti-Biden screeeds.
Kupelian made a big deal out of WND needing "at least $100,000 over and above our normal expenses over the next three months, that is, by June 30," adding, "Please help us reach our $100,000 goal. We will keep you informed as to our progress and report regularly on how the campaign is doing." Except he hasn't done that; no WND article since then as detail the progress of the campaign, let alone how, exactly, WND is spending that money -- transparency you'd think Kupelian and Co. would want to engage in to show donors their money is being well spent. So who's actually looting who here?
If WND can't be bothered to truthfully report on itself, there's no reason to believe -- and it has consistently demonstrated -- that it can't truthfully report on others. Unless it can do that, WND continues to be doomed to fail, and all of its treading water is simply delaying the inevitable.
We've previously noted Kerik's enthusiasticembrace of Eric Greitens for a Missouri Senate seat despite the allegations of sexual blackmail and election finance violations that forced him to resign as Missouri governor. Even after Greitens' ex-wife made allegations of spousal abuse against him, Kerike apparently hasn't abandoned him; we could find no statement from Kerik either defending or denouncing Greitens even though Newsmax, which publishes his column, abandoned its fawning coverage of him after the latest allegations came out.
Perhaps that's why Kerik went the boring route in his endorsement in the Republican primary for an Ohio Senate seat in an April 12 column:
In the Ohio Senate primary, there’s a clash of self-proclaimed MAGA candidates all clamoring for the Trump, America First mantle.
However, it only takes a closer look to see who are pretenders, and who's the real deal.
Jane Timken is the only true MAGA conservative in Ohio who has been there for President Trump and the America First movement since 2016 and all the way through, to the present day.
Kerik went on to slag the better-known (and crazier) candidates in the primary like J.D, Vance and Josh Mandel, as not Trumpy enough: "While other candidates in this race, especially Josh Mandel, love to talk about the 2020 election because they know it’s what President Trump wants to hear, my question to them is: where were they when it mattered?"
Unfortunately for him, Kerik's endorsement of Timken, the chairwoman of the Ohio Republian Party, didn't matter to Ohio Republicans -- she finished fifth in the primary with less than 6% of the vote. Even Kerik's praise of Timken's promotion of Donald Trump's Big Lie didn't sway anyone:
As the lead investigator for President Trump’s legal team, led by Rudy Giuliani into the 2020 election, I know that Jane Timken put in the work to make sure Ohio’s election was secure and that Ohio delivered.
She worked with the Trump campaign to have an election integrity war room, and even caught a Democrat operative trying to push ballot harvesting and referred them to the attorney general.
Pehaps it's best that Kerik doesn't remind anyone that he has been dancing around with Jan. 6 committee investigators over whether to talk about his presence in the Trump campaign's "command center" on the day of the riot.On the other hand, Timken has said there were no election issues in Ohio, but embraced the Big Lie enough to claim other states were the real problem.
CNS Still Fretting About Afghan Refugees In U.S. -- But Silent About Ukraine Refugees Topic: CNSNews.com
After the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, CNSNews.com made sure to fearmonger about refugees coming to the U.S. from that country, with lots of fretting about whether they had been properly vetted. Months afterward, the fearmongering continued: A Jan. 27 article by Craig Bannister complained:
A number of refugees from Afghanistan, part of group of as many as three hundred being temporarily housed in a bankrupt hotel by the federal government, recently breached security and wandered onto the golf course of a gated resort community in Scottsdale, Arizona.
The refugees from the defunct hotel are unsupervised and free to come and go as they please, so they simply roamed onto the golf course of the Gainey Ranch and Golf Club, the AZ Free News reports:
[...]
What’s more, Scottsdale citizens report that the Afghan refugees have been panhandling in the area. A spokesman for the mayor’s office and council told the AZ Free Press that the refugee-hotel project “is a federal government activity over which the city of Scottsdale has no oversight.”
'Bannister didn't explain why these refugees must be treated like children with constant supervision. The next day, editor Terry Jeffrey groused:
The Department of Homeland Security put out two press statements on Wednesday announcing that the last Afghan refugees have been released into the United States from Camp Atterbury in Indiana and Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.
“To date, more than 66,000 Afghan evacuees have been resettled in communities across the country,” said DHS.
Jeffrey rehashed an earlier attack from an interview he did with Republican Rep. Chris Smith, who "raised concerns about the vetting of the Afghans brought into the United States."
The complaining continues to this day: A May 18 article by Susan Jones made the headline claim from DHS that "approximately 74,000 Afghan nationals have come to the United States as part of OAW, the largest number of foreign evacuees arriving at one time in nearly 50 years."
By contrast, the idea of refugees from Ukraine fleeing from Russian aggression and possibly settling in the U.S. has drawn virtually no concern from CNS. While several CNS articles have referenced the refugee crisis, only two have made them the focus: A pre-war Feb. 22 article by James Carstensen predicting a crisis if Russia invades Ukraine, and a March 9 article by Carstensen noting the growing crisis but not referencing the U.S. There has been nothing since -- for more than two months.
For all of its fretting about Afghan refugees, CNS has been almost completely silent about Ukrainian refugees coming to the U.S., even though President Biden has launched a program to bring 100,000 refugees into the country and CNS has freaked out over a smaller number from Afghanistan. Why? Is it because the Ukrainians are presumed to be Christian and the Afghans are not, something that has been a longtime CNS obsession? Whatever the reason, the double standard is glaring.
Enemy: MRC Tries To Destroy Reporter For Telling Truth About Homophobic Right-Wing Activist Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has irrationally considered reporter Taylor Lorenz to be an enemy for a while now. Last year, for example, it cheered when Fox News host Tucker Carlson attacked her -- which led to threats against her by his rabid fans -- for doing a story on Carlson. And in an April 1 post, Alex Christy complained that MSNBC "blamed Fox News, Tucker Carlson, and Glenn Greenwald for online death threats and sexual harassment directed at female journalists, which includedWashington Posttech columnist Taylor Lorenz tying such attacks to her PTSD, then gave Carlson a pass for his hate: "The point of Carlson’s segment wasn’t mocking Lorenz for being encountering the worst parts of the internet, but pointing out that she claims to be against harassment but, because she isn’t very good at her job, she ends up being what she claims oppose [sic]." Christy did eventually concede that Lorenz writing about things "doesn’t justify death threats or sexual harassment," but he won't admit Carlson helped incite those threats and harassment.
So when Lorenz wrote a Washington Post story exposing the woman behind the Twitter account Libs of TikTok -- which reposted videos from TikTok of LGBT people talking about things, which typically resulted in attacks and threats on the video subject by the account's followers -- the MRC was enraged. Kevin Tober kicked off the rage against Lorenz in an April 18 post for doing the simple reporterly act of seekoing comment from people and going to people's houses to interview them:
In a stunning act of hypocrisy, Washington Post columnist and technology reporter Taylor Lorenz who weeks ago cried on national television that people were harassing and threatening her online, reached out to Governor Ron DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw to help her expose the person behind the popular Twitter account “Libs of TikTok.”
Late Monday evening, Pushaw posted to Twitter an email from Lorenz seeking comment about her story " exposing the woman behind the ‘Libs of TikTok account.”
[...]
Amongst the predictable uproar on social media, The Babylonbee's social media manager posted from her Twitter account @Morganisawizard to reveal she has confirmation that not only has she reached out to Pushaw, but Lorenz also knocked on the door of a relative of the woman who runs Libs of TikTok, and has been calling numerous family members.
Because no MRC employee ever worked as an actual journalist, Tober clearly doesn't understand that seeking comment about a story and going to someone's house to interview them regarding a story is Journalism 101 -- which is why he huffed, "Needless to say, this is Orwellian stuff.
The next day, Nicholas Fondacaro lashed out at Lorenz for writing the story at all:
If you dare to expose the lunatics, groomers, and general extremists of the left (particularly those exposing it to kids) via the videos they themselves put out, The Washington Post and hypocritical malefactor Taylor Lorenz have declared Tuesday it’s okay to run down them, their family, and those on the periphery in an attempt to open them up to retaliation and life-threatening danger. They’ve effectively set the rules of engagement in the culture war in targeting and doxxing @LibsOfTikTok.
In a totally serious segment for MSNBC on April Fools’ Day, Lorenz cried crocodile tears about how she lived in fear of information about her getting on the internet. “You feel like any little piece of information that gets out on you will be used by the worst people on the internet to destroy your life and it's so isolating,” she said, claims she has “PTSD” and had “contemplated suicide.”
But that’s exactly what she wanted to happen to Libs Of TikTok account owner Chaya Raichik when she and The Post outed her identity to the world in a piece titled, “Meet the woman behind Libs of TikTok, secretly fueling the right’s outrage machine.” A piece packed with quotes from leftists from the ACLU and Media Matters who were eager to spit venom.
Fondacaro then tried to whitewash Raichik's intent in maliciously posting the videos with the goal of harassment:
The content shared by the account is just reposts of videos put out by the liberal teachers and activists themselves. The videos have illustrated how their enthusiastic subversion of parents and intense indoctrination of gender and political ideology. Essentially, it's provided examples of why Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill was needed.
But Lorenz takes issue with the truth being exposed to the world and frames it as just stoking “outrage” for the sake if the “right-wing” “machine”:
If Raichik was doing nothing malicious and hateful, there would be no reason for her to hide behind anonymity and no reason to complain she was outed.
Deliberately oblivious to the fact that Libs of TikTok has a mission to demnonize people Raichik hates, Fondacaro went on to rant:
Lorenz was out to demonize Libs Of TikTok and make an example of anyone even vaguely in the same orbit. Libs Of TikTok shared a Twitter message she received from an account with a similar name as her real one, in which Lorenz threatened to ruin their life if they don’t respond to her message. “You’ve been mentioned as the administrator of the ‘Libs of TikTok’ account … you’re being implicated as starting a hate campaign against LGBTQ people…” she wrote.
Actually, that's called reporting. If there are two Twitter accounts out there with similar names, Lorenz obviously wanted to make sure she had the right person. Again, that's reporting, not a "threat." (And Fondacaro identified no threat in Lorenz's message anyway.) Nevertbhess, he went on to rant:
Unironically, and without evidence, Lorenz tied the “popularity of Libs of TikTok” to purported doxing and execution calls of school officials. She also lamented the “chilling effect” caused by just reposting the videos that are already out there.
Libs Of TikTok seemed to have gone into hiding after Lorenz’s doxing. “Thankfully I’m currently holed up in a safe location. I’m confident we will get through this and come out even stronger,” she tweeted. “Words cannot express how appreciative I am of the support I’m receiving right now … Grateful for all the thoughts and prayers[.]”
Who's being unironic here? Fondacaro's sputtering rage -- which seemed to be on the verge of going violent -- is a perfect reason for Lorenz to go into hiding. And there are even more unhinged right-wingers than Fondacaro out there who would be happy to do personal harm to a reporter for commiting an act of journalism, and people could very well be inspired to act on the rage spewed by Fondacaro and his fellow right-wingers.
In another post that day, Alexander Hall baselessly called Lorenz an "infamous disgraced journalist" despite identifying nothing in her article that was incorrect. He went on to cite a couple of right-wingers (while not identifying them as such) attacking Lorenz over her story, counterfactually insisting that Libs of Tik Tok is merely an "innocuous content aggregator," despite the fact that Lorenz's article exposed Raichik's real-life homophobia.
In March, the Washington Post reported that Facebook's owner, Meta, paid a Republican consulting firm called Targeted Victory to manufacture fear about competitor TikTok as a Chinese-owned app that is endangering teenage users, which included "placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor," as well as emphasizing TikTok's foreign ownership.
The Media Research Center really hates it when it'spointed out that the white and Christian refugees of Ukraine are getting much more love in the U.S, particularly from conservatives, than brown-skinned ones from elsewhere. Kevin Tober huffed in a March 7 
CNSNews.com columnists have been 
We've documented
A key part of Joseph Farah's 
The Media Research Center's Curtis Houck got over 
Michael Brown devoted his April 6 WorldNetDaily 
Back in 2014, CNS 
We showed how
David Kupelian's writings for WorldNetDaily these days are just 
Bernard Kerik knows how to pick 'em, doesn't he?
After the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, CNSNews.com 
The Media Research Center has irrationally considered reporter Taylor Lorenz to be an enemy for a while now. Last year, for example, 
