WND's Cashill Ignores Facts To Further Ray Epps Conspiracy Theory Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily has continuedto cling to the Omar Epps conspiracy theory, and it's clearly not going to stop anytime soon. This time, it's Jack Cashill trying to further it in his Nov. 16 column:
"Understanding what it means if the facts and the evidence are there, and they decide not to prosecute – how do we then call ourselves a nation of laws?" Rep. Liz Cheney said of the Department of Justice on CNN in August.
Cheney was directing her fire at Donald Trump, and she wasn't through. "The question for us is, are we a nation of laws?" she continued. "Are we a country where no one is above the law?"
At a University of Chicago forum last week, student Daniel Schmidt asked Cheney a variety of that same question. From his perspective, the person who showed himself above the law on Jan. 6, 2021, was not Donald Trump.
That person was the one Jan. 6 protestor the left has been ordered to love. "Do you demand the prosecution of Ray Epps?" Schmidt asked. "He's an actual insurrectionist on tape. Do you demand his prosecution?"
After a lengthy recitation of Epps' purported offenses and bashing of Cheney for pointing out that the committee she was on can't order any prosecution, Cashill took us back into conspiracy theory territory:
Despite the millions who had seen it, Cheney carried on as though the video did not exist, trying desperately to memory-hole Epps before he was even a memory.
"As far as what I've seen Mr. Epps, there are conspiracies around the role he was playing that day." There probably was a conspiracy. "Conspiracy theorists" simply want to know how the conspiracy unfolded and who was behind it.
"People are pushing [Epps] was doing what he was doing," Cheney continued, "because the federal government was telling him to. That's not true. There's no evidence of that. And Justice Department and the committee have both said that clearly."
Lacking even a shred of self-awareness, Cheney tried to convince a knowing student of recent history that he should put the word of the DOJ and Cheney's kangaroo committee above logic and hard evidence to the contrary.
It was only fitting. As Orwell reminded us: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
Yes, speaker-elect, we have reached that point. Do something about it!
Cashill doesn't want Epps prosecuted, of course -- at least, not as a member of a violent mob. Like his fellow conspiracists, he believes that Epps was a deep-state plant and FBI informant who egged on his fellow protesters. But as others have noted, there are good reasons why Epps -- who, by the way, is very much a conservative, not an FBI plant -- has not been prosecuted: he did nothing beyond being unlawfully present on the Capitol grounds, and very few rioters have been prosecuted solely for presence on restricted grounds.
But Cashill doesn't care about facts -- he has a conspiracy theory to foment. Indeed, he whined, "Epps seemed so much an agent provocateur, in fact, that on one occasion the protestors in his vicinity chanted 'no, no, no' and 'fed, fed, fed' after he encouraged them to breach the Capitol."
Cashill has to ignore a whole lot of inconvenient facts to keep this conspiracy theory alive. That, of course, puts him in good standing as a WND columnist.
As you'd expect from the pro-Trump sycophants at Newsmax, Donald Trump's announcement of his 2024 presidential campaign got all the pomp it could muster up -- indeed, it was dutifully reporting Trump's teases way back in October. A Nov. 4 article by Nicole Wells teased that Trump "is tentatively planning to announce the launch of a 2024 presidential campaign on Nov. 14." Eric Mack dutifully reported another tease on Nov. 6.
A Nov. 7 article by Mack teased the announcement of the annoucement at a Trump rally that was ostensibly for Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance, noting that Trump "also announced a Nov. 15 Mar-a-Lago announcement on his hotly anticipated plans to run for the presidency once more in 2024." That was followed by a Nov. 10 article by Michsel Katz noting that a "senior Trump adviser" confirmed the announcement, followed by Nov. 11 wire service article teasing the announcement, while a paywalled article that day claimed to list the pros and cons of the announcment.There was even a Nov. 11 article by Theodore Bunker noting that Trump's "longtime adviser Jason Miller" said Trump would announce.
For the actual announcement on Nov. 15, Mack again served as stenographer (while also making sure to point out that the announcement "aired live on Newsmax"):
Former President Donald Trump, turning a deaf ear to establishment calls to hold off and Democrat efforts to stop him, officially declared his 2024 presidential campaign Tuesday night.
"In order to make America great and glorious again, I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States," Trump told his crowd at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida, at 9:22 p.m. ET. The address, heavily touted for days, aired live on Newsmax.
"This will not be my campaign. This will be our campaign all together, because the only force strong enough to defeat the massive corruption we are up against is you the American people. It's true. The American people, the greatest people on Earth. We love them all. And we love both sides. We're going to bring people together. We're going to unify. ..."
It wasn't until several more paragraphs of stenography that Mack got around to mentioning concerns over his announcement:
Trump had been beating back recent calls for him to hold off his declaration, calling out establishment efforts to prop up primary challenges, including by longtime ally Gov. Ron DeSantis.
DeSantis, who won reelection by a huge margin in the midterms, is being hailed by some political observers as a leading candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, with some recent polling now showing him ahead of Trump. Other polls continue to characterize Trump as the Republican to beat.
Meanwhile, Trump is still facing Democrat resistance, including continued attempts to frame him for the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol. He is also facing the investigation under the Presidential Records Act that led to the raid on his private residence at Mar-a-Lago in August.
Despite "some reservations" about former President Donald Trump making his official declaration Tuesday night, former Arkansas GOP Gov. Mike Huckabee said this "pitch perfect speech" can make Trump once again "unbeatable."
"I think he's going to be unbeatable, if he stays in this message," Huckabee told Newsmax host Rob Schmitt moments after the speech concluded.
[...]
Huckabee did admit Trump has a "bedside manner" that does not sit well with everyone.
"One thing I always want to say about Donald Trump: Look, if this is a hospital, and there are a lot of doctors in it, he's got the worst bedside matter of anybody in the entire hospital — no doubt about that — but he's the best surgeon in that hospital," Huckabee concluded.
"Nobody can do the operation better than he can."
Newsmax had previously reported on Huckabee's desire for Trump to wait on his announcement.
A Nov. 16 article by Luca Cacciatore grumbled that "Minutes after former President Donald Trump revealed his intentions to run for office again in 2024, Democrats from Sen. Raphael Warnock's campaign to the White House jumped at the opportunity to raise cash." He went on to huff that "The move comes despite Biden being more unpopular than both Donald Trump and Barack Obama were at this stage of their presidencies — even with a less-than-devastating midterm performance."
Mack compiled a list of even more Trump sycophants for a Nov. 17 article:
Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas, former White House doctor for President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump, has officially endorsed Trump for the 2024 presidential election.
"President Trump is the greatest president I've ever seen," Jackson posted on Truth Social, as hailed by Trump in a recent Save America PAC statement. "I'm on his side 100%! President Trump has my complete and total endorsement!!!"
Jackson's endorsement was among a number of the earliest endorsers for Trump's 2024 campaign, which he made official in a Tuesday night Mar-a-Lago address, which aired live on Newsmax.
Reps. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., and Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., made their endorsements before Trump even officially declared his intention to run.
Trump endorsed hundreds of midterms candidates who he now will call on to return the favor sooner than later as he gets ahead of what could become a growing 2024 GOP presidential primary field.
A Nov. 17 article by the apparently uniroinically named Charlie McCarthy complained that "Rupert Murdoch-owned media outlets, including Fox News, have ramped up attacks on Donald Trump after the former president declared his run to reclaim the nation's top office." Newsmax's biggest Trump sycophant, Dick Morris, joined in taking a shot at the competition in a Nov. 17 TV appearance by critizing Rupert Murdoch's empire for not being a Trump cheerleader like him and favoring Ron DeSantis instead:
Dick Morris, a bestselling author, TV host, and former adviser to Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, said he doesn't buy the notion of "many" supposedly fair-minded media outlets bashing Trump's Tuesday announcement of seeking the White House again in 2024.
Morris said it's one guy largely pulling the messaging strings on the anti-Trump rhetoric: Media mogul and billionaire Rupert Murdoch, who owns the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Fox News.
Murdoch still "resents that Trump wouldn't let him run the White House" from 2017-21, Morris told Newsmax Thursday afternoon, while appearing on " American Agenda" with hosts Bob Sellers and Katrina Szish.
[...]
Fox News is "working with the RINO anti-Trump establishment" on a daily basis. In that event, the coverage would be skewed, added Morris.
"It's not particularly significant [to hindering Trump's reelection campaign]," said Morris. "It's just another example of media manipulation."
Morris went on to hype that while, in the words of article writer Jay Clemons, "DeSantis might be faring well in one-on-one polls against Trump ... Trump still owns a significant advantage of 14 percentage points over all comers" with registered voters.
NEW ARTICLE: The MRC's Hypocritical Herschel Embrace, Part 2 Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center stuck by Republican Herschel Walker as the scandals and abortion allegations piled up. And when he ended up in a runoff for the Georgia Senate seat, it had to do so all over again. Read more >>
MRC Leaps To Hang Democratic Tag On Racist LA Council Member Topic: Media Research Center
As further evidence that it's a partisan attack organization than any sort of legitimate "media research" outfit, the Media Research Center loves to link random bad people to Democrats (even as it vociferously denies that bad behavior -- i.e., flirting withanti-Semitism -- by the leader of the Republican Party is an accurate reflection of the party itself).Scott Whitlock seized on another such case in an Oct. 11 post:
Kudos to CBS and reporter Mark Strassmann for fairness. Strassmann, on the CBS Evening News and CBS Mornings shows, was the only journalist to repeatedly note that the powerful Los Angeles politician who went on a racist rant is a Democrat. ABC barely noticed it. NBC briefly covered the story on Monday and Tuesday mornings, but made no mention of party affiliation.
Nury Martinez, who just resigned as the President of the Los Angeles City Council, in a secretly recorded audio tape from 2021, complained abut “the blacks,” the “dark” Koreans and sneered at the child of one council member as a “monkey.”
Journalist love to generalize all Republicans as guilty when there is a comparable scandal. When it’s a Democrat, the party affiliation is often hidden.
Nicholas Fondacaro similarly seized on the situation while also exposing a hole in the MRC's attack:
Twenty four hours after suggesting that only white people could be racist because of “a power dynamic,” ABC’s The View suddenly decided “minorities can be racist against each other, too” on Tuesday. This hypocritical flip-flop came after the Latina Democratic president of the Los Angeles City Council, Nury Martinez made racist remarks, captured on a secret recording, against “the blacks,” “dark Koreans,” and a black child who she called a “monkey” in Spanish.
Of course, the fact Martinez is a Democrat wasn’t mentioned on the show but Sunny Hostin opined about the incident “as Afro-Latina” and how she “grew up” experiencing “anti-blackness, anti-black hatred in the Latino community.” “And that's always been a painful thing I have dealt with, the anti-blackness in the Latino community, and it has to stop. It has to stop with this,” she declared.
After Hostin noted her mother is a “white Puerto Rican” and her father is “a black man,” self-described Republican Ana Navarro sympathized with her saying that kind of racism “exists” and that “minorities can be racist against each other, too.” “Yes. Yes,” Hostin agreed.
While the "View" ladies were quick to call out Martinez's racism, the MRC was much more reluctant to directly criticize Donald Trump's dipping his toe into the fetid pool of anti-Semitism -- again, they're more mad that people made logical conclusions that if the leader of the Republican Party is cool with that, the Republicans who don't or won't criticize it are cool with it as well. Fondacaro will never admit that difference. Instead, he repeated the MRC falsehood that Vice President Kamala Harris said, in his words, "hurricane relief funds should be given out based on race."
How can you say that a Democrat is in trouble without saying that a Democrat is in trouble? Just skip the word ´Democrat´.
This is exactly what the national Spanish-language newscasts did, not in one report, but in report after report – a solid 39 minutes of airtime in a little over 24-hours - about the scandal involving four “Latino politicians” from Los Angeles. The public officials, considered to be the apex of Democrat Hispanic power, were caught red-handed on a recorded conversation where they made racist and disparaging remarks about other Latinos, and about the Black son of a fellow white Democrat council member who is also gay. Telemundo, Univision and CNN En Español, all skipped mentioning their political affiliation, a fact that raised many red flags.
[...]
It’s amazing how little is said on air when a controversy involves elected DEMOCRAT public officials. Were they Republicans, can you imagine the uproar? From MAGA ultra-right-wingers, to fascists, to you name it; the coverage would contain the word Republican every other second.
It's hard to take Krumhansl seriously as an authoritative voice when she's using the right-wing pejorative of describing someone as "Democrat" instead of the grammatically correct "Democratic."
Clay Waters also hyped "the notorious leaked audio of Democratic Latino members of the Los Angeles city council making offensive remarks about blacks and Jews" in an Oct. 16 post, followed by Larry Elder emphasizing in an Oct. 21 column that Martinez was part of an "all-Democrat (plus one independent) Los Angeles City Council."
None of these posts mentioned that nobody is defending Martinez -- even as they continue to defend Trump no matter what he does.
Biased CNS Article Touts Right-Wing Lawsuit Against Abortion Drug Topic: CNSNews.com
Peyton Holliday wrote in a Nov. 22 CNSNews.com article:
The Alliance Defending Freedom has filed a lawsuit against the U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), arguing that the agency failed to abide by its legal obligations “to protect the health, safety, and welfare of women and girls” when it authorized the use of chemical abortion drugs in the U.S. and “eliminated necessary safeguards for pregnant women and girls who undergo this dangerous drug regimen.”
The chemical abortion drugs specifically are mifepristone and misoprostol. According to doctors, they usually must be taken prior to the 11th week of pregnancy to ensure an abortion. Mifepristone is taken first and then, 24 hours later, 4 misoprostol pills are taken. Several hours later cramping and bleeding starts and the tiny baby is expelled from the uterus.
Currently, these abortion drugs can be delivered through the mail – as ordered by the Biden administration during the COVID pandemic – but this is a violation of federal law, according to the plaintiffs, who also charge that the FDA “never had the authority to approve these drugs for sale” in the first place.
The lawsuit was filed Nov. 18 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Amarillo Division. The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American College of Pediatricians and several other doctors are suing the FDA commissioner, other FDA officials, and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.
The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine is a nonprofit membership organization that represents nearly 30,000 health-care professionals. The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) represents the plaintiffs.
Missing from all of this is explicit labeling of the right-wing anti-abortion bias of all these groups. Contrary to Holliday's benign description of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, it is in fact an anti-abortion group that attacks the procedure as "the intentional destruction of human life through barbaric methods." The American College of Pediatricians is also a right-winggroup that is not only anti-abortion but also deeply homophobic.
Holliday also gave voice to another anti-abortion group that she failed to label a such attacking the drug's safety:
Commenting on the case, SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser said, “First authorized in 2000 and expanded via mail-order under the pro-abortion Biden administration, abortion pills are swiftly becoming a leading health risk to mothers and babies. The FDA’s reckless lack of meaningful oversight has led to serious complications and a surge in emergency room visits for women using this drug regimen.” “Pregnancy is not an ‘illness’ as the FDA described in their creative justification to broadly distribute this dangerous pill.”
SBA Pro-Life America further said in a statement, “Multiple peer-reviewed studies confirm that women are at risk of severe side effects after taking chemical abortion pills, including hemorrhaging, the need for follow-up surgery, and even death. New Lozier Institute peer-reviewed research has found women are also twice as likely to be admitted for surgery if their abortion pill-related complications are miscoded by emergency room personnel as a natural miscarriage.”
Holliday gave no space to anyone to argue for the safety of the drugs. As Wonkette summarized:
The fact is, Mifepristone is extremely safe. It is safer than Tylenol, it is safer than Viagra, it is safer than penicillin. It is safer than a lot of drugs that have historically been prescribed or sold over the counter. It is, in fact, far safer than being pregnant. Since 2000, 26 patients have died from complications related to Mifepristone, while 700 have died from pregnancy ... per year.
Of Holliday's 14-paragraph article, only two were given to non-right-wing activists -- not to get an actual comment about the lawsuit, mind you, but for a simple (and lazy) copy-and-paste:
Planned Parenthood praises the use of chemical abortion drugs. “Medication abortion is extremely effective in ending an early pregnancy, working approximately 95-99% of the time, and gives patients the option to end their pregnancy at home or in another setting in which they feel comfortable, while still providing them with the medical support and information they need,” said Planned Parenthood on its website.
“A growing number of patients in the United States are choosing to end their pregnancy with medication abortion,” said the nation’s largest abortion provider. “In fact, in 2014, nearly one in three people seeking abortion outside of a hospital used medication abortion.”
Like other CNS interns before her, Holliday appears to have spent her time there being taught to spread partisan talking points, not how to practice journalism.
MRC Excuses Trump Trading In Anti-Semitic Tropes, Denies He's Anti-Semitic Topic: Media Research Center
In the month before Donald Trump had a dinner with anti-Semites Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, the Media Research Center labored to protect Trump from allegations of being anti-Semitic over his criticism of non-right-wing American Jews for allegedly not being sufficiently supportive of Israel. When he first made the claim in October, Mark Finkelstein launched quickly into Trump Defense Mode in an Oct. 17 post:
Monday's Morning Joelaunched quickly into Trump Attack Mode, bizarrely claiming Donald Trump put out a "dangerous" and "anti-Semitic screed" on his Truth Social account about American Jews and Israel.
Today's Morning Joe deceptively cast this Trump "tweet" as suggesting that American Jews better get their act together before it's too late—for them!
That sounded ominous--until you read what Trump had actually written.
[...]
In other words, far from making a threat against American Jews, Trump's tweet was actually a plea for greater support for Israel! That Israel was endangered, from neighboring anti-Semites like the Iranians.
But Morning Joe repeatedly insisted that Trump's tweet was "anti-Semitic." And not merely a "dog whistle," but "screaming it out loud."
In a dramatic display of twisting these remarks out of context, Jonathan Lemire claimed that Trump's tweet "could be interpreted by his followers as a moment to potentially commit violence against Jews." And Joe Scarborough said the tweet was akin to a previous one by Trump in which he said that Mitch McConnell had a "death wish."
Trump was saying no such thing. But Morning Joe was sending a false message to potentially deranged people out there that Trump was in fact calling for violence against Jews. So if there's any violence that emerges, they can point their fingers.
Finkelstein followed up with more defense the next day:
This would be funny if it weren't so outrageous.
On his MSNBC show on Sunday, Mehdi Hasan, formerly of Al Jazeera, teed up notorious antisemite Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar to falsely accuse Donald Trump of making an antisemitic post, and to wring her hands of the rise of antisemitism in America.
As Eli Lake, tongue firmly in cheek, tweeted: "Up next, Vladimir Putin will talk to Mehdi about the importance of international law in a nuclear world."
Hasan introduced the subject by abjectly mischaracterizing Trump's tweet as having "threatened American Jews." To the contrary, as we noted yesterday, "far from making a threat against American Jews, Trump's tweet was actually a plea for greater support for Israel!"
Ilhan proceeded to wring her hands over Trump's alleged use of antisemitic "tropes." In particular, she condemned Trump's supposed charge of "dual loyalty" against Jews. This from the woman who said, in a reference to American Jewish supporters of Israel, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says that it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
Omar has a long history of anti-Israel/antisemitic statements. There was that notorious tweet in which she wrote: "Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel."
Her most infamous bit of classic antisemitism came when, directly pointing the finger at AIPAC, Omar claimed US support for Israel is "all about the Benjamins baby."
Finkelstein didn't explain any criticism of Israel is automatically anti-Semitic.
When Trump said pretty much the same thing a month laters, it was Jason Cohen's turn to be the designated defender in a Nov. 22 post:
In the left’s latest effort to frame Donald Trump as an antisemite, HuffPost tried to spin his recent remarks at the Republican Jewish Coalition in a piece with the headline “Donald Trump Scolds Jews, Praises Evangelicals In Geopolitical Swipe.” Sounds terrible, right? But in reality, it was not at all. Huff Left out details about the speech and the response to it.
For starters, in the clip it used from Mediaite, Trump began: “I just grew up with a great fondness and a great feeling for Jewish people and for Israel.”
HuffPost ignored that and started with this quote: “Some people in the United States — Jewish people — don’t appreciate Israel the way they should.”
Funnily enough, this line received loud applause from the crowd at the RJC, but HuffPost neglected to note that. Is the audience at the Republican Jewish Coalition anti-Semitic too?
[...]
Trump continued, “But I appreciate Israel, and it’s an honor to have, I think, done far more for Israel than any other president.”
Trump is particularly proud of his accomplishments in Israel, his favorite child is Jewish, and he has a lifelong record of being a friend to the Jewish people.
Worst anti-Semite ever.
Actually, Trump has a record of invoking offensive Jewish stereotypes such as calling them good with money and shrewd negotiators, as well as telling Jews that Israel is "their country," which invokes another anti-Semitic trope, that of dual loyalty. Cohen's claim that Trump "has a lifelong record of being a friend to the Jewish people" linked to an article written by a pro-Trump organization called Jews Choose Trump -- hardly an objective source.
Cohen concluded by huffing: "When will the left ever learn to judge people by their actions, not words and tonality?" Weird how Cohen thinks words and tone don't matter when it's a right-winger spouting the offensive ones.
A few days later, Trump had his dinner with Ye and Fuentes. Cohen was among those MRCers who were mad -- not at Trump, of course, but that reasonable observers viewed this dinner as evidence Republicans have a certain comfort level with anti-Semitism.
WND's Alexander Pushes Dubious Election Fraud Claims In Arizona Topic: WorldNetDaily
Rachel Alexander spent her columns prior to the midterm elections laying the groundwork for claiming election fraud after the election if her preferred Arizona right-wing Repuhlican candidates lost. Well, they did, and she did exactly that in her Nov, 14 column -- though she also whined that there wasn't enough evidence to gum up the works:
As the former Maricopa County elections attorney, I've watched the midterm election results trickle in with disbelief. Polls across the country mostly showed a red wave, and usually in previous years when the polls tighten up and show Republicans neck and neck with Democrats, the Republicans end up winning. (I've always suspected the "tightening up" was a trick by pollsters to demoralize the right early on.) But this year, just like 2020, the results are defying polling.
There are some strange things occurring, such as how the results from the reddest batches of ballots in Arizona were widely expected to come in last – but by Saturday there were still plenty of blue batches. One election attorney told me the county is violating the law by changing the order of which ballots they are counting. Election fraud denier Bill Gates, chair of the Maricopa County Supervisors, said on Wednesday that 95-99% of the results would be in on Friday, but on Thursday he said counting would finish up the next week, with, oddly, no counting over the weekend.
[...]
Reports are coming out of suspicious activity, but without probable cause or a blatant "smoking gun," legal challenges will go nowhere. For example, at Washoe County in Nevada, the livestream cameras stopped working Wednesday night at 11:24 p.m. Officials said all staff had left the building an hour earlier and didn't return until 7 a.m., so the cameras were not restored until 7:53 a.m.
This doesn't easily translate into legal action. A judge isn't going to issue a search warrant to conduct a forensic examination of the voting machines solely based on that, and if there was nefarious activity with ballots, how would you figure out what it was, outside of a hand count, which is difficult to get ordered?
Alexander seems shocked that one must have evidence before making a claim. Rather than, you know, supplying evidence, she played victim by ranting that attorneys are being held accountable for making bogus claims:
The problem is no attorneys or judges licensed by state bars dare to get involved, since they're likely to get disbarred if they do; the left has so much control over state bars. One of the only election attorneys in Arizona who has the guts to get involved in these issues has been under investigation by the state bar for almost two years. The Arizona State Bar is one of the most vicious bars in the country targeting conservative attorneys. This is why the left repeatedly claims there has been no "evidence" of voter fraud in court cases.
People can rant all they want about voter fraud, but until they start cleaning up the legal system – and that means rallying around conservative attorneys under attack and conservative leaders targeted through lawfare who have been ignored and deserted since too many don't want to be associated with "losers," preferring to focus on sexier issues – no one is going to be prosecuted.
Alexander pushed the unproven narrative again in her Nov. 21 column:
The Democrats, MSM and RINOs are complaining about voters' concerns over election fraud, saying "we need to move on," "quit living in the past," and "no one cares about it as an issue; you're hurting the Republican Party to continue focusing on it." There may be a grain of truth in all of that, but it's outweighed by the fact that if we don't stop the fraud, we may never get another Republican president into office and more states will turn blue.
No one really believes deep down that Arizona rejected four top Republican candidates – three who were leading in almost every poll, including MSM polls – considering the breakdown of voter registration in the state. Republicans have a 4-point voter registration advantage over Democrats in the state as well as within Maricopa County. Republican candidates swept the rest of the races around the state, leading many to believe only those four top races, which featured all Trump-endorsed candidates, were deliberately targeted.
Again, Alexander has only conspiracy theories, not solid facts, to serve up:
One of the main theories going around in Arizona is that since bad actors knew Republicans were going to vote heavily on Election Day, they focused their efforts there instead of on mail-in ballots. They speculate that someone on the inside, likely a tech inspector, was paid a large amount of money to incorrectly adjust the settings on printers located in heavily Republican precincts the night before, after the final tests of equipment were performed, throwing in a handful of blue precincts for distraction. Well over 350% more Republicans than Democrats voted in person on Election Day in Maricopa County.
[...]
Election-fraud experts tell me it's part of a plan by Democrats to take over states one by one. First they started with states like California, Washington and Oregon. They moved on to states like Colorado and Nevada. Arizona happens to be their latest target. One election-fraud expert in California believes there are actually rather close numbers of Republicans and Democrats in that state, but due to years of election fraud there, no one bothers investigating anymore, allowing it to become rampant.
[...]
No one wants to talk about election fraud anymore because they risk being sued or even prosecuted, kicked off Big Tech platforms, or shunned by powerful Republicans with money, who are often referred to as RINOs due to their heavy conflicts of interest. In order to keep their money flowing in, these powerful players have to keep up many alliances and contracts with people who don't share conservative values. There's no easy solution there, because without funding, who's going to pay to get the conservative message out? There aren't enough millionaires and billionaires who can operate outside of those entanglements.
So many people just nod and wink and pretend there's no election fraud in order to keep their funding, labeling anyone concerned about it as "crazy" or "conspiracy theorists," which often destroys their reputations and careers and makes them question their sanity. Stories of mass election fraud, like the type "2,000 Mules" exposed in Yuma County, go ignored. The focus needs to be on figuring out how to turn this type of messaging around, vindicating those who question the obvious instead of ridiculing them.
Alexander repeated her conspiracy theories in her Dec. 5 column, ans well as her complaint that right-wing lawyers who tie up the legal system with bogus claims are being held accountable:
Republicans have started filing election lawsuits over the strange outcome in Arizona, since no one believes that the top Trump-endorsed slate of candidates who were almost all leading in MSM polls lost. But the left is already ahead of the lawsuits, filing bar complaints against conservative election attorneys. The scary 65 Project, which basically seeks to stamp out conservatives from the practice of law, has been selectively filing ethics complaints against these attorneys. Since state bars are almost all controlled by the left, and many states have mandatory state bars, it's a no-brainer way to push through an illegal agenda like rubber stamping voter disenfranchisement.
The 65 Project is all over conservative election attorneys in Arizona. I'm the former Maricopa County Elections attorney, and it's like a who's who list of my colleagues in Arizona. Recent state bar complaints have been filed against Alex Kolodin, Dennis Wilenchik and his son Jack Wilenchik, Lee Miller, David Spilsbury, Christopher Viskovic and Kurt Olsen, who's been heavily involved in Arizona litigation including representing GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.
Other prominent attorneys around the country they've filed complaints against (in states where there are no mandatory state bars, the complaints get filed with other types of grievance commissions) include Ted Cruz, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Joseph DiGenova, Cleta Mitchell of the Election Integrity Network and numerous Republican attorneys general.
Does anyone really believe that a large number of conservative election attorneys happen to all be corrupt? Of course not. The bar complaints are a horrendous abuse of our justice system. No attorneys dare stand up for those attacked because it then puts a big target on their back. Non-attorneys aren't aware of how bad the abuses have become because it's a very technical area with lots of intricate and vague rules.
To discuss just one of those lawyers, Olsen: Numerous other lawyers in Arizona have said the claims of election fraud by Lake, as represented by Olsen, lackmerit, and indeed, her lawsuit was thrown out. Alexander declared that "These lawyers are the last bulwark standing in the way of massive voter disenfranchisement and suppression, it is imperative not to let them hang out to dry" and pompously concluded:
If we do not stop the fraud, we will never see a Republican president again, and the left will continue toppling red states like dominoes. The RINOs can complain all they want that the Trump-endorsed candidates lost because they were too Trumpian, not because they were targeted with election fraud, but we all know history repeats itself. The left will come for the RINOs next.
Alexander began her Dec. 12 column with this wildly conspiratorial claim:
The MSM secretly distributes talking points, which often come from the DNC, instructing its reporters to include statements in articles about voter disenfranchisement and suppression of Republicans, declaring that there has never been any evidence of widespread voter fraud. If you're not a lawyer, you might buy it. But if you know just the tiniest bit about the law, it's frankly embarrassing to see non-lawyer journalists repeatedly writing this, pretending to be authoritative and objective.
Needless to say, she provides no evidence of these secret talking points -- which fits right in with her lack of evidence on other claims. And the conspiracy theories, and her cheering on of Lake, just kept coming:
Previous election lawsuits in 2020 challenging voter disenfranchisement and suppression were stymied due to other reasons, not lack of evidence. It's dishonest for the MSM to pretend otherwise. Judges found vague technicalities to throw them out, afraid of having their careers destroyed since the left dominates much of the legal system.
[...]
Trump-endorsed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake filed a lengthy lawsuit on Friday challenging the results of the state's botched election, where thousands of Republicans on Election Day in Maricopa County ran into complications voting and, based on what they saw, doubt their votes were counted. The complaint cited extensive witness testimony regarding wrongdoing, including 90% of mismatched signatures just swept under the rug and approved instead of being "cured" to ensure they were legitimate. Other witness testimony cited a lack of chain of custody for 298,942 ballots that were delivered to a third-party voter signature verification service. That is a class 2 misdemeanor.
Just because a judge comes up with a bogus technical reason to throw out a lawsuit doesn't mean there was never any evidence produced. Some of the reasons the 2020 lawsuits went nowhere were because the election attorneys were targeted with disciplinary actions, as in Wisconsin Voters Alliance v. Pence. The attorneys were only too grateful to drop the case to avoid worse discipline. They weren't just any attorneys either, but part of the respected Thomas More Society's Amistad Project. The judge who scared them into withdrawing the case was appointed by President Barack Obama, James Boasberg. The 65 Project, which appears to exist in order to drive conservative attorneys out of the practice of law, has preemptively submitted bar complaints against many of the election attorneys filing lawsuits over the 2022 election.
[...]
All eyes are on Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson, who was assigned to Lake's lawsuit. Will he withstand the immense pressure and acknowledge the massive statutory violations, or will he succumb to the bullies on the left and their comrades in the MSM?
Thompson threw out Lake's lawsuit and found what little evidence Lake provided was unpersuasive. Alexander will no doubt blame "the left" for this, while refusing to address the lack of credible evidence that was presented.
MRC Defends Musk, Clings To Its Manufactured Narrative About Conservatives Being 'Censored' Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's hero worship over Elon Musk buying Twitter continued on its merry way. Tim Graham began his Nov. 30 column by whining:
Anyone who thinks the First Amendment is best represented by the “news” media is not paying attention to the way they wage war on freedom of speech for the conservative “rabble” on social media platforms.
Imagine if the media had attacked new media owners Jeff Bezos or David Zaslav with the kind of venom that they’re using on Twitter owner Elon Musk. No one would suggest it’s important for the government to monitor The Washington Post or CNN as potential sources of misinformation. Their brands are supposed to be synonymous with “trustworthy,” even though public opinion would offer a harsh reality check.
In recent weeks, Musk has taken the place of Rupert Murdoch on the information-supervillain beat. Outlets like CNN and the Post are actively rooting for Twitter to fail, chronicling that a third of Twitter advertisers haven’t appeared in the last several weeks.
But Graham's comparison is highly flawed. Unlike Zaslav's CNN or Bezos' Post, Twitter is not a media organziation that does original reporting -- it's a social media site with user-generated content, a big difference. He went on to stupidly huff that "The problem here is which privileged people are allowed to define what is 'misinformation' and what is 'hate'" -- as if the MRC doesn't exercise taht same privilege in attacking its political enemies.
Joseph Vazquez lashed out at the Post again later that day:
That The Washington Post can claim with a straight face that there was “no proof” of Twitter censoring conservatives when the Media Research Center has been documenting individual cases of censorship for over two years is simply ridiculous.
A Nov. 27 Post article written by three reporters brazenly claimed “[t]he right wing and conservatives for years have accused Twitter of censorship with no proof.”
That’s despite the fact that Twitter owner Elon Musk stated unequivocally days before the article’s publication that it was “correct” when conservative podcaster Dinesh D’Souza said that Twitter “[c]ensorship has been deployed as a one-way operation against conservatives.”
The Post glossed over Musk’s affirmation of Twitter censorship by teasing that he “agreed with right-wing figures on the site who accuse Twitter’s previous management of being biased against conservatives,” but only as a way of making it seem like the billionaire is misleading when “he says he’s a political moderate.”
Vazquez offered no reason why Musk's words should be trusted at face value or why a convicted felon and documented liar like D'Souza should be trusted at all. Instead, he felt he needed to shill for his employer:
MRC Free Speech America would also like to introduce The Post to its CensorTrack.org database, which was launched in September 2020 to specifically show the proof of the extent of Big Tech censorship of conservatives. It’s pretty convenient for the liberal rag to treat this database as though it didn’t exist. MRC Free Speech America researchers have logged 4,714 documented cases of Big Tech censorship across platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and others. Twitter alone accounted for 55 percent (2,583) of the total number of cases logged in CensorTrack.
The MRC’s exclusive database was so influential that an MRC Free Speech America study based on CensorTrack data was cited in an ongoing lawsuit from Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration for allegedly colluding with Big Tech to censor Americans. What’s ironic is that The Post has reported on the same lawsuit against Biden that cited CensorTrack data. One Oct. 25 story was headlined: “Cyber officials may have to testify about alleged social media collusion.”
Another MRC Free Speech America study released in 2021 showed that Big Tech overwhelmingly censored Republican members of Congress by a rate of 54-to-1 compared to congressional Democrats. But “[n]o proof,” right Washington Post?
The CensorTrack database is not proof of anything -- it's a political tool designed to push the partisan right-wing narrative of conservative "censorship" that completely ignores any other "censorship" claim and makes no distinction between a social media site enforcing its terms of service and actual censorship of a mainstream conservative view.
Vazquez played the Soros boogeyman card in another Nov. 30 post complaining that "A group funded by liberal billionaire George Soros is pressuring the federal government to investigate the world’s richest man simply because he now owns Twitter."
Autumn Johnson followed with a couple of hero-worship articles:
CNS Climbs Aboard The Right-Wing Anti-ESG Bandwagon Topic: CNSNews.com
The latest right-wing fad is to express performative outrage over investment policies that focus on environmental, social and governmental issues -- or ESG for short -- and CNSNews.com was pretty much ideologically ordered to hop aboard that bandwagon. Lauren Shank wrote in a Nov. 15 article:
The woke investing of ESG – Environmental, Social, and Governance – by state governments and other entities is destructive and a threat to pension holders, said Louisiana State Treasurer John Schroder on Monday in Washington, D.C. “We should invest more in our own states,” he said, “if you don’t invest in your own state, who is?”
Schroder made his remarks at the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF) National Convention on Nov. 14, where he was joined by state treasurers and auditors from Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and eight other states.
As explained by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, “ ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance. ESG investing is a way of investing in companies based on their commitment to one or more ESG factors. It is often also called sustainable investing, socially responsible investing, and impact investing.”
At the convention, CNS News asked Schroder how people can combat ESG investing, and what he has done to protect Louisiana from the effects of it.
As befits someone who cares more about pushing a narrative than being the fair and balance journalist she purports to be, Shank talked to no supporter of ESG investments. Instead, she hyped a study claiming that ESG investments perform relatively poorly.
Fellow fall intern Peyton Holliday also made a trip to that same convention, and she churned out a similarly biased article the same day:
“Elections matter” and Americans should strive to “elect people that are representing the interest of pensions,” said Kentucky State Treasurer Allison Ball on Monday in Washington, D.C. She also sharply criticized ESG investing and explained that many voters are unaware that their pensions are being invested in ESG companies instead of in what is best for their retirement and their state.
Ball made her remarks on Nov. 14 at the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF) National Convention, where she was joined by state treasurers and auditors from Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and eight other states.
Like Shank, Holliday made no effort to talk to an ESG supporter. But this narrative is apparently such a priority for CNS' parent, the Media Research Center, that both of these articles werereposted at NewsBusters. Apparently, there is no more wall between news and activism, if indeed there ever was.
She followed up with another anti-ESG article on Nov. 29 combined with Elon Musk stenography:
Entrepreneur and business magnate Elon Musk considers ESG -- environmental, social, and governance investing or ‘woke’ investing -- to be “the devil.”
Musk was tagged in a Twitter post by Carol Roth who wrote, “Remember when @ElonMusk wanted to bring free speech to Twitter and then S&P removed Tesla from their ESG 500 index, but kept in Exxon?”
“ESG is business social credit,” she added. “It’s a means to control capital, keep business people in line with the narrative, and, ultimately, control you.”
To which Musk responded, “ESG is the devil.”
Holliday did note a reason why Musk might be a little sour about ESG investments: Tesla, where he serves as CEO, was removed from from S&P 500's ESG index.
Craig Bannister served up another Republican anti-ESG promotion in a Dec. 5 article:
Florida is pulling $2 billion of assets from BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm, because the company should be choosing investments based on its clients’ best interests, and not on an environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda, the state’s attorney general explained Monday.
“Governor DeSantis (R) has been very clear: Florida is where ‘woke’ goes to die. But, this is a bigger picture,” AG Ashley Moody said in an interview with Fox & Friends First:
[...]
Florida funds don’t belong in “these large institutions that were doing anything other than looking at risk, return and diversification, any other sort of ideological agenda,” Moody said.
Bannister served up more Republican anti-ESG stenography the next day:
On Tuesday, six House Republicans launched a probe into whether a group of banks and money managers, wielding the influence of a reported $60 trillion of investments, is violating federal antitrust laws in order to promote ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) policies.
The letter, sent to two investment executives on the steering committee of Climate Action 100+, is signed by the incoming chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), joined by Reps. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI), Cliff Bentz (R-OR), and Tom McClintock (R-CA).
[...]
“Woke corporations are collectively adopting and imposing progressive policy goals that American consumers do not want or do not need,” the letter adds.
[...]
The letter also lists other ESG-related goals, such as abortion access, climate change fear-mongering, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, gun control and censorship of so-called disinformation.
Good intentions, no matter how dearly they are held, do not excuse antitrust violations, the letter explains, requesting that the information sought be provided by December 20, 2022.
Bannister became very much an anti-ESG propagandist for Republicans, writing in a Dec. 7 article:
The committee is looking into the ways, and extent, that BlackRock’s efforts to achieve an ideological agenda is harming its Texans and the state’s pension plans by boycotting some industries, such as coal and oil, in favor of less profitable, so-called “green” initiatives.
[...]
Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar has described the ESG movement as an “opaque and perverse system,” where financial institutions “use their financial clout to push a social and political agenda shrouded in secrecy.”
More propaganda -- and a promotional piece -- followed in a Dec. 9 article:
“If somebody tries to sell you on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing, hold on tight to your wallet and to your values – ESG is coming for both,” Senior Fellow at the School of Public Policy Pepperdine University Andy Puzder warns in a PragerU video.
Puzder details how, due to the ESG investment strategy, “companies, and even whole economies, go from woke to broke – including your 401(k).”
ESG is an anti-capitalism investment strategy that assumes that “If you’re a company just trying to make a profit, you’re the problem” – even though the profit motive has brought about some of mankind’s greatest inventions – including electric cars, solar panels and wind turbines, Puzder notes.
A bank tried to use his loan application as leverage to coerce him into publicly expressing support for Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) ideology, businessman Bud Brigham alleged in testimony at a Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs hearing.
Brigham, founder and executive chairman of Brigham Minerals, detailed his allegation at a December 15, 2022 hearing examining the harm that the ESG movement - in which financial institutions limit their investments to companies aligned with specific leftwing environmental and social causes - is doing to Texans, their access to capital, and their investment portfolios.
In his testimony, Brigham claimed that Credit Suisse, a global investment bank and financial services firm, suggested that his company would have its loan application approved – but, only if he tweeted out statements repeating and promoting principles of liberals’ climate agenda.
“I’m going to provide you with a couple of specific examples of how corrupt it is, looking at the ESG movement,” Brigham began his testimony.
In none of these articles did Bannister offer any sort of balance in the way of a pro-ESG viewpoint. That's because CNS is paying him to be a biased propagandist, not a balanced journalist.
MRC Tries To Rewrite Election History To Protect Republicans Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Kevin Tober complained in a Nov. 28 post:
On MSNBC's The ReidOut, New York Times editorial board member and MSNBC analyst, Mara Gay proved that she knows very little about the civil rights movement or how the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed when she attempted to slime the "modern" Republican Party as being in opposition to civil rights. When in reality, the civil rights legislation of the 1960s would never have passed without GOP support.
[...]
Gay jumped in to smear the GOP as a bunch of racists who are against civil rights for African Americans, which of course is an obvious lie to anyone who took a fifth-grade-level history course.
"The origin of the Republican Party as we know it today really has to do with a backlash to civil rights. And so any understanding of that Republican Party without that historical backlash to civil rights is incomplete," Gay said with a straight face.
While facts and logic are a foreign concept on MSNBC and The New York Times, they aren't here at NewsBusters. The truth is in 1964, the Civil Rights Act was in serious trouble because of Southern Democrats in the Senate.
Even then-Democrat [sic] President Lyndon Johnson told Hubert Humphrey that “The bill can’t pass unless you get Ev Dirksen," who was the Republican Senate Minority Leader at the time.
Despite having 67 members of the Senate, barely 40 Democrats supported cloture on the Civil Rights legislation. According to Senate.gov's history of the legislative fight, "This meant that Dirksen had to deliver at least 25 votes from his 33-member caucus that was divided among 21 conservatives, five moderates, and seven liberals."
In the end, the Republican Party under the leadership of Everett Dirksen, "the final tally stood at 71 to 29—27 Republicans and 44 Democrats joined forces to support cloture."
By focusing only on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- which Reid and Gay didn't even mention -- Tober is engaging in a highly selectiveand biased reading of history. Yes, Democrats joined Republicans in supporting that bill, but Southern Democrats (or Dixiecrats) were so mad about its passage that they began switching their party allegiance afterward to Republican. As one historical summary noted regarding that 1964 vote:
Six Republicans voted with the Dixiecrats, and one was Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who was that year's GOP nominee for president. One of the filibuster leaders was Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who switched his party allegiance to Republican and backed Goldwater for president. President Lyndon Johnson was elected in a landslide that November, but Goldwater carried Thurmond's home state and its Deep South neighbors: Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. It was a harbinger of things to come, when these states would help flip all the "Solid South" from D to R in the Electoral College.
So, yes, the civil rights movement did, in fact, establish the Republican Party as being opposed to civil rights. Sounds like Tober is the one who needs to take a remedial fifth-grade history course.
Brad Wilmouth served up his own similarly selective reading of racial history to protect Republians in a Dec. 10 post:
On Wednesday's CNN This Morning, as the show had on Washington Post reporter Matt Brown to discuss the Georgia Senate runoff, co-host Kaitlan Collins asked Brown about his article tying the runoff system to White segregationists who designed it in the 1960s.
Neither mentioned that these segregationists were Democrats as Collins vaguely called them "conservative White candidates," and Brown's Post article completely scrubs the word "Democrat" even though it recounts that "Republicans" in recent years have tweaked the system for self-serving purposes.
[...]
In the actual article, titled, "Georgia's runoff system was designed to dilute Black voting power," Brown begins: "Tuesday's showdown between Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D) and Republican challenger Herschel Walker is the product of an unusual general election runoff system that was pushed by a powerful Georgia segregationist who sought to blunt the power of Black voters in the 1960s."
In the rest of the 1,644-word article, which was mostly about Southern Democrats who tried to limit Black power in the 1960s, the word "Democrat" was not used at all. But, in the last few paragraphs, Brown did specify that "Republicans" had made reforms in recent years for self-serving reasons.
Without informing viewers that Democratic Senator Wyche Fowler was defeated in a 1992 runoff after he came in first place with less than 50 percent of the vote, Brown vaguely stated that the "state legislature changed the threshold for a runoff, requiring a candidate to win at least 45 percent of votes instead of 50 percent." Not mentioned was that it was a Democrat legislature that made the change, and that the change worked as planned, helping Democrat Max Cleland get elected Senator with just 49 percent of the vote in 1996 as the Libertarian candidate drew more than three percent.
Like Tober, Wilmouth similarly forgot to mention that segregation-favoring politicians in the South went from Democrat to Republican after civil rights legislation passed -- and those Republicans did nothing to get rid of the runoff system. And why would they? Out of 10 runoffs between 1992 and 2018, Republicans won nine of them, and the GOP candidate saw an average vote percentage increase of 5 points. Wilmouth also didn't mention that it was a Republican-controlled state legislature who changed the law back in 2005 to requiring a 50 percent threshold.
Further, it's only because Republicans have lost runoffs in the past few years -- two of which involved Warnock -- that Georgia Republicans are now calling for the runoff system to be eliminated. Neither Wilmouth nor anyone else at the MRC have told their readers about that.
The Big Lie About Election Fraud Moves To Brazil, And WND Buys Into It Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily has kept an eye on presidential elections in Brazil -- unsurprising since it likes the very Trumpy right-wing authoritarian leader there, Jair Bolsonaro. Scott Lively used an Oct. 24 column to fret that a Bolsonaro loss might mean a decrease in hate for LGBT people there:
On Oct. 30, 2022, the people of Brazil will chose a new president in a run-off election featuring conservative incumbent Jair Bolsanaro and the Marxist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, aka Lula. Current polling in the corporate media shows Lula in the lead, raising the nightmare specter of a return to the extreme homofascism that marked the Lula regime from 2003-2010.
It was during Lula's regime that Brazil's LGBT Brownshirts drove my friend and ministry ally Julio Severo and his young family into hiding in a foreign country. He died there in 2021, partly in consequence of the dire poverty they faced as Brazilian ex-pats living illegally in exile. My ministry has taken up the task of helping his widow, Sarah, and seven young children to survive without him.
[...]
Allow me at this point to remind the reader that the slur "homophobe" is an invention of the LGBT movement to characterize literally ALL disagreement with its political agenda as mental illness. A phobia is a anxiety disorder, and the purpose of the "homophobia" slur is to frame disagreement as hateful bigotry driven by an irrational fear of homosexuals.
"Homophobia" was originally a psychiatric term for a person's fear of his own homosexual inclinations back in the days when "science" admitted the truth about sexual health and actually helped people overcome same-sex attraction disorder. But after the LGBT movement took permanent control over the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in a political coup in 1973, the "science" was edited to serve the new agenda. And the term "homophobia" was re-purposed to create an anti-Christian/anti-naturalist pejorative equivalent to the anti-homosexual slurs "fag" and "dyke." All such slurs are dehumanizing and antisocial, and "homophobe" should be condemned alongside the other two – but of course the only standards upheld by the left are double-standards.
[...]
I am urging Christians around the world to join me in prayer that Lula does not return to power in Brazil. And I include especially in that call to prayer our Russian brethren, who since 2013 have set the standard in their own law banning "gay" propaganda to children, and who have influence in Brazil as a part of the BRICS alliance. Ukrainian believers too should pray with us, because they face under pro-LGBT Zelensky the same agenda as Brazilians will again suffer under a second Lula regime – and if prayer can save Brazil that fate, it can save Ukraine (and I pray that even now). But mostly I appeal to American Christians, because it is our government that has been the Whore of Babylon pushing LGBT perversions across the entire globe, and thus we have a special duty to try and mitigate the damage.
After Bolsonaro lost, he pulled another Trumpy move by crying election fraud ... and WND bought into it. Editor Joseph Farah-- already a pro-Trump election fraud dead-ender despite a complete lack of credible evidence to support it -- rushed to Bolsonaro's defensein his Nov. 17 column:
While Americans continue to grumble about the elections stolen in Arizona and elsewhere, the blackout news media refuse to cover it – with the notable exception of WND, Gateway Pundit and Real America's Voice
But our neighbor to the south, in Brazil, haven't left the streets for weeks because of the electoral cheating that has taken place there.
Brazilians packed the streets in admirable civil protest again Nov. 13, on Republic Day – to the tune of over 3 million people.
In fact, the party of President Jair Bolsonaro presented its report on the Really Big Steal, announcing it will apply to have the election annulled since the results could not be validated.
Since the massive fraud during the runoff election on Oct. 30, millions of Brazilians have been protesting on the streets every day against fraud by communist convicted criminal Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the supposed winner.
[...]
Even before Election Day, Biden had a not-so-subtle message for Bolsonaro: According to Foreign Policy magazine, "Over the past year, U.S. President Joe Biden has deployed top administration officials to meet with their Brazilian counterparts and convey a simple message to President Jair Bolsonaro: Don't derail Brazil's democracy."
In other words, the fix was in.
[...]
Further, Bolsonaro was a friend of President Trump – so of course he had to go.
In fact, not even the Bolsonaro-controlled Brazilian military has found any evidence of election fraud. But lack of evidence has never stopped WND before, so the narrative continues. Art Moore wrote in a Dec. 1 article:
For the 32nd consecutive day, millions of Brazilians are on the streets of cities throughout the nation in perhaps the largest pro-democracy protests in history, contending left-wing presidential challenger Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's declared victory over conservative populist President Jair Bolsonaro was fraudulent.
Brazil's Superior Electoral Court announced Tuesday the certification ceremony of da Silva, a member of the Workers Party, will take place at 2 p.m. on Dec. 12. The inauguration is scheduled for Jan. 1.
On Wednesday, however, Bolsonaro filed a petition with Brazil election authorities formally contesting the results, alleging some voting machines malfunctioned and that any votes cast through them should be annulled.
[...]
Establishment media largely have ignored the massive protests, said investigative reporter Matthew Tyrmand.
"This is the largest democratic protest in possibly human history, and the global media is crickets on this," he said in an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
What's clear, he said, is that the Brazilian people "don't want to be led by a convicted criminal."
Moore didn't mention that Tyrmand has been busted for telling lies about the Brazilian election before. He also didn't mention that the Brazilian military found no election fraud, though he did note that the mlitary "has a special role in the Brazilian constitution giving it authority to adjudicate separation of powers disputes."
MRC Bitter That Herschel Walker's Scandals Were Accurately Reported Topic: Media Research Center
On the day of the Georgia Senate election runoff, the Media Research Center continued to whine that Republican Herschel Walker's failures were being pointed out by the media. Mark Finkelstein played whataboutism in a Dec. 6 post when "Morning Joe" co-host Mika Brzezinski questioned whether Walker could do the job if elected, huffing, "You had to wonder: was Mika talking about Herschel Walker—or John Fetterman?" He had more whataboutism when it was pointed out that Walker would be nothing but a GOP rubber stamp: "Unlike Raphael Warnock? That brave, independent-minded, iconoclast who has only voted with Joe Biden . . . 96.4% of the time?" He ended with one last bit of huffiness:
Note: Morning Joe regular Eugene Robinson was not on the panel today. But he has a Washington Post column out claiming [emphasis added],"If Walker wins, it will be because Republican voters decided that loyalty to party was more important than having effective representation in the Senate."
Not loyalty to party, Mr. Robinson. Loyalty to principles that are important to many Georgians. Warnock will not be providing "effective representation" for those Georgians, when, if sent back to the Senate, he will dutifully vote for lax border control, higher taxes, more gun control, etc.
FInkelstein didn't mention Walker's loyal to the "principles" of committing domestic violence and handing out abortions like candy to his girlfriends. And needless to say, the MRC censored the fact that five more women came forward to accuse Walker of abuse.
Kevin Tober sounded a little desperate in a Dec. 6 post, loudly complaining that Walker's scandals were being accurately reported on while his preferred right-wing anti-Raphael Warnock narratives were being ignored:
On Tuesday evening, as many voters in Georgia were heading to the polls after work, ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News continued to provide in-kind contributions to the campaign of Democrat Senator Ralphael Warnock by burying his scandals and ties to a noted racist and anti-Semite and getting in one last hit job on his Republican opponent Herschel Walker.
ABC unsurprisingly left the smears to one of their most partisan “reporters” congressional correspondent Rachel Scott, who dutifully regurgitated DNC talking points by sneering: “Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock says this race comes down to two things: character and competence. He says his Republican rival Herschel Walker has neither.”
“For months, Walker has fended off a barrage of scandals, accused of domestic violence, of lying about his resume, failing to publicly acknowledge several children, and paying for two women to have abortions, which he has denied,”Scott continued.
She even interviewed voters, many of whom were voting for Warnock due to his perceived lack of qualifications and scandals which the media were responsible for hyping.
Tober didn't explain why he was continuing to defend such a scandal-ridden candidate like Walker. Also, his anti-Warnock link went to a Fox News story, but he didn't accuse Fox News of offering "in-kind contributions" to Walker's campaign by publishing it. Instead, he concluded by whining, "If Walker does indeed lose on Tuesday, the leftist media’s election interference and censorship of damaging stories about Warnock will certainly be a contributing factor."
Yes, only in the MRC's right-wing bubble would accurate reporting be considered "election interference."
Walker did lose to Warnock like he lost the general election, and this time the post-election whiner was Curtis Houck, who complained like Tober that accurate reporting was so unfair:
The flagship broadcast network news programs were ebullient Wednesday morning on the heels of their team’s victory in Tuesday’s Georgia Senate runoff election with Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) defeating Republican Herschel Walker, whom ABC, CBS, and NBC boasted had “struggled to overcome” “one scandal after another” (and thus allowed Warnock to evade questions about his past).
On ABC’s Good Morning America, liberal congressional correspondent Rachel Scott bragged that Walker “spent much of his campaign fending off one scandal after another, accused of domestic violence, of lying about his resume, failing to publicly acknowledge several children and paying for two women to have abortions, which he denies” even though it “turned some voters...away.”
In the show’s second hour, Scott repeated this narrative: “Warnock said that this race was about two things, competence, and character, pointing to a string of controversies that plagued Herschel Walker's campaign.”
[...]
NBC correspondent Peter Alexander was similarly happy about the Warnock win on Today and promoted how the Peach State senator “reflect[ed] on his mother’s extraordinary journey” from a poor woman picking cotton to mother of a senator.
On Walker, Alexander only had negativity and focused on scandals: “Walker struggled to overcome a series of public scandals from allegations of domestic abuse to accusations he paid for two women to have abortions, claims that he vehemently denied.”
Houck didn't explain why he chose to defend such a morally compromised candidate even after that immorality could not be denied.If he can't do that, he -- like the rest of the MRC -- has no moral authority to pass judgment on anyone else.
Finkelstein returned for one last post-election defense, whining in a Dec. 7 post that S.E. Cupp, whom he dismissed as a "CNN Republican: said that Walker wouldn't have been a candidate "if you had a strong Republican leadership willing to say to Donald Trump, this candidate is crap," huffing in response: "Can you imagine Cupp, or any CNNer, ever disparaging a Democrat in such a scatological manner?" He then tried to wash his hands of Walker by blaming GOP primary voters, not Trump, for picking Walker as their nominee (though Trump did, in fact, endorse him) -- and he still couldn't stop playing whataboutism:
David Urban, a former Trump adviser, pushed back. He said there are no smoke-filled rooms choosing candidates, and that Walker was not the pick of the GOP establishment, but of one man: Donald Trump.
In fact, although Trump did push Walker's candidacy, it was not even the former president who chose Walker--it was the Republicans of Georgia, who gave him a resounding 68% of the GOP primary vote.
Lemon stubbornly clung to his notion that the Republican establishment hand-picked Walker. That was Lemon's way of suggesting that Republicans are condescending to black candidates and voters, falsely assuming that black voters will support any black candidate, regardless of qualifications.
In fact, if there is a group that truly disparages black Republicans, it is the liberal media, particularly fellow African-Americans.
In denial to the end. So much for putting principles before party.
As it has for the pastfewmonths -- and as it regularly does with Democratic presidents -- CNSNews.com obscured November's good employment numbers by cherry-picking other numbers. Susan actually led with the good numbers in her lead article, yet the headline read "Dropping: Labor Force Participation, Number of Employed; Rising: Labor Force Dropouts":
The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics said the economy added 263,000 jobs in November, higher than the anticipated 200,000; and the unemployment rate held steady at 3.7 percent.
But there are troubling trends in Friday's employment report:
Despite the rising cost of living, the number of employed Americans dropped for a second straight month, falling by 138,000 to 158,470,000; the number of Americans counted as not in the labor force -- meaning they have no job and are not looking for one -- increased by 359,000 to 100,227,000, the highest this number has been in a year; and the labor force participation rate declined for a third straight month, to 61.1 percent in November.
People who are not in the labor force are retirees, students, caregivers, and others who have dropped out.
Conversely, the participation rate is the percentage of the population that is either working or actively looking for work.
When Jones got to her preferred number, the labor force participation rate, she did have to admit that Biden's record improved since he took offices while het again touting how much better it was under Donald Trump:
In November, the civilian non-institutional population in the United States was 264,708,000. That included all people 16 and older who did not live in an institution, such as a prison, nursing home or long-term care facility.
Of that civilian non-institutional population, 164,481,000 were participating in the labor force, meaning they were either employed or unemployed -- they either had a job or were actively looking for one during the last month. This resulted in a labor force participation rate of 62.1 percent in November -- down from 62.2 percent in October; 62.3 in September; and 62.4 percent in August, so the trend continues to be negative.
The participation rate was 61.4 percent when Joe Biden took office as the pandemic raged. Today's number, 62.1 percent, is more than a point below the Trump-era high of 63.4 percent recorded in February 2020, just before COVID-prompted shutdowns.
There was no sidebar this time, such as the typical story from editor Terry Jeffrey on government employment.
WND Writers Desperately Want Trump To Run Again Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily is filled with Trump dead-enders, and they want their guy back in the White House. Scott Lively set up conspiracy theories to support the idea in his Nov. 11 column:
The all-too predictable RINO campaign to defeat Donald Trump's bid for the White House in 2024, before it has even been formally announced, has begun. Interestingly, it features as its leading argument that Ron DeSantis would make a better president and wouldn't have all the "divisive" and distracting baggage Trump has. We're expected to believe that the RINOs actually want DeSantis as president, when all they really want is a Trump/DeSantis primary-season bloodbath so the White House will stay blue and they can keep their lucrative posts as willingly controlled "opposition" and preserve the corrupt cozy collegiality of the Purple Uniparty.
Does anyone really doubt that Mitch McConnell deliberately sabotaged the MAGA takeover of the U.S. Senate to preserve his own place and power? Does anyone really believe that the light-in-the-loafers Lincoln Project perverts would willingly let "Don't Say Gay" DeSantis get within a hundred miles of the presidency? No, the dump Trump to crown Ron is a bait-and-switch con game trolling for suckers. Donald Trump is not going away, and the only thing that will come from the effort to dump him is an expansion of the list of people we know can't be trusted to defend the Constitution and Truth itself: some because they never stood on principle in the first place and others because they are otherwise good people who nevertheless allowed themselves to be duped into the role of useful idiots, even after having their eyes opened to election fraud, the plandemic and other serious crimes of the elites.
Every virtue-loving American, but especially the latter group being lured into the RINO trap, should remember one essential fact: Donald Trump doesn't need to win another election to legally and morally deserve a second term in the White House. HE ALREADY EARNED IT IN 2020! The Usurper-in-Chief occupying the Oval Office is a filthy traitor whose every pronouncement is a pack of lies, and whose very presence behind the presidential podium is an act of contempt for the citizens of this country and our Constitution.
America owes Donald Trump a second term in the same way that a government-run impound yard owes a new car to a victim whose own car was stolen while under government protection. Our election system has a legal and moral duty to conduct free and fair elections and to ensure the rightful winner is seated after an honest, objective and transparent review of the votes cast by legally qualified citizens only. That process was hijacked and grossly abused by a vast network of conspirators of both parties, united by a visceral hatred of Trump so intense that it justified in their warped minds the greatest political crime in world history: a literal regime-change coup in the most powerful nation on earth and a cover-up of that crime, which continues to this very day using every possible weapon and tactic in their considerable arsenal. Not even the United States Supreme Court could stand against that conspiracy, as all the many highly meritorious lawsuits were derailed on cynical procedural pretexts – even the ones that reached the Supremes.
And yet, by the sheer persistence of one of the most remarkable men ever born on this earth, that conspiracy – intended as an American version of the Reichstag fire – has been exposed, explained and partially extinguished in the build-up to the 2022 midterms.
Every honest, educated citizen in America knows that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, and by the time he is finally inaugurated in January of 2025, the entire world will know that as well – with all the evidence laid out clearly on the table for all to see, along with a list of those awaiting prosecution to the fullest extent of the law – some of them deserving the death penalty for treason. The MAGA movement in the House of Representatives and throughout the citizenry will pursue that mission with a passion for truth, justice and the American way that would put Superman to shame.
Donald Trump doesn't have to earn his second term a second time, but he will. Only an act of God telling him not to run, or assassination by the elites, will stop that from happening.
[...]
I'm not going to offer the standard platitude about Trump being a flawed man like the rest of us, because he's NOT like the rest of us. Only Donald Trump could have brought America back from the precipice of Marxist hell in 2016, and only Donald Trump can finish that job. He is absolutely perfect for the task God has assigned to him, warts and all, and America owes him a massive debt. Admitting that and fully backing his campaign (should he choose to climb back on that bronco and not hand the reins to Ron early) is the very least we can do.
Michael Master penned an "open letter" to Trump in his Nov. 14 column that pushed election fraud conspiracy theories before he got around to the interesting stuff:
If you decide to run, then you will win the Republican nomination. Your support in the Republican Party is huge. MAGA is the only real alternative to Democratic destruction of American values. Mitch McConnell et al. have no answers. Ninety-three percent of your candidates won in the Republican primary elections. You will win the Republican nomination in 2024 if you want it.
Now, can you win the general election in November 2024?
As you well know, Democrats have figured out how to cheat. Ballot harvesting, drop boxes, mail-out of ballots, weeks of voting, days of counting ballots, machine manipulation.
Mr. Trump, can you stop the cheating? Since states are responsible for how each one runs its own elections, can you stop all the fraud?
Now, for the bigger question: If you cannot stop the cheating and Republican leadership will not try to stop it, then who else can? Answer: no one.
So what do we do if you do not run?
Trump's actual announcement on Nov. 15 warranted a fluffy "news" article by Joe Kovacs that started by falsely calling him "President Donald Trump." (He's not president now, Joe, despite your bogus wishes to the contrary.) Indeed, Kovacs is still bitter about 2020 and clinging to conspiracy theorires:
Biden won then, but his victory likely will carry an asterisk mark for many people because of two outside influences that polls and surveys confirm almost without a doubt took the victory from Trump.
One was that the FBI interfered in the election by calling on social media companies to suppress what it called "Russian disinformation" about the curious income – millions of dollars – the Biden family got from sources in Russia and China.
It wasn't disinformation, however. It was accurate reporting, and polls suggest that enough Democrats would have fled his camp if they had known that Trump would have been re-elected.
The second factor was Mark Zuckerberg's distribution of $400 million plus, through foundations, to various local election officials. They often used it to recruit voters from Democrat districts, perhaps explaining why Biden got so many millions more votes than the very popular Barack Obama had years earlier.
That was followed by WND's biggest Trump fanboy, Joseph Farah, gushing all over himself at the announcement in a Nov. 16 column with the screaming headline "THE RETURN OF TRUMP!":
"We do not have to endure what is taking place in Washington. You see our country, the corridors of power … they're our corridors, they're not their corridors. These are our corridors, and we are going to take those corridors back."
That was one of the seminal lines that distinguished Donald Trump's speech announcing his bid to recapture the White House. He hit just the right notes. It was a home run.
They're OUR corridors, not their corridors. These are our corridors, and we are going to take those corridors back.
He was at once telling Nancy Pelosi – as well as affirming a truism to the average American – that these institutions are OUR institutions and this movement is about taking them back.
That's what Trump did with his Tuesday bid to retake the White House in 2024.
Farah simply repeated a lot of quotes from Trump's low-energy speech, then concluded:
But is Trump the undisputed frontrunner?
"I do want to point out that in the midterms, my endorsement success rate was 232 wins and only 22 losses. You don't hear that from the media." It is a remarkable record. He's the only candidate who could do that.
Trump has promised to Make America Great Again – and he is probably the only person who can do it. Nobody else rises to the occasion. We're lucky to have him.
Farah may think that because the audience for his WND these days is largely MAGA conspiracy theorists like him.
NEW ARTICLE: Fake News And Flip-Flops On Abortion At The MRC Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center changes its argument about an anti-abortion vote in Kansas, spreads lies about Margaret Sanger, and throws a fit over Chrissy Teigen saying her miscarriage was an abortion. Read more >>
WorldNetDaily has continued to cling to the Omar Epps conspiracy theory, and it's clearly not going to stop anytime soon. This time, it's Jack Cashill trying to further it in his Nov. 16 column:
As you'd expect from the pro-Trump sycophants at Newsmax, Donald Trump's announcement of his 2024 presidential campaign got all the pomp it could muster up -- indeed, it was dutifully reporting Trump's teases 
As further evidence that it's a partisan attack organization than any sort of legitimate "media research" outfit, the Media Research Center 
Peyton Holliday wrote in a Nov. 22 CNSNews.com 
In the month before Donald Trump had a dinner with anti-Semites Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, the Media Research Center labored to protect Trump from allegations of being anti-Semitic over his criticism of non-right-wing American Jews for allegedly not being sufficiently supportive of Israel. When he first made the claim in October, Mark Finkelstein launched quickly into Trump Defense Mode in an Oct. 17 
achel Alexander spent her columns prior to the midterm elections 
The Media Research Center's hero worship over Elon Musk buying Twitter continued on its merry way. Tim Graham began his Nov. 30 
The 
The Media Research Center's Kevin Tober complained in a Nov. 28 
WorldNetDaily has kept an eye on presidential elections in Brazil -- unsurprising since it likes the very Trumpy right-wing authoritarian leader there, Jair Bolsonaro. Scott Lively used an Oct. 24 
On the day of the Georgia Senate election runoff, the Media Research Center 
As it has for the 
WorldNetDaily is filled with Trump dead-enders, and they want their guy back in the White House. Scott Lively set up conspiracy theories to support the idea in his Nov. 11 
