MRC's Transgender Hate Rolls On Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's rage againsttransgender people has continued unabated.A Feb. 20 post by Clay Waters complained that a news segment on anti-transgender laws didn't include any transphobes:
NPR's big story on Monday's Morning Edition was “Florida bans gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Parents raise concerns,” by Melissa Block. She's a former morning anchor turned “NPR special correspondent covering gender issues." Block’s completely one-sided seven-minute story included a portrait of teenager Liz Bostock, “[a]ssigned male at birth.”
With a soft, celebratory focus on activist mothers, happy "trans kids," and virtually no dissenting voices aired or inconvenient facts raised, it’s a perfect encapsulation of the liberal media’s harmful attitude that children can be born in the wrong body, an error that needs irrevocable surgical and-or chemical fixing that can result in permanent sterilization.
NPR used the bizarre term "gender-affirming care" describe gender denial....five times in seven minutes. The teenager started receiving puberty blockers last August. "It's been amazing," said her mother.
A Feb. 24 item by Brad Milmouth weirdly insisted that a CNN host who called out anti-transgender politicians was actually "promot[ing] transgender surgery for underage teens":
On Tuesday's The Lead show, CNN host Jake Tapper did his part to promote transgender surgery for underage teens as he devoted a segment to fretting over Idaho's push for a state ban. Republicans only stood for "cruelty" and "meanness" that is somehow against God.
Teenage transgender activist Eve Debitt and father Michael Debitt were given an extremely sympathetic forum to complain about the Idaho legislature's actions with no serious consideration of the view that such surgery causes irreversible harm through amputation.
Tim Graham served up his own whine on March 4 that transphobes aren't getting included enough in stories on anti-transgender legislation:
The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and federal funding for TV public-affairs programs, insisted on “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature." The CPB and PBS have ignored this language ever since.
On Wednesday, the PBS NewsHour aired an 11-minute segment under the headline “Parents concerned as new state laws restrict rights of transgender children.” They summarized it on Twitter: "Republican legislators are advancing bills restricting doctors and other providers from offering transition-related health care for minors."
Anchor William Brangham began with a medley of permissive parents who lobbied against Republicans who oppose so-called "gender-affirming care" for kids, from puberty blockers to amputation surgeries. Then he conducted an interview with radical transgender activist Erin Reed, which made it nearly unanimous -- on a subject that is clearly "of a controversial nature." Reed fights dirty, comparing GOP opposition to "genocide."
The conservative or Republican view was aired for 48 seconds, and then Reed was allowed to shoot it down, with no rebuttal.
We don't recall Graham ever complaining that Fox News gave short shrift to "the liberal view" then attacked it with no rebuttal.
The MRC's chief transphobe, Tierin-Rose Mandelburg, raged at a transgender child in a March 6 post:
Two words that should never appear in the same sentence but so often do these days: “trans” and “kids.”
“Real Housewives” star Heather Dubrow posted on Instagram for International Son’s day in honor of her “son” who was once her daughter. As a result, numerous blue checks praised the “inclusivity” and “celebration” of the child's deep confusion.
Dubrow posted a photo of the beach with the word “ACE,” her “son’s” name, etched into the sand for International Son’s Day on March 4th.
[...]
Unironically, most trans kids don’t grow up healthy, happy, confident or independent like Dubrow said. Many of them deal with the life-long side effects of the mutilation they had done. Most can’t have kids naturally, can’t breastfeed, deal with depression and even thoughts of suicide. Last year, 82% of trans-identifying people considered suicide.
Mandelburg didn't mention that the study noted that "Interpersonal microaggressions made a unique, statistically significant contribution to lifetime suicide attempts" -- meaning that transgender people are being driven to suicide in part because of haters like her.
On a similar note, Waters returned for a March 11 post complaining that one TV host raised the possibilty of "real-world violence" against transgender people as the result of anti-trans legislation: "How do 'we know' anything of the kind about how state legislation leads to 'real-world violence,' besides from the rhetoric of the most extreme trans-activists?"
A March 13 post by Mandelburg twisted President Biden's words to bizarrely portray his speaking out against anti-trans laws as an endorsement of child mutilation:
Perhaps it’s opposite day.
On Monday’s segment of Comedy Central's The Daily Show, President Joe Biden spoke with gay man and former White House staff member in the Obama era, Kal Penn, where he admitted that he thought restricting kids from getting their private parts mutilated was “sinful.”
The pair began speaking about gay-marriage and Biden’s efforts to keep it legal. Biden said his stance was “simple” after talking about his “epiphany” with homosexuality when he saw two men locking lips in high school.
Penn also asked about the transgender population, specifically transgender youth who are dealing with, so-called “regressive state laws.”
“Transgender kids is a really harder thing,” he began. “What’s going on in Florida is, as my mother would say, close to sinful. I mean it's terrible what they're doing.”
In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis is spearheading laws that would prohibit kids from receiving dangerous surgeries and drugs to change their gender. DeSantis recognizes that there are two genders and that children are not mature enough to make such life altering decisions. While his laws are evidence of him looking out for children's best interests, the left is twisting it into an anti-LGBTQ campaign by the Republican Governor.
Mandelburg pushed the right-wing narrative that a failure to sufficiently hate transgender people is making people transgender:
Obviously Biden is not a fan of such a move. "It’s not like a kid wakes up one morning and says, ‘You know, I decided I want to become a man' or 'I want to become a woman' or 'I want to change.' What are they thinking about here? They are human beings. They love. They have feelings. They have inclinations that are... It just, to me, is, I don’t know is, it's cruel,” the president said in the clip.
Well, he was right that kids don’t wake up and just choose to be a different gender. More often than not, they are conditioned or indoctrinated into believing that is their reality. Whether it’s their teachers who shove LGBTQ propaganda to them in schools or parents who agree to let their kids live a delusion, Biden is failing to recognize that kids don’t know better. Kids trust adults and if adults tell them that getting life altering surgery is good, then they’ll do it.
So upset was the MRC by Biden's "Daily Show" interview that Alex Christy complained about it the next day.
Christy returned for a March 25 post in which he groused that commentator Jonathan Capehart portray right-wing concern about "parental rights" as all about hating transgender kids (which he didn't rebut) and tried to lamely tried to respond whe Capehart called out "rabble-rousing parents" who are actually just targeting transgender kids: "It is not “rabble-rousing” to say that boys are boys and girls are girls and that teenagers should not be given hormone treatment, but it is rabble-rousing to say that they should."
How Is The MRC Fearmongering About Soros Now? Topic: Media Research Center
When the Media Research Center wasn't busy trying to tie George Soros to the district attorney prosecuting Donald Trump for financial crimes (and loudlydenying it was leaning into anti-Semitic tropes by doing so), the Media Research Center was attacking Soros in all the usual ways. Here's what the MRC has done in the field of Soros-bashing since the beginning of the year, when we last checked in:
We've already noted how the MRC has lashed out at a Soros-funded group for accurately pointing out how Elon Musk is pushing Twitter rightward, and how it tried to scapegoat a Soros-linked prosecutor for dropping a charge against a man who later perpetrated a massacre even though the charge dropped was carrying a concealed weapon without a permit, something right-wing gun-lovers like the MRC endorse (shades of what it would later do to Bragg).
It wouldn't be the MRC if there wasn't at least one wacky attack on Soros, and Gabriela Pariseau oblliged in a Feb. 17 post accusing Soros of hypocrisy for pointing out Donald Trump's narcissism:
Leftist billionaire George Soros railed against former President Donald Trump and called him a narcissist. Yes, America’s most notorious self-absorbed billionaire is whining about “narcissism.”
Soros delivered a climate alarmist speech at the Technical University of Munich where he took time to lambast Trump as “a deeply flawed character, a confidence fixer whose narcissism grew into a disease.” Soros admitted that his "hope for 2024" is that the Republican vote would be split between DeSantis and Trump as a third party presidential candidate resulting in an overhaul of the Republican Party. “That would lead to a Democratic landslide and force the Republican party to reform itself. But perhaps I may be just a little bit biased." More than a little biased indeed. This is the same Soros who once claimed he saw himself as “some kind of god,” made it his goal to “become the conscience of the world,” and told The New York Times in 2019 that he was working to “bend” the “arc of history” in the “right direction.” Soros is “narcissism” personified.
MRC Business previously reported in its recent three-part series on Soros that the conceited billionaire even admitted that he “always harbored” an “exaggerated view” of his “self-importance,” in his magnum opus The Alchemy of Finance (1995).
Soros is certainly vying to be the “conscience of the world,” and he’s bought himself influential access to nearly every sphere of the political scene imaginable.
Note that Pariseau did not dispute anything Soros said about Trump -- she simply attacked Soros for saying it. She also seemed not to realize that Soros admitting to his narcissism shows he has a more healthy and realistic view of himself than Trump, who is far too narcissistic to ever admit such a thing. Pariseau instead endeavored to find more alleged Soros crimes:
In Soros’ latest speech, he targeted Trump’s encouragement that states pass stronger election integrity legislation and accused the former president of trying to “ensure that his party will remain in power indefinitely.” His disdain for election integrity is unsurprising considering Soros was part of a $59 million effort to boost the dubious practice of mass mail-in voting prior to the 2020 election. He later coordinated with fellow leftist billionaire and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar to weaponize millions in cash through the leftist group Way-to-Win ’s donor collaborative, Valiente Fund, in a campaign to recruit Latino voters “for victory in the November [2022] midterms.”
In fact, "election integrity" is little more than a right-wing narrative to make voting more restrictive in an claimed attempt to stop purpored election fraud that really doesn't exist -- indeed, Trump has been pushing that narrative to advance his false claims that the 2020 presidential eleciton was "stolen" from him.And calling mail-in voting "dubious" is also a right-wing narrative (also lacking factual justification) with a goal of restricting the practice because more Democrats than Republicans make use of it. Finally, get-out-the-vote efforts are not against the law, they're not evil, and Republicans do the same thing.
Pariseu concluded by huffing: "Soros is in no position to be complaining about 'narcissism.'" If she can't or won't admit Trump's narcissism, she's in no position to criticize Soros.
MRC Desperately Puts Pro-Musk Spin On NPR Standing Up To Musk's Threats Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center absolutelyloved it when Elon Musk, seeking to generate some desperate clickbait after getting caught not giving right-wing hate and extremism a totally free pass, arbitrarily labeled NPR's Twitter feed as "state-affiliated media." When Musk dialed the label back a bit to "government-funded media," the MRC's Luis Cornelio fretted that it was a "fake news victory."
Whwen Musk completely reversed himself and dropped such labeling not just for NPR but for all similar media organizations -- even the ones that were clearly state propaganda, somehing the MRC insisted NPR was but could never prove -- a dejected Cornelio lamented even more in an April 25 post headlined "CAVING?"
Twitter 2.0 appears to be caving to leftist pressure by removing the “government-funded” labels it slapped on taxpayer-financed outlets like NPR.
Twitter owner Elon Musk initially supported labeling government-funded media labels for the outlets that receive funds from the government. Still — after pressure from the left — Twitter has removed labels that accurately described NPR and other news organizations as “government-funded.” NPR even actively promotes on its website how “[f]ederal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR.”
This is not the first time Twitter 2.0 caved to the left. Earlier this month, Musk slapped NPR with a “state-affiliated media” label but switched gears after left-wing backlash.
Cornelio didn't mention that Musk dropped the label for indisiputable state propaganda, not just NPR -- or that an official with Russian state media outlet RT praised Musk for doing so. Instead, he whined that people defended NPR:
NPR President and CEO John Lansing threw a hissy fit over Musk’s move by barring the company from publishing its news on Twitter, The Washington Post reported. “We were disturbed to see last night that Twitter has labeled NPR as 'state-affiliated media,' a description that, per Twitter's own guidelines, does not apply to NPR,” Lansing said. NPR opted to quit Twitter after the Twitter labels.
Even White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre rushed to defend NPR journalists at an April 5 press conference, claiming they “work diligently to hold public officials accountable and inform the American people.” “The hard-hitting independent nature of their coverage speaks for itself,” she decried. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins similarly defended NPR. “That’s not obviously NPR,” Collins said in reference to the definition of state-affiliated media. “NPR does great journalism.”
Cornelio then huffed, "The evidence of NPR’s left-wing, pro-Democrat talking points is endless" -- which disproves that it's state-controlled media, because if it were it would have offered Republican propaganda when Donale Trump was president.He then cited as anexample of this a correcpondent who " dubbed the Wuhan laboratory leak story one of the “biggest conspiracy theories” about COVID-19" -- which means that the narrative is nothing more than a right-wing talking point and certainly not a search for truth (and he didn't explain how, exactly, how the narrative is "left-wing").
When Musk tried to coerce NPR into tweeting again by threatening to give its Twitter handle to someone else -- even though NPR had not met Twitter's own standards for abandoning an account handle, which is based on logging into the account, not tweeting -- Cornelio misleadingly framed it ina May 3 post as NPR being "triggered" by Musk instead of the reality that Musk threatened NPR:
Twitter owner Elon Musk managed to trigger the leftist, taxpayer-funded NPR — again.
Musk pledged to transfer the username of NPR’s main Twitter account (@NPR) to a different organization or person with the same acronym according to email correspondence between Musk and NPR reporter Bobby Allyn. Musk’s comment came as a response to NPR’s hissy fit decision to abruptly quit Twitter after being accurately labeled as “government-funded.”
“So is NPR going to start posting on Twitter again, or should we reassign @NPR to another company?" Musk allegedly said in a Tuesday email. “‘Our policy is to recycle handles that are definitively dormant,’” Musk wrote in another email to NPR. “‘Same policy applies to all accounts. No special treatment for NPR.’”
Actually, Musk is the one who's throwing a hissy fit, but Cornelio won't tell you that, nor will he mention that there's no evidence NPR has abandoned its handle based on longstanding Twitter guidelines. Instead, he quoted a fellow MRC employee bizarrely claiming that Musk is trying to execute a power play (never mind that it violates Twitter corporate policies) and tried to insult the NPR reporter for pointing out facts:
MRC Free Speech America & MRC Business Director Michael Morris reacted to Musk’s actions against NPR. “I think what Musk is really doing here is putting a thumb on NPR to pressure it to reveal the true nature of its government funding,” he said. “If Musk does take @NPR’s handle, he shouldn’t give it back until NPR comes clean. #DefundNPR.”
Allyn further complained that journalists are no longer able to differentiate between what is “real and what is fake” now that blue check marks are available for all Twitter users, not just the elite.
“By recently making ‘verified’ blue checks available for purchase, Musk has created a turbulent social media landscape, blurring the lines for users between what is real and what is fake on one of the most influential social networks,” he wrote.
Allyn topped his child-like tantrum off by praising Twitter 1.0. (Yes, the same platform that muzzled a sitting president and colluded with the government to censor information amid the COVID-19 pandemic).
“For most of its 17-year history, Twitter has had rules that maintained a certain level of order and offered both individuals and organization some control over their presence on the platform,” the reporter claimed.
Yikes, cry more.
It's highly unlikely that Allyn or anyone else at NPR is crying over this situation -- that would be Musk, who is losing content because of his own impulsiveness and insistence on generating right-wing clicks and trying to own the libs ahead of sound business practices.But Cornelio won't tell you that either.
CNS Hid That Columnist Was Arrested On Charges Of Incest, Sexual Misconduct Topic: CNSNews.com
In the four months before its shutdown, CNSNews.com published 33 columns by Michael Letts, whose bio describes him as "CEO and founder of In-VestUSA, a national grassroots non-profit organization helping hundreds of communities provide thousands of bulletproof vests for their police forces through educational, public relations, sponsorship, and fundraising programs." (It also published threeadditionalcolumns before that.) Letts invoked the usual right-wing talking points -- attacking President Biden, praising police, gushing over Elon Musk and defending guns chief among them. But he also ventured into conspiracy theory territory, as in this March 14 column:
Tucker Carlson played some of the video footage viewed by the House of Representatives’ January 6 Committee. Not surprisingly, it showed the opposite of what the Democrats have been saying about the events of January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.
It was not a Republican insurrection hell-bent on overthrowing the government. It was closer to a maze created by Democrats to create an impression of insurrection probably so they could stop the certification of the 2020 election results.
Carlson aired video of the riot recently that turned the narrative about the what happened that day on its head.
While it did show some violence and chaos, it also presented Capitol Police opening doors and ushering people into the U.S. Capitol. It displayed citizens wandering peacefully through the halls and taking pictures.
It showed the police escorting the QAnon shaman, a protestor who wore what looked like a buffalo headdress, through the halls and even trying doors to find a way to let him into the Senate chambers.
Another video disclosed a police officer who was supposedly killed after being battered by a fire extinguisher walking around fine with no signs of distress after he was supposed to have been killed.
As we've documented, the footage Carlson aired was also cherry-picked and misleadingly edited -- prosecutors pointed out that the footage of Jacob Chansley, the "QAnon Shaman," ignored that that he spent the previous half-hour resisiting arrest, and the head of the Capitol Police said that if the officer in question, Brian Sicknick, had "not fought valiantly for hours on the day he was violently assaulted, Officer Sicknick would not have died the next day."
Still, Letts concluded by ranting that "These are private citizens who government officials maliciously slandered. Congress itself should also take action against those members of the committee for withholding evidence in an investigation. The real criminals here are not the people, but the Democrats in government."
In the final column CNS published by him before its shutdown, on April 12, Letts bizarrely asserted that "Today, in the wake of the Nashville shooting in a Christian school that left six people dead, Democrats and many mainstream media outlets are blaming nine-year-old children for the shooting. Why? Because their Christian faith doesn’t support the gender ideology agenda, and the murderer was transgender."
But here's what CNS has censored about Letts: He was arrested three years ago on charges of incest and sexual conduct with a minor. As the Associated Press reported:
Michael Allan Letts sexually abused a relative from the time she was 10 until she turned 17, Richland County deputies said.
Letts was arrested Wednesday at the completion of the investigation which began when the victim came to authorities in January, deputies said in a statement.
Letts, 56, was charged with incest; second-degree criminal sexual conduct with a minor between 11 and 14 years of age; second-degree criminal sexual conduct with a minor under 16; and third-degree criminal sexual conduct.
The AP added that "Letts is founder and CEO of In-Vest USA, which raises money for bulletproof vests for police forces that can’t afford them," which makes it clear that this is the same person as the CNS columnist.
A search of court records in Richland County, S.C., shows that the charges against Letts remain pending; he was freed on a $100,000 surety bond, and has since obtained a consent order from the court to allow him to travel. Additionally, there was a charge of shoplifting filed against Letts in 2022; that case remains pending as well, and he was released on a $2,125 personal recogizance bond. We found no statement at either Letts' personal website or the In-Vest website regarding his arrest, and a Google search indicates he has made no public statement about it.
Letts' column-writing seems to be an effort to bury news of his arrest with his own work. Another work in that effort appears to be a softball September 2021 interview with a writer who posts at Medium who did little than feed Letts generic questions about leadership and copy-and-paste Letts' bio from the In-Vest website (which claims that he had been given "the title His Excellency Count, Sir Michael A. von Letts, Chevalier, Knight of Honour of the Imperial Teutonic Order, by the Republic of Germany") while failing to mention his arrest.
CNS is not the only ConWeb site that has published Letts' columns; Newsmax and WorldNetDaily have as well. But neither have published as many in such a short period of time as CNS did.
MRC Joke Policeman Unironically Complains Of Others Being Joke Police Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Alex Christy complained in a March 17 post:
Comedy Central’s The Daily Show claims to be a comedy show, but temp host Kal Penn and husband of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Chasten Buttigieg, turned it into the joke police on Thursday while condemning a recent joke told by former Vice President Mike Pence at Pete’s expense.
Penn set the table by reporting, “At the Gridiron Dinner in Washington, D.C., that’s a dinner where politicians are known to make humorous speeches—”
After Buttigieg interrupted to add “they try,” Penn continued “They try, yes. Vice President Mike Pence made a joke about your husband taking paternity leave and he referred to it as ‘maternity leave’ and when I saw that, my biggest reaction was, really? You're just going to recycle a 1998 joke that’s, like, been around forever, but what was your reaction?”
If Penn found the joke boring, that would be one thing, but Buttigieg insisted it was much worse, “I mean, I think ‘joke’ is being generous.”
The real joke here is that Christy's main job at the MRC is to be a joke policeman, heaping disdain on late-night comedy shows that make too much fun of right-wingers like him. Here's a sample of what he has written since the beginning of this year, with a particular focus on Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers (with a little Jimmy Kimmel for good measure):
Christy has determined that any joke that doesn't align with his right-wing ideology is not funny and, must therefore be condemned. Seems like he needs to step away and spend some time taking classes at joke police academy if he wants to keep his certification.
WND's Farah Responds To Trump Indictment With Racism, Conspiracy Theories Topic: WorldNetDaily
Given the size of the freakout WorldNetDaily had over the indictment of Donald Trump, it stands to reason that WND's biggest Trump fanboy, editor Joseph Farah, would be freaking out just as bigly. Indeed, Farah's March 31 column began with a bizarre racial attack, accusing district attorney Alvin Bragg (who is black) of "shucking and jiving" over the indictment:
What was all this shucking and jiving about for the last few weeks?
President Donald Trump was about to be indicted. Then he wasn't. Then he was.
What was going on in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office, I wonder. Who was he talking to besides his fairy godmother, George Soros? Was he seeking permission from Merrick Garland or Joe Biden? Did he know what kind of furor he would set off by criminally indicting a U.S. president for the first time in history?
And what are these 30-something counts he was putting together for release next week? Were they something the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York and the Federal Election Commission haven't seen before? They decided against bringing charges. In fact, two of Bragg's own attorneys quit his office when he began talking about indicting Trump.
You would think he was trying to disgrace himself by going ahead finally with his wicked plans. Or maybe he had to get permission. Maybe it's just part of a devious plot to further weaponize the government, as if we could imagine that.
And why is so brazen to turn down a subpoena to testify to the House Judiciary Committee?
There's something very strange about the timing of it all. Trump is growing in popularity since announcing his bid for the presidency. Does Bragg think this is going to make him less of a political threat?
Despite not seeing any of the evidence, Farah ranted that Trump is innocent:
They're just going to stay on him. To date they haven't found ANYTHING! He's as clean as a hound's tooth. They keep throwing stuff at him, and he acts like the Energizer Bunny. Hey, maybe this guy just loves his country. Have they ever thought of that?
Nevertheless, these are gravely dangerous times in America. Most of us just can't wait to get Trump back in office; it won't come fast enough. We just have to live through the next few months. The country can't take much more punishment and oppression.
Of course, nobody feels it like Donald Trump. He should have one job to do – run for president! He's never taken his sight off that. How can a man go through all of this?
Just pray for him – and anybody who can afford to give him some money along the way, encourage him that way.
Trump is a very wealthy man who does not need anyone to donate money to him.
Farah repeated discredited election fraud conspiracy theories to defend Trump in his April 5 column headlined "Trump was right about EVERYTHING!":
You can see it for yourself now. It's perfectly obvious to all of us. Donald Trump accurately called the stolen election in 2020, what followed in the Capitol "insurrection" and all that followed in America ever since. Just look at the Big Picture. Just watch how the Democrats changed their tactics and became tyrants.
That's right. In case someone hasn't noticed yet, the odds are they are actively considering another Big Steal in 2024 – or worse. They are actively building a police state, an authoritarian nightmare. It's their only option to retain power.
First, they tried to sell the claim that 2020 was just another election – with Joe Biden receiving some 80 million votes – without even campaigning! Then they created, manufactured, dreamed up the Capitol sham. Next came the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Then Alvin Bragg's gambit. And there are other states and jurisdictions set to wage lawfare against Trump this year. They'll potentially be able to tie him up, not giving him time to campaign this year – or worse.
Nothing they do now would surprise me.
What they know is that Trump seriously threatens their New World Order, their Great Reset. They've already got the fake media in their pocket, Big Tech censors in place, unlimited money interests set up, the Deep State machinations. They have New York, California, Illinois and a few other clueless states they can count on. We have Donald Trump's real popularity – up to 72% in some polls.
[...]
"2024 is the final battle," said President Trump in Waco, Texas, recently. "That's going to be the big one. You put me back in the White House, their reign will be over, and America will be a free nation once again."
We all need to back Trump now – our best hope for the future in the natural world. May God bless him, and may God bless America.
Only a dead-ender like Farah would think a corrupt, amoral man like Trump is "our best hope for the future in the natural world."
for his April 6 column, Farah cherry-picked quotes by President Biden to invent a reason why he had not spoken out on Trump's indictment: "Hint: It's because he's in on the plot to stay in the shadows for once, now that others are carrying the ball."
MRC's Jean-Pierre-Bashing, Doocy-Fluffing Watch (Sans Doocy) Topic: Media Research Center
Curtis Houck sounded much more like a PR flack for Kevin McCarthy than the "media researcher" he's supposed to be in his writeup of the April 21 White House press briefing:
Prior to the weekend, more Hunter Biden headlines, and Monday’s media tsunami regarding Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon, there was Friday’s White House press briefing and it began with a rant from White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre ghoulishly claiming House Republicans want to “fill our cities with smog,” “give asthma to our children,” and allow oil companies to use chemicals that would “melt bones.”
This rant represented no basis in reality, but not one White House reporter stepped up to the plate to condemn this, including the front row of NBC’s Peter Alexander, ABC’s Mary Bruce, CBS’s Nancy Cordes, Reuters’s Steve Holland, CNN’s Kevin Liptak, and Darlene Superville of the Associated Press. There wasn’t even an installment of Doocy Time to call this out.
The plan spearheaded by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) would only, among other things, roll spending back to 2022, ax new spending for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and impose additional work requirements for certain welfare programs. So, yes, Republicans would be going back to the dark, old days where bones were melted and cities were filled with smog in....2022?
Jean-Pierre had been hawking Biden’s “bold climate and environmental justice agenda” when she argued it “could not stand in starker contrast to the dangerous proposals MAGA House Republicans are putting forward.”
Citing a pants-on-fire chart behind her, she declared McCarthy’s “ransom note” would mean the party wants “to kill jobs, fill our cities with smog, and give asthma to our children.”
“The proposal would repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy tax credits,” she continued, “sending thousands of jobs back to China” and “make it easier for oil companies to use toxic chemicals that cause severe burns, damage people’s eyes, and quite literally melt bones.”
Houck offered no actual evidence anything Jean-Pierre said was wrong -- he just mocked her and repeated similar mocking from his fellow right-wingers.
Houck spent his writeup of the April 24 press briefing whining that everyone was talking about Fox News firing Tucker Carlson and nobody was talking about Hunter Biden, and that a right-wing reporter asked about an old story:
While media observers, Twitter, and cable news viewers were lighting their hair on fire Monday over the monumental shakeup with CNN firing Don Lemon and Fox News axing Tucker Carlson, the Biden White House held its near-daily press briefing and there were a few moments that slipped under the radar, including one about Hunter Biden.
The New York Post’s Steven Nelson took advantage of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan serving as Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s crutch for the day and asked about an April 11 revelation from a former Obama-Biden official that alleged Sullivan — then a top Biden aide — called for support to the Ukrainian gas industry just after Hunter Biden signed on with Burisma.
Houck's April 27 briefing writeup was heavy on the right-wing scandal du jour (let's call it "Questiongate"):
Thursday’s White House press briefing featured an embarrassing performance by the ever-inept Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre as she tried to defend and explain away an infamous photo captured of President Biden holding a card Wednesday afternoon with the name of a reporter he called on (Courtney Subramanian of the Los Angeles Times) and a typed-out question that was close to the one she asked.
Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich brought it up, but treaded carefully: “The LA Times said that their reporter did not submit any questions in advance of yesterday’s press conference, so, to people who saw that pocket card, can you explain how that ended up there and why the President needed something like that?”
Jean-Pierre thanked Heinrich for bringing it up and, sure enough, had comments. She insisted “[i]t is entirely normal for a president to be briefed on reporters who will be asking questions at a press conference and issues that we expect they might ask about” and thus “it is not surprising” to hear the White House anticipated questions about 2024 and semiconductors.
Adding that press briefings also serve as a way of gleaning what reporters are interested in, Jean-Pierre proclaimed: “[W]e do not have specific questions in advance. That's not something that we do. And in fact, I would point out the questions that was asked was different than what it was on the card that you all saw.”
After she insisted such preparation was done in order to shape the news coverage, the Daily Caller’s Diana Glebova wasn’t having it: “How are the reporters decided?”
Jean-Pierre actually replied, explaining the White House “reach[es] out to a number of reporters who — who were going to — who we know are going to be at the press conference and that's what we did yesterday and also...who has not gotten a question in a while.”
Houck censored the fact that both of these reporters work for right-wing outlets -- thus demonstrating their bias -- or that it's standard procedure for presidents and other officials to be briefed on what reporters are likely to ask them at a press briefing.
Michael Dorstewitz spent his April 7 Newsmax column cheering Elon Musk's partisan stunt of arbitrarily labeling NPR's Twitter feed as "state-affiliated media," citiing as evidence that NPR ignored the story of Hunter Biden's laptop:
NPR is partially-funded by taxpayer dollars, but most importantly it only seems to “hold the powerful accountable” when “the powerful” happen to be conservatives or Republicans. They generally carry water for Democrats, as they demonstrated in the closing days of the 2020 presidential election.
What should have been an October surprise that would have assured then-President Trump’s reelection, never made it off the starting block. The New York Post’s stories of Hunter Biden’s “Laptop From Hell” were banned from Twitter as “disinformation.”
But legacy media such as NPR did all they could to ignore it, and NPR appeared proud of its decision.
“Why haven’t you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story?” NPR asked on Twitter. “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
They wouldn’t even try to confirm or rebut what should have been the biggest news of the 2020 election cycle.
As we've pointed out, the New York Post -- a biased right-wing, pro-Trump newspaper -- refused to provide no independent verification of the story at the time that would have overcome reasonable concerns about partisanship, instead demanding that people take this story hyped by anti-Biden partisans at face value. Dorstewitz is simply mad that a dubious "October surprise" was justly ignored by media outlets that actually care about reporting facts.
Dorstewitz then complained that White HOuse press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre vouched for NPR's editorial independence: "In other words, to make its case that it’s not a government mouthpiece, NPR cites praise from the White House and the Pentagon. They could have made their case better by citing complaints from the government."
He went on to whine that it was accurately pointed out that George Soros had not directly donated any money to Trump-prosecuting district attorney Alvin Bragg but cheered that "Twitter fact-checked the fact-checker and added context to Kessler’s claim" by noting that Soros donated to a group that help elect Bragg -- which, again, is not the direct contribution Bragg-haters claimed it was. He conlcuded by gushing:
None of this would have been possible had billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk not purchased Twitter and turned it around.
It’s always refreshing when someone has the courage to state the obvious: that “the emperor has no clothes.”
And it makes no difference whether it’s a little boy that says it while enjoying a royal parade, or it’s a social media platform pointing out the obvious prejudices of legacy news.
Either way, it’s always fun.
Yes, Dorstewitz would think that right-wing bias and stunts are "fun."
WND Helps Right-Wing Channel Play Victim Over Suspension Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's Bob Unruh took a page of the Media Research Center victimization playbook for an April 4 article:
Another day and another attack on conservative voices in America.
It is the Google-YouTube conglomerate that again is being accused of using its online power to "eradicate the web of conservative voices" after its decision to suspend Right Side Broadcasting Network.
RSBN was accused of "pushing content on the stolen elections, fraud in the 2020 elections, and [an absence] of opposing voices," according to a report from The Gateway Pundit.
It's a frequent claim from leftists and liberals who want to suppress concerns about America's elections.
[...]
The Gateway Pundit report noted, "One day before President Trump is to be indicted on 'trumped up' charges by a Soros-funded district attorney, Google-YouTube suspended the Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) account."
It explained, "Google-YouTube used a familiar excuse accusing RSBN of pushing content on the stolen elections, fraud in the 2020 elections, and absent of opposing voices in their videos."
The report, however, openly wondered, "Since when did Google-YouTube start forcing conservatives to contain liberal insanity in their content? And has the same standard been forced on the regime-approved mainstream media outlets?"
As we pointed out when the MRC whined about this very same thing, RSBN spreads proven falsehoods about election fraud and it doesn't believe it should be held accountable for doing so. Unruh clearly sympathizes, and he added his own conspiracy-mongering:
But the facts remain that a Media Research Center poll after the 2020 election revealed that Joe Biden almost undoubtedly would have lost key swing states – and the election, had social and legacy media not interfered in the election by suppressing damaging, but accurate, reporting about the Biden family's international business schemes.
Further, there was the undue influence on election results from the $400 million plus that Mark Zuckerberg handed out through foundations to local election officials, who often used the windfall to recruit voters from Democrat districts.
Almost certainly without those factors, which came from outside America's election process, the U.S. would be in the middle of President Trump's second term now.
Unruh censored the fact that Zuckerberg foundation grants were available to any election official who wanted it and much of it was used to help defray added expenses of holding an election during a pandemic. Also, there is nothing sinister or evil about encouraging people to vote, and the MRC's election-fraud conspiracy theory is based on polls it bought from Trump's campaign pollster and the polling firm founded by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.
NEW ARTICLE: The MRC's Partisan Interpretation Of 'Anti-Semitic' Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center had trouble criticizing Kanye West's anti-Semitism, but it rushed to proclaim without explanation that Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar's criticism of Israel is "anti-Semitic." PLUS: The MRC defended Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones against charges of racism after an old photo resurfaced. Read more >>
MRC's Whataboutism On Fox News-Dominion Settlement Continued Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center found even more ways to minimize andplay whataboutism over Fox News paying Dominion $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit. An April 22 "flashback" post by Rich Noyes complained that Fox News has always been a target of the "liberal media":
Fox News’s liberal competitors are happy at this week’s news that the network will pay nearly $800 million in damages to settle a lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, but they are sad that the settlement means they won’t be able to jab Fox with the daily negative headlines they could hope for from a trial.
“Capitalism won. Dominion won. Did democracy get anything out of this?” CNN’s John King whined on Wednesday’s Inside Politics. By “democracy,” of course, King was referring to CNN’s (and the larger liberal media’s) anti-Fox agenda.
This disdainful attitude has been a feature of the media’s treatment of their rival since Fox News debuted in 1996. That year, Los Angeles Times TV writer Howard Rosenberg sneered at Fox News boss Roger Ailes for building a news organization around “the ditsy notion of the media having perverted the United States by being a cesspool of lefty ideologues.”
[...]
A quick reminder: For 85 consecutive quarters (21.25 years), Fox News has been the most-watched cable news network in prime time.
Of course, "liberal media" critiques have nothing to do with Fox News choosing to lie to its viewers about election fraud, and popularity does not equal moral superiority as Noyes seems to suggest.
Mark Finkelstein spent an April 24 post complaining that a Dominion lawyer said the settlement doesn't restore the company's reputation that was destroyed by lies from right-wingers (like Fox News):
Cry me a river—788 million miles long!
On Katie Phang's Saturday show on MSNBC, Stephen Shackelford, a lead lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems, echoed the claim by the company's CEO that the settlement payment of $787.5 million from Fox News was "bittersweet."
In a New York Times op-ed, the CEO, John Poulos, in addition to calling the settlement "bittersweet," actually wrote:
"If we could,we would trade it all in a heartbeat to go back in time to get our reputation back. "
Riight. The entire company was most recently valued at $226 million. The $778 million settlement thus represents more than three times that valuation! And as for CEO Poulos wanting to get Dominion's reputation back, the company got untold millions in free publicity supporting its reputation. This will turn out to be a windfall for Dominion that goes beyond the huge settlement.
Moreover, the majority owner of Dominion is Staple Street, a private equity firm. They're in the business of making money, not of serving as social-justice warriors. Odds they would have traded $788 million for a more profound apology from Fox News? Precisely zero.
Shackelford added to the farce by saying that the $788 million settlement represented "some measure of compensation" for Dominion. Some?
And then there's the "measure of compensation" for Shackelford and the other Dominion trial lawyers on the case.[...]
It's fair to assume that the lawyers will receive tens of millions in compensation. Hopefully, that will be sufficient to assauge poor Shackelford's "bittersweet" feelings.
Finkelstein didn't explain where Dominion should go to get its reputation back, or why his ffellow right-wingers won't do their part by admitting they were wrong to spread false conspiracy theories about the company.
In an April 25 post, Clay Waters complained that critics wanted to see evidence that Fox News had learned something from falsely defaming Dominion:
Before the Tucker Carlson stunner, the Jeremy Peters “Media Memo” on the front of Monday’s New York Times Business section was headlined “Will the Fox-Dominion Settlement Affect Its News Coverage? Don’t Count on It." Peters went beyond the embarrassing particulars of the Fox News settlement with Dominion Voting Systems to hint racism at the right-leaning network, and also chided it for not showing “humility” by bowing to Democratic President Biden after the settlement.
[...]
Peters’ desire for Fox News to be “humbler or gentler” sounds like code for “tacking leftward.”
Waters then got mad at the Times writer for calling out Fox News for continuing to give airtime to election fraud conspiracy theories:
Peters lamented that Jesse Watters didn't push back on Clay Travis when he claimed Biden “only won by 20,000 votes after they rigged the entire election, after they hid everything associated with Hunter Biden, with the big tech, with the big media, and with the big Democrat Party collusion that all worked in his favor.”
Trump lost the popular vote by seven million votes, but why can't the Times admit they were on the team hiding all the Hunter Biden laptop developments with the Democrats? The Times has admitted the laptop contents were real, so don't Republicans have a reason to complain about suppression?
Peters added "Stories of voter fraud, often exaggerated and unsubstantiated, have been part of the network’s D.N.A. well before 2020. In 2012, Roger Ailes, who founded Fox News with Mr. Murdoch, sent a team of journalists to Ohio to investigate still-unproven claims of malfeasance at the polls after former President Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney there."
The paper did not address how it has sent teams of journalists to investigate suspected election fraud in the presidential races in 2000, 2004, and 2016.
All of Waters' whataboutism obscured the fact that he wouldn't criticize Fox News for still spreading lies and conspiracy theories.
WND Columnists Rant About Trump Indictment Topic: WorldNetDaily
Just as WorldNetDaily's "news" side freaked out over Donald Trump's indictment, its opinion side did too. Scott Lively managed to work his homophobia obsession into it in an April 3 column headlined "Trump's arrest is a lefty 'Sieg Heil' to the Rainbow Swastika":
Without Trump we would collectively have slept right through the transition from a Constitutional Republic to a Global Maoist Technocracy under Hillary Clinton – ignoring the shouts of warning from "crack-pot bigots" like myself on the "radical fringe" of society. And that is, of course, why ALL the Woke, and a great many "useful idiots" following their lead, hate Trump with a passion that burns in them like the unquenchable fires of Hell, blinding them to all reason and prudence – to the point that many have abandoned even the pretext of rationality and justice. Trump is America's "Judge" in the truest Old Testament Samsonian sense, and our fate as a nation is inextricably intertwined with his.
[...]
Learning from history doesn't necessarily ensure you can avoid its repetitions. You also have to take effective action to stop the bad guys. In this case, it means educating Americans on the centrality of the LGBT agenda to the attack on our system, and the willingness to accept that the only real solution is a restoration of Judeo-Christian religious and cultural norms.
But the person who most needs to learn the history exposed in this article is President Trump, who seems completely ignorant of the fact that his indictment and arrest is above all else a Lefty Sieg Heil to the Rainbow Swastika.
Rachel Alexander was less homophobic, but still worked in a Stalin reference, in her column the same day:
We are living in an Orwellian era when the formerly most powerful man in the world, who remains very powerful, is being prosecuted in order to stop him from becoming president again. If they can take him down, they can take down any conservative. The left has weaponized lawfare, which started with merely civil lawsuits but has now progressed into disbarring attorneys and prosecution. Once they've gone after Trump through prosecution – even if unsuccessful – it will be easier to go after him again on other charges, and easier to go after any other conservative. And they won't stop there; they'll next go after RINOs and those on the left who side with the right against the abuse of the legal system.
[...]
The left is throwing everything they can at Trump in order to stop him from becoming president again. They brought impeachment charges against him twice. The FBI was sent to search his home. More indictments by other prosecutors are expected.
The U.S. is turning into a banana republic with this deterioration of the legal system combined with election fraud determining elections. As Stalin's secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria, famously said, "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime." Similarly, criminal defense attorney Harvey Silverglate wrote a book, "Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent," which explains how there are so many vague and broad laws now the average person commits three felonies a day and doesn't know it. If they want to get you, they'll figure out a way.
Andy Schlafly manufactured a victimhood narrative in his April 4 column:
By indicting President Trump, the New York County prosecutor is infringing on the First Amendment rights of all Americans. Every American has a right to an unfettered debate and campaign by candidates, including Trump, for our nation's highest elective office.
This indictment interferes with the 2024 presidential election by hampering the full participation of a leading candidate, and the right of Americans to benefit from his undivided attention to his campaign. One Democrat district attorney in Manhattan infringes on all these rights by indicting the front-runner Republican candidate, Donald Trump.
"The freedom to speak and the freedom to hear are inseparable; they are two sides of the same coin," declared Justice Thurgood Marshall in 1972. Democrats are interfering with the right of every American to hear from Donald Trump without distraction by an improper prosecution.
[...]
As patriotism declines in polls and millions of immigrants fail to assimilate into our traditional culture, the glue binding our vast country together may have lost some strength. In 1857, the Dred Scott decision arrogantly denied rights to slaves rather than allow the political process to work, and a few years later our nation broke up.
Last we checked, paying hush money to a porn star to cover up an affair is not an act of patriotism.
Jim Darlington's April 7 column described the purported three-step process behind Trump indictment, which escalates quickly into right-wing conspiracy theories:
Speculation 1: Tar the candidate.
This is the opening salvo of a multi-pronged lawfare campaign. If these parking-ticket-level "offenses" are to be the new standard for Democrat prosecutions, then we can expect the name of Donald Trump to be showing up on any number of dockets 'round the blue states of the nation. The tentative calculus here must be for the communists to watch and see if the algorithm of echoing blind accusations and actual pending charges can be safely deemed sufficient to sink Trump's presidential candidacy.
Speculation 2: Bury the candidate.
But if not … When the backfiring effect of this plan arouses the nation's perception of Trump's heroic martyrdom and his poll numbers hit 60%, we have every right, even every duty, to prepare for the day of the assassins. The battle is boiling down to the division of the godly from the godless, who, in the end, can be trusted to act without a shred of moral hesitation. Sort through the recorded lists of the purported "Arkicides" associated with the Clinton Syndicate, and pause a moment to wonder, "Are these really just a string of coincidences, cooked up by some feckless fool on the loony fringe, or, is there more to see here than we might really care to see?"
Speculation 3: Abolish the nation.
Some of us poor pessimists keep thinking, "This could be our last election." Even every movement of the paranoids is now available to be temporally and spatially monitored. We know where you are, when you are there. The Planned Epidemic proved successful in measuring the American citizenry's massive willingness to submit to federal dictates, based upon spectacular lies. The J6 Reichstag fire was aimed at letting you all know that the feds can make bucking the narrative an act of terrorism, and making you tremble. The escalating outrages by the Biden group are straight-out destructive on one hand, and an invitation to counter-revolutionary conservative violence – which, if big enough, could be answered with martial law. As Dear Leader Joe said, "What good are your AR-15s when we've got F-35s?" Justin Trudeau gave us a shout out from up North, to the effect, "Watch what happens when we seize their bank accounts."
Biden didn't actually say that, despite Darlington putting it in quotes, and neither did Trudeau (who froze, not seized, bank accounts of those behind last year's disruptive trucker protests). And, of course, portraying the Capitol riot as a "Reichstag fire" is wildly dishonest.
MRC Helped Crowder Play The Victim -- But Buried His Victimization Of His Estranged Wife Topic: Media Research Center
Right-wing podcaster Steven Crowder has long been a key beneficiary of its right-wing victimization narrative, portraying any attempt by tech platfgorms to hold him accountable for his extremism as "censorship." But he also says enough conservatively correct things to keep benefiting. For instance, a March 2022 post by Jeffrey Clark cheered how Crowder criticized Jon Stewart for having money and for using fancy book-learnin' words when talking about climate change:
Political commentator Steven Crowder tore former Daily Show host and multimillionaire Jon Stewart apart for preaching environmental progress but downplaying the cost — the livelihoods of working people.
Crowder recently blasted an episode from The Problem with Jon Stewart on the March 16 edition of his show Louder with Crowder. In a roundtable conversation, Stewart’s senior episode producer Reniqua Allen-Lamphere said that there was a need for a “just transition” for coal miners and other blue collar workers who are losing their jobs to the climate change lobby. Stewart responded during his woke new show “The Human Cost of Climate Change,” that “[p]rogress is never fair. And almost never just.” Then he gave the kicker, asking: “How can we give the soft landings to the inevitable destruction that is ancillary to our progress?” Crowder cut the clip and snapped back, “And there it is. Your jobs, your livelihoods, are “ancillary” to ‘our progress.’” He continued, “Is there any more elitist phrase that you’ve ever heard on a program?” Stewart has an estimated net worth of $120 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth.
[...]
Crowder also dissected the elitist worldview underpinning Stewart’s comments by exposing his tone deaf usage of the word “ancillary.” “What’s under ancillary?” He continued: “The cost of gas, the cost of all energy, the cost to heat your homes, your jobs, right, if you’re working in any kind of an energy sector that isn’t renewable.”
[...]
“So right now, we have a bunch of privileged, wealthy people game-planning the entire economy under the guise of climate justice while considering your livelihood and everything therein to be ‘ancillary.’”
“You don’t need a conspiracy,” Crowder said. “That’s the great reset.”
The MRC also touted Crowder's comments on variousothersubjects, and it invoked the victim narrative again by complaining that Crowder was among several purportedly "pro-free speech" people and groups (read: right-wing extremists) banned from TikTok.
An April 27 post by Tierin-Rose Mandelburg, however, surprisingly tiptoed toward criticism of Crowdder by suggesting that Crowder's nasty mockery of a Down syndrome-themed Barbie doll may have gone a teensy bit over the line:
Conservative talk show host Steven Crowder sorta poked fun at the move and joked about Mattel making a doll with Sickle-Cell and added that the doll didn’t look “that downsy” and that the slogan could be "[Barbie] now with more retard.” I think Crowder’s intent was trying to make fun of how Mattel always tries to be inclusive (even and especially about woke crap) but his delivery proved to be insensitive.
Mandelburg's complaint that Crowder was being a tad "insensitive" -- while touting "spicy takes" about the doll by her fellow right-wingers -- was hollow given her own rant that Barbie dolls "regularly show their support for the gays, lesbos and whatever else is part of the alphabet mafia."
Unfortunately for Mandelburg, her tepid critique of Crowder came out the same day that a video surfaced showing Crowder hurling vicious verbal abuse toward his estranged wife, even threatening to "fuck her up." This was followed by Crowder issuing threats against her on his podcast and reports (by the right-wing New York Post, no less) that working for Crowder is not a terribly pleasant experience.
The MRC issued no statement critiicizing Crowder's behavior, of course. The only allusion to it that can be found at the MRC was a May 2 post touting an appearance by MRC executive Tim Graham on Newsmax talking about the firing of Tucker Carlson and leaks about his behavior at the network, with Graham declaring that the leaked Carlson statements don't show that he's a "terrible person," adding, "It's not exactly a 'Steven Crowder with his wife' video." Host Eric Bolling chuckled, declaring that Graham's remark "made me laugh." Ironic, given that Bolling was fired from Fox News over allegations of sexual harassment.
Priest-Turned-Right-Wing Activist's Final CNS Column Was Weirdly Appropriate Topic: CNSNews.com
Rev. Michael Orsi -- the Catholic priest who thinks he's aright-wing pundit -- continued to have a space to ply his trade at CNSNews.com until it was shut down last month. He served up a laundry list of right-wing talking points in his March 14 column:
There are many signs of malaise in our country at present. For instance, in the post-COVID period, some 2 million people still haven’t returned to active employment. Many have chosen to drift along on what remains of the compensation provided during the pandemic lockdowns and business closings.
Others get by on “gig jobs,” temporary assignments, or parttime, short-term projects, interspersed with government assistance.
Another sign of malaise is the large number of young men in the Generation Z-to Millennial age range who have decided not to pursue marriage. Many (according to some surveys, as high as 60 percent) have even given up dating, choosing instead to spend their time in online gaming and viewing Internet pornography.
Young women, for their part, admit to being lonely, depressed, often angry. A corresponding 60 percent of them are given to contemplating suicide. Their lives too are spent mainly in the online world, where they’re subjected to messages and images that create doubt about their self-worth and make them feel they just don’t (and can never) measure up to unrealistic standards of female perfection.
This leaves them vulnerable to creeps who prowl the Internet in search of confused girls to exploit, often financially, sometimes physically.
These are signs of a society devoid of ambition and teetering on the brink of hopelessness.
Add to all that a pervasive and growing distrust of government and the leadership class, a sense that the stabilizing elements of our society are somehow slipping away, that we’re being manipulated, and important facts about political, economic, and social conditions are withheld from us.
The banking crisis that’s unfolded in the last few days is a good illustration. Surely, this hasn’t come out of nowhere. Why is it such a surprise? Where were the knowledgeable analysts who should have been raising red flags? How were the banks allowed to go so far into dangerous financial territory?
Another example is the lack of clarity about Ukraine. We can’t get a clear picture of what’s happening. We know that thousands of Ukrainians are being killed, along with thousands of Russians. But what progress has our huge investment in arms and support gained? Is this war winnable? Is it just?
We face an even greater danger when our focus becomes so narrow that we not only downplay negative factors but actually deny what’s real. This becomes a kind of blindness — a distinctly spiritual blindness — one that’s rampant in society today.
That blindness drew attention during the recent International Women’s Day, when First Lady Jill Biden bestowed the State Department’s annual International Women of Courage Awards. According to State’s website, “a group of twelve extraordinary women from around the world” were honored for their work in building “a brighter future for all.”
In particular, award recipient Alba Rueda was described as someone who had shown bravery while being “kicked out of classrooms, barred from sitting for exams, refused job opportunities, subjected to violence, and rejected by her family” for efforts to “end violence and discrimination against the LGBTQ-plus community in Argentina.”
The award raised eyebrows because Alba Rueda is a “transgender woman.” Which is to say: a man.
[...]
Defying all reality — not to mention Genesis 1:27 (“male and female He created them”) — a person who was born male, but who believes he’s a woman, received an award intended for females who demonstrate womanly courage. And the citation was validated by no less than the wife of the President.
Surely such a denial of God’s creation is spiritual blindness.
Orsi threw in a reference to "transgender ideology" for good measure -- as if being transgender is like being a Catholic.
Orsi's final CNS column on April 19 -- the day before CNS was abruptly shut down -- was perhaps an unintentional bit of foreshadowing, focusing as it did on how a deceased body should be treated: "It should be buried in a grave that has been properly prepared and protected from disturbance (a practice known technically as inhumation). Or else it should be cremated, the ashes then interred in a permanent enclosure, often referred to as a columbarium." Ironically, the Media Research Center's treatment of CNS -- shutting it down abruptly, apparently firing nearly everyone who was involved in it and not even announcing why it was shut down, even though it was about to mark its 25th anniversary and the fired employees had worked for CNS through much of that time -- shows it inexplicably wants the website to be buried deep in an unmarked grave.
MRC's Graham Tries To Minimize Fox News Settlement With Dominion Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center played a lot of whataboutism in the wake of Fox News deciding to pay $787 million to Dominion rather than go to trial, and Tim Graham spent his April 19 podcast rehashing what his minions put out earlier that day -- namely, lots of whataboutism and lots of complaining that some were disappointed that Fox News didn't have to apologize to spreading lies about Dominion.It was a bit of an echo of a February podcast in which he similarly played whataboutism as lawsuit filings reveal just how deliberately Fox News lied to its viewers.
Graham's podcast guest was Dan Schneider of MRC's Free Speech America division -- you know, the one that insists that misinformation cannot be defined objectively in such a way that social media can try to counter it without being accused of "censorship." Graham did admit that "it's certainly a bad day for Fox's reputation, it's kind of a bad year for Fox's reputation." Schneider. who claims to be a lawyer, went on attack against "the left" by weirdly arguing: "If you ask any of those people what Fox did, they're not going to tell you -- it's just that Fox lied. How? What was the actual accuation? They don't know, they just want punishment of this media outlet they hate." In fact, the exact evidence has been well documented. Still, Schneider tried to minimize Fox News' actions, which even Graham felt the need to push back on, only to play whataboutism instead -- and then to admit some uncomfortable truths after all this time:
SCHNEIDER: What did Fox do that was so horrible, so horrible that was worth 7.8 or ... Lou Dobbs tweeted out that his guest, Sidney Powell, said that she has no doubt that Dominion was able to manipulate the vote. All he did was quote that he will have a guest who says this. And that was really worth $787 million.
GRAHAM: I think most of this was them putting on guests who said things they couldn't prove. That is certainly true. Now, I would say this -- Jim Geraghty has a piece at National Review to respond to this in a sense is that, yes, Lou Dobbs on December 10, 2020, tweeted, not on air, "Cyber Pearl Harbor! Sidney Powell reveals groundbreaking new evidence indicating our presidential election came under massive cyberattack orchestrated with the help of Dominion, Smartmatic and foreign adversaries." So to me, yes, "Cyber Pearl Harbor," I mean, you could see where you'd say, well, now you're overdoing it. But wthe whole problem with all of this is, this is all the same stuff they said about Russia in 2016.
SCHNEIDER: Right. So, I don't want to sound like I am flacking for Fox, because Fox basically did the same thing that harmed Donald Trump's own re-election bid, they started reaching out to people like Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis and people who have law degrees but have never actually -- well, Sidney actually did -- was a federal prosecutor for a time, but if you ever hear her legal analysis, it is thin to say the least -- ridiculous, yes. Jenna Ellis, never -- as far as I know she's never actually practiced law, sand he spouts things that cannot be supported. But Fox and then Trump surrounded themselves with people who got them in trouble.
GRAHAM: Yes. And -- I mean -- this was the line that really made sense to me from Jim Geraghty. He said if you choose to believe the 2020 presiential election was stolen, you must believe Fox News agreed to pay $787 million to Domnion in a settlement rather than present any of that evidence.
Not only did Graham nor anyone else at the MRC raise these concerns about Powell, Ellis and the election fraud claims emanating from both the Trump campaign and Fox News -- to the contrary, it uncritically embraced those falsehoods -- it manufactured its own conspiracy theories about the election to claim it was stolen from Donald Trump. We've also documented how the MRC tried to insert Powell into its victimhood narrative after she was suspended from social media for spreading election misinformation, so it's a bit rich for Graham and Schneider to finally get around to disavowing her.
Graham went on to dismiss all of that truth-admitting, arguing that Fox News didn't suffer much "reputational damage" from the settlement because "poeple who think Fox News doesn't do news thought that before, have been thinking that for decades," while "conservatives see this as the latest attempt by the liberal media to undermine Fox News, so there's going to be a rally-around-Rupert effect." He then added: "This won't damage Fox's reuptation -- or let's put it this way: It won't damage people's reliance on Fox to try and balance out what the liberal media does."
In other words, Graham is saying that pushing the correct narratives is more important to conservatives than telling people the truth. And people wonder why anyone should trust Fox News or any other right-wing media outlet, or why the MRC whines so much when NewsGuard points out how untrustworthy right-wing media is.
That was followed by Schneider uniroinically rehashing his employer's conspiracy theory about the 2020 election, which involved buying biased polls from Trump's campaign pollster and the polling firm founded by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway to complain that not enough people knew about Hunter Biden's laptop. Graham was happy to echo that conspiracy:
GRAHAM: This is the interesting part, where they'll say we took a poll -- Geraghty says this -- you know, you take a poll and say, "did Biden legitimately win?" I think the key there is the word "legitimately." Because anybody who looks at these polls and says, if there's the risk that if these people had actually reported in real time on the Hunter Biden laptop, that this could have changed the election. Obviously, this election was in some states very close, and so, yes, it's quite possible that just by these voters not voting for Biden, whether or not they voted for Trump, could have affected the results. So I would say, did Biden win? He did, but he won, as we've tried to demonstrate, by suppressing damaging information.
Graham then went the whataboutism route once more, complaining yet again about Anita Hill and women who accused Brett Kavanaugh of untoward behavior, as well as bringing up the CNN settlement with Nicholas Sandmann.
Graham's April 21 column didn't comment much about the Fox News-Dominion settlement despite that being the news peg it was based on; instead, it was almost entirely whataboutism -- mostly whining about BuzzFeed publishing the Steele dossier (while downplaying the fact that BuzzFeed never presented the dossier as fact), huffily insisting that those who promoted the dossier have no moral standing to criticize Fox News.But if Graham is going to give a pass to Fox News' lies, what moral standing does he have to criticize others?
The Media Research Center's rage against transgender people has continued unabated.A Feb. 20 post by Clay Waters complained that a news segment on anti-transgender laws didn't include any transphobes:
When the Media Research Center wasn't busy 
The Media Research Center 
In the four months before its shutdown, CNSNews.com published 33 columns by 
The Media Research Center's Alex Christy complained in a March 17 
Given the size of 
Curtis Houck sounded much more like a PR flack for Kevin McCarthy than the "media researcher" he's supposed to be in his writeup of the April 21 White House 
Michael Dorstewitz spent his April 7 Newsmax 
WorldNetDaily's Bob Unruh took a page of the Media Research Center victimization playbook for an April 4 
The Media Research Center found even more ways to 
Just as WorldNetDaily's "news" side 
Right-wing podcaster Steven Crowder has 
Rev. Michael Orsi -- the Catholic priest who 
The Media Research Center 
