CNS Cleans Up After Trump Again Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com's love of pro-Trump stenography bit it back, prompting some furious back-pedaling. An anonym ously written June 21 article served up a stenographic account from President Trump's rally in Tulsa the previous day:
During his rally in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday night, President Donald Trump discussed his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and said that he had “said to my people: Slow the testing down please.”
“We saved hundreds of thousands of lives and all we do is get hit on like we’re terrible,” said Trump.
“And what we’ve done with the ventilators, and with the medical equipment, and with testing—You know, testing is a double-edged sword,” he said.
“We’ve tested now 25 million people. It’s probably 20 million people more than anyone else,” Trump said. Germany’s done a lot. South Korea’s done a lot. They call me, they say: The job your doing—
“Here’s the bad part. When you test, when you do testing to that extent you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases,” Trump said.
“So, I said to my people: Slow the testing down, please,” Trump said.
“They test and they test,” he said. “We had tests of people who don’t know what’s going on. We got tests. We got another one over here. The young man’s ten years old. He’s got the sniffles. He’ll recover in about 10 minutes. That’s a case. Add up to it. That’s a case. That’s a case.”
This anonymous writer didn't seem to be aware that Trump was effectively admitting that Trump was slowing down testing to artificially keep coronavirus numbers down. So it was damage-control time -- which CNS is all too familiar with -- and who better to do that than CNS' top Trump stenographer, Melanie Arter:
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said President Donald Trump did not actually tell officials to slow down testing for the coronavirus.
His comment was made jest in an effort to expose how the media ignores the fact that there are more COVID-19 cases in the U.S., because “we have more testing.”
[...]
When asked what he meant by saying that he told his people to slow down on testing, the press secretary said, “The president was trying to expose what the media oftentimes does is they ignore the fact that the United States has more cases because we have more testing. We are leading the world in testing, and he was pointing that out that it's a fact that the media regularly ignores.
“It was a comment made that he made in jest. It’s a comment that he made in passing, specifically with regard to the media coverage and pointing out the fact that the media never acknowledges that we have more cases because when you test more people. You find more cases,” the press secretary said.
When asked whether it was appropriate to joke about coronavirus considering that 120,000 people have died, McEnany said the president was not joking about coronavirus.”
“I just said he was joking about the media and their failure to understand the fact that when you test more you also find more cases,” the press secretary said.
Thus, the narrative that Trump was joking became fact,despite the fact that there are no actual facts backing up -- indeed, the very same day that McEnany insisting that this was merely "in jest," Trump declared when asked about his statements: "I don't kid. Let me just tell you. Let me make that clear."
CNS' Arter devoted an article to that, in which she downplayed the "I don't kid" remark and highlighted his complaint that "the more COVID-19 testing that the United States does the more cases it will reveal" and his whining that "we have never been credited" for the amount of testing that has been done.
But Tim Graham of CNS' parent, the Media Research Center, didn't note any of that in his April 24 column, instead playing whataboutism by attacking CNN for criticizing Trump's "joke" -- an assessment Graham accepted without question, though he did have the sense to admit that it was "distasteful" -- because it was just as "distasteful" for CNN's Chris Cuomo to have "jokey interivews" with his brother, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, including one where "Chris decided to mock the size of his brother's nostrils by unveiling a series of ever-larger Q-Tips (or test swabs) and cracked his brother up."
Graham failed to note that was at least a clear, unambiguous attempt at humor, while the only evidence Graham has that Trump was joking is McEnany telling us after the fact that it was. And he accepted it as fact anyway.
Brent Bozell Tweets A Lie Topic: Media Research Center
Media Research Center researcher Nicholas Fondacaro is a liar -- but maybe that lying is part of the culture at the MRC and comes straight from the top.
MRC chief Brent Bozell declared in a July 17 tweet: "Bank of America has pledged to give Marxist Black Lives Matter ONE BILLION DOLLARS. Every conservative customer MUST CLOSE THEIR ACCOUNTS."
That's a lie. The truth: Bank of America has pledged $1 million over four years to help communities of color and minority-owned businesses.There's no evidence that any of the money -- let alone all of it -- is going to Black Lives Matter. Bozell apparently got his lie from Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, who had to issue a correction the next day.
By contrast, Bozell's false tweet is still live, and he has not corrected his lie in any subsequent tweet. In other words, his threat to the bank's business by demanding that conservatives "MUST CLOSE THEIR ACCOUNTS" there is built on a lie -- and is perhaps actionable on the bank's part. Remember that Bozell had to pay $3.5 million to World Wrestling Entertainment for spreading lies about the organization, so he's no stranger to defamation lawsuits.
Like we said, straight from the top. Bozell apparently doesn't care about the truth -- and as Fondacaro has demonsrated, neither do his employees.
Given all this, there's little reason to trust anything the MRC puts out.
WND -- Which Suggested Obama Wouldn't Leave WH -- Complains Over Suggestions Trump Won't Leave Topic: WorldNetDaily
An anonymously written July 14 WorldNetDaily article complained:
Hillary Clinton in an interview this week revived the conspiracy theory expressed earlier by presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden that President Trump, if he loses the 2020 election, would not leave the White House voluntarily.
The Washington Examiner noted Clinton said the nation has to "be ready" for such a scenario.
"Well, I think it is a fair point to raise as to whether or not, if he loses, he's going to go quietly or not. And we have to be ready for that," Clinton said.
[...]
An earlier Examiner report noted that it was Biden who confidently claimed that the military will escort President Trump out of the White House should the incumbent lose in November, and refuse to leave.
[...]
Biden then said, of the president, "I promise you: I am absolutely convinced they will escort him from the White House with great dispatch."
Responding to Biden's theory, Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh called it "just another brainless conspiracy theory from Joe Biden."
WND would rather you forget that its founder and editor, Joseph Farah, pushed the completely unfounded idea that President Obama would not leave office when his term expired.
as we documented the last time WND complained about this, Farah used several columns in 2015 and 2016 to forward the idea that Obama wouldn't leave office, either because he was "living it up on our dime" and would be loath to give up "six all-expense-paid vacations every year at his venue of choice" or because he felt he had "an obligation to prevent Trump from assuming office."
Since then, Trump has refused to commit to accepting the results of the November election if he loses, making such concerns legitimate. Farah's fever dreams aside, Obama said no such thing.
Farah wrote in one column, "Will America follow the rule of law and the will of the people after the November election no matter what Obama might think about his successor?" WND can be counted on to never ask that question about Trump.
CNS Interns Pester Members of Congress With LGBT-Bashing Gotcha Question Topic: CNSNews.com
The tradition of CNSNews.com to send its summer interns to pester members of Congress with a loaded gotcha question designed to advance CNS' right-wing agenda continued this year despite the coronavirus pandemic. This time, CNS dipped into its well of anti-LGBT animus to fabricate another attack on Joe Biden with this question: "Joe Biden says that as president he will require federally funded schools to let biological males who identify as females use female bathrooms and locker rooms. Do you support that?"
Here's who got dragooned into CNS' game, and how they responded to provide CNS with 11 articles worth of content:
As usual, there's little news value here -- it's mostly an exercise in providing the intern some resume bait by giving them the chance to ask a question of a member of Congress. Plus, any congressperson who fails to give the conservatively correct answer will be pilloried at CNS, with the hope of blowing up the incident into the larger conservative media (and the intern can get partial credit for that too). The only Democrat on CNS' list is Feinstein; the Republicans who were noncommital have likely opened themselves up for attacks from right-wingers like CNS for failing to adequately hate the LGBT community and treating them as human.
This is much more about honing right=wing political messages than it is about delivering "news."
WND's Cashill Can't Stop Obsessing About Obama Topic: WorldNetDaily
Barack Obama has been out of office for nearly four years now, and WorldNetDaily columnist Jack Cashill remains obsessed with him, devoted multiple columns to bashing him since Cashill has a decidedly belated anti-Obama book coming out next month.
On May 20, Cashill declared: "When the final chapter is written on Obamagate, historians will look to the April 10, 2016, as the day President Barack Obama triggered the eponymous coup." Of course, Cashill didn't tell his readers that Obamagate isn't really a thing.
In his June 3 column, Cashill complained that Obama "failed catastrophically" in trying to "ease racial tension in America," though he didn't explain why it was Obama's responsibility to do that and nobody else's. Cashill then started ranting about Trayvon Martin -- about whom Cashill wrote a hatchet job -- and promoted a film he participated in on the death of Martin by infamous charlatan Joel Gilbert.
On June 17, Cashill proclaimed apropos of nothing that the Seattle house where Obama's mother moved shortly after his birth "was located in what might be called "Greater CHAZ," just a few blocks beyond the current borders of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone," then grumbled: "Throughout the Obama years, the very same journalists who mocked "birthers" made a hash out of Obama's nativity story, the story on which he built his candidacy." Of course, Cashill doesn't mention that he was a fellow traveler of the birthers.
Cashill used his June 24 column to cast aspersions about Obama's presidential memoirs purportedly running behind schedule, adding, "Obama fans need not fret. They can learn all they need to know about President Obama by reading my book, 'Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency,' which is on schedule for its Aug. 18 release." he then rehashed his conspiracy theory that "Obama hasn't written any of his books himself and likely none of his speeches" -- then went into revisionist history about it.
Cashill has historically claimed that Bill Ayers actually wrote much of Obama's book "Dreams From My Father." In his column, he revised that, stating that "In September 2008, I introduced the thesis that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers played a major role in crafting "Dreams." and highlighting how biographer Christopher Andersen "confirmed Ayers's involvement."Actually, Cashill was a source for Andersen's claim, which makes it suspect; by contrast, a British professor using a software program to detect similar words and phrases between works found that it was "very implausible" that Ayers wrote Obama's book.(Needless to say, Cashill attacked the professor for debunking his pet conspiracy theory.)
Cashill rehased his attacks on Obama and Trayvon Martin in his July 8 column, complaining that Black Lives Matter was founded by "radical ... activists" and "traces its founding "to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's murderer, George Zimmerman," which is somehow Obama's fault. Again, Cashill blamed Obama for letting racial divisions "fester and the mayhem to explode"; again, he didn't explain why it was solely Obama's responsibility and not, say, Cashill's to do something about it.
On July 15, Cashill was ranting again about Obama, this time segueing into the hoary Benghazi conspiracy:
Lately, however, the question of Obama's whereabouts has become more literal. Where exactly is he? Where has he gone to labor away on his long overdue and overpaid memoir? Insiders, I am told, worry about his mental health and his fondness for a stiff drink.
Obama's elusiveness should not surprise. He has a habit of disappearing, and the media have a habit of not inquiring too hard into where he has gone, most memorably on the night of Sept. 11, 2012.
This led into yet anotherdefense of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, whose inflammatory anti-Muslim film was originally believed to have sparked the attack on the Benghazi compound (it did spark protests elsewhere). Once again, Cashill portrayed Nakoula as a victim, calling him "vulnerable" because he was on parole. As usual, he didn't tell his readers that Nakoula lied to his actors about the nature of the film he was making -- some of the actors were put in danger because of Nakoula's intentional deception -- and handwaved his lengthy criminal record to portray him as being involved in nothing worse than a "check-kiting scheme." (Actually, Nakoula was using fake names and stolen identities to move money around.) Cashill suggested that Nakoula was some kind of political prisoner for making the film; in fact, he was sentenced to a year in jail after admitting that he lied to authorities and violated his parole by uploading the film to the internet.
And that's what Jack Cashill has been up to lately.
MRC Makes A Pro-Trump Video With Pro-Trump Conservatives Topic: Media Research Center
On July 7, the MRC -- and its "news" division, CNSNews.com -- posted what is for all intents and purposes a pro-Trump election video, titled "We Hold These Truths: Conservative Leaders Answer The Mob." The CNS version declared: "A group of conservative leaders worked with the Media Research Center to record a message defending the greatness of America and its founders and condemning the protesters and mobs that have attacked our nation’s founding principles and commitment to individual liberty." The version posted at NewsBusters railed: "Conservative leaders from all over the country are fighting back and answering the violence and chaos of the angry, lawless mob marching in America’s streets."
It begins with various conservative reciting the opening of the Declaration of Independence ; Mark Levin got the "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" line, so he got in a stealth promotion for his Fox News show, "Life, Liberty and Levin."It even threw in Charlie Daniels in what was apparently his final media appearance before his death, for no other apparent reason than that he was an MRC favorite.
Oh, the MRC will never admit it's a pro-Trump video, since it's careful not to mention the word "Trump" anywhere in it -- after all, explicit electioneering would violate the MRC's nonprofit status. Butafter the recitation ended and the philosophical waxing was over with, it was on to reinforcing the Trump agenda, with stirring orchestral music swelling in the background.
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton huffed regarding statue-toppling: "Those who deface or destroy these statues or other remembrances of these men are criminals." David Bozell, son of MRC chief Brent Bozell and head of activist group For America, chimed in: "They're also an ignorant mob, period. Full stop." Neither Fitton nor Bozell specifically excluded Confederate statues from their defense.
Republican Rep. Mike Lee defended the police as "necessary to protect the vulnerable and to keep dangerous communities from descending into chaos." Right-wing activist Jenny Beth Martin added: "Are there bad players? Of course. But don't lie about the police. Don't smear them as racist. Don't dismiss that they have to put their lives on the line every single day with lowlifes who harass and threaten them and, yes, kill them."
MRC senior fellow Allen West ranted: "Kneeling for the national anthem disrespects the flag ald all those who served them."
Former National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch -- who's best known for putting Klan hoods on "Thomas the Tank Engine" characters to declare her opposition to diversity in children's television -- huffed: "Free speech is a pillar of a free society and the best way to collectively seek and defend the truth. Firing or canceling those who offend woke sensibilities is grotesque, illiberal and un-American." She didn't mention her Klan-hood incident as a prime example of forcing cancel culture.
This was concluded by an end-of-video finale from much of the cast:
BRENT BOZELL: So a word directly to the protesters, the rioters and the hoodlums out in force these last several weeks.
MARK LEVIN: How dare you disrespect out heroes and trample on our heritage!
MARK BRANDON (president of FreedomWorks): How dare you rampage in our streets!
DENEEN BORELLI: How dare you intimidate and beat people with whom you disagree!
DAN BONGINO: Your hideous tactics match the hateful rot and ideology you champion.
CHARLIE DANIELS: You will not redefine America or frighten good, honest Americans into submission.
DANA LOESCH: We want to assure you of one thing.
JENNY BETH MARTIN: You will lose!
TOM FITTON: Your vandalism and cancellation, your lies and riots, will not stand.
TONY PERKINS (Family Research Council president): We live in the last, best hope of mankind, and we're not about to lose it to a bunch of fanatics, added and abetted by a complicit media and cowardly corporations.
BOZELL: You will not prevail. America will prevail -- today, tomorrow, and by the grace of God, forever.
Bozell and his buddies have decided that the death of George Floyd and other examples of police brutality that sparked all the unrest in the first place must be flushed down the memory hole.
CNS Obsessed With Biden's Purported 'Cognitive Decline' Topic: CNSNews.com
Back in March, CNSNews.com touted how Rudy Giuliani asserted that Joe Biden was allegedly "showing obvious signs of dementia" (never mind Giuliani's own questionable mental health). Now that Biden's the Democratic presidential nominee -- and the Trump campaign is making questions about Biden's mental health a key piece of his campaign -- CNS is being a good Trump lackey and amplifying those questions.
A June 29 article by Craig Bannister -- who wrote the above Guiliani item -- touted a Rasmussen poll finding that "Due to his ever-growing legacy of public gaffes and displays of confusion, 38% of likely U.S. voters now believe that former Vice President Joe Biden has 'some form of dementia'." Bannister added:
Biden’s mental lapses have gained added public attention since he became the frontrunner to become the Democrat Party’s 2020 presidential candidate. Last week, for example, Biden claimed while campaigning in Pennsylvania that 120 million Americans have died from the coronavirus – 1,000 times the actual count.
The next day, Bannister cherry-picked a quote from a statement from Biden on the issue and framed it as an unflattering headline -- Biden: ‘All You’ve Got to Do Is Watch Me’ to See if I’m Suffering Cognitive Decline -- in response to a question from a biased Fox News reporter.
Melanie Arter did a separate article based on the very same Biden response, then played gotcha:
Biden then confused the Thomas Jefferson Memorial for with the Lincoln Memorial.
“It's better that they do not, but it’s fundamentally different than pulling down the statue or going to the Lincoln Memorial and trying to pull-- not Lincoln Memorial - that's a bad example -the Jefferson memorial and grabbing Jefferson off his chair,” he said.
The Lincoln Memorial features the former President Abraham Lincoln sitting in a chair. The Jefferson Memorial features former President Thomas Jefferson standing up.
On July 14, Bannister found another poll on Biden's mental health to amplify:
While more than two-thirds of all likely U.S. voters say presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden should debate President Donald Trump, Democrat and Republican voters strongly disagree on whether or not the former vice president is up to the task, a new Rasmussen survey finds.
Bannister didn't seem concerned with Trump's mental health, nor did he question why Rasmussen apparently didn't poll people about it (because it has a pro-Republican and anti-Democratic bias).
CNS has amplified Biden's purported mental issues in other articles as well. In a June 23 article, Susan Jones uncritically quoted right-wing writer Victor Davis Hanson referencing "Joe Biden's cognitive impairment"; on June 26, Bannister promoted right-wing radio host Mark Levin in the midst of an attack on Nancy Pelosi's mental health, declaring that it was "Time for Pelosi to join Biden in a padded room" as he was "comparing Pelosi's lapse to those of former Vice President Joe Biden."
CNS has been similarly attacking the supposed mental health issues of Pelosi.
By contrast, we could find only one recent CNS article that noted questions about President Trump's mental health: a March 11 article by Bannister quoting "a Yale psychiatrist with a history of claiming President Donald Trump is mentally unfit" stating that "she doesn’t even want to discuss the mental health of Democrat presidential frontrunner Joe Biden – because Biden’s mental lapses are merely 'gaffes' – while Trump’s endanger all of humanity." It was a lazy rewrite of a NewsBusters post by Tim Graham, who went on to complain that mental health professionals -- as opposed to the random people Rasmussen polled and Bannister touted -- keep raising questions about Trump's mental fitness, declaring that doing so was "partisan."
MRC's Fondacaro Spreads Another Lie Topic: Media Research Center
Media Research Center writer Nicholas Fondacaro hasabadhabitof spreading lies and conspiracy theories, in part on his faulty definition of what a "lie" is. He did it again right in the headline of a June 25 post that screamed: "Nets Conceal Biden’s LIE: 'Over 120 Million' Americans Are 'Dead from COVID'." In the post itself, he whined:
At a campaign event Thursday, former Vice President and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden mislead [sic] the public about how many Americans had died from the coronavirus, claiming “over 120 million dead from COVID.” In reality, there have been over 120 thousand Americans killed by the virus, which meant Biden’s claim was 1,000 times larger. That gross miscalculation went completely unreported by ABC, CBS, and NBC’s evening newscasts, which all boasted about Biden calling Trump a “child.”
At no point in his post did Fondacaro back up his headline claim that Biden's statement, while false, was a "lie." The dictionary defines a lie as "a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; Fondacaro offers no evidence that Biden misstated the number of COVID victims deliberately.
Fondacaro also censored the fact that Biden immediately corrected himself to accurately state that there were 120,000 deaths. That's why the networks didn't report on this -- it's a non-story. But then, if Fondacaro had told the whole truth, he wouldn't have an item.
Still, Fondacaro spent most of his item complaining that thte neteworks didn't report a right-wing attack claiming that a cancer research initiative spent much of its money on salaries. That's a reminder that Fondacaro is a pro-Trump partisan and not an impartial "media researcher" whose work can be trusted.
Libel: Newsmax Columnist Wildly Accuses Judge Of Murdering Her Husband Topic: Newsmax
In a July 19 tweet, Newsmax columnist James Hirsen highlighted a Bloomberg Law article about a case in which a bank is being sued over allegations that it didn't properly monitor high-risk customers such as Jeffrey Epstein. To that he added in all caps: "THE JUDGE IN THIS CASE HAD HER SON MURDERED, HUSBAND SHOT."
On Sunday, a man dressed as a delivery driver entered the home of the judge in the case, Esther Salas, with a gun, killing her son and wounding her husband. Authorities apparently offered no public evidence that Salasis a suspect in her son's death. Indeed, earlier today, a suspect in the shooting was later found dead of an apparent self-infliced gunshot wound; he was an attorney who had a case before the judge a few years ago.
It appears that Hirsen has committed libel by making a statement he knew or should have known was false. He has presented no evidence Salas is involved in this incident, and it can be argued he was acting with malicious intent, perhaps because Salas was appointed to her current federal judgeship by Presient Obama in 2015. While this story is continuing to develop, it's not looking good for Hirsen right now.
Hirsen claims to be a lawyer, so you'd think he would know better and how not to violate established libel law. Apparently not.
UPDATE: The alleged deceased suspect is Roy Den Hollander, an anti-feminist "men's rights activist" who was an attorney and had a case pending before Salas.
Newsmax has also published an article on the incident and noting the suspect's death. No mention was made of its columnist's apparently false accusation that Salas was behind it.
WND's Fake Democrat Wants People To Vote For Republicans Topic: WorldNetDaily
We'vedocumented how WorldNetDaily columnist Bob Just keeps portraying himself as a Democrat while apparently supporting no Democratic Party positions and telling people to vote for Republicans. Indeed, before the 2018 midterm elections, he wrote a column headlined "To my fellow Dems: Yes, vote -- but vote Republican!"
Just is doing much the same thing in his June 29 column, similarly headlined "Democrats can save our party – by voting Republican." He immediately discredits himself as a real Democrat by using right-wing lingustic corruptions like "Democrat leaders" and "Democrat U.S. senators" when "Democratic" is the gramatically and factually correct word. Just does a lot of fawning over the late radio host and fellow WND columnist Barry Farber and repeated an old column he wrote in which he ranted about "New Fascist" and the "cold civil war" and generally sounded like a right-winger, then went into his pro-Republican spiel:
Younger Democrats may be shocked to read this considering it was written so long ago, and by a fellow Democrat. They should take a hard look at the angry faces of our party leaders and ask themselves: Is this what we want our future to look like?
They need to join the national conversation on talk radio, listen to the arguments and get informed. That's what free-thinkers do. And then – quietly if necessary – they need to vote Republican. If they do not, they won't have a future that is recognizably American.
[...]
Democrats can actually save our party by voting against it. How else can we turn our leaders away from their dangerous "party first" behavior and life-draining policies? But first we must be willing to see the truth. This election won't really be about President Trump's "character," although my party will try to make it so. It will be about the character of the Democrat voter.
If we can watch our party leaders and their toadies in Washington break every imaginable rule of conduct – baseless investigations, lying accusations in public (contradicting private testimony under oath), framing an innocent man to protect their political power, leaking classified documents to subvert a presidency and disgracing us before the whole world with a pathetic political impeachment – and despite all that and much more, like hiding key evidence and breaking privacy laws, if we still vote Democrat, then something is terribly wrong, and not with Republicans.
This is not who we are as Democrats – and we must not accept it – or vote for it!
We don't recall Just objecting to baseless investigations and attempts to subvert a presidence when conservatives were doing that to Barack Obama. But, again, he's not actually a Democrat.
Nobody should accept that Just is a Democrat, no matter how much he continues to insist that he is.
Help, MRC! We've Been Censored! Topic: Media Research Center
Dear Media Research Center:
In your posts on purported attacks on conservatives in social media, you have stated: "If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form to be included in our database, and help us hold Big Tech accountable." I have an addition for your database.
On July 1, we responded to a tweet by NewsBusters blogger Mark Finkelstein promoting his post attacking MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace as "sexist" for calling White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany as a "spokesgal" by pointing out conservative criticism of women that, by Finkelstein's definition, are also sexist -- first, by noting that MRC writer Gabriel Hays called the U.S. women's soccer team "gals" for fighting to increase their salaries and, later, by pointing out that Rush Limbaugh repeatedly smeared Sandra Fluke as a "slut" for talking about birth control.
That last tweet got us in trouble with the powers that be at Twitter, which deemed it offensive and suspended the ConWebWatch account -- even though the tweet was factually accurate and in no way an endorsement of Limbaugh. (By comparison, your organization started an "I Stand With Rush" website to support Limbaugh after his sleazy attack).
We appealed the suspension -- but after more than two weeks of waiting, we heard nothing from Twitter about the appeal, during which our account was suspended and we were unable to post anything to it. Bcause the delay has hurt our mission to report on right-wing media, we have canceled our appeal and deleted the tweet in question in order to regain control of our account.
By your definiton, we were censored for expressing a conservative viewpoint. Can we be on your list?
CNS Won't Fact-Check Trump On His Mail-In Vote Fearmongering Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com fell into pro-Trump stenography mode once again in a June 22 article by Susan Jones:
President Trump is an outspoken critic of vote-by-mail, and the topic merited all caps as he tweeted Monday morning:
RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!
Trump was echoing Attorney General William Barr, who told "Sunday Morning Futures" he worries about mail-in ballots opening "the floodgates of potential fraud."
Because CNS doesn't fact-check anything Trump says -- in this case, Jones merely adds a statment from a critic that Trump is trying to suppress the vote to ensure a win and that voting by mail is already permitted in many states -- it was left to an actual news operation to point out why Trump is wrong about mail-in ballots coming from "foreign countries":
Even a fifth-grade class president, though, can probably identify at least one problem with this theory.
The first is precisely that votes are necessarily correlated to voters. Submitting millions of ballots in general means identifying millions of active voters on whose behalf the ballots should be sent. Trump has repeatedly lifted up a Pew Center on the States report from 2012 delineating bloat in America’s voter rolls. People routinely move or die without updating their status with local registrars of voters, meaning that there are theoretical voters who are either living out of state or not living at all. The 2012 report identified 1.8 million dead voters alone.
The irony, of course, is that the focus on these inactive voters has meant that counties have been more active about culling expired registrations. Los Angeles County was sued by the pro-Trump activist group Judicial Watch, leading it to purge 1.5 million presumably inactive voters. That’s 1.5 million fewer voters for a theoretical foreign power to exploit.
Mind you, a foreign power that obtained a full voter file would not necessarily know any better than the county itself which voters were inactive. So you would get a ton of submitted ballots for voters who were themselves already voting — especially given that turnout peaks during a presidential election year. Meaning a ton of duplicate ballots, quickly exposing the attempted fraud.
None of this, though, is the main reason that Trump’s theoretical fraud would not work. The main reason the fraud wouldn’t work is that casting a ballot isn’t as easy as getting one and turning it in. County governments then validate the ballots against existing information — usually matching a signature by hand — before considering it valid.
In other words, not only would this foreign government need to identify nonvoters or get lucky by not duplicating ballots; it would also have to somehow ensure that the ballots it was submitting didn’t include obviously forged signatures.
So if the foreign power obtained those signatures, matched them to voters and mailed them back in, the signatures would then have to be obviously not forged even if they were exact replicas of the originals on file (which, of course, would probably raise eyebrows by itself). For example, they would need to not be obviously printed on the ballot, as opposed to signed by hand. This isn’t as hard to pull off as it might seem, Siegel suggested, but it is still an example of a bar that needs to be surpassed.
Only then do we hit all of the other problems: that the voter is still valid, that he or she has not already voted and so on.
Jones also failed to note that numerous Trump officials -- and Trump himself -- have already voted by mail.
CNS has previously gotten angry that Trump was fact-checked at all on the issue of mail-in voting. After Twitter tagged an earlier Trump tweet falsely attacking mail-in voting with a link to facts on the issue, Craig Bannister huffed in a May 27 article that Twitter has begun posting rebuttals to tweets by President Donald Trump under the direction of a 'Head of Site Integrity' who has, himself, used the social media giant to call Trump officials 'actual Nazis' and 'Joseph Goebbels,' in a move one columnist deems 'a shocking step.'" He huffed further that the rebuttals came from "anti-Trump liberal media like CNN and The Washington Post," but he didn't dispute the accuacy of the rebuttal.
A day later, Bannister touted how Trump issued new tweets "promising that allowing mail-in ballots would result in substantial voter fraud and a rigged election," claiming that the earlier tweet had "link[ed] to liberal media defending mail-in voting" but, again, failing to dispute the factual accuracy of the defense.
MRC's Bozell Is So Homophobic, He's Quitting AmazonSmile Program Over Cutting Off Anti-LGBT Groups Topic: Media Research Center
A June 22 Media Research Center press release stated:
MRC President L. Brent Bozell on Monday announced that the Media Research Center would no longer accept money from the AmazonSmile program. Amazon has brushed off conservative concerns about letting an anti-Christian organization like SPLC decide which groups may receive funds. Additionally, Amazon recently tried to censor a book because it didn’t toe the party line on the coronavirus lockdowns.
“Any money from Amazon is tainted, hate-filled money that we want nothing to do with,” said MRC President L. Brent Bozell. “The liberal-loving Jeff Bezos and his hacks at Amazon and Washington Post oppose everything we stand for at the MRC. While we thank supporters who have used the program, we ask that they continue their donations directly, instead of through Amazon’s filter of hate,” added Bozell.
“AmazonSmile uses the hate group SPLC to oversee the Amazon Smile program. To allow Planned Parenthood to receive donations, but not Christian convervative groups like Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom, is completely unacceptable. We will no longer have anything to do with this deeply biased program,” Bozell said. "Amazon is no longer just a retailer. It's a left-wing activist organization with an agenda."
Bozell's description of the the Southern Poverty Law Center as "anti-Christian" and a "hate group" is laughable. Hhis evidence that Amazon "brushed off conservative concerns" linked to a column at Bozell's CNSNews.com by the Heritage Foundation's Kay Coles James complaining that AmazonSmile would no longer fund right-wing groups like the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom based on the SPLC's designation of them as hate groups for their virulent opposition to LGBT rights. James insisted that the FRC and ADF are "long-established, venerable organizations" and "mainstream conservative organizations" and framing their anti-LGBT activism as merely "defense of traditional marriage." Rather than address the SPLC's evidence against the groups, James ranted that "The SPLC itself is a completely discredited organization" and denied that that her fellow gay-haters were listed "in a directory alongside real hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis."
In other words, James is declaring that hating gays is a "mainstream conservative" position -- and Bozell is declaring that he's as homophobic as other conservatives, but he didn't explain why favoring LGBT rights is inherently "left-wing." But he clearly opposes those rights to the point that he will refuse donations to his organizations.
Bozell also didn't say how much money the MRC had received through AmazonSmile, or if he will return that money to Amazon. Bozell is apparently hypocritically happy with the money the MRC has already accepted through the program.
Every single thing that's been done to help black people has been done specifically because they're recognized as a Crayola crayon color. Speaking of which, one wonders how long it will be before Crayola discontinues black crayons because they've "woked" to how insensitive having a black crayon is to those people for whom being a crayon color is an identity. But I digress.
[...]
Saturday evening I was a guest on a Baltimore, Maryland, talk show where the host failed to grasp the meaning of George Kelly's book on Personal Construct Theory, which argues: "Psychological disorder is any personal construction which is used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation, i.e., repeating the same thing failure after failure is a psychological disorder." The problem, however, is the ability this specific psychological disorder provides to make massive amounts of money and to be on the right side of every crayon skin-color issue.
This was the point I made to the host of said program. But like most of his kind, they're willingly blind because it's easier to be same.
The coalminers of West Virginia weren't helped because they were a crayon color. They were helped because they were Americans in dire straits. But so-called blacks have always been identified as a crayon first. The host of the Baltimore talk program I referenced above smugly told me that there was no way America would ever become colorblind.
[...]
Everything about crayon color people begins with the prefix black or African. Children from the womb to the grave are inculcated with a construct of inhibitory control that enables them to achieve the lowest common denominator.
It's this variant form of Pavlovian conditioning that encourages and validates hatred, disorder and sub-human behavior. There's no condition known to man that has not been claimed to be disproportionately adverse to the crayon people, except wealth, industry, propriety and civility.
The majority of reasonable and logical minds are at a loss to solve the conundrum of why so many of these people embrace the jaundiced cosmological view that they do. The rationale is quite simple when one understands the behavioral etymology of same.
It's not a Gordian Knot that keeps so many people tied to the plantation of self-limitation and immiseration – it's a pernicious form of an inculcated stenotopic mindset that constrains the person to being a prisoner of his own making. Compounding this satanic pathology are draconian marplots that have successfully advanced a supportive culture that refuses to rebuke the self-defeating Pygmalion of being a crayon color before all else.
[...]
It's time to start being concerned about Americans not crayon colors. And contrary to all of those who think they know best, I'm right based both upon historical evidences and, more importantly, because the immutable Word of God says God is not a respecter of persons.
The MRC's Hypocrisy on Copyright Issues And Property Rights Topic: Media Research Center
For a gorup purporting to embrace the conservative idea of private property rights, the Media Research Center sure does have a problem other people enforcing their private property rights. We saw that last November, for example, when P.J. Gladnick mocked singer Taylor Swift for wanting more control over how her music is used by others.
The MRC's big thing of late is whining about how conservatives are being "censored" when right-wing videos are taken down by social media because copyright holders for the images in them pointed out they were being used without permission.
A March 2 post featured an interview the MRC's Dan Gainor conducted with right-wing meme creator Carpe Donktum, who whined that his videos are "taken down for copyright strikes that shouldn’t actually be real, you know, things that aren’t actually copyrighted."
An April 24 post by Corinne Weaver complained that "a video tweeted by Trump that mocked former President Barack Obama’s endorsement of Biden was reportedly deleted by Twitter, according to the Washington Examiner. The reason for the alleged removal was a 'copyright complaint.'"
A June 5 post by Alexander Hall groused that "Twitter “disabled” a video by the Trump reelection campaign, alleging a copyright violation," then gave space to a Trtump campaign spokesman to rant that ""This incident is yet another reminder that Twitter is making up the rules as they go along. From the dubious removal of the hilarious Nickelback video to capricious fact checks and manipulated media labels to questionable claims of copyright, Twitter has repeatedly failed to explain why their rules seem to only apply to the Trump campaign but not to others." Hall did not indicate that he fact-checked the spokesman's claims, though he did acknowledge a report that "Harvard University's Lumen Database, a third-party research group Twitter uses to study cease and desist letters, reviewed the complaint and found it to be valid under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."
Under an all-caps "CENSORED" headline, Hall used a June 24 post to declare that "Twitter has continued its unabashed attacks on President Donald Trump and his allies by permanently suspending well-known, pro-Trump meme creator Carpe Donktum" after a video he made that Trump retweeted was made "inaccessible in response to 'a report by the copyright owner.'" Hall let Carpe Donktum spread a conspiracy theoryshowing "a grim portrait of the platform’s ideologically driven management,"insisting without substantiation that "I have been banned for being effective" (and not, apparently, for repeated violations of other people's copyrights).
Twitter has censored yet another meme posted by President Donald Trump. The company removed an image tweeted by Trump for allegedly violating its copyright policy.
Twitter has cracked down on Trump’s sincere demands for order, his calls to action, and now even his jokes once again. A meme photo was posted by Trump on June 30 depicting a photo of himself, captioned with the words: “In reality they’re not after me they’re after you” and the phrase, “I’m just in the way.”
Twitter confirmed in an email that the meme photo in question had been removed after a copyright claim. The tweet now just shows a “media not displayed” notice with the caption explaining that “[T]his image has been removed in response to a report from the copyright holder.”
The meme featured a photo taken by Damon Winter for The New York Times, reported CNBC. “‘Per our copyright policy, we respond to valid copyright complaints sent to us by a copyright owner or their authorized representatives,’ a Twitter spokesperson [stated],” according to CNBC. “The New York Times filed the takedown notice, a company’s spokesperson said.”
The MRC does not explain in any of these posts why copyright holders are apperently not allowed to enforce their rights when their intellectual property is used without authorization by conservatives.
This is all hypocritical, of course -- the MRC actually does care about copyright issues when it serves its right-wing agenda. A February post by Weaver gloated that "trillion-dollar company" Google "could be in trouble for copyright infringement, according to a lawsuit from tech company Oracle" over a lawsuit accusing the search giant of having "“copied verbatim 11,000 lines of Java code and then broke Java’s interoperability.”
CNSNews.com's love of pro-Trump stenography bit it back, prompting some furious back-pedaling. An anonym ously written June 21 article served up a stenographic account from President Trump's rally in Tulsa the previous day:
Media Research Center researcher Nicholas Fondacaro 
An anonymously written July 14 WorldNetDaily article 
The 
Barack Obama has been out of office for nearly four years now, and WorldNetDaily columnist Jack Cashill remains obsessed with him, devoted multiple columns to bashing him since Cashill has a decidedly belated 
On July 7, the MRC -- and its "news" division, 
Back in March, CNSNews.com 
Media Research Center writer Nicholas Fondacaro 
In a July 19 
We've
Dear Media Research Center:
CNSNews.com fell into pro-Trump stenography mode once again in a June 22 
A June 22 Media Research Center 
Every single thing that's been done to help black people has been done specifically because they're recognized as a Crayola crayon color. Speaking of which, one wonders how long it will be before Crayola discontinues black crayons because they've "woked" to how insensitive having a black crayon is to those people for whom being a crayon color is an identity. But I digress.
For a gorup purporting to embrace the conservative idea of private property rights, the Media Research Center sure does have a problem other people enforcing their private property rights. We saw that last November, for example, when P.J. Gladnick 
