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DONNY EVANS

THE PENTAGON gave undisclosed government assignments to several conservative military veterans who used large social media platforms to promote Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s agenda and target critics of the Trump administration, *The Washington Post* reported.

Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel, and Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel, had active government email addresses assigned to the office of Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, according to Pentagon records reviewed by the Post. Their addresses carried a “.civ” suffix identifying them as civilian employees.

Thomas Anderson, another retired Army colonel, appeared in Pentagon records earlier this year with a civilian email address and an assignment to Tata’s office. Anderson, an attorney who writes under the name Cynical Publius, was no longer listed late last week.

The three men command a combined audience of more than 1 million followers on X. Their government status remained absent from public commentary promoting Hegseth’s positions on Pentagon personnel, military education and other policy matters. The department has not said what responsibilities they received, when their assignments began or whether taxpayers funded their work.

Pentagon spokesman Joel Valdez declined to answer the Post’s questions about their duties, compensation and expected length of service. Tata did not respond. Maness and Schlichter did not respond to requests for comment. Anderson declined to comment by phone.

The men served as special government employees or highly qualified experts, according to people familiar with the assignments. Schlichter carried an “HQE” designation in a government database reviewed by the Post.

Federal law limits special government employees to 130 working days during any consecutive 365-day period and permits compensated or uncompensated service. Pentagon employment rules for experts and consultants allow full-time, part-time or intermittent appointments, with compensation decided individually. The financial arrangements involving Maness, Schlichter and Anderson remain unknown.

Their work included a visit to the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in May on behalf of the Pentagon’s Senior Service College Task Force. Hegseth established the task force in March to examine military colleges for ideology he characterized as “toxic” or “woke” and concentrate their curricula on developing warfighters.

Maness, Schlichter and Anderson met with students and faculty members over several days, according to two people familiar with the visit. They asked participants to assess Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Some students questioned how candidly they could respond and whether unfavorable answers could bring consequences. Task force members also raised concerns about a course covering communication between military officers and Congress.

The task force has completed its research and prepared a report that has not been released, according to one person familiar with the visit.

Maness continued publishing commentary on issues within Hegseth’s portfolio. In a July 30 column for the right-wing *Daily Caller, he urged the administration to remove *“disloyal” Pentagon employees and condemned “careerists who treat the Pentagon as their permanent fiefdom.” The author biography identified him as a retired Air Force colonel and omitted a current Pentagon role.

PIX]

Rob Maness as a colonel in the Air Force. He retired in 2011. (U.S. Air Force)

Maness later wrote in an Aug. 26 article that “Secretary Hegseth’s outrage is justified” over the Army’s retreat from tougher academic requirements for Reserve Officers’ Training Corps students. His government assignment was not disclosed.

A July letter defending Hegseth’s military-education policies described Maness as a retired officer. A Post spokesperson said Maness had not disclosed a Pentagon connection before publication.

Schlichter continued writing and posting about politics and military affairs without identifying a Pentagon role. Anderson defended Hegseth’s military overhaul and wrote in an April commentary for *The Federalist* that there is “a cancer in America’s military ranks, and it must be expunged before it’s too late.”

Scrutiny of the Pentagon’s influencer relationships intensified after the department and conservative commentator Jennica Pounds disclosed that she had become a special government employee in July. Pounds, known online as DataRepublican, had held a journalist credential in Hegseth’s revamped Pentagon press corps through June after receiving the pass in April.

Former Republican congressman and Air Force veteran Adam Kinzinger said on X that the Pentagon appeared to be using taxpayer money “to hire influencers on X to put out partisan talking points.”

The Pentagon has disclosed some outside appointments. In May, the department publicly named journalist Jerry Dunleavy to a panel reviewing the 2021 U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

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Federalist boss Sean Davis reacted to the birthright citizenship ruling with an unhinged list of “ways forward” that alarmed even conservatives.

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ZUCKERBICK BS RODNEY INST

...The practical effect of these massive, privately manipulated election-office funding disparities was to create a “shadow” election system with a built-in structural bias that systematically favored Democratic voters over Republican voters. The massive influx of funds essentially created a high-powered, concierge-like get-out-the-vote effort for Biden that took place inside the election system, rather than attempting to influence it from the outside.

6

A voter submits a ballot in an official drop box during early voting in October 2020.AP

We call this the injection of structural bias into the 2020 election, and our analysis shows it likely generated enough additional votes for Biden to secure an Electoral College victory in 2020.

Our preliminary results in Georgia and Wisconsin suggest a similar impact on Biden’s vote margin from CTCL spending. And spending in those states was likely large enough and targeted enough to have shifted them into Biden’s column.

This research and analysis project will culminate in the creation of a counterfactual electoral map based on the combined results of our state-by-state analysis. It will reflect how the election results would have looked after the last legal ballot was counted if CTCL and CEIR did not spend their $419.5 million in 2020.

We have good reason to anticipate that the results of our work will show that CTCL and CEIR involvement in the 2020 election gave rise to an election that, while free, was not fair. The 2020 election wasn’t stolen — it was likely bought with money poured through legal loopholes.

*William Doyle, Ph.D., is principal researcher at Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas. He specializes in economic history and the private funding of American elections. Previously, he was associate professor and chair in the Department of Economics at the University of Dallas. Reprinted with permission from The Federalist.

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GGL 5 26

AI Overview

Yes, William Doyle, Ph.D., is the research director and principal researcher at the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas. [1, 2]

Profile & Expertise

Notable Research

[### William Doyle, Author at The Federalist

The Federalist

https://thefederalist.com › author › williamdoyle](https://thefederalist.com/author/williamdoyle/)

William Doyle, Ph.D., is research director at The Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas. He specializes in economic history.Read more

NO LNX

William Doyle, Ph.D., is research director at The Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas. He specializes in economic history and the private funding of American elections. Previously, he was associate professor and chair in the department of economics at the University of Dallas. He can be contacted at doyle@rodneyinstitute.org.

Posts from William Doyle

Page 1 of 1

Elections

Democrats Can’t Shut Down Election Concerns So Easily This Time Because We Have The Receipts From 2020

William Doyle

November 4, 2024

Elections

Mass Mail-In Voting Is Democrats’ New ‘Blue Wall’ To Beat Republicans

William Doyle

September 16, 2024

Elections

How Red States Can Hold ‘Zuckbucks’ Group Legally Accountable For 2020 Election Meddling

William Doyle

July 2, 2024

2024

How College Student Voters Could Blow Up Democrats’ Ballot-Harvesting Election Ploy

William Doyle

May 15, 2024

Elections

Infamous ‘Zuckbucks’ Group Tries To Election-Meddle Again — This Time With Federal Tax Dollars

William Doyle

January 19, 2024

2022

Without Their Precious ‘ZuckBucks,’ Democrats Won’t Win Georgia In 2022

William Doyle

November 4, 2022

Elections

Don’t Be Fooled: ‘Nonpartisan’ Get-Out-The-Vote Efforts Always Benefit Democrats

William Doyle

September 15, 2022

Elections

Until Election Integrity Issues Are Fixed, Conservatives Should Not Stop Talking About The 2020 Election

William Doyle

August 15, 2022

Elections

How No-Excuse Absentee Voting Allows Special Interests To Manipulate Voters

William Doyle

February 15, 2022

Elections

Why The Wall Street Journal Is Wrong About The 2020 Election

William Doyle

January 28, 2022

Elections

Mark Zuckerberg’s $350 Million In Election Funding Went To Far-Left Activists, Not ‘Nonpartisan’ Outfits

William Doyle

January 18, 2022

Politics

The 2020 Election Wasn’t Stolen, It Was Bought By Mark Zuckerberg

William Doyle

October 12, 2021

[### “Why is the study of election funding so difficult? Well, it doesn't ...

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com › emkinstitute › posts › why...](https://www.facebook.com/emkinstitute/posts/why-is-the-study-of-election-funding-so-difficult-well-it-doesnt-have-to-be-and-/815987590567027/)

William Doyle, Ph.D., is principal researcher at Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas. He specializes in economic history and the ...

[### William Doyle

The American Conservative

https://www.theamericanconservative.com › author › will...](https://www.theamericanconservative.com/author/william-doyle/)

William Doyle is Research Director at the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, TX. The Latest. How Mass Mail-In Voting Changes Everything.Read more

Missing: Ph. ‎D., ‎principal ‎researcher

[### Mark Zuckerberg spent $419M on nonprofits ahead of ...

New York Post

https://nypost.com › 2021/10/13 › mark-zuckerberg-sp...](https://nypost.com/2021/10/13/mark-zuckerberg-spent-419m-on-nonprofits-ahead-of-2020-election-and-got-out-the-dem-vote/)

Oct 13, 2021 — During the 2020 election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars to turn out likely Democratic voters.

[### When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated $400 million ...

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com › posts › when-facebook-fo...](https://www.facebook.com/abc27news/posts/when-facebook-founder-mark-zuckerberg-donated-400-million-to-help-fund-election-/10159449512510420/)

... William Doyle, Ph.D., the principal researcher at the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas, writes for The Federalist. Doyle, whose ...

[### t Stolen, It Was Bought By Mark Zuckerberg

Groups.io

https://groups.io › topic › the_2020_election_wasn_t](https://groups.io/g/PoliticallyIncorrect/topic/the_2020_election_wasn_t/86277457)

William Doyle, Ph.D., is principal researcher at Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas. He specializes in economic history and the ...

[### Zuckerberg had Trump's campaign team embedded in the ...

Facebook · Unions Australia

1 comment · 1 year ago](https://www.facebook.com/groups/unionsaustralia/posts/9521282804617368/)

Revealed: Trump campaign strategy to deter millions of Black Americans from voting in 2016. Rachel Griffiths and 13 others. 14 reactions ·.Read more

[### Zuckerberg Spent $419.5M to Push Democrat Votes in 2020

Newsmax

https://www.newsmax.com › Politics](https://www.newsmax.com/politics/facebook-zuckerberg-2020-democrats/2021/10/14/id/1040463/)

... William Doyle, Ph.D., the principal researcher at the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas, wrote for The Federalist in the article ...

[### Facebook is commissioning an independent study on "the effects ...

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com › NBCNews › posts › faceb...](https://www.facebook.com/NBCNews/posts/facebook-is-commissioning-an-independent-study-on-the-effects-of-social-media-on/2513266745360007/)

... William Doyle, Ph.D., the principal researcher at the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas, writes for The Federalist. Doyle, whose ...

[### Did this just happen no generators? - Page 7

Class Racer

https://www.classracer.com › classforum › showthread](https://www.classracer.com/classforum/showthread.php?p=649957)

Election reform anyone? Credit; William Doyle, Ph.D., is principal researcher at Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas*. He specializes ...

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NOTE LEGACY MEDIA CNN NBC ~ OBAMA TRAITOR BS

As Trump struggles to deflect from reporting on his Epstein ties, MAGA media set their sights on the press

It’s getting really bad out there

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 07/23/25 MMA

Six months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, an unhinged MAGA media is infested with calls for the arrest of former President Barack Obama — and one prominent right-wing commentator is even floating legal consequences for journalists who debunk their twisted rationale.

On July 18, amid a Trump administration effort to stave off a MAGA revolt over its handling of disclosures related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released documents she claimed proved the existence of “a treasonous conspiracy” by the Obama administration following the 2016 election against Trump, claiming she had asked the Justice Department to investigate further. The president piled on in remarks to the press on July 22, claiming that “we caught Barack Hussein Obama” and accusing him of “treason.”

This argument is based on either malice or stupidity. Gabbard is conflating the findings of a December 2016 document showing that the intelligence community did not assess that the Russian government had hacked election systems and changed vote totals to benefit Trump with those of a January 2017 assessment that the Russian government had sought to influence the campaign to benefit Trump by, among other things, hacking Democratic email servers and releasing the contents.

Based on that faulty premise, Gabbard accused Obama and his advisers of subverting the intelligence community for political aims. But the December 2016 assessment is consistent with what the Obama administration was saying publicly at the time, while the findings of the January 2017 assessment were reiterated in Trump administration reports by the Justice Department as well as a Senate committee helmed at the time by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Indeed, that committee reviewed the January 2017 intelligence community analysis and concluded it was an “impressive accomplishment” that “reflects proper analytic tradecraft” and “provides a proper representation of the intelligence” and that the analysts who produced it faced “no politically motivated pressure.”

Members of the right-wing media ecosystem, with few exceptions, do not care about these facts, and they are using incredibly demagogic language to rile up their audiences as they call for political retribution.

Benny Johnson is floating a “military tribunal” for Obama; Mike Davis says the former president should “lawyer up”; Charlie Kirk wants “perp walks”; Liz Wheeler is demanding that the charges be not “perjury” but “treason”; Jesse Watters is asking a U.S. senator whether Obama should “go to prison.” They have apparently learned nothing from overpromising on Epstein only for the Trump administration to under-deliver when the facts couldn’t match the MAGA narrative.

Indeed, according to Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist and a Fox contributor, even typing the preceding paragraphs casting doubt on the validity of Gabbard’s argument should expose me to legal exposure. In a July 22 thread, she described Gabbard’s “revelations” as “the biggest scandal in our history” and condemned media outlets for “ignoring” and “downplaying” it.

“Every time the Washington Post, CNN, the New York Times, Margaret Brennan, The Atlantic, etc., lie and say this story is not a big deal, they are perpetuating their seditious conspiracy,” she added. “Creative minds should think about what legal exposure they have for their role in this.”

Hemingway went on to describe those outlets and journalists as “co-conspirators” in the alleged plot. She did not identify the legal consequences she believes they should face. Nor is it clear what this legal argument would mean for conservatives like her Fox colleague Andrew McCarthy or Eli Lake, who criticized Gabbard’s conclusions, or the right-wing outlets which published their assessments, Rich Lowry’s National Review and Bari Weiss’ The Free Press.

It should go without saying that the idea of “creative minds” dreaming up ways to punish journalists for producing reporting which contradicts the views of the president, his administration, and its propagandists is an affront to the First Amendment and basic principles of free speech and a free press.

Unfortunately, right-wing dreams of frog-marching journalists may not be far-fetched

We warned in December, after Trump campaigned on threats to jail reporters and pull the licenses of critical news outlets and won, that a coalition of elite right-wing figures were “using wealth, lawfare, and government power to silence the press and carry out their political agenda unimpeded.” And the last six months have demonstrated the president’s determination to use his power to bend the press to his will.

Trump has sought to put financial pressure on news outlets in order to chill speech critical of him. He filed lawsuits that experts found frivolous over reporting he disliked from ABC News and CBS News, then successfully leveraged the threat or use of corrupt regulatory actions to secure eight-figure settlements. He is currently pursuing similar lawsuits against the Pulitzer Prize Board, The Des Moines Register, and the corporate parents of The Wall Street Journal. The president has threatened additional lawsuits against The New York Times and CNN and called for the firings of their reporters.

Corporate owners of media outlets appear to be buckling to this pressure. “Executives at major media outlets are reportedly instructing their newsrooms to temper their coverage of President Trump and his administration amid growing fears of political retribution,” Axios reported in May. Indeed, Trump has gloated to reporters about the effectiveness of his strategy.

Beyond personal lawsuits, Trump has floated federal criminal investigations into news outlets over their reporting. That is no idle threat given his pattern of launching Justice Department probes into his political enemies via executive order and given the reality that the top ranks of federal law enforcement are stocked with people who are comfortable functioning as an extension of his personal desires.

Indeed, federal law enforcement officials appear more than willing to participate in Trump’s assault on the free press. His attorney general terminated rules which restricted prosecutors from seeking records and testimony from journalists as part of leak investigations. Several noncitizens have faced detention by the Department of Homeland Security over their public writing. And a former lawyer for January 6 defendants is running a DOJ “Weaponization Working Group” whose purpose appears to be weaponizing the government against Trump’s foes.

Trump’s diverse right-wing coalition and the fractured media ecosystem he unified during his campaign may be breaking apart over his handling of the Epstein case. But he seems to recognize that one thing that brings them together is their shared hatred of Democrats like Obama and the free press, and he’s been acting accordingly. And that means that just an eighth of the way through his second presidency, we’re already in very dangerous territory.

//

Trump’s latest attempt to defuse the Epstein revolt: Point supporters at common enemies

07/21/25 2:38 PM EDT

  1. ### Misinformer of the Year: Anti-media intimidation

12/23/24 9:59 AM EST

  1. ### Freedom of the press is about more than access

05/28/25

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mma 9 24

MAGA media are attacking ProPublica’s comprehensive account of the role Georgia’s six-week abortion ban played in a woman's death

Special ProgramsAbortion Rights & Reproductive Health

Written by Chloe Simon

Published 09/19/24

Right-wing media are attacking a ProPublica piece scrutinizing the death of Amber Nicole Thurman, who died after she could not get an abortion in her state and then got delayed abortion care in a local hospital.

The piece elaborates on Thurman’s “preventable” death and Georgia’s strict abortion ban and vague language on “life of the mother” exceptions. Thurman had to travel to North Carolina for a dilation and curettage because she was past the six-week limit in Georgia, but traffic made her miss her appointment, so she received medication abortion instead. She suffered a rare complication, and doctors at a Georgia hospital failed to perform the needed D&C until it was too late.

Right-wing and anti-abortion media have denounced ProPublica’s report as “lies” and claimed that Georgia’s abortion law is not the reason for Thurman’s death.

Breitbart published a piece titled “Left-Wing ProPublica Ties Georgia Abortion Law to Woman’s Death Without Clear Evidence.”The article goes on to claim that “Thurman’s story, in addition to other tragic stories, is already being used by Democrats to promote their agenda of undoing all abortion restrictions by passing a federal law that allows abortion-on-demand.” Breitbart, [9/18/24]|}:

* Washington Examiner’s David Harsanyi wrote that the “ProPublica piece on Amber Thurman's death is a masterclass in hackery and conjecture.” He went on to say that there’s “literally nothing in the piece backing the claim that Thurman died because of GA's abortion law.” Twitter/X, [9/17/24]

Related

  1. ### Broadcast news, Fox News failed to cover deaths stemming from Georgia's six-week abortion ban

09/19/24

  1. ### Project 2025 partner president makes misleading claims about IVF and hospital treatment of women dealing with miscarriages

09/13/24

  1. ### Anti-abortion groups have launched aggressive lobbying campaigns against ballot abortion access amendments across the country

09/05/24

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mma 9 24

September 13, 2024, edition of RedPill78, streamed on Rumble

ZAK PAINE (HOST): Well, thank you again, Joy, and, you're welcome back. For part two, you're going to have to do a book on trans acts of violence because, unfortunately, that's — you know what I mean? It sounds funny, but there are so many of them, trans shooters. I mean, it just seems like every time you hear about it —

JOY PULLMAN (THE FEDERALIST EXECUTIVE EDITOR): We have — for those interested at The Federalist, we have a t----- tracker — well, we call it the t----- tracker. Maybe I shouldn't be telling you that, but it's for transgender shootings. And so —

PAINE: That's the internal — that's what's on the spreadsheet.

PULLMAN: We also have one for corporations, you know, pledging large amounts of money for — to transgender causes.

PAINE: Yeah. OK. Well, worthwhile checking out. And, again, I love The Federalist.

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RESEARCH/STUDY

Biden suspended his campaign and right-wing media responded with conspiracy theories

Conservatives demanded proof the president was still alive, claimed Biden was a “hostage” in a “soft coup,” and even suggested his decision was part of an “inside job” to assassinate Trump

WRITTEN BY JACK WINSTANLEY

PUBLISHED 07/26/24

Following President Joe Biden’s announcement that he was suspending his 2024 reelection campaign, right-wing media figures pushed wild conspiracy theories alleging that the president did not make the decision himself or that it was a backup plan to defeat Donald Trump after the failed assassination attempt against the former president. Conservative media figures repeatedly asked for “proof of life,” claimed Biden was being held “hostage,” and even suggested that Biden's withdrawal letter was forged.

*Sean Davis, CEO and co-founder of conservative outlet The Federalist, commented that Biden has “made no public appearance” since he dropped out of the race, adding, “Also: do we have any evidence Biden is even alive right now?” His post then claimed, “This is banana republic insanity.” Twitter/X, [7/21/24]

12 23

Biden Pledges $3 Billion To Neocolonialist ‘Green Climate Fund’

pix of poor afr kids]

vice President Kamala Harris announced that the United States will send $3 billion to the “Green Climate Fund,” an organization financed by rich countries committed to keeping underdeveloped countries poor and vulnerable. The announcement was made this week at the United Nations (UN) COP28 climate summit in Dubai. This $3 billion comes in addition to the $2 billion the U.S. has already contributed to the fund.

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) is a UN organization that claims to promote “climate action in developing countries.” The GCF collects billions of dollars from developed nations and supposedly invests said funds into green energy projects in poor nations. The organization is known for its lack of public transparency, and its higher-ups have been accused of victimizing employees via abuse of power, racism, sexism, harassment, and inappropriate relationships.

But it isn’t just secrecy and alleged workplace harassment that should worry the American taxpayers who are bankrolling and expanding the GCF. Indeed, the GCF is part of a neocolonialist movement to prevent developing countries from using the life-saving fossil fuels the Western world obtained decades ago.

Contrary to what UN climate cultists would have us believe, green energy is unreliable and insufficient. Additionally, fossil fuels improve the lives of billions of people by providing them with heating, air conditioning, weather warning systems, mass irrigation, and durable buildings. It is largely thanks to fossil fuels that climate-related disaster deaths have reduced by 99 percent compared to 100 years ago.

In his 2018 book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, climatedepot.com founder Marc Morano included a speech delivered by South African development activist Leon Louw at the 2011 UN Climate Conference. During his speech, Louw explained how the GCF is hurting the citizens of poor nations. “Government to government aid is a reward for being better than anyone else at causing poverty,” stated Louw. “It enriches the people who cause poverty. … The UN is saying to poor countries: ‘Those of you who adopt more anti-prosperity, anti-jobs, and anti-growth policies—under the pretense of environmentalism—we will enrich you.’”

According to Louw, crooked leaders in Third World countries, who are supposed to be investing in green energy projects, instead often spend the funds “on themselves, meaning various government projects, creating bigger departments—bigger bureaucracies, it’s called big bureaucratic capture. They build empires, they build conference centers, and they buy political support. They go and distribute the money to communities where they want support and votes.”

“Climate policies have a cost, and these predominantly hurt the poor,” explained Danish political scientist and statistician Bjørn Lomborg in Morano’s book. “So in choosing to spend that $10 billion on renewables, we deliberately end up choosing to leave more than 70 million people in darkness and poverty.”

The UN doesn’t just promote pointless green energy projects and corrupt politicians. Western nations, including the U.S., collectively and purposely conspire to squash fossil fuel energy projects in developing nations. For instance, during the UN’s COP26 conference, 25 wealthy nations pledged to either stop or radically limit financial support for international fossil fuel projects.

Eco-Imperialists Say ‘Let Them Eat Cake’

In his book, Morano recounted how, at the 2002 UN Earth Summit, he asked then-Democratic California governor Jerry Brown if he thought citizens from poor nations did not want to develop economically. Brown responded, “Many do, but it’s not viable … the developed model cannot work without another five planets.”

Likewise, in 2013, then-President Barack Obama told a group of young African leaders during a town hall in South Africa that “If everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over — unless we find new ways of producing energy.”

In other words, rich, eco-imperialist countries, like the U.S., have decided poor nations are not allowed to increase their quality of life. “The developed world is denying a ​​billion people of color in the developing world—Asia, Africa, South America—the coal, natural gas, and other carbon-based energy that they need to pull themselves up out of dire poverty, as the wealthy Western world has already done,” wrote Morano. “There is an unmistakable racial component to this: black and brown people are essentially being told they can never be allowed to have the same standard of living [] the predominantly white Western world has enjoyed since the industrial revolution.”

The consequences of green colonialism are dire. “Only one in three Africans has access to electricity,” reports the World Bank, and the limited available electricity tends to be unreliable. In Sub-Saharan Africa, “31 out of 49 countries experience daily power outages.” Meanwhile, the life expectancy in Africa is generally around a decade shorter than in the rest of the world. “No number of solar panels on top of huts made of animal dung is a long-term solution for grinding poverty,” Morano pointed out. “A simple fact needs to be recognized: carbon-based energy has been one of the greatest liberators of mankind.”

Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuelsand Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas – Not Less, has spent his career explaining how fossil fuels are largely responsible for the developed world’s lower poverty rates, longer life expectancies, and lower infant mortality rates. As Epstein wrote in his book, thanks to fossil fuels, “We don’t take a safe environment and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous environment and make it far safer.”

Not only do COP28 attendees not care about the inhabitants of poor nations, but they also clearly do not care about the environment. By promoting poverty in poor countries, the UN is actively harming the earth because wealthier nations are proven to have cleaner environments and put less strain on natural resources. Moreover, the world’s wealthiest 1 percent account for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66 percent. So, if Kamala Harris and everyone at COP28 actually cared about the planet, they would show it by amending their own behavior. (Perhaps they begin by canceling all future UN climate summits, which attendees travel to every year on private jets).

“This is an administration that brags about equity,” Morano told The Federalist, pointing out the hypocrisy of the “equitable” Biden administration preventing poor countries from benefiting off the fossil fuel energy production we enjoy here in the U.S. “What these poor nations need is free markets, innovation, economic growth, and infrastructure,” Morano added. “They don’t need handouts from people who say, ‘Hey, don’t make the ‘mistakes’ we did as we live our lavish lifestyle.’”

Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.

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12 22 off the radar a while 2 in gmail alert cop 27 nope same one

https://thefederalist.com/videos/marc-morano-explains-climate-alarmists-plan-to-follow-the-covid-emergency-lockdown-playbook/

vid 24 min evita duffy?  SUV bad weather in africa; a co2 increase hurricanes etc flat or decline; CA 1990 drought, no emergency; UK prime min west got waelthy anf brought benefits to poor cntry [colonization];

pay #w leaders to keep ppl poor; poor ppl worse for envir [lomborg]...stidies show...morano says rich put less strain on env; house made of animal dung, burn trees, no hi yeild agric; need more land to feed...

“The climate activists look at how everything was done in Covid, without a single bit of a vote under emergency powers, and they want the same thing to happen in climate,” said ClimateDepot.com founder Marc Morano. “They’re now in the process of trying to ban meat-eating without anyone voting on it. They’re doing it through net-zero regulations, they’re doing it through corporate-government collusion, and they’re trying to ban the gas-powered cars. Again, like Covid, without a vote.”

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same conv

following is part of an interview with ClimateDepot.com founder Marc Morano and Federalist Staff Writer Evita Duffy, in which they discuss the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, the Great Reset, Covid, and the future of the West. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Evita Duffy is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.

Evita Duffy: Hi everyone, this is Evita Duffy, staff writer at The Federalist, and I am joined today by Marc Morano, the founder of ClimateDepot.com and author of “The Green Fraud” and “The Great Reset: Global Elites in the Permanent Lockdown.”

Marc Morano: Thank you, Evita, happy to be here.

ED: So you were in Egypt this last week for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP27. Can you just explain to us, what are climate reparations? How much is it going to cost us? What did you learn while you were there?

MM: Well, it’s called “COP” because it’s “Conference of Parties,” which is a UN bureaucratic name. It really began when George H.W. Bush went to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and signed the “Rio Earth Treaty,” which literally led to the creation of this UN climate process. So what’s happened over the years is they’re basically saying that the wealthy nations — Europe, United States, Canada, Australia — our use of fossil fuels (i.e., us driving around in SUVs) has created bad weather in Africa and therefore we need to give them reparations for all the bad weather we caused. That’s literally the sales pitch.

The problem with that is twofold. [First,] weather hasn’t gotten worse as CO2 has increased. Oddly, the weather has actually improved. And you can look at this — hurricanes, floods, wildfires, drought, tornadoes, on every climate time scale — 30, 50, 100 years — there’s either no trend in these bad weather extremes or there’s a declining trend. And how they get trends is … they can always cherry-pick a region or a timescale but if you look at it from a big climate picture, there is no climate emergency — no climate bad weather that we need reparations for.... The [second] thing interesting about this … is that thesepoor nations have actually immensely benefited from the wealthy nations’ use of fossil fuels. We brought schools, hospitals, medicine, infrastructure to these developing world countries and allowed them to develop even better. They’re enjoying a lot of the First World benefits from our wealth, and so the key is to allow the Third World or the developing world (Africa, Asia, South America, the 1 billion-plus people that have no access to running water, adequate access to running water and electricity) to develop like we did. And the real problem is they don’t want them to develop. They don’t want them to make the same “mistakes” (i.e., long life expectancy, lower infant mortality, infrastructure, wealth creation). So instead, they want us to just pay them, pay their leaders to keep their people poor because then they’ll be good stewards of the environment. In a nutshell, that really is what the UN climate reparations fund is all about. Yeah, like you say it’s “keep the poor poor,” and there’s been a lot of studies that have come out that say poor people and poverty are actually worse for the environment. When people are in desperation, they put a strain on natural resources far more than people who are in developed societies. So it’s actually probably having the opposite effect that [the UN delegates] want. Is that correct?<  Yes, you’re directly on point. What’s happened is — and there have been studies on this and we’ve observed this over the last 100 years — wealthier nations have cleaner environments and put less strain on the resources. Now, you can look at places in the developing world, whether it’s India or Brazil or South America or African nations.They’re living in huts made of animal dung. They’re burning dung and wood inside with horrible air quality. They don’t have modern sanitation. The rivers are polluted. They don’t have means of modern fossil fuel energy. So what do they do? They clear-cut forests, they burn trees, they in some cases hunt species that lose habitat. They don’t have  high-yield agriculture that comes with wealth and wealth creation and technological advancement. So they don’t get enough food, or they need more land to feed people instead of increasing the food yield on the existing land for farmland. ...So it turns out if you look back at like Eastern European nations, they had some of the filthiest environments and they were the ones that were the poorest centrally planned socialist nations of the 20th century. In fact, if you look at like the United States, the World Health Organization lists the United States air quality as among the cleanest in the world. And since the first Earth Day, we’ve radically improved our air and water quality while at the same time seeing massive economic growth and massive population increases. It can be done. And the way not to do it is the way the United Nations in this climate summit in Egypt tries to approach it through central planning, through regulatory bodies, and through literally trying to micromanage every aspect of human life and development, instead of allowing wealth prosperity through a free market system. They’re dead set against that.... So let’s go back to what happened at COP27 just for a moment because I read that China is exempt from paying any of these climate reparations, but China has the world’s second-biggest economy and they’re the world’s biggest polluters. So how did that happen? : Well, it happens because China is still listed as a “developing nation.” You know, these are all called racist colonial terms. You can’t say “Third World.” If you say “First World nation,” like Europe or the United States, that’s considered racist. So I guess China’s an “emerging economy,” is how they define it.So the United States could be on the hook for a billion dollars per year, possibly in climate reparations, and then China would have to pay absolutely zero, not a cent,because they’re considered a developing nation/emerging economy. … They were also in many ways exempt from the UN Paris Agreement for the same reasons >And so what’s happened here is all of these nations end up coming here and they’re begging for money. And this doesn’t necessarily help the people at all. This helps the leaders of the countries begging for this money because it ensures they get money, they can then buy their reelection, they can build monuments to themselves, they can pay off all the people that they need to, they can solidify their power. But I wouldn’t even be surprised in the UN process if China ended up being on the receiving end of these climate reparations. Keep in mind, China doesn’t only benefit from not having to pay so-called climate reparations. But they benefit from the entire UN Green New Deal [and] net-zero agenda because the world is going to be looking to China. The U.S. buys over 80 percent of our solar panels currently from China. We rely on China for all the rare earth mining for lithium and cobalt. China is expanding mining operations in Africa — places like the Congo withallegationsof underage labor of children of 8, 9 years old by international human rights groups. So this whole UN climate summit we saw in Egypt was actually the China empowerment summit because China is going to benefit from everything that comes out of this. The West will get poorer. The West will see more regulations. The West will be more reliant on China as we go forward with this UN Green New Deal agenda.  That’s getting at the real question here because when all these delegates showed up in Egypt, there were, I guess, 400 jets that landed, and so [the delegates] can’t care about the environment that much if they’re taking private jets to the conference. So what’s in it for them? I mean, why would they want to make Western nations poorer and these other Third World countries richer? Why redistribute the wealth? What is the purpose? What’s in it for [the Westerners who are allowing this to happen]? That’s a great question. You figure, why are they doing this? Well, the answer is simple. On one hand, you have the ideologues, and these could be the people like Harrison Ford and Leonardo DiCaprio, who literally think that the earth is facing a climate emergency and unless the UN saves us somehow from this climate catastrophe by passing some agreement that we’re all doomed. And you have young activists who actually believe that. Now, Greta Thunberg left [the UN climate summit]. She’s not a climate skeptic. She believes in the climate emergency but she’s so concerned about climate that she now recognizes that if you care about climate, the UN is actually a scam full of lying and greenwashing. And this is why Greta Thunberg for the first time since she came on the public seat was not in attendance at this conference So what ends up happening is you have world leaders who get to virtue signal, who get to have all these ideologues in green energy and corporate backers — in many cases, Democrat Party donors — push this whole green agenda on it because there’s a lot of money and campaign contributions to be made. And they don’t think they’re necessarily destroying America. They think, and they’ve been led to believe, that solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels, and they’re just about to take over and this is going to be a revolution and they’re going to lead it. Some of the politicians actually believe it. The others maybe are more cynical and this is just what their donors are pushing. This is what the UN is pushing. This is what the media is pushing. It becomes a sort of groupthink virtue signal. And it’s incredible.

I interviewed as a member of the Ukrainian delegation at this conference, and they actually told me with a straight face that [what] Vladimir Putin fears [the most] is European nations doubling down on green energy. I can tell you right now, theMiddle East, Venezuela, China, and Vladimir Putin’s Russiawould laugh hysterically at European nations doubling down on green energy because this is the mess that they’re in. Because of the green energy agenda, [European nations] ended up beingreliant. In the case of Germany, 50 percent of their energy was coming from Russia. And now we’re seeing the new prime minister of England basically saying they’re not going to open up their fracking, they’re still continuing this. It’s a powerful ideology, where they think if they go against it, they’ll lose elections, they’ll lose donors, they’ll get media disapproval, and they’ll get their children angry at them because they’re not saving the Earth. So that’s how you get people to go against their own interests. 

The flip side of that is how do you get African nations and poor nations where a billion people don’t have adequate running water and electricity — how do you get them to sign on to these UN deals? You pay them off.You come up with a climate slush fund, the climate reparations fund. So the one thing you have to understand is the UN is very competent at one thing, Evita, and that is A) throwing a party and B) knowing how to play politics, knowing how to transfer money, knowing how to put the right interests in the right place to make things happen. So they bring Africa and poor nations in South America to the table by offering huge sums of cash. They bring the Western leaders to the table by offering massive disapproval and, as John Kerry said, “global shaming” if you don’t support this. Look what happened when Donald Trump pulled us out of the UN Paris Agreement. All hell broke loose. World leaders, the media, academia, the United Nations, [and] youth activists condemned him. Donald Trump was seen as Satan himself for not supporting the UN Paris climate accords and withdrawing from them. So you ask what they get out of it? They get out of avoiding being labeled like Donald Trump was. 

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 Climate denial abounds on Fox as Hurricane Ian devastates Florida.. On back-to-back nights during Florida’s Hurricane Ian nightmare, Fox hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham cast doubt on climate science

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ILANA BERGER

PUBLISHED 09/30/22

In response to Hurricane Ian, Fox News primetime shows sought to mislead viewers about how climate change is affecting hurricanes, using bad faith and often-repeated climate denier talking points.

More than 2.6 million people were without power across the state on Thursday morning, as extreme flooding left many residents trapped in their homes and on top of cars. At a press briefing, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called Ian a “500-year flooding event” and added, “The impacts of this storm are historic and the damage that has been done is historic. … We've never seen a flood event like this, we've never seen a storm surge of this magnitude.” There were at least 21 confirmed deaths as of Friday morning, but that number is expected to rise as recovery efforts continue.

Fox primetime shows recycle debunked or irrelevant talking points on climate

Meanwhile, Fox personalities attempted to gaslight viewers into complacency by describing any hurricane coverage that mentioned climate change as “alarmist.” Fox also cherry-picked information about the relationship between climate change and hurricanes to imply that the two are not related. Climate scientists and media outlets have acknowledged that there is not enough evidence to support the theory that climate change will increase the frequency of hurricanes. However, there is evidence suggesting that higher ocean and air temperatures are causing hurricanes and storms to intensify more rapidly instead of weakening as they approach landfall, as happened with Ian. Hurricanes are also absorbing more moisture and dumping more rain on affected areas. Fox ignored this crucial connection or refuted it all together.

On September 27, Tucker Carlson called severity warnings leading up to the storm a “scam” on Tucker Carlson Tonight. But the next day, he called Hurricane Ian “a catastrophe” and a “national disaster,” adding, “People will certainly be killed.” Carlson then tried to use an exchange between CNN’s Don Lemon and Jamie Rhome, the deputy director of the National Hurricane Center, to push his agenda. Carlson used Rhome’s reluctance to link climate change to specific events to suggest that for political reasons, the media is more concerned about climate change than actual climate scientists are. However, Rhome clearly agreed that climate change is having an impact on storms, which is consistent with mainstream reporting on the issue. In fact, on September 28, CNN meteorologist Tom Sater reiterated Rhome’s point and added, “Since 1950 there have been seven landfall hurricanes in Florida that were a category 4 or 5 … the first 4 were each in a different decade. The last three — all in the last 5 years.”

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On September 29, Carlson devoted a good chunk of his show to ranting about climate change as well.He was obsessively focused on hurricane frequency, arguing that somehow, a decrease in the numbers of storms would cancel out the plethora of other evidence indicating that the storm events themselves are intensifying. After citing a NOAA research overview highlighting that hurricanes are predicted to become more intense, Carlson went on to insist that “the claim is never proven,” and that “there’s no science behind these claims.” Later in the segment, he implied that humans cannot influence weather events because “they’re called natural disasters. … they’re products of nature, God is in charge.”

He then discussed Hurricane Ian with Candace Owens, who has a long history of climate change denial. Owens reiterated that climate change does not exist because “if there was no human beings that walked the face of the planet, there would continue to be hurricanes, like there would continue to be blizzards, and like there would continue to be tornadoes.” She also used several other environmental concerns such as the hole in the ozone layer, which has diminished because of the Montreal Protocol, and ocean acidification, which remains a concern due to climate change, to try and argue that “they’ve been wrong over and over and over again.”

Video

CitationFrom the September 29, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

On September 28 edition of The Ingraham Angle, frequent Fox News guest and climate contrarian Michael Shellenberger and host Laura Ingraham told viewers that their personal experiences with extreme weather were untrustworthy and invalid. Ingraham implied that concerns about climate change only exist because people “feel that the ocean is warmer … but a feeling is notfact.” Shellenberger falsely claimed that hurricanes are “not intensifying right now, so any perception that hurricanes are more intense is just a perception fed by that relentless alarmist media.”Guest Mollie Hemmingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, later claimed that “the left” is pushing a “conspiracy theory” that “man-made climate change is the cause of hurricanes. … There’s just no evidence for this theory that people keep holding.” Hemmingway said this despite the fact that no one is claiming that climate change is the primary cause of hurricanes, rather it is one factor making them more dangerous.

Video file

Video CitationFrom the September 28, 2022, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

Hemmingway and Shellenberger also latched onto the idea that hurricane frequency is apparently the only metric that should concern the public, glossing over the very real dangers of threats like higher rainfall rates, which is the main factor that drives deaths and damage during a hurricane. They were fixated on the number of hurricanes that have occurred over different periods of time, using various irrelevant data points to unsuccessfully support their climate denial. They also downplayed damage caused by storms by saying that nowadays more people live in the areas most affected by hurricanes. Shellenberger first said that damage caused by hurricanes “has not increased at all” but then claimed that the increase in damage is due to the fact that “there’s more wealth in harm’s way,” going on to claim that the extreme weather events of the last several decades represent “an incredible success story for America,” because, in his telling, they could have been worse. 

Before Ian made landfall, Sean Hannity hosted his favorite climate denier Joe Bastardi to emphasize that hurricane frequency in Florida has not increased. On September 28, Hannity said that the media should not discuss climate change because “this is hurricane season and during hurricane season, you usually have hurricanes like we did a hundred years ago.” Fox News contributor Lara Trump insisted that the Democrats' “marketing arm, the mainstream media” is “now trying to claim that one of the quietest hurricane seasons in 30 years is somehow due to climate change.” Finally, former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee, who was a guest on the show, said that people should reject the established science of climate change and instead of “worshipping that which is created rather than the creator … get back to the simple things of science and real faith and trust in God.”

The public is beginning to increasingly understand the dangers of climate change and the need for actions that not only reduce climate-causing emissions, but make our communities less vulnerable to the climate impacts that are already happening. But as the public and more media outlets are starting to connect extreme weather to the need for climate action, Fox News coverage seeks to break those links.

THE LATEST...

Fox News host: “Americans are going to have to start strapping up and exercising their Second Amendment rights”

09/30/22 5:30 PM EDT

Climate denial abounds on Fox as Hurricane Ian devastates Florida

09/30/22 2:52 PM EDT

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Climate deniers

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Climate denial and near climate silence has marred national TV news coverage of Hurricane Ian

09/30/22 1:48 PM EDT

Right-wing media manufacture outrage over CNN host Don Lemon discussing relationship between climate change and strengthened hurricanes

09/29/22 1:53 PM EDT

As Hurricane Ian hits Florida, Fox News undermines climate change

09/27/22 11:15 PM EDT

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For Americans who are old enough to remember the Cold War and the Reagan era, it is ironic that some of today’s MAGA Republicans aren’t shy about openly expressing their admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin — even during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This admiration for Putin, liberal New York Times opinion writer Paul Krugman noted in a scathing column published on September 12, has been expressed by everyone from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to the leader of the MAGA movement: former President Donald Trump. In that column, Krugman argued that praising Putin’s authoritarianism fits right in with the “MAGA ethos.”

But liberals and progressives certainly aren’t the only ones who have been calling out the pro-Putin attitudes in the MAGA movement. More than a few Never Trump conservatives have been slamming Putin’s MAGA sympathizers, including veteran columnist Mona Charen. In an article published by The Bulwark on September 14, Charen lambasts “pro-Putin, pro-authoritarian” Republicans as the “new useful idiots.”

“At the moment when freedom-loving people around the world are elated, if on tenterhooks, at the progress of Ukrainian forces in pushing back the Russian invaders, Heritage Action, the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, has joined with other self-styled conservative groups to oppose helping Ukraine fight for its life,” laments the 65-year-old Charen, who was a speechwriter for First Lady Nancy Reagan during the 1980s. “I know, I know, the Trumpification of the GOP has been a fact for six years, and yet, this heel turn is remarkable. It’s as if People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals announced that they support puppy mills for medical research.”

READ MORE: Why Ukraine’s victories are a humiliation for 'MAGA tough guys': Paul Krugman

Charen adds, “Responding to President Biden’s request that Congress appropriate another $13.7 billion to help the Ukrainians cope with energy price hikes and other security needs, Heritage Action urged a no vote, railing that ‘These funding requests ignore the concerns of the American people.’”

The conservative journalist/author points out that “pro-Putin” Republicans are also likely to be admirers of far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

“The pro-Putin, pro-authoritarian voices in the GOP are not yet a majority — about a quarter of House Republicans and 11 of 50 Senators voted against the $40 billion aid package for Ukraine in May — but they’re not a small minority either, and the wind is at their backs,” Charen explains. “CPAC has all but canonized Hungary’s strongman Viktor Orbán, and in the first hours after Putin rolled into Ukraine, Trump reveled in the murderer’s ‘savvy’ and ‘genius.’ The 2022 election could bring more authoritarian-friendly Republicans to Congress, and meanwhile, hatcheries of conservative orthodoxy like Fox News and The Federalist are doing the spade work of persuading the base that Kremlin propaganda is more trustworthy —pravda, if you will — than the New York Times.”

Charen continues, “Just two weeks ago, Tucker Carlson, Putin’s favorite American broadcaster — clips from his show are routinely featured on Russian state TV — told viewers that Biden’s steadfast support of Ukraine was absurd…. It was bad enough to excuse Putin before February 24 on the risible grounds that he represented some sort of Christian champion (against the) scourge of wokeness. But after? That a spokesman for a so-called ‘conservative’ TV network can cheer the rape of a free country — Carlson has said he ‘roots’ for Russia to win — is not just morally depraved, it violates the basic tenets of what used to be conservatism.”

READ MORE:Libertarian writer slams MAGA Republicans' ‘creepy’ affection for Viktor Orbán

Charen also calls out two Trump-backed U.S. Senate candidates — Blake Masters in Arizona and “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance in Ohio — for their indifference to the invasion of Ukraine.

“The vapidity of this new ‘conservatism’ is bottomless,” Charen writes. “They haven’t bothered to consider that brutal aggression by a larger against a smaller state invites a Hobbesian international disorder in which no one is safe….

Putin’s Russia differs from the USSR in ideology, but in repression and rapacity, it is comparable. And it’s scarcely believable that the ‘useful idiots’ who make excuses for it today — who actually root for its success — are ‘conservatives.’”

READ MORE:CPAC official melts down over Joe Biden's 'semi-fascist' label despite its embrace of Viktor Orbán

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https://www.mediamatters.org/one-america-news-network/genocide-denial-racist-myths-and-fight-against-canceling-columbus-look-0

no lnx ,ammy

Genocide denial, racist myths, and the fight against canceling Columbus: A look at One America News’ anti-Indigenous coverage

Over the past nine months, OAN has disseminated racist, revisionist content about Indigenous people in Canada and the United States. AT&T is responsible.

WRITTEN BY BEATRICE MOUNT

PUBLISHED 11/24/21

Note: The subjects discussed in this article may be triggering for some readers. If you need immediate care or long-term support, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition has compiled a culturally sensitive resource kit.

Since February, right-wing cable outlet One America News Network has revived some of its favorite white nationalist conspiracy theories, bigoted lies, and racial epithets in a series of incendiary segments targeting Indigenous people of North America. Hosts, reporters, and guests have thrown fit after fit about small recognitions made in 2020 and 2021 to acknowledge the whitewashed history of colonization, power imbalances, and racist depictions of Indigenous people in North America.

In June, the network turned to full-fledged genocide denialism after ground-penetrating radar uncovered over 1,300 unmarked graves of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children killed under Canada’s residential school policy. Canada's 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission called the residential school system a "cultural genocide" of Indigenous people, and the federal government formally apologized for it in 2008.OAN downplayed this history and dismissed the discovery of the graves as an “excuse” for “an anti-Christian crusade.”

In October, OAN used Indigenous Peoples Day to praise Christopher Columbus and Europeans for “civilizing” the “savages.” And throughout the nine-month period, OAN figures regurgitated right-wing talking points about “social justice warriors” forcing sports teams to change their names from racist slurs and “erasing” Columbus from our calendars.

Meanwhile, a Reuters investigation revealed that telecom giant AT&T had played a key role in creating and funding the far-right network, with 90% of OAN's revenue reportedly coming from its AT&T contract.

Less than a month later, in November, AT&T Vice President Tom Brooks (a member of the Kanien'kehà:ka nation) renewed his company's commitment to “support Indigenous peoples” for Native American Heritage Month. That marked AT&T’s latest commitment to support Indigenous people via nonprofit fundraising, policy research and advocacy, and its Inter-Tribal Council of AT&T employees.

But the company can't have it both ways: AT&T cannot support Indigenous rights in one breath while funding OAN in the next.

As we recognize National Native American Heritage Month, here’s a look at how OAN has attacked Indigenous people so far this year -- all enabled by AT&T’s continued support for the network

Key narratives

OAN denied the history of genocidal policies used to assimilate Indigenous children

In the 1800s, governments in the U.S. and Canada partnered with churches to force Indigenous children into boarding schools under a genocidal assimilation policy with the explicit goal to “kill the Indian, save the man.” An estimated minimum of 6,000 Indigenous children died from injuries, illness, abuse, and neglect sustained in Canada’s system alone. Countless more children disappeared alongside their languages, cultures, and traditional teachings. By the time Canada shuttered the last of these schools in 1996, the residential school system left behind an ongoing, traumatic legacy extending far beyond the immediate survivors of the cultural genocide.

This traumatic legacy made headlines earlier this year after the discovery of over 1,300 bodies on the sites of former residential schools in Canada. In the U.S., the story prompted Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (a member of the Pueblo of Laguna) to order the first comprehensive federal review of American residential schools with an explicit “emphasis on cemeteries or potential burial sites.” While imperfect, this order is a significant first step in America’s own slow reckoning with its genocidal assimilation policies -- one that OAN seems intent to undermine by spreading disinformation to its viewers.

Led by Tipping Point host Kara McKinney, OAN treated the discovery of more than a thousand Indigenous children’s graves as a lie meant to target churches, drawing a tenuous connection between the discoveries and a string of church vandalism and arson across Canada.

On July 12, McKinney called the reporting on mass graves of Indigenous people at former residential schools an “odious lie” used to “excuse” the “desecration of holy grounds.”

On July 23, McKinney asserted that the media had “exaggerated” its coverage of residential schools, stating, “Just like the history of slavery in America gets overexaggerated in some cases in order to be weaponized to reorder society to this day -- they make everything about race -- the same thing is happening with these schools in Canada.”

Days later, OAN irresponsibly blamed Canadian church fires on “activists seeking revenge for Indigenous students,” comparing them to “American churches [that] were burned down or vandalized” by “George Floyd protesters” in 2020. (Though some suspects have since been arrested and charged for the Canadian fires, authorities there have yet to discuss their possible motivations.)

In a Tipping Point segment promoting her deceptive YouTube video “The Canadian Mass Grave Hoax,” alt-right troll Lauren Southern downplayed the discoveries at former residential schools, saying, “If you scratch past the surface, none of it is true.” She later claimed that “it is a far stretch to say a pit of murdered children with thousands of bodies across Canada and a gravesite that the markers have been lost -- a massive stretch, and one that ... led to mass hatred and hate crimes and terrorism, quite frankly, across Canada.”

OAN mocked Indigenous Peoples Day

OAN was outraged after President Joe Biden issued a proclamation officially recognizing October 8 as Indigenous Peoples Day. The move neither removed nor replaced Columbus Day, which is still a federally recognized holiday. Instead, it simply shifted focus onto the Indigenous community by creating what the Indigenous Peoples’ Initiative calls a “more powerful, more accurate, and more inspiring narrative about the contemporary Native experience” than the whitewashed history of colonization long perpetuated by Columbus Day.

That didn’t stop OAN from calling the move a leftist attempt to divide America. OAN hosts and guests accused Biden of “trying to erase Italian Americans,” whitewashed and defended genocide, and used derogatory terms to refer to Native Americans.

Host Stephanie Hamill discussed the “divisive” decision with Andre DiMino, executive board member of the Italian American One Voice Coalition, who portrayed the recognition of Indigenous Peoples Day as Democrats “trying to revise history and attack western culture by starting at the foundation, which was the uniting of the continents by Columbus.” DiMino whined that Indigenous people were taking Italian Americans’ holiday even though they already have “August 9, the day after Thanksgiving, and the whole month of November.”

Host Natalie Harp cited Indigenous Peoples Day as proof that “the people running our country, they do hate America at this point.” Her guest, conservative columnist Lee Smith, claimed the new holiday was part of “a campaign of demoralization” by Democrats to tell other Americans “that we will replace you with whoever we can drop into the country at any particular time” -- a direct reference to the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory.

After accusing Indigenous groups of cannibalism during her October 11 program, McKinney contradicted Columbus’ own accounts of enslaving and brutalizing Indigenous people, asserting that he “actually treated native peoples with great respect for his time" and “actively punished his own crew members when they abused and hurt the native peoples.”

After repeatedly referring to Native Americans as “savages,” host Dan Ball asked, “What if Christopher Columbus had not found and tried to colonize this land? What if European settlers ... did not come to America and civilize the Native Americans? … If this land was left to tribes that were warring for the last 500 years, what would this land look like?” These types of rhetorical questions are predicated on racist myths about Indigenous people that continue to perpetuate systemic health, economic, political, and social inequalities.

OAN attacked Indigenous activism and spread racist misconceptions about Native Americans

OAN regularly derided historic figures and activism and ensuing media coverage, paying particular attention to the Washington Football Team’s decision in July 2020 to stop using its previous racist moniker after decades of Indigenous activism against harmful and racist naming practices in sports. Hosts and guests referred to the team by the defunct name well into 2021.

OAN segments consistently criticized and undermined the historic nomination of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, claiming the media focused too much on “the fact she’s the first Native American named to a Cabinet position” instead of her supposedly “radical environmentalist agenda” to fight "so-called climate change.”

In an August 5 segment that repeatedly referred to the Washington Football Team by its racist former name, two OAN news hosts mocked Indigenous concerns and suggested that the Pittsburgh Pirates would be the next sports team to cede to “the left” and change its moniker “because a group of pirates are very upset about that.”

On the July 23 edition of The Real Story, American Principles Project President Terry Schilling told Indigenous people to “stop taking everything so personally” as “it’s a total honor to name your team after the Indians, or [the Washington Football Team’s former name], or the Cherokees, or the Chiefs or whatever” because they were “very tough adversaries” who “we had to fight … in America for 400 years.”

Over a graphic stating “No Whites Allowed,” Ball suggested applying to a reparations fund meant for Black and Indigenous Californians “because I have Native American on my dad’s side, with probably more than Pocahontas,” referring to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), “but if I describe myself as an Indigenous person then I could apply to this.” His guest, former Trump adviser Harmeet Dhillon, said that this reparations policy is an example of “the ultimate racial privilege, really.” (Under current Federal enrollment guidelines, tribes do not consider a vague Indigenous ancestor or DNA test as valid proof of Native ancestry. Furthermore, using tenuous claims of Indigenous identity to avoid accountability for racist policies and beliefs is racist.)

On September 29, Tipping Point guest Christopher Check, president of Catholic Answers, downplayed Franciscan monk Junipero Serra’s brutal treatment toward Native American people, calling the colonizer a “saintly man that wanted nothing more than the best thing for natives of California, that eternal salvation." As Bad Indians author Deborah Miranda (Ohlone Costanoan Esselen nation) told KQED, “Serra did not just bring us Christianity. He imposed it, giving us no choice in the matter. He did incalculable damage to a whole culture.”

Sumantra Maitra, a senior contributor to The Federalist, used the October 11 edition of McKinney’s show to call the landback movement “a prelude to violence” and said that “the logical endpoint to that rhetoric is taking that land back, and taking that land back would've mean a reconquest,” explicitly comparing it to the Balkan genocides of the 1990s. Maitra’s comments grossly mischaracterize the landback movement, which is the latest social media-focused iteration of a broad political movement calling for settler governments to return land stewardship to Indigenous peoples.

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ntbcw

The Federalist Papers has pushed misinformation about the US elections and Covid, including unproven claims

about anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine being an effective treatment for Covid.74

The Federalist Papers frequently syndicates content from The Western Journal, another of the Toxic Ten identified

by this report.75 The publication also comments on or publishes content from various other outlets, with some stories

treating social media posts as their primary sources.76

The site claims its mission is to “use social media to educate Americans on… what’s going on with government today,

and how to push back”.77

The Federalist Papers, whose domain was registered in 2011, generates revenue from advertising and is owned and

operated by Steve Straub.78 According to his LinkedIn page, Straub is also CEO at a processing solutions company

which offers “success secrets of the fastest growing companies”.79

This Federalist Papers article included in our sample claims that leftists “use

climate change to scare people into submission” and that their predictions

have been “wrong every time”.80 The article has carried Google ads for the

mining company Glencore which state the business’s “commitment to protect

the environment”

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omg

new 10 21 mma

Federalist recently published an article which flagrantly argued that for Christians, dying from COVID-19 “is a good thing.” And that was just the latest in the outlet's dangerous pandemic coverage, which has undermined the vaccine rollout and suggested COVID-19 protections are anti-Christian, dangerous, and discriminatory.

The recent article, published October 18, positioned COVID-19 precautions as an attack on Christianity in an effort to undermine the gravity of the pandemic.Written by Joy Pullmann, executive editor at the Federalist, the article condemned churches pausing services out of precaution and claimed that doing so “contradicts numerous clear commands of scripture.” Pullmann further suggested that Christians must “individually and corporately … repent” for pandemic safety guidelines that interfered with worship and thus “betrayed Our Lord.”

Media Matters has repeatedly identified The Federalist’s pattern of pushing COVID-19 denial and advocating reckless behavior when it comes to public health. In the early months of the pandemic, the outlet even suggested that “controlled voluntary infection” was a solution to ending the pandemic. Later on, it asserted that “without a real coronavirus vaccine, herd immunity is our only hope” -- a claim that has been debunked by the scientific community and would result in millions of deaths before the herd immunity threshold could be reached.

Brazenly inaccurate and socially irresponsible, The Federalist’s spread of COVID-19 misinformation serves only to prolong the pandemic by minimizing its risks and undermining the efficacy of standard coronavirus protections.

In addition to the recent article, here are some of the worst narratives The Federalist has peddled in its crusade against public health measures since the COVID-19 vaccine became available to the public earlier this year.

Painting COVID-19 protective measures as dangerous and discriminatory

The Federalist has attacked COVID-19 protective measures of all kinds, spreading baseless claims that undermine public health initiatives:

Suggesting that vaccines and other COVID-19 protections are anti-Christian

The Federalist has leveraged Christianity in its opposition to COVID-19 protections, attempting to cement pandemic safety measures as another flashpoint of the culture war:

Amplifying vaccine skepticism and refusal

The Federalist has repeatedly provided a platform to individuals refusing to comply with vaccine mandates and amplified and encouraged vaccine skepticism:

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https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/07/cnn-smears-sen-ron-johnson-as-climate-denier-for-not-bowing-to-climate-alarmism/

cNN Smears Sen. Ron Johnson As ‘Climate Denier’ For Not Bowing To Climate Alarmism

JULY 7, 2021 By Gabe Kaminsky

CNN’s Chris Cuomo opened his Tuesday monologue smearing Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson for refusing to bow down to climate alarmism after a new “KFILE” report found a video of Johnson calling climate change, “bullsh-t.”

KFILE reported Johnson told attendees at a June Republican Women of Greater Wisconsin luncheon, “I don’t know about you guys, but I think climate change is — as Lord Monckton said — bullsh-t.”

Cuomo blasted Johnson for his comments. “We need to call out garbage in the form of the game,” he said. “The target tonight, Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson … Sounds like a denier, no?” He continued:

Now many see Johnson as just selling stupidity. I see something worse. I know this guy. I remember him when he came to the Senate. Businessman, and he said, ‘I don’t know anything about this politics, I’m just here to make things happen.’ …He wanted to come on my show and show economic theories and principles and do charts to justify policy. Now he’s this. This is how he responds to a heatwave gripping North America.

Johnson failed to walk the politically correct line, so CNN thought they scored a win. But in reality, the senator provided a full comment to the outlet that it did not include in its story. Reporters Em Steck and Andrew Kaczynski included the first four sentences of Johnson’s response.

“My statements are consistent. I am not a climate change denier, but I also am not a climate change alarmist. Climate is not static. It has always changed and always will change,” Johnson said.

The rest? Deemed irrelevant to the narrative, as spokeswoman Alexa Henning indicated to The Federalist. Here’s what they left out:

I do not share Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s view that the “world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Or President Biden saying the “greatest threat” to U.S. security is climate change. I consider those to be extreme positions — to say the least. At some point, all the Malthusian predictions that have not come true should begin reducing the credibility of the scaremongers. But that would take honest reporting by mainstream media, so I’m not holding my breath.

Marc Morano and other seasoned energy experts have consistently exposed climate alarmism as another way for the left to expand government regulation on false premises.

Cuomo connected the heatwave across the country to climate change. But Morano, the author of “Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse Than You Think” and a former George W. Bush administration staffer in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, told The Federalist this is false.

“Any heatwave, hurricane, tornado outbreak, etc., are always used by the media and other climate activists as some kind of ‘proof’ of a climate emergency,” Morano said. “At least these claims are more plausible than claims that building collapses or illegal immigration is caused by ‘climate change.'”

Morano said the current global satellite temperature for June 2021 is below the 30-year average, and that in addition to the U.S. heatwave, there are ongoing record cold temperatures elsewhere.

“The media gaslight anyone who mocks ‘global warming’ on a record cold or snowy day but has no problem doing the exact same thing whenever it’s hot. As University of Alabama climate scientist John Christy’s research has found: ‘About 75% of the states recorded their hottest temperature prior to 1955, and over 50 percent of the states experienced their record cold temperatures after 1940,'” he said.

Johnson said climate change is “bullsh-it,” and he is not wrong. He even told CNN “climate is not static” and that he is “not a climate change denier,” but the outlet wants to mold a narrative.

Gabe Kaminsky is an intern at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, The American Conservative, the Washington Examiner, and other outlets. He has also appeared on Fox News, Hill.TV, and various radio programs. Follow him on Twitter @Gabe__Kaminskyor email gkaminskycontact@gmail.com.

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hypocrisy

Former Associated Press reporter Emily Wilder was fired from the international media company late Thursday following a pressure campaign by right-wing media, including publications such as The Federalist and The Washington Free Beacon working in tandem with the Standford College Republicans. Wilder was "canceled," if you will, for pro-Palestinian activism during her years in college — not at the AP.

The campaign to have Wilder fired started on Monday with the Stanford College Republicans taking to Twitter to bill the reporter's past pro-Palestine demonstrating as controversial, coming to the verdict that she would never be able to be impartial while covering national news.[twt pix]

"Recently, we discovered that theAssociated Press has hired former Stanford anti-Israel agitator, Emily Wilder, who referred to the late Sheldon Adelson as a 'naked mole rat' as one of their 'journalists,'" the college Republican organization tweeted. The series of tweets from the Standford Republican chapter went onto claim that the reporter, who is Jewish, during her college years belonged to a "Students for Justice in Palestine," on-campus group. The college Republicans — who appear to have their own questionable Twitter activity — also took offense to Wilder calling right-wing provocateur Ben Shapiro a "little turd" and Sheldon Adelson a "naked mole-rat."

From there, the right-wing outrage machine got ahold of the story, including The Federalist, The Washington Free Beacon, and Fox News, which billed the reporter as being "anti-Israel." Notably, the Free Beacon ran their hit-piece with no attached byline and didn't return Salon's request for comment as to why.

On Thursday, an all-staff email from AP News director Peter Prengaman to employees read: "A note to say that news associate Emily Wilder is no longer with the AP[twt pix]

but the Associated Press claims it wasn't her activism in college. "While AP generally refrains from commenting on personnel matters, we can confirm Emily Wilder's comments on Thursday thatshe was dismissed for violations of AP's social media policy during her time at AP," an AP spokesperson told The Wrap.

"Amazing how quickly a talented young reporter's career can be snuffed out by a Twitter mob that decided to feign outrage over some college tweets. And if @vv1lder somehow violated @AP's social media rules, the solution is to offer guidance, not termination, to a new reporter," TheWashington Post's Glenn Kesslerwrote on Twitter following the ouster.

[twt pix]  responding to her firing, Wilder told SFGATE that her firing was nothing more than a right-wing outrage mob that reportedly disdains "cancel culture," doing what they claim to resent.

"There's no question I was just canceled," told SFGATE reporter Eric Ting on Thursday following the news of her firing. "This is exactly the issue with the rhetoric around 'cancel culture.' To Republicans, cancel culture is usually seen as teens or young people online advocating that people be held accountable over accusations of racism or whatever it may be, but when it comes down to who actually has to deal with the lifelong ramifications of the selective enforcement of cancel culture — specifically over the issue of Israel and Palestine — it's always the same side."

in her interview with SFGATE, Wilder noted an "onslaught of absolutely vile messages" she received after right-wing media began running with the story. Wilder didn't immediately return a request for comment from Salon.

While The Associated Press might have folded to the demands of the right-wing mob, many journalists on Twitter voiced their support for the young journalist. "Shame on @AP @peterprengaman. I stand with Emily. Her reporting at our newspaper was excellent. Reverse your decision NOW," The Arizona Republic's reporter Rebekah Sanders wrote. The Washington Post's Dave Weigel responded: "'Hire @vv1lder' is something more and more people are saying."

"Every journalist should be outraged about @AP firing [Wilder] over college activism in favor of freedom for Palestinians. The industry is rife with clear double-standards on this," Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Adam Elmahrek commented on the firing. The Daily Beast's senior politics reporter Will Sommer replied, "It's crazy that editors are still falling for these bad-faith campaigns from right-wing media."

The decision to out Wilder comes on the heels ofright-wing pundits cheering the Israeli airstrike that leveled a building in Gaza on Saturday, housing several international news outlets, including The Associated Press.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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alex k

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2020/12/09/who-funds-the-federalist-finally-we-know/

For years, the funding behind the right-wing, pro-Trump publication The Federalist has been a total mystery. Many Twitter users have asked the website’s leaders, repeatedly, “Who funds The Federalist?” only to be blocked by the likes of publisher Ben Domenech, co-founder Sean Davis, or senior editor Mollie Hemingway. (This author is blocked by all three.)

Last year, Hemingway characterized the question as “a kind of a veiled threat” and a “clear, coordinated attempt to silence The Federalist.

However, a few months earlier, The Federalist’s affiliated nonprofit, FDRLST Media Foundation, had been certified as a 501(c)(3) charity by the Internal Revenue Service, meaning that donors could begin making tax-deductible contributions to the foundation. If the donor was a nonprofit organization like a family foundation or trade association, its grants to the FDRLST Media Foundation would eventually be part of the public record. Hemingway is a director and “governor” of the foundation.

Last week, CMD obtained the 2019 tax records of two right-wing funders who donated to the FDRLST Media Foundation that year: GOP megadonor and shipping supply billionaire Richard Uihlein and DonorsTrust, a donor-advised fund manager that has been dubbed “the dark money ATM” of the conservative movement.

The Uihleins

The Federalist may have once had a “never Trump” image, but the conservative publication moved quickly rightward as President Donald Trump became president and took over the Republican Party. The outlet is now known for vigorously defending Trump, for its trolling and conspiracy-laden posts, and for attacking liberal media. Sometimes trafficking in racism, The Federalist had a “black crime” tag until someone exposed the tag on Twitter.

It’s unclear when Uihlein, the Illinois-based founder of shipping supply company Uline, began funding The Federalist, but it makes sense that his foundation, the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, donated $400,000 to the FDRLST Media Foundation last year. Uihlein and his wife, Liz, are influential Trump donors and among the Republican Party’s biggest funders; Uihlein is the fifth-biggest donor to outside political spending groups of the 2020 federal elections, having doled out over $63 million tosuper PACs such as the pro-Trump America First Action, Club for Growth Action, the Senate Leadership Fund, and Restoration PAC, which he funded nearly exclusively.

The New York Times reported in August that, based on interviews, Richard Uihlein was a donor to The Federalist, but his foundation’s 2019 tax return is the first evidence of his financial support to be made public.

As The Federalist published story after story denying science and opposing mask wearing during the coronavirus pandemic—including one story allegedly written by an anonymous small-town mayor claiming that health officials order mask mandates for political, not scientific, reasons—Liz Uihlein minimized the virus, calling it “overhyped,” and endangered Uline workers by allegedly using lax safety practices and initially discouraging employees from working from home. Liz Uihlein, the president and CEO of Uline, got an exemption from Canada’s quarantine requirement to visit a Uline facility in the country, which she reached via private jet. The Uihleins would eventually contract COVID-19 in November.

The Uihleins have endorsed fringe candidates such as Roy Moore, the far-right Alabaman who ran for Senate in 2017 and was credibly accused of sexual misconduct with minors by multiple women. Liz Uihlein was a member of the 2016 Trump campaign’s economic council.

The Ed Uihlein Foundation gave to additional right-wing media outlets in 2019, including The Daily Caller News Foundation ($25,000), the Media Research Center ($275,000), and the Real Clear Foundation ($350,000), which has ties to The Federalist (see below). It also donated $400,000 to the Center for Security Policy, an anti-Muslim hate group. Its largest 2019 contribution, $3.2 million, went to the Foundation for Government Accountability, a State Policy Network member that advocated kicking people off of Medicaid this year during the pandemic. Since 2014, the Uihleins have given the Foundation for Government Accountability over $11 million.

The “Dark Money ATM” of the Conservative Movement

One of the political right’s biggest funding vehicles, DonorsTrust, gave $249,000 to the FDRLST Media Foundation in 2019. CMD was first to report on DonorsTrust’s 2019 tax records and on the group’s major donation to the white nationalist hate group VDARE, as well as a smaller amount to the New Century Foundation, the nonprofit behind the white nationalist publication American Renaissance.

DonorsTrust also gave $1,350,000 to the Real Clear Foundation and nearly $400,000 to the Media Research Center in 2019, part of $15 million in grants to conservative media operations that year.

DonorsTrust is a donor-advised fund sponsor, meaning that it manages individual charitable accounts of its wealthy clients, who have included GOP megadonors such the DeVos, Koch, and Mercer Families. These clients can donate appreciable assets into their accounts and score a double tax benefit: they get both a capital gains tax break and a charitable tax deduction. Clients then direct DonorsTrust to donate their money to the nonprofits of their choice, as long as the DonorsTrust board approves the proposed recipient. Donor-advised fund managers allow their clients to remain anonymous, as the manager legally owns and disperses the money.

DonorsTrust and its sister organization, Donors Capital Fund, distributed $165 million in grants in 2019, much of it going to right-wing think tanks, advocacy groups, litigation centers, media outlets, extremists, and climate deniers.

Past Clues

The Uihlein and DonorsTrust grants are the first known donations to The Federalist, but one financial tie was already public. Journalist Andrew Perez found that the George E. Coleman Jr. Foundation is an investor in FDRLST Media, LLC, the company behind The Federalist. In 2018, the Coleman Foundation had $148,000 invested in FDRLST Media. The foundation’s trustee, Daniel Oliver, is a former Reagan official who was once executive editor of the conservative National Review, which receives significant funding from DonorsTrust through its affiliated National Review Institute.

In advance of a 2019 Buzzfeed News article that cited the Coleman Foundation investment, Domenech, The Federalist’s publisher, refused to comment but tweeted that this impending revelation of public information amounted to “doxxing” an investor. “They will do this because they want to shut us down,” he claimed.

Federal tax records for the FDRLST Media Foundation are not yet public, but the Washington, D.C. secretary of state has public records of the foundation. David DesRosiers, the publisher of Real Clear Politics and the former executive vice president of the Uihlein-funded Manhattan Institute, is a director. Hemingway is both a director and a “governor.” Attorney Alan P. Dye is the third director.

It’s possible that more FDRLST Media Foundation donors will emerge as CMD obtains additional 2019 tax records from conservative foundations.

In September 2017, FDRLST Media filed an offering of debt securities with the Securities and Exchange Commission. At the time, $200,000 of the $750,000 offered had been sold. Listed as a director of FDRLST Media was John McIntyre, president and CEO of Real Clear Media. Someone named Jenn McIntyre was also listed as a director and an executive officer. The filing located FDRLST Media at the same Chicago address as Real Clear Politics, the main publication of Real Clear Media.

Real Clear has taken a “sharp right turn” in recent years, likely due to its increased funding from right-wing donors and its reaction to Trump’s takeover of the Republican party. A CMD report showed that at least 99 percent of the 2015 to 2018 revenue of the Real Clear Foundation, which funds the outlet’s investigative stories, came from right-wing funders, including DonorsTrust, Donors Capital Fund, the Uihlein Foundation, and two foundations of Charles Koch.

“As the administration lurched from one crisis after another,” wrote The New York Times’ Jeremy Peters last month, “Real Clear became one of the most prominent platforms for elevating unverified and reckless stories about the president’s political opponents, through a mix of its own content and articles from across conservative media.”

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primary 320 on covid party jump the shark

promote 2nd 1219, strangely resilient, sticking by djt on impeach of course, but// UPUSA, got teflon after fail (or maybe revealing white nat'l ain't really a problem? plus big funder?

series of embarrassments?

bak 1120 txt bad code?

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seems to have a deal with pope ctr --> martin g on education BS eg jenna robinson

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/despicable-dangerous-right-wing-assault-2020-election

Right-wing media’s pro-Trump echo chamber is not letting President Donald Trump go down without a fight. And its members are more than willing to make faith in the democratic system a casualty of their disinformation campaign.

Election experts long predicted that Election Day would end with a “red mirage” showing Trump in the lead, only for there to be a “blue shift” afterward as key states counted mail-in ballots that heavily favored Democratic nominee Joe Biden. That is exactly what is happening now. Biden’s popular vote margin has soared since Tuesday, and tightening margins in key states are bringing into focus his potential electoral path to victory.

Trump’s response has been to carry out the strategy he has foreshadowed for months. He falsely claimed victory, baselessly declared himself the victim of massive voter fraud, and said that he would be vindicated in the courts. Notably, these fraud claims are absent from his campaign’s actual lawsuits, which “appear mostly designed to generate headlines that Trump is contesting the outcome, rather than cases that could determine the outcome of the race,” as Popular Information’s Judd Legum pointed out after reviewing the filings.

But Trumpist media figures are recklessly touting false and nonsensical fraud accusations to bolster the president’s position. From MAGA social media influencers to right-wing YouTube stars, prime-time Fox hosts to conservative radio giants, their mutually reinforcing web is bombarding audiences with a full-spectrum effort to undermine confidence in the election results, raising tensions and fomenting unrest.

Here’s Tucker Carlson, the most popular cable news host in the country, along with the president’s lawyer Jenna Ellis, touting the since-retracted viral falsehood that Biden mysteriously received 138,000 votes in Michigan.

Here’s Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio host who has been a Republican kingmaker for decades and received the Medal of Freedom from the president this year, pushing the easily debunked viral lie that “Wisconsin now has more votes than people who are registered to vote."[11/4 show]

here’s Newt Gingrich, a former Republican speaker of the House and longtime Fox contributor, telling the viewers of the president’s favorite morning news show that there need to be Senate investigations and lawsuits due to purported fraud.

The fever-swamp mentality has engulfed right-wing social media and conspiracy-minded Trumpist websites.

It’s also spreading among the president’s more “intellectual” supporters. Here’s Ted Cruz, a prominent Republican senator who has argued cases before the Supreme Court, promoting Fox host Maria Bartiromo touting The Federalist’s baseless claim that “Democrats Are Trying To Steal The Election In Michigan, Wisconsin, And Pennsylvania,” which relies in part on the 138,000-vote lie.

These baseless fraud claims are fueling extraordinarily overheated rhetoric, as leading members of the Trumpist media urge their audiences to be “angry,” “outraged,” “worried,” and “concerned,” and to prepare “to fight” the Democrats who are “stealing your nation from you,” perhaps by trying to “surround” ballot counting locations to exert a “demanding presence.”

As the frenzy builds, Trump supporters have already begun swarming those locations in Michigan and Arizona. In the latter state, election officials briefly stopped the count after being intimidated by the armed protesters, before sheriff’s deputies in tactical gear arrived on the scene. Some pro-Trump influencers appear to be getting ready to add to the scene in Michigan and generate a similar one in Philadelphia.

It’s unclear what impact, if any, all of this will have on the election’s result. But it seems overwhelmingly likely that a large portion of Trump supporters will come to believe that the election is illegitimate and has been stolen from him. His propagandists could try to forestall that, working to dampen tensions -- but instead they'd rather inflame them.

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920 grab

Most Popular

Donald Trump speaks at a September 2020 rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania . Christopher Bedford.

NEARLY 10 MILES OF CARS LINE UP FOR TRUMP — AND A RAUCOUS NIGHT IN SMALL TOWN AMERICAThe county paper predicted a crowd of 2,000-plus for Pr

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RIC GRENELL GOES TO TOWN ON IDIOT REPORTERS: MAYBE YOU’RE TOO YOUNG OR DUMB TO INTELLIGENTLY DISCUSS ACTUAL ISSUESFormer Acting Director of the National Intelligence Ric

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TRUMP-HATER JOHN BOLTON DEBUNKS ANONYMOUS ATLANTIC HIT PIECE ON TRUMP’S VETERANS RECORD

Fired former National Security Advisor John Bolton debu

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820

random grab, tho triggered by john eastman birther:

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/new-report-reveals-one-of-the-funders-of-the-federalist-and-how-right-wing-commentators-warp-the-news/

alex h

some right-wing pundits will offer a policy-by-policy defense of President Donald Trump, while right-wing pundits of the Never Trump persuasion — from CNN’s Ana Navarro and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough to Bill Kristol and Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark — will go issue by issue while slamming the president. But Jeremy W. Peters, in an article for the New York Times, examines a third type of right-wing pundit: one who is generally pro-Trump but is less interested in defending Trump on the issues than demonizing Trump’s liberal critics.

“What these writers and pundits don’t tend to do is make the doggedly pro-Trump defenses that appear on Breitbart and erupt from the mouth of Sean Hannity,” Peters explains. “Often, they don’t bother at all with the awkward business of trying to explain away Mr. Trump’s latest folly. Instead, they offer an outlet for outrage against those the president has declared his enemies, often by reducing them to a culture war caricature of liberalism.

Peter cites The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway and Allie Beth Stuckey (who hosts the podcast “Relatable”) as examples of pundits who fall into that category. Stuckey, according to Peters, “does not go out of her way to defend the president” but does go out of her way to demonize his liberal critics.

“Through this lens,” Peters observes, “Mr. Trump’s transgressions seem irrelevant compared with the manifold misdeeds of everyone from the Clintons to CNN. Their portrayal of what the country would look like if the Democrats win big in November is indeed a frightening one to Trump supporters: a White House with Sen. Bernie Sanders as the shadow socialist president; a Democratic House of Representatives where Rep. Ilhan Omar calls the shots; a society in which mask mandates are the first step in a government experiment with social control; a political arena where conservatives are badgered into silence."

the piece also revealed one of The Federalist’s funders, who have long been kept secret, and indicated how the backer may have influenced its coverage:

Critics have asked who is funding the site, since ad revenue alone wouldn’t be enough to sustain its staff of 14 and political websites often rely on wealthy donors for support. The Federalist has not disclosed its supporters, leading to criticism that it is not being transparent about its agenda. But according to two people with knowledge of its finances, one of its major backers is Dick Uihlein, the Midwestern packing supply magnate and Trump donor who has a history of giving to combative, hard-right candidates, like Roy S. Moore of Alabama, who make many Republicans squeamish. (After Mr. Moore was accused of assaulting underage girls in 2017, The Federalist ran an opinion piece that defended men who dated young women as a practice with a long history that was “not without some merit if one wants to raise a large family.”)

Another pundit Peters discusses in his article is Ben Shapiro, who famously became the butt of jokes in the U.K. after calling British conservative Andrew Neil a “leftist” during an appearance on his BBC program (to Brits who are familiar with Neil, the notion that he is a “leftist” is beyond laughable). Shapiro is not deeply enamored of Trump the way that Breitbart’s staff are, but as Peters notes, Shapiro’s hatred of liberals by far outweighs his issues with Trump.

“Mr. Shapiro isn’t shy about calling out the president for his divisive and unfocused leadership, but far more often, he takes shots at Mr. Trump’s critics,” Peters explains. “Mr. Shapiro echoes other conservatives who deflect: Mr. Trump wasn’t helping anyone, for instance, by asking top public health officials to study whether disinfectant could be injected into the human body as a coronavirus treatment. But, Mr. Shapiro explained he didn’t actually tell people to put bleach in their bodies: ‘That doesn’t mean he was recommending actually injecting Clorox, people.’”

Tim Miller, a Never Trump conservative and GOP activist who writes for The Bulwark, told the Times that publications like The Federalist are motivated by “an unquenchable desire to take everybody else down a peg.” Miller, on the other hand, believes that Trump has been terrible for the conservative movement — and he is happy to express that view during his appearances on cable news.

With Hemingway, Stuckey and Shapiro, Peters observes, the main ingredient is “anti-liberalism” — not an intense adoration for all things Trump like one finds at Breitbart.

Nicole Hemmer, a research scholar at Columbia University in New York City, told the Times, “The conservative ideology that had been cohesive during the Cold War is falling apart. It seems to me that ‘owning the libs’ is kind of the way you hold everyone together when your policy preferences are coming apart."

==

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-federalist-publisher-calls-on-republicans-to-get-physically-involved-against-blm-protesters/

ben Domenech, publisher of the right-wing outlet The Federalist, called on Republican Party leaders to “physically take part” in defending the nation’s ?statues honoring Confederate leaders, slave-holding men, and brutal colonizers from protesters who are calling for the statues’ removal.

In a June 23 article titled “Where Are Conservative Leaders In This Moment?,” Domenech laments that Republican leadership has seemingly done little to defend ?the monuments from protesters across the nation?, despite running campaigns with messages doused in American nostalgia. Domenech writes:

Wrapping themselves in the language of the Founding Fathers, filling their buildings with quotes, books, busts, statues, and artist’s renderings, conservatives have thrived by making themselves the defenders of American history against a verbally iconoclastic left. But in practice, they spent more time advocating for lower taxes, feel-good donor interests, and pro-business regulatory reforms than the cultural defense they used to make the money roll in.

For Domenech, Republicans’ lip service is not enough. Instead, he wants to see GOP leaders take to the front lines of opposition:

Now that the left has become not just verbally iconoclastic, not just changing the names of streets or buildings but physically assaulting the past, why have conservatives gone quiet? Why are they standing back instead of standing up to defend our history? Why is it that a bunch of South Philly Italian bros have more gumption about a statue of Columbus than the people who have spent decades invoking Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and more to raise money for their causes and win elections?

The “South Philly Italian bros” that Domenech contrasts with Republicans ?leaders were a roving assemblage of vigilante white men in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood who threatened and intimidated Black Lives Matter protesters with bats and makeshift weapons? early in June, all with the tacit approval of the local police officers. Members of the group ended up assaulting a local news producer who was documenting the group’s ground presence, leaving him bloodied. Billy Penn reports that the men were alerted by police officers that “looting” could happen in their area?, which the men? interpreted it as a call-to?-arms.

Last week, a similar crowd ?of vigilante white men assembled in front of a statue of Christopher Columbus? again in Philadelphia on June 14. They were reportedly greeted with handshakes by police officers, who later allowed the group to assault people protesting at the statue.

Domenech called on Republican leaders to stand arm-in-arm with police officers and to fight protesters trying to remove statues.

What I want to see right now more than anything is elected officials and community leaders who are willing and ready to link arms with these cops and physically take part in cleaning up this mess and defying the mob.

Tags: Ben DomenechBlack Lives MatterGeorge Floydviolent rhetoricThe Federalist

---

aha: this has existed for a while as dirty tricks tactic (us vs them enemies; dirty germy foreigners; we are victims? amplifty and acclerate by trump and soc med echo escalator post truth; bktv 5/20 re-imagine capitalism says inequality acknowledged by all, even ceo; increases social instability and will --> left or rt populism and you won't like either, ceo's [lipton tea, aetna min wage]

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-uses-his-weird-grip-on-republicans-to-stoke-a-nihilistic-culture-war/

no lnx pix

trump uses his weird grip on Republicans to stoke a nihilistic culture war

Donald J. Trump holding a rally in Panama City Beach, Florida, on May 8, 2019 // Office of the President of the United States/Donald J. Trump

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon May 29, 2020

I don’t think there’s ever been a U.S. president with more influence with his political base that Donald Trump. All presidents are defended by those who support them, of course. Even the most unpopular failures have diehard fans who stick with them to the bitter end.

But Trump is unusual in that he has only ever attempted to govern on behalf of the people who support him and has no feeling of responsibility toward any other citizens. He has taken the already polarized Republican Party and turned it into a cult of personality. His influence over the 40 to 45% of the population who seem to idolize him is immense.

Perhaps it’s because Trump was a celebrity with a TV show long before he entered politics that makes his fans love him so unconditionally. Whatever it is, Trump and his supporters have an unusually personal and almost intimate bond. It’s clear after three and a half tumultuous years that they will follow his lead no matter what.

The political implications of this are profound. This weird relationship between president and base now completely dominates the Republican Party, apparently making it impossible for any prominent national figure in the party to allow even the smallest daylight between himself or herself and Trump. (Frankly, very few even seem to be trying.)

The red MAGA hat serves as an official symbol of Trump loyalty, and there is a certain part of his following that uses it as a tool of intimidation. Even more disturbing, there has been a spate of mass shootings and other acts of violence by people who have named Trump or his ideas as motivation.

In order to maintain his supporters’ devotion, Trump has stoked the culture wars at every turn, ruthlessly dividing the country in order to keep his fans engaged. They receive such hypocritical gestures of solidarity as his newfound “pro-life” zealotry with enthusiastic gratitude — but what they really love are his brutal assaults on those they consider their political and cultural enemies. In that, Trump and his base are one.

So it should come as no surprise that when Trump faced the first crisis of his presidency that was not of his own making — and failed to meet the challenge — he would reflexively fall back on culture-war tactics to reinforce his base. His response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been abysmal, with the death toll now over 100,000 and the economy in dire straits. After bungling the response so badly that it will be studied by historians for centuries as an example of poor leadership, Trump is returning to his original instinct, which was simply to deny that the whole thing mattered, or was even happening.

His supporters have eagerly followed his lead, defying public health guidelines and demanding that their governors “reopen” immediately (or in Trump’s own words of incitement, that they “liberate” their states.) Trump clearly believes that he can wish away the virus — or at least people’s concern about the virus — by pretending that the crisis is over and that we can go back to normal.

As we speak, he’s arguing with the state government of North Carolina about the Republican National Convention, which is scheduled for late August in Charlotte. Republican officials had reportedly been discussing how they could stage the event while observing CDC social distancing guidelines, and everything had been going smoothly. Trump, however, wants his big party, and wants it to be crammed with people screaming ecstatically at his every word. What he doesn’t want is anyone wearing masks.

In fact, wearing a mask, or rather not wearing one, is fast becoming as much of a symbol of Trump fealty as those red MAGA hats. Trump’s allies on Fox News have pushed it hard among the faithful (with the unexpected exception of Sean Hannity.)

Acyn Torabi

@Acyn

Laura’s war against masks continues

Embedded video

As Salon’s Igor Derysh reports, studies show that people who watch Fox are far more inclined to defy public health guidelines. But really, it’s Trump himself who has turned masks into a culture-war symbol by ostentatiously refusing to wear one.

This makes little sense, of course, if he genuinely wants to reopen the country in a way that allows workers and consumers to feel safe going about their business. Masks and social distancing are common-sense ways to begin doing that, and normalizing that behavior will bring back the economy more quickly. But Trump has decided to pretend that the crisis is over, as I said earlier, and mask-wearing and social distancing don’t exactly send that message.

I also suspect that his resistance is largely due to vanity. The man truly believes that wearing one will make him look foolish (which can only be described as amazing) and he may also have concerns about the mask rubbing off his thick orange makeup.

All of this comes as he’s also implying it’s somehow weak, unmanly and un-American to wear one. In fact, he’s seized upon this as a new attack line against Joe Biden:

Judd Legum

@JuddLegum

New Trump ads on Facebook mock Biden for wearing a mask

View image on Twitter

Some Republicans are actually pushing back on this, notably state governors who will have to deal with the resurgence of cases if people follow Trump’s dangerous example. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has urged people to wear them. It’s hard to know why these dissenters are stepping up now, but maybe it’s because they see something really dark and ugly taking hold among the Trump faithful.

For instance, Republicans in the Pennsylvania legislature who have been railing against public health measures turned out to have concealed the fact that one of their own members had contracted the virus. They quarantined themselves but never told their Democratic colleagues, allowing them to potentially expose their family members and loved ones without knowing it.

According to the Washington Post, there are businesses in various parts of the country now barring customers from wearing masks in their establishments. This was from an interview with Kevin Smith, proprietor of the Liberty Tree Tavern in Elgin, Texas:

“If we’re only allowed to be at 25 percent capacity, I want them to be the 25 percent of people that aren’t p—–, that aren’t sheep,” Smith told The Washington Post. “Being scared all the time isn’t good for your health. It suppresses your immune system.”

Trump posted this tweet yesterday, cutely pretending that he was just making an observation:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

So many different viewpoints! https://twitter.com/leesmithdc/status/1265629746450358273 …

Lee Smith

@LeeSmithDC

Terrific ?@molmccann? piece in ?@FDRLST? — masks aren’t about public health but social control. Image of Biden in black mask endorses culture of silence, slavery, and social death.  https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/27/mandatory-masks-arent-about-safety-theyre-about-social-control/ …

39.6K

5:16 AM - May 28, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

20.7K people are talking about this

The science is clear on this: Masks work. If everyone wore them when they were out in public it would make a significant difference in slowing the transmission of the virus. These people are pretending to be tough, but in reality they’re just following the example of the president and living in denial.

Imagine a world where, instead of behaving so foolishly, Trump modeled sensible behavior by wearing a mask and social distancing and encouraging businesses to open up responsibly? His followers would buy red MAGA masks by the truckload and turn social distancing into the mark of macho American individualism. But he can’t do that, of course, because stoking the culture war is literally his last hope of winning re-election.

==

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omfg

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/twitter-deletes-right-wing-outlets-post-suggesting-americans-get-intentionally-infected-with-covid-19

no lnx

Twitter deletes right-wing outlet’s post suggesting Americans get intentionally infected with Covid-19

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement March 25, 2020

Twitter has finally stepped in and deleted a post from The Federalist that links to their article suggesting a program intentionally infecting healthy Americans with the coronavirus. The highly-controversial article which runs counter to medical experts’ advice effectively suggests coronavirus parties as a “social activity,” a database of every person in the U.S. and their COVID-19 infection status, and wonders: “Will we allow parents to make these sorts of infection decisions for both themselves and their children?”

“This Tweet is no longer available because it violated the Twitter Rules,” is the message social media users trying to access The Federalist’s tweet now receive.

Twitter has finally stepped in and deleted a post from The Federalist that links to their article suggesting a program intentionally infecting healthy Americans with the coronavirus. The highly-controversial article which runs counter to medical experts’ advice effectively suggests coronavirus parties as a “social activity,” a database of every person in the U.S. and their COVID-19 infection status, and wonders: “Will we allow parents to make these sorts of infection decisions for both themselves and their children?”

“This Tweet is no longer available because it violated the Twitter Rules,” is the message social media users trying to access The Federalist’s tweet now receive.

Facebook has not deleted The Federalist’s post promoting its article. NCRM will not link to it but our original reporting on the article is here.

The article itself, penned by an Oregon dermatologist, has not been taken down, but it has been removed from the front page and does not appear in the website’s list of most popular stories, which given the controversy surrounding it, likely is.

“Twitter initially added a warning to the link stating that the post might be ‘unsafe,’” Mediaite reports. Twitter then “temporarily locked” The Federalist’s account, but it is once again active, sans the offensive and dangerous tweet, which read: “It is time to think outside the box and seriously consider a somewhat unconventional approach to COVID-19: controlled voluntary infection.”

“Twitter has taken aggressive measures to crack down on misinformation surrounding the coronavirus,” but there is still a tremendous amount of user-generated bad information on the platform.

As NCRM reported earlier, aside from the obvious problems with the article itself, the author ignores the fact that there is no proof re-infection would not happen after the coronavirus parties. There is sufficient anecdotal information to suggest at least some can “catch” the virus after recovery.

The Federalist is a right wing website whose secret finding has been the source of much online speculation. It advocates increasingly extremist viewpoints, and was co-founded by Ben Domenech, who is a regular on NBC’s and MSNBC’s “Meet the Press.”

==

==

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Here are just some of the most notable examples of conservative media pushing this negligent narrative:

America’s Newsroom co-anchor Ed Henry said that “you don’t want to minimize any lives,” but then noted a “best estimate” of the mortality rate is less than 1%, and asked “what is the balance?”

Fox primetime host Tucker Carlson argued that “you can't just let epidemiologists run a country.”

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick appeared on Carlson’s show to suggest that many grandparents, like himself, would be willing to die if it meant saving the economy.

Right-wing radio host Buck Sexton tweeted, then deleted, a comment saying that “America is going to have to go back to work very soon, even if that means there are more casualties from Covid-19 than would occur under this continued extreme shutdown.” Sexton added that, “it’s a hard thing to say, but it is reality and we need to accept and act on it.”

Fox News host Steve Hilton said: “You know that famous phrase ‘the cure is worse than the disease’? That is exactly the territory we are hurtling towards"

[pix]

Fox News’ Bill Hemmer Reports, Heritage Foundation fellow Stephen Moore, a former Trump adviser, said that “we have reached the point where maybe the cure is worse than the disease.”

A panel on Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria agreed that the economic shutdown is worse then the deadly virus itself, expressing support for the U.K.’s strategy of “encouraging people to go out, pretty much expecting that everybody will get it, and that's the point.”

The Federalist published an article asking the “harsh” question of “whether the nation might be better off letting a few hundred thousand people die.” The article argues that social distancing policies restrict “freedom” and are giving Americans “a dress rehearsal for tyranny."

Another article published in The Federalist asked, “Will the costs of a Great Depression outweigh the risks of coronavirus?”

The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed titled “Rethinking the Coronavirus Shutdown: No society can safeguard public health for long at the cost of its economic health.”

Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren tweeted, “these Democratic governors and mayors are LOVING all this power. Every day they take away a little more and a little more.” In another tweet, Lahren attacked California Governor Gavin Newsom for closing hiking trails and state parks.

Top Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow appeared on America’s Newsroom, where he told co-anchor Ed Henry that he agrees with the president that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease, and we’re gonna have to make some difficult trade-offs.”

The Gateway Pundit published an article cheering Trump's tweets for suggesting “the destruction of the US economy over [the] Chinese Flu is not in his plans.”

Right-wing commentator Bill Mitchell theorized that the virus was a bioweapon designed to hurt the economy, tweeting, “The difference between a #BioWeapon and a #BioEconomicWeapon? A #BioWeapon is designed to destroy the enemy's fighting and working age population. A #BioEconomicWeapon is designed to destroy an enemy's economy through fear. #BioEconomicWeapons require #Media allies to work.”

Fox News host Mark Levin said that “we cannot have medical experts and scientists making economic policy. We just can’t. So there needs to be a more sober look at this.” ...

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/dumbassery-conservative-editor-calls-out-right-wing-medias-bad-takes-on-deadly-coronavirus-pandemic/

no lnx

‘Dumbassery’: Conservative editor calls out right-wing media’s ‘bad takes’ on deadly coronavirus pandemic

Written by Alex Henderson March 17, 2020

As the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic continues to grow in the United States and many other countries, one thing The Bulwark can take pride in is the fact that — unlike so many other right-wing media outlets — it didn’t spend weeks trying to convince readers that coronavirus was merely a liberal hoax or “fake news” designed to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency. The Never Trump conservatives at The Bulwark always took the pandemic seriously, including The Bulwark’s senior editor, Jim Swift — who lambasts some of the incredibly moronic things that various Trumpistas and far-right media figures have said about coronavirus recently.

“The internet being what it is, and politics being what it is — and 2020 dumbassery being what it is — there are a lot of bad covid-19 takes floating around,” Swift asserts. And he cities Newsmax writer John Cardillo as a glaring example.

On March 13, Cardillo went to Twitter and said of coronavirus, “Treat it like the flu. The panic and hysteria created by the media is criminal. They are destroying lives, businesses, and the economy to make Trump look bad and again screw with elections.”

In response to Cardillo’s tweet, Swift writes, “Sure, John. The news media aren’t covering this story because it’s important and deadly, they’re only covering it because they want to take down President Donald J. Trump.”

In other words, treat it like the flu.

The panic and hysteria created by the media is criminal.

They are destroying lives, businesses, and the economy to make Trump look bad and again screw with elections. https://t.co/Pmclsy25wJ

— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) March 13, 2020

Swift also slams Liberty University’s Jerry Falwell, Jr. Appearing as a guest on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends,” Falwell argued that Americans are “overreacting” to coronavirus and that all the media coverage of the pandemic is merely an “attempt to get Trump.” Moreover, Falwell claimed that coronavirus is a North Korean bioweapon.

On Fox & Friends, Jerry Falwell Jr claims people are “overreacting” to coronavirus, the national response is “their next attempt to get Trump,” and the virus itself is a North Korean bioweapon. pic.twitter.com/2JPuNBW7C3

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) March 13, 2020

Swift goes on to lambast Infowars’ Alex Jones and “old-school televangelist grifter Jim Bakker” for “hawking” bogus treatments they claim will cure coronavirus. And Swift cites a March 12 tweet from The Federalist’s Sean Davis as another example of idiocy: Davis tweeted, “Corporate political media hate you, they hate the country, and they will stop at nothing to reclaim power to rule over you. If that means that they destroy the economy via a panic that they helped incite, all while running interference for the communist country that started it, so be it.”

Truly deranged, InfoWars level stuff from The Federalist. pic.twitter.com/FzBTldunsg

— andrew kaczynski?? (@KFILE) March 13, 2020

Sarcastically describing Fox News’ Ainsley Earhardt as an “aviation expert…. not to be confused with Amelia Earhart,” Swift notes her recent comment, “It’s actually the safest time to fly. Everyone I know that’s flying right now, terminals are pretty much dead.”

Ainsley Earhardt: “It’s actually the safest time to fly. Everyone I know that’s flying right now, terminals are pretty much dead.” (It is not the safest time to fly.) pic.twitter.com/a3BnajAbj5

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) March 13, 2020

AmGreatness’ Julie Kelly, who Swift describes as a “nutty, bad-faith operator,” has called social distancing a left-wing plot to “get control” that is “far scarier than any virus.”

Scientists and health officials say social distancing (reducing contact, temporarily) is an effective way to reduce infections. Naturally, some are claiming it’s a leftist plot to gain control of the country. pic.twitter.com/TDMJM6ddir

— Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) March 13, 2020

At this point I think you have a greater chance of being attacked by Joe Biden than catching coronavirus

— Julie Kelly (@julie_kelly2) March 10, 2020

China. https://t.co/VULqyrceUH

— Ron Coleman (@RonColeman) March 13, 2020

Good news on the coronavirus you won’t find anywhere else:

-China has closed down its last coronavirus hospital. Not enough new cases to support them.

-Italy is hit hard, experts say, because they have the oldest population in Europe (average age of those that have died is 81).

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) March 13, 2020

Swift concludes his article by warning that as coronavirus “spreads” in the U.S., Americans will do themselves a favor by not taking nonsense from Fox News seriously.

“Things are going to get worse — not only as the pandemic spreads, but as the bad takes spread too,” Swift warns. “If you’re stuck at home, I’d encourage you not to watch cable news — and encourage your family to avoid it, too. Especially Fox News.”

==

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not exactly punked?

https://www.mediamatters.org/abc/abc-takes-bait-and-suspends-veteran-correspondent-over-bad-faith-right-wing-hit-job

2/26/20

ABC News suspended veteran correspondent David Wright on February 25 after he gave reasonable criticism of the network while being secretly recorded in a video later released by Project Veritas. The organization has a well-known reputation for videotaping media figures and progressive activists and releasing bad-faith, edited videos to push a right-wing agenda.

The video, which Project Veritas released on February 26 after teasing it the night before, features Wright offering criticisms of ABC’s coverage of the Trump administration and other political issues. It has clearly been edited to portray Wright’s comments in a negative light.

In the heavily edited video, Wright was critical of the broadcast news business model and suggested that the network still hasn’t figured out how to properly cover Trump. He claimed that ABC fails to give Trump credit for things he does right while also failing to “hold him to account”; chooses more exciting, “TV-friendly” stories over practical issues that matter to voters; takes Trump’s coverage bait in a way that enables him; and overcompensates for the false accusation from groups like Project Veritas that mainstream media pull for the Democratic Party.

Wright also complained that drama surrounding Trump dominates the news cycle and the “voters are poorly informed.” He criticized ABC’s “self-promotional” relationship with Disney, saying that the network often blends news with commercial interests: “You can’t watch Good Morning America without there being a Disney princess or a Marvel Avenger appearing.”

Many of these comments are consistent with criticisms other journalists have made of political media in the age of Trump, and thus there was swift condemnation of ABC for its decision to suspend Wright.

Others were furious that Wright was suspended after he expressed support for progressive policies and said he considers himself a socialist, calling his suspension “absolutely outrageous” given a lack of progressive voices in mainstream media.

Project Veritas, founded by James O’Keefe, has a long history of secretly recording videos and then deceptively editing and releasing them in order to paint its subjects as negatively as possible and catch them in a “gotcha” moment. Veritas targets organizations that it claims have a “liberal” association, and its operatives often approach targets using a false name to coax information from them through casual conversations.

O'Keefe's goal is typically to obtain footage that can be edited in a way that embarrasses or delegitimizes targeted organizations, often seeking to expose “liberal bias” in the media. Past targets have included NPR, The New York Times, and CNN, and as a result, many news organizations are aware of Project Veritas’ motives when these videos are released.

Wright has been a journalist with ABC for nearly 20 years, covering the White House and reporting from the Middle East and Europe. His reporting has earned him an Emmy and a Peabody Award for work related to Iraq and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, respectively.

The reasonable nature of Wright’s criticisms of a business model that prioritizes generating ratings over informing viewers, combined with Project Veritas’ well-known reputation and bad-faith tactics, make ABC’s decision to suspend Wright and reassign him from political reporting to “avoid any possible appearance of bias” concerning.

Conservative media outlets like Fox News and The Federalist and figures such as Turning Point USA’s Benny Johnson have already pounced on the footage to advance the right-wing narrative that ABC is a biased source that does a poor job of informing viewers -- and by suspending Wright, the network has fallen for it too.

Update (5:45 p.m.): O'Keefe and Sean Hannity agreed that ABC News should not have suspended Wright[aUDIO]

O'KEEFE: This guy Wright is just being honest. He's just talking about how ABC's pushing Disney products on Good Morning America. He called himself a socialist. He calls Trump a bad name, the d-word, in this tape. He also seems to say that they don't give Trump credit -- they don't give him enough credit. He actually says this about Trump, that they don't give him enough credit for the things that he does right. So he's simultaneously kind of trashing Trump, calling himself a socialist, but also saying Trump does some good things and we don't talk about it, we don't care about voters, we don't cross the Hudson River, this guy says, to look at what voters care about. So he's just being honest, he's been suspended for being honest, and for that I think it was wrong to suspend him. I think he was just telling the truth, Sean.

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): Well, I think so too.

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==

https://www.mediamatters.org/mollie-hemingway/federalist-trump-one-day-tale-how-quickly-baseless-allegation-reaches-president

mma 220

no lnk many twt

Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

From The Federalist to Trump in one day: A tale of how quickly a baseless allegation reaches the president

Trump accused Sen. Chris Murphy of potentially violating the Logan Act after right-wing media created and spread the allegation

WRITTEN BY KAYLA GOGARTY

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM BOBBY LEWIS

PUBLISHED 02/20/20 2:22 PM EST

After The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway reported that Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) met with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, right-wing media seized on the opportunity to call Democrats hypocrites and baselessly allege that the meeting was a violation of the Logan Act. President Donald Trump repeated the same allegation to the press a day later.

Trump has a history of promoting conspiracy theories and baseless allegations after he sees them amplified by right-wing media outlets. In this instance, right-wing media figures and the president are accusing Murphy of violating the Logan Act, “a 1799 law that prohibits ordinary citizens from negotiating with foreign powers.” According to University of Texas School of Law professor Steve Vladeck, the law, which has never been used to successfully prosecute any American citizen, “only applies to conduct that is designed to ‘defeat the measures of the United States’ or influence the conduct of foreign governments.”

Although there is no evidence that Murphy did either of those things in his meeting with Zarif, Trump accused the senator of violating U.S. law (an allegation he also previously made against former Secretary of State John Kerry). Trump’s allegation against Murphy came after right-wing outlets and social media accounts quickly amplified the report that The Federalist had originally published, using it to call Democrats hypocritical and to inaccurately compare Murphy to former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn. (Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.) Claiming that Democrats are hypocrites is a bad-faith argument that right-wing media personalities are using to create faux outrage, a common tactic of theirs.

Here is how the allegation against Murphy spread across right-wing media and was repeated by Trump on February 18:

Mollie Hemingway reports that Democratic senators met with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif

On February 17, Hemingway, the Federalist’s senior editor, published an article that claimed a “source briefed by the French delegation” to the Munich Security Conference said that Murphy and other Democratic senators met with Zarif during the conference last week. The article went on to baselessly allege that “such a meeting would mean Murphy had done the type of secret coordination with foreign leaders to potentially undermine the U.S. government.”

Hemingway also alleged that the State Department “was not aware of any side meetings with Iranian officials that Murphy was engaged in.” CNN and a Politico reporter debunked this allegation, saying that Murphy’s office actually did notify the State Department before the meeting with Zarif.

Right-wing media outlets and social media accounts amplify Hemingway’s report and start making egregious claims

Pro-Trump social media spread Hemingway’s article, including Facebook pages Patriot Movement AZ, Nashville Tea Party, and Make America Great Again, and Twitter accounts of Hudson Institute’s Rebeccah Heinrichs and The Federalist’s Sean Davis. Some right-wing media outlets, such as the The Daily Wire, CNS News, The Gateway Pundit, and Southern Patriot News, also reported on it.

On Twitter, right-wing accounts started making egregious claims:

Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk

Hudson Institute senior fellow Michael Doran

Iranian opposition group Mojahedin-e-Khalq’s propaganda persona Heshmat Alvi

Conservative radio talker and Fox News host Mark Levin

Townhall’s Kurt Schlichter

Pompeo: “If they met, I don’t know what they said. I hope they were reinforcing America’s foreign policy, not their own.”

During a press availability on February 18, Voice of America’s Cindy Spang asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo if he could confirm that a group of Democratic senators met with Zarif. Pompeo said that he has “seen that piece” and that “if they met, I don’t know what they said. I hope they were reinforcing America’s foreign policy, not their own.”

Following Pompeo’s response, right-wing media outlets, including Townhall, The Washington Free Beacon, and The Federalist, reported on his comments, spurring additional reactions from right-wing social media accounts.

Murphy confirms that he met with Zarif

As is his general practice, Murphy discussed his overseas trip in a “behind the scenes” Medium post on February 18, part of which he turned into a Twitter thread as well. According to Murphy, he and Republican Sens. Ron Johnson (WI) and John Barrasso (WY) met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, Ukraine, and they then met up with the rest of the bipartisan congressional delegation at the Munich Security Conference, which included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), other House members, and over a dozen senators. Murphy wrote that he met with Zarif during the conference to discuss Yemen, “to gauge whether he thinks the reprisals for the Soleimani assassination are over,” and to “raise the issue of American prisoners held in Iran.”

Right-wing Twitter personalities inaccurately call the meeting a violation of the Logan Act

In response to Murphy’s comments, right-wing outlets accused him of “stonewalling,” “secretly meeting” with Iran, and being “a massive hypocrite.” TheBlaze even claimed, “None of this would be a problem had Murphy been more forthright about the meeting and his motivations for holding it before it took place.”

On social media, right-wing figures accused Murphy of violating the Logan Act, with Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton suggesting he committed treason. The phrase was even trending on Twitter at one point. Here are some examples:

Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk

Far-right Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich

Radio host Sebastian Gorka

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton

Right-wing personality Kambree Kawahine Koa

Donald Trump Jr.

Fox News contributor Dan Bongino

The Federalist’s Sean Davis

Trump: “Sounds like to me a violation of the Logan Act”

As the story spread on social media, Trump quickly weighed in while speaking with the press on February 18.

His comments further fueled the baseless allegations against Murphy and even sparked a response from Zarif.

Even Fox News admits that “it would be a bit of a stretch to say he violated the Logan Act” before changing its tune

Right-wing media outlets such as Hot Air, The Washington Times, and Fox News covered Trump’s comments. Fox News aired Trump speaking with the press on January 18 and, in response, Fox News chief White House correspondent John Roberts said, “It would be a bit of a stretch to say that he violated the Logan Act.”

However, Fox changed its tune later:

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs said Murphy is “an abject fool,” “nothing more than a self-important hack,” and “knows how to be played.”

On Fox News @ Night, Hemingway said, “While it's true that [the Logan Act] is rarely used, it was famously used against Trump affiliates to really gin up that entire Russia collusion hoax. But now Chris Murphy seems to have a different view when it comes to his own coordination with the Iranian foreign minister.

Fox also hosted Hemingway on Fox & Friends the next morning, when she said, “Just a few years ago, when Mike Flynn, as an incoming member of the Trump administration, had a conversation with his Russian counterpart, Chris Murphy thought that this was treasonous, illegal. … But now, when Chris Murphy is having secret meetings in the hotel rooms of Iranian leaders, … now he thinks that’s perfectly fine.”

Trump amplified the allegation on Twitter

Trump continued to attack Murphy on February 19, repeating the false allegation in a post on Twitter that also raised his old accusations against Kerry and retweeting Sean Davis’ tweet about it.

Trump retweet of Sean Davis' February 18, 2020 tweet about the Logan Act

Trump attacked both Kerry and Murphy again on February 20 on Twitter, claiming that they “grossly violated the Logan Act.”

The short timeline between The Federalist’s publication of its report and Trump's amplification of the baseless allegation is emblematic of how quickly disinformation spreads across the right-wing media ecosystem, gets amplified by Fox, and influences the president. It's a tactic that has successfully exploited the Fox-Trump feedback loop and led to the president issuing pardons and making policy decisions.

==

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/hallmark-movies-are-the-most-insidious-authoritarian-propaganda-heres-how/

no lnx

Hallmark movies are the most insidious authoritarian propaganda — here’s how

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon December 26, 2019

The Hallmark Channel has been having a rough go of it in the past few weeks. The cable TV behemoth, which has been minting money with its patented holiday season schmaltz, drew widespread criticism earlier this month when it pulled ads for the wedding company Zola that featured a lesbian couple kissing at their wedding. The company’s initial excuse was that they do not allow ads that feature “overt public displays of affection,” claiming the policy is “regardless of the participants.”

This was, obviously, nonsense, as couples kissing at weddings is not only not outré, but generally seen as mandatory (and features in the channel’s numerous rom-coms).Unsurprisingly, critics quickly found plenty of examples of straight snogging on the channel that shows that sexual orientation was the sole reason for the ad pull. (That, and Hallmark was clearly responding to a right-wing pressure campaign claiming that lesbian kissing “ruined” the channel’s “family friendly” offerings.) Hallmark then flip-flopped, apologizing for pulling the ads and claiming they have been “a progressive pioneer on television for decades” and “committed to diversity and inclusion.”

Which is, of course, laughable to anyone who has even glancing knowledge of the channel’s offerings. Running down this year’s schedule of Christmas movie offerings is like a trip into an uncanny valley of shiny-teethed, blow-dried heteronormative whiteness, with only a few token movies with characters of color. It’s like watching “The Stepford Wives,” but scarier, since the evil plot to replace normal people with robots is never actually revealed.

None of this should be a surprise, because Hallmark movies, as cloying and saccharine as they are, constitute the platonic ideal of fascist propaganda.

That is probably a startling statement to some. When most of us think about fascistically propagandistic movies, we think of the grotesque grandeur of Leni Riefenstahl’s films celebrating the Third Reich — grand, but cold sweeping shots of soldiers goose-stepping and flags waving, all meant to inspire awe and terror. But the reality is, even in Nazi Germany, the majority of movies approved by the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, were escapist and feather-light, with a Hallmark movie-style emphasis on the importance of “normality.”

There’s plenty of reason that empty-headed kitsch fits neatly in the authoritarian worldview. It’s storytelling that imitates the gestures of emotion without actually engaging with real feeling. The Hallmark movie steers clear of the real passion or deeper emotion that tends to be the engine driving more artful fiction. Characters who have real feelings, after all, can prompt empathetic reactions in the audience, and empathy for others is the greatest single threat to the authoritarian mindset. And so schmaltz walks through the paces of “love” without touching on any of the messy but compelling realities of it.

Instead of characters driven by real feelings, therefore, the guiding hand of “normalcy” pulls the characters along through narratives — and unsurprisingly, that idea of “normalcy” doesn’t have a lot of room for the true diversity of American experiences.

This much is evident in the efforts to include Jewish characters in recent Hallmark holiday movies which, by all accounts, seems like a complete disaster — in part because the rule of “normalcy” reorients everything towards a very narrow, sentimentalized version of Christmas.

“In the Hallmark-Lifetime Cinematic Universe, Hanukkah and the characters who celebrate it exist only in relation to Christmas,” Nancy Coleman of th New York Times complained, adding that the Hallmark movie “Holiday Date” could, with “remarkably little editing” turn into “a Jewish ‘Get Out.'”

Britni de la Cretaz, writing for the Washington Post, not only complained that the Jewish Hallmark movies were “Christmas movies with Jewish characters,” but also that the movies “rely on some of the oldest anti-Semitic tropes in the book,” such as painting one Jewish character as the “perpetual outsider” who is “sneaky, untrustworthy.”

“The drama hinges on Jewish characters being compelled to observe Christmas, and the tension resolves only when these outsiders learn how to participate in or appreciate the dominant religious tradition,” she adds.

Sadly, it’s hard to imagine it being any other way. The qualities that people cite when they defend Hallmark movies — comforting, formulaic, soothing — are all a result of the aggressively conformist impulse that drives them. And that impulse and fealty to the dominant culture stands in direct contrast to the values of diversity Hallmark facetiously claims to hold.

Hallmark movies, with their emphasis on returning home and the pleasures of the small, domestic life, also send a not-at-all subtle signal of disdain for cosmopolitanism and curiosity about the larger world, which is exactly the sort of attitude that helps breed the kind of defensive white nationalism that we see growing in strength in the Donald Trump era.

If you don’t believe me, listen to authoritarians themselves. At the Federalist, which is ground zero website for generating frankly fascist “culture war” arguments, Hans Fiene argues that, “culturally speaking, Hallmark Christmas movies are noticeably Christian.”

By this, Fiene isn’t talking about characters who actually go to church or pray — even self-identified conservative Christians don’t want to see that — but a set of patriarchal and authoritarian values that are more about white evangelicals defining themselves as an ethnic group, and not about a genuine feeling of spirituality.

The movies always depict a “heroine who begins the story loving her self-involved life in the city chooses family and a life of self-sacrifice in her hometown,” he writes, arguing that it’s the “last remaining hideout” for those who want a fantasy of a world where “the cynicism and immorality of modern life aren’t allowed.” By “cynicism and immmorality,” Fiene explains he’s talking about “fornication” and acceptance of “sexual deviants,” by which he means LGBTQ people.

None of this, of course, means that everyone who watches Hallmark Christmas movies is some kind of fledgling fascist. These movies are not for me, but I believe people when they say they find it relaxing to watch these predictable movies that have low stakes because none of the characters feel like real people. I’ve got my own flavors of trashy entertainment I fully enjoy without mistaking it for high art. (Baby Yoda, what’s up?)

Still, it’s critical to be mindful of the role that Hallmark movies are actually playing in our society. The very fact that they’re presented as harmless fluff makes it all the more insidious, the way they work to enforce very narrow, white, heteronormative, sexist, provincial ideas of what constitutes “normal.”

It’s easy to spot fascist propaganda when it’s goose-stepping Pepe-the-frog memes. It’s a lot harder to notice how it’s working when it’s tied up in Christmas cheer and suggesting grinchhood of anyone who questions the rigidity of its worldview.

As University of Richmond communications professor Nicole Maurantonio wrote in a recent piece exposing the sneakily racist propaganda of Confederate-themed Christmas ornaments, “seemingly apolitical objects like cookbooks, toys and Christmas ornaments commemorating Confederate history serve to normalize,” and in doing so, make white supremacy seem less harmful than it actually is.

Ultimately, there’s a reason that authoritarian religious right groups like One Million Moms and American Family Association — who made the initial demands on Hallmark to end the lesbian-inclusive ads —  believe that the Hallmark Channel “belongs” to them. They may use euphemisms like “family friendly,” but as there is nothing more family friendly than light PDAs from loving couples at weddings, we can say for certain that is not what bothers them. Instead, it’s because they believe Hallmark is “safe” because it excludes people who don’t fit their extremely rigid ideas about what constitutes “normal.”

“So many people feel betrayed because this is one of the very last channels that families could go to and not be bombarded with politically correct commercials and the LGBTQ agenda,” the American Family Association griped in a press release.

Note that the language is solely that of exclusion. This isn’t about Christian conservatives wanting more Hallmark movies that show characters who actually go to church or anything like that. What makes something “family friendly” and “Christian” is who is not allowed inside the fantasy land of impossibly expensive rural houses and women who are realizing that they wanted to just get married to the boy next door all along.

Ultimately, there is probably no way to square the claim to believe in “diversity” with fascistic impulse that guides the current crop of Hallmark movies, which center always around these frankly MAGA-style ideas about what constitutes “real” America. As the Jewish movies show, the best that Hallmark can do is some token “diversity” that wipes out most of what makes people actually diverse.  Their money comes from selling a vision of America that increasingly authoritarian conservatives wish to believe once existed and can be restored again — an America that excludes most of an increasingly urban, racially diverse,  cosmopolitan nation. That won’t change no matter how many inclusive Zola ads the network airs.

Amanda Marcotte is a politics writer for Salon. Her new book, “Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself,” is out now. She’s on Twitter @AmandaMarcotte.

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no lnx many, link to clintel eur decl bs ltr 500 sci not listed

Climate Worship Is Nothing More Than Rebranded Paganism

We're seeing sexualized dances, hallucinogens, worshiping nature, confessing sins in pagan animism, worshiping purified teen saints, all to promote a supposedly greater cause.

Sumantra MaitraBy Sumantra Maitra

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Lynn Townsend White Jr., an American historian from Princeton, wrote an influential essay in 1967, at the height of the cultural revolution in Western campuses, arguing that Christianity and Judeo-Christian values are responsible for ecological disaster and climate change. The essay, naturally, was adapted by generations after, ironically almost like a document of faith.

The central argument went like this. White argued, “The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture. … By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.”

If nothing else, the last few days should be enough to prove that Western civilization, a product of more than 1,500 years of Judeo-Christian values, is facing its most significant and sustained challenge in centuries from tribalistic paganism, a force that seeks not only to turn back time but essentially to destroy the entire current edifice.

Greta Thunberg and the Church of Mother Earth

As secular liberalism destroyed the fundamental ties that bind society — faith, flag, and family — the human instincts for faith — to believe, worship, submit, and fear — didn’t just go away but manifested in various other pre-civilized tribal ways. For example, a liberal seminary encouraged its students to skip classes to pray and confess sins in front of potted plants. In Switzerland, 250 people in full funereal garb mourned the apparent approaching death of a glacier.

That is why members of “Extinction Rebellion” do what they do. Extinction Rebellion is an apocalyptic cult that wants to radically end every thing around you, from your private cars to the burgers you eat and the plastic chairs in your yard. It is a cult that was formed after its founder took psychedelic drugs and prayed for “social change.” Members have blocked D.C. and London intersections, “twerking” the way people in a pre-civilized era would perform a fertility dance to pray to Gaia.

And then there’s Saint Greta, our perpetual teen of sorrow. I have been comparing her worship to Joan of Arc ever since she was invited to the British Parliament, the birthplace of modern democracy. She was surrounded by buffoons nodding their heads like they were listening to gospel truth.

Lads, I hesitate to take credit for my predictions…I am magnanimous and noble like that…but this entire Joan of Arc thingy…you guys read it here, first.

"Climate Apocalypticism" is simply a paganist religion, with its own saints, sinners, and providential end. pic.twitter.com/YF5VmGfGVl

— Mr Maitra (@MrMaitra) September 22, 2019

I wrote about her long before the new woke-capital fanatics adopted her as a pawn. In a recent speech to the U.N., while clearly having an emotional meltdown, she told assorted leaders, voice trembling, that they have failed the children and history wouldn’t be kind. The “gatekeepers” immediately hailed her as a brave savior as well as a vulnerable, autistic teen who shouldn’t be bullied.

So, there you have it. Sexualized dances, psychedelic hallucinogens, worshiping nature, confessing sins in pagan animism, worshiping purified teen saints, and throwing them up on an altar, bereft of their childhood, to promote a greater cause. Add to that witches hexing Brett Kavanaugh, and having an Ouija board to invoke the spirit of Karl Marx, and everything old is new again.

The reality is, of course, completely different. Much less than destroying the planet, climate change isn’t even a settled science. Conservatives don’t disagree that climate is changing. That is a straw man. Conservatives, however, are opposed to hysteria, have skepticism about the rate of the climate change, and would like to see an actual cost-benefit analysis of the radical changes being demanded.

More important than that, conservatives understand that climate change is cynically used by a certain section of people to justify their political goals of steering the West away from its way of life, a way they perceive to be evil and harmful, hetero-patriarchal, and capitalist. How? Appealing to the faith-based part of human brains, the need for subservience, and propping up children as human shields.

The Left Created a Climate Crisis and Worships It

Consider a new letter by more than 500 scientists, which the mainstream media completely ignored. It urges the United Nations to have an open debate between scientists from both sides of the argument and states there’s “no climate emergency.” The report goes on to say, among other things:

The world has warmed at less than half the originally-predicted rate; Climate policy relies on inadequate models; More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth; There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent; There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050.

In short, everything you’re being told is wrong or flawed, and you’re a chump who is being taken for a ride.

For all the Marxists’ faults, the old left at least wanted to conquer nature instead of turning subservient to it. Of course, that went to its own extremes, but one can imagine Joseph Stalin putting all twerking climate fanatics as mentally ill people in a forced labor camp to build railroads in Siberia. The current Chinese government, likewise, gives two hoots about climate change, and for all the bravery of Green Peace and St. Greta, there’s nothing they can do about China burning more coal than the rest of humanity combined.

The modern left is a combination of two of the worst impulses in human history. First are the ultra-privileged bourgeoisie, which, having lost their old Judeo-Christian faith, are instinctively attracted to pre-civilized rituals, from overt sexuality to fewer familial ties. Consider Late Roman public orgies, and you get an idea. At the same time, human minds feel a gaping void that still needs to be filled by an alternate faith. It is in that intersection where this occultist, apocalyptic climate paganism comes from. It gives some privileged people a noble purpose.

As French philosopher Pascal Bruckner wrote in his book “The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings,” the current movement has all the trappings of a religion: saints, sinners, a providential end, apocalyptic fear, punishment, and penance. It appears Emperor Constantine’s children clearly failed to civilize their future generations. The pagan barbarians from the north are back circling outside the citadel.

Sumantra Maitra is a doctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham, UK, and a senior contributor to The Federalist. His research is in great power-politics and neorealism. You can find him on Twitter @MrMaitra.

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Koch Foundations Increased Media Investments in 2018

by Alex Kotch | November 26th, 2019

Billionaire Charles Koch's two foundations spent nearly $3.5 million on media grants and contracts in 2018.

As the political and philanthropic network of billionaire libertarian Charles Koch employs its latest PR strategy, the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF) and the Charles Koch Institute (CKI) increased their giving to media organizations by roughly $1 million in 2018.

Koch has generally funded right-wing organizations such as the Daily Caller News Foundation, which funds much of the content on the Daily Caller website, and the Reason Foundation, which publishes libertarian-minded news and opinion on Reason.com. These and other donations continued in 2018, but the two foundations also contracted with conservative media outlet RealClearPolitics and two center-left publications, The Atlantic and Ozy Media.

Overall, CKF and CKI combined to spend nearly $3.5 million on media grants and contracts in 2018. This amount is a small, but growing, portion of the foundations’ annual donations. In 2018, CKF gave out $127.5 million in donations, mostly to fund Koch’s right-wing educational and political infrastructure.

Daily Caller News Foundation

CKF’s largest media grant in 2018, $746,250, went to the Daily Caller News Foundation. While less than the $960,000 it gave a year before, it was still Koch’s biggest contribution to a media organization last year, as it has been since 2015.

On Nov. 11, the Daily Caller News Foundation uploaded a mashup video to YouTube that included a clip of a neo-Nazi rapping about his support for President Donald Trump. In the verse of the original video that followed the clip used by Daily Caller, the neo-Nazi rapped about the “Great Replacement,” a central white nationalist propaganda theory that claims immigrants of color will replace white populations.

This wasn’t the first time the Daily Caller has been linked to white supremacy; it has published several white supremacists and antisemites and has had some on staff.

After a November 2018 Sludge report on the Koch foundations’ funding of pro-Trump media, three CKF top officials claimed to Washington Post opinion writer and Reason alumnus Radley Balko that, “they personally and the Kochs and their foundations more generally find the Daily Caller abhorrent, and feel the same way about Tucker Carlson.” The officials argued that the CFK funding went towards writer fellowships for articles that are made available by wire to a broader range of news outlets. It is not publicly known whether CFK has funded the Daily Caller News Foundation this year.

The Daily Caller New Foundation’s 2018 revenue numbers aren’t yet public, but CKF’s donations in 2016 amounted to 84 percent of the foundation’s annual contribution total.

RealClear

Two entities of the conservative media operation RealClear got money from the Koch foundations in 2018. The Real Clear Foundation, which funds RealClearInvestigations and “news aggregation and content creation that is in the public good,” according to tax records, received a $375,000 consulting contract from CKI.

RealClearPolitics, the company’s news, opinion, and poll aggregation website, and CKI teamed up to poll the public and veterans on military intervention and specific wars in 2017 and 2018. Also in 2017, the website published a piece critical of activists organizing against a Koch-funded center at Wake Forest University. RealClearPolitics accepts trainees from CKI’s Media and Journalism Fellowship program “with no strings attached.”

RealClearPolitics got $75,000 from CKF in 2018. Neither entity received money from the Koch foundations from 2015-17. RealClearPolitics published an op-ed from CKF official Will Ruger in October 2018 and another by Sarah Ruger, director of free expression at CKF, this June.

RealClear Foundation has been funded by right-wing megadonors for years. In fiscal year 2013, the sole disclosed donor was Nelson Broms, an insurance executive who co-founded the Koch-funded Manhattan Institute, who gave $50,000. By FY2016, the Real Clear Foundation had significantly increased its fundraising ability, getting $2,250,000 from the Koch-tied DonorsTrust. CMD has tracked over $5.5 million in Real Clear Foundation funding since April 2013, including $1 million from the similarly Koch-tied Donors Capital Fund and six-figure amounts from conservative megadonor foundations in the Koch funding network, such as the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.

[graf]

RealClearPolitics co-founder John McIntyre is tied to the far-right Federalist website. He and his wife, Jenn, are listed as directors of The Federalist on a 2017 securities offering filing, alongside co-founders Ben Domenech, who is married to Meghan McCain, and Sean Davis. Jenn McIntyre is also listed as an executive for The Federalist, which is not connected to the Koch-funded Federalist Society.

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Federalist falsely claimed that CNN and MSNBC “refuse to air” Senate Judiciary hearing on IG report findings live

12/11/19 2:20 PM EST

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/crowdstrike-the-truth-about-trumps-insane-ukraine-server-conspiracy

no lnx many

The Truth About Trump’s Insane Ukraine ‘Server’ Conspiracy

Trump asked Ukraine’s president to help prove a bonkers, Russia-friendly conspiracy theory that U.S. intel relied on manufactured evidence to blame the 2016 DNC hack on Moscow.

Kevin Poulsen

Sr. National Security Correspondent

Updated 10.16.19 12:47PM ET / Published 09.25.19

Update: President Donald Trump on Wednesday once again promoted the baseless idea that a Democratic National Commitee server that was hacked in 2016 is being held in Ukraine. Below is a story The Daily Beast published last month about this conspiracy theory amid revelations that Trump asked the president of Ukraine to investigate it.

Donald Trump asked for more than a criminal investigation of his political opponent’s son in his call with Ukraine’s president. Trump also sought help in reviving a long-ago debunked conspiracy theory that challenges the basic underpinnings of the U.S. intelligence community’s findings on Russia’s 2016 election interference, in a bizarre spectacle that sees an American president trying to conscript a foreign leader into undermining his own intelligence agencies.

“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike,” Trump said, according to a compilation of notes on the call released by the White House. “I guess you have one of your wealthy people. The server, they say Ukraine has it.”

To those not versed in fringe-right canon, it’s a curious thing to say. “It almost sounds like he was babbling to the president of Ukraine,” said Robert Johnston, CEO of Adlumin, who led the DNC breach investigation while at Crowdstrike. “I imagine it would have confused the Ukranian president. Like, ‘What are you talking about?’”

Conservative websites are spinning the odd exchange as a reference to a Justice Department investigation ordered by William Barr into the origins of the Mueller probe. “It is unclear specifically what Trump was referring to with Crowdstrike,” reads one article in this vein on The Federalist. In truth, it’s actually quite clear. Trump is referencing a conspiracy theory pushed by Russian trolls and far-right pundits that imagines the Democratic National Committee fabricating all the evidence in Russia’s 2016 breach of the DNC network.

“Trump has shown a pronounced preference for the pretend version of events.”

The hoax has its roots in a GRU persona, “Guccifer 2.0,” created to cast doubt on Russia’s culpability in the DNC hack. Today it’s buttressed by deceptive blog posts, memes, and putative forensic analysis of metadata in documents leaked from the DNC and John Podesta intrusions, and has spun out several related theories and offshoots, including the Seth Rich hoax that blames the hack on a slain DNC staffer with previously-unknown hacking skills.

Crowdstrike enters the picture because it’s the security firm the DNC hired to investigate the breach back in 2016, and the first of many to identify Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, as the perpetrator. A publicly-traded company headquartered in California, Crowdstrike has nothing to do with Ukraine, except in conspiracyland, which pretends that Crowdstrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is Ukrainian, and that he framed Russia for election interference both on the DNC’s orders and to punish Putin for invading his homeland.

In real life, Alperovitch is an American citizen born in Russia who escaped to the U.S. with his family during the Soviet era. But Trump has shown a pronounced preference for the pretend version.

“Why wouldn’t Podesta and Hillary Clinton allow the FBI to see the server?” Trump asked the AP in 2017. “They brought in another company that I hear is Ukrainian-based… I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian, that’s what I heard.”

The “server” in the conspiracy is the hacked DNC server that the Democrats, the claim goes, won’t let the FBI examine because it would expose their elaborate plot. “What is the server saying?” Trump asked in one tweet last year.

That part’s made up, too. The DNC turned down one unusual FBI request early in the hack investigation. The bureau wanted access to the DNC’s network while the Russians were still in it, most likely to stage a counter operation against the GRU. The DNC declined, perhaps reluctant to have two intelligence agencies playing capture-the-flag in their systems five months before a presidential election. The DNC later authorized Crowdstrike to share full copies of the hacked servers with the bureau, giving the FBI access to the same evidence Crowdstrike had.

“With regards to our investigation of the DNC hack in 2016, we provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI,” Crowdstrike said in a statement Wednesday. “As we’ve stated before, we stand by our findings and conclusions that have been fully supported by the US Intelligence community.”

...

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Similarly, The Federalist has published more than 50 articles about Ukraine since September 23. Among its arguments for Trump’s innocence are that it was actually the Democrats who colluded with a foreign government during the 2016 election, that this entire scandal exposes only that the Biden family is corrupt, that the whistleblower can’t be trusted because he contacted a House aide before filing his complaint, that members of the “deep state” made suspicious changes to a whistleblower complaint form, that anti-Trump members of the press are just lying because they’re not happy with the outcome of the 2016 election, and finally, that sure, Trump did it, but it’s not like it’s a crime or anything. (Of course, The Federalist is far from alone in pushing most of these arguments.)

There’s a lot of baseless speculation and downright false information in those articles, and it’s certainly possible that the people writing them know this. The goal, as in any Gish Gallop, is to make debunking bad information a Sisyphean task while overloading the public with useless information in order to confuse them.  mma

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Right-wing outlet The Federalist blatantly lied about the impact of Trump's trade war on farmers.

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Hemingway And Harsanyi: Does Robert Mueller Know What’s In His Own Report?July 25, 2019 The Federalist StaffMollie Hemingway and David Harsanyi discuss their latest revelations about Robert Mueller, William Barr, and 'Comedians In…READ FULL ARTICLE >

Mueller’s Ignorance Of Fusion GPS Proves His Investigation Was A ShamJuly 26, 2019 Margot ClevelandRobert Mueller’s ignorance when queried about Fusion GPS exposed both the proceedings and the special counsel probe…READ FULL ARTICLE >

‘Disaster For The Reputation Of Robert Mueller’: Mueller’s Doddering, Stumbling Performance Shocks PunditsJuly 24, 2019 Chrissy ClarkThroughout Robert Mueller's testimony, pundits pointed to the 74-year-olds lack of ability to answer questions in a…READ FULL ARTICLE >

How Howard Zinn’s Anti-American Textbook Inspired The Antifa Bombing AttemptJuly 26, 2019 Mary GrabarThe power of ‘A People’s History of the United States’ to inspire violence should not be doubted…READ FULL ARTICLE >

This ‘Ethical Taxidermist’ Is Making Art Out Of RoadkillJuly 25, 2019 Madeline Osburn'You can buy a form of a squirrel holding a nut—how boring—but if you want to make…READ FULL ARTICLE >

Boris JohnsonFor Boris Johnson To Succeed, He Needs To Pick The U.S. Over The EUJuly 25, 2019 Sumantra MaitraGive the mess Britain is in, simply invoking the spirit of Nelson won’t be enough. Boris must…READ FULL ARTICLE >

Elizabeth WarrenElizabeth Warren’s Proposed Breakup Of Big Tech Only Reveals Her Ignorance And HypocrisyJuly 25, 2019 Franklin EinspruchIs she confused or cynical? This presidential hopeful says she's over corporate giants, but when it comes…READ FULL ARTICLE >

courtney-adamo family instagramHow Vanity Fair’s Instagram Mommy Murfer Celebrates Traditional LivingJuly 24, 2019 Melissa Langsam BraunsteinWhat’s perhaps most countercultural about Courtney Adamo, an heiress who can afford to live as she pleases,…READ FULL ARTICLE >

How Veronica Mars’s Refusal To Be Vulnerable Propels Her Into TragedyJuly 25, 2019 Libby EmmonsIn Hulu's reboot, Veronica Mars is older, wiser, and as jaded as ever. The plot is just…READ FULL ARTICLE >

Will Democrats Heed Pelosi’s Demands To Move On From Squad Goals?July 25, 2019 David MarcusRobert Mueller's lackluster performance vindicated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's pragmatic opposition to impeaching President Trump.READ FULL ARTICLE >

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Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.

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no lnx

Trump’s answer to losing the rust belt: Minnesota

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly July 26, 2019

Writing for the ultra-conservative Federalist, Stewart Lawrence all but admits that, when it comes to the 2020 election, Trump is in trouble in the Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—the three that put him over the top in 2016. But not to worry, Lawrence has a solution.

Thanks to the success of Trump’s policies and other fortuitous developments, several other blue-trending states are certain to be in play in 2020.

Of these, none is more important than Minnesota. Its 10 electoral votes alone could offset a possible Rust Belt loss. The mainstream media has barely covered Trump’s remarkable gains in Minnesota, a state that historically is the bluest of the blue.

Apparently, the president agrees.

@realDonaldTrump

In 2016 I almost won Minnesota. In 2020, because of America hating anti-Semite Rep. Omar, & the fact that Minnesota is having its best economic year ever, I will win the State! “We are going to be a nightmare to the President,” she say. No, AOC Plus 3 are a Nightmare for America!

Lawrence goes into a little more detail about what is happening in Minnesota that has conservatives convinced that Trump could win the state. First, he mentions the booming economy, with an unemployment rate of 3.3 percent. Of course, that doesn’t tell the whole story, as Pete Kotz notes.

Our little northern outpost has been doing better than most for decades, precisely because we do what Trump does not: invest in education, health, public services, and wildlands. If you need a lesson in what Trumpism can do to a state, look no further than Wisconsin, which trails Minnesota in every meaningful economic category.

The one thing Trump has done that could directly impact Minnesota’s economy was to expand a major copper and nickel mining operation in a way that could affect the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Lawrence seems to think that something the president’s administration did last month is responsible for Minnesota’s booming economy, even though, as Kotz suggests, it has been one of the strongest in the country for years. He also thinks that this move to expand the mining operation will help Trump, even though polling suggests that 70 percent of the state’s residents oppose it.

Some of us remember that Trump made one trip to Minnesota in 2016 and it came just two days before the election. It was clear that the only reason for the rally was to rile up his base against Muslim immigrants to this country.

Donald Trump on Sunday warned darkly of the danger posed by Somali migrants in Minneapolis, a deeply segregated city that has the largest Somali-American community in the US.

“Here in Minnesota, you’ve seen first-hand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with very large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state without your knowledge, without your support or approval,” the Republican nominee told a rally in the solidly Democratic state, two days before the presidential election.

He then claimed: “Some of them [are] joining Isis and spreading their extremist views all over our country and all over the world.”

“Everybody’s reading about the disaster taking place in Minnesota,” he added, before claiming, falsely: “You don’t even have the right to talk about it.”

In other words, the attacks on Representative Ilhan Omar, whose family fled Somalia when she was a child, are nothing new to the residents of Minnesota. But for both Trump and Lawrence, fanning the flames of fear and hate is a winning strategy.

What neither the president nor his fan club at the Federalist want you to know is that Trump’s approval rating is deeply underwater in Minnesota. According to Morning Consult, his net approval rating is -16 percent. Compare that to the Rust Belt states where Lawrence admits the president might be in trouble.

Wisconsin: -14 percent

Michigan: -15 percent

Pennsylvania: -9 percent

It is way too early to make any solid predictions about which presidential candidate will win Minnesota’s ten electoral votes. But in the spirit of being helpful, I’ll give Lawrence a tip: if Trump loses Wisconsin, he doesn’t have a prayer of winning Minnesota.

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Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (b. circa 1974)[1] is an American political commentator. She is currently a senior editor at the online magazine The Federalist, and a contributor for Fox News as of March 2017. [2] Previously, her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, CNN, RealClearPolitics, National Review, and Christianity Today.[3][4]

1 Early life and education

2 Political commentary

2.1 Views

2.2 Reception

3 References

Early life and education[edit]

Mollie Ziegler was born in Denver, Colorado. Her father is a retired pastor of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and her mother is a retired schoolteacher. She earned a degree in economics at the University of Colorado.[5]

Political commentary[edit]

Her first job in political commentating was at the weekly trade magazine Radio and Records, which she described as, "an answer-the-phone and get-coffee kind of job, you know, take the faxes off the fax machine type of thing".[5] In 2002, she moved to Gannett Publishing, where she worked at the Federal Times. She describes how her work there helped her shape her political views,[citation needed] writing about big government and its "waste, fraud and mismanagement".[5]

Ziegler married Mark Hemingway, a senior writer for The Weekly Standard who also worked as a freelance writer, contributing to many publications including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Ricochet, particularly writing about religion-related topics, and who was one of the founding members of The Federalist.[5] On March 26, 2017, it was announced that Fox News had signed her as a contributor.[6][7]

Views[edit]

Politico described Hemingway as a "a reliably pro-Trump commentator,"[8] while Salon called her The Federalist's "most reliable Trump defender."[9] Hemingway herself, meanwhile, writing in the Washington Post, says of her own view of Trump:

Trump was not my first or even second choice for president, but a full two years ago I predicted he would win. I also predicted he’d be a progressive president, which explained why I was not among his supporters and why I am so pleased now. [10]

In May 2017, Hemingway defended Trump's decision to fire FBI Director James Comey.[11] In July 2017, after Comey testified to Congress, Hemingway questioned Comey's character, saying "this is not a choir boy here. [Comey] could teach masterclasses in how to cover your own behind and engage in typical Washington, DC shenanigans."[12]

In February 2018, she suggested that Carter Page, a former Trump campaign advisor who had been subject to intelligence surveillance since 2014, had his civil liberties violated.[13] Hemingway warned, "if the civil rights and civil liberties of Carter Page can be violated, they can be violated for anyone."[13] Page, who had murky relationships with Russia and unusually pro-Putin views, had been the subject of attempted recruitment by Russian intelligence since 2013.[13]

In May 2018, Hemingway made unproven allegations that the FBI spied on Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, and said that this was "unprecedented and scandalous".[14] Hemingway's claims were retweeted by President Trump.[14] They were later debunked as false.[15]

Reception

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank criticized conservative panelists, including Hemingway, for concluding in a discussion that marriage overall is good for women. Hemingway responded with her own column, "Dana Milbank Is Incoherent On Marriage". Hemingway wrote another column later that year criticizing Milbank, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Dana Milbank".[5][16]

Charlotte Hays of the Independent Women's Forum described her as "a lightning rod in the debates about feminism and religious liberty" and, "a big deal in conservative-leaning intellectual circles of the nation’s capital."[17]

References[edit]

Jump up New York Times: "Mollie Hemingway Hates How Feminists Talk About Sex" by Ana Marie Cox June 9, 2016

Jump up "Fox News signs Federalist's Mollie Hemingway". The Hill. Retrieved 2017-06-12.

Jump up "Mollie Hemingway, Author at The Federalist". The Federalist. Retrieved 2016-05-22.

Jump up "Mollie Hemingway | Author | RealClearPolitics". www.realclearpolitics.com. Retrieved 2016-05-22.

^ Jump up to:a b c d e "Meet Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, scourge of lazy journalists". Rare. 2014-07-28. Retrieved 2016-05-22.

Jump up Concha, Joe (March 27, 2017). "Fox News signs Federalist's Mollie Hemingway". The Hill.

Jump up The Federalist Staff (March 27, 2017). "Fox News Signs Mollie Hemingway As A Contributor". The Federalist.

Jump up "How Trump Blew Up the Conservative Media". POLITICO Magazine. Retrieved 2018-05-17.

Jump up Sheffield, Matthew. "Roy Moore, the Federalist and the decay of the conservative mind". www.salon.com. Retrieved 2017-12-08.

Jump up https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-wasnt-a-trump-supporter-i-am-now/2018/01/19/58abd43a-fca2-11e7-a46b-a3614530bd87_story.html?noredirect=on

Jump up "How the Right and Left Reacted to Comey's Firing". The New York Times. 2017-05-10. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2018-05-17.

Jump up "Why even Fox News didn't really defend Trump against Comey's testimony". Vox. Retrieved 2018-05-17.

^ Jump up to:a b c "The Happy Martyrdom of Carter Page". The New York Times. 2018-02-06. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2018-05-17.

^ Jump up to:a b Greenwood, Max (2018-05-29). "Trump: I shouldn't be focusing on 'rigged Russia witch hunt'". TheHill. Retrieved 2018-05-30.

Jump up https://www.vox.com/2018/5/25/17380212/spygate-trump-russia-spy-stefan-halper-fbi-explained

Jump up Milbank, Dana (2014-03-31). "Dana Milbank: Conservatives to women: Lean back". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2016-05-22.

Jump up Hays, Charlotte. "IWF – Portrait of a Modern Feminist: Mollie Hemingway". www.iwf.org. Retrieved 2016-05-22.

Categories: 1970s birthsLiving peopleUniversity of Colorado alumniAmerican political writersAmerican reporters and correspondentsFox News peopleThe Wall Street Journal peopleThe Washington Post peopleUSA Today people

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dingdong!

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-ridiculous-spin-conservatives-want-you-believe-about-scott-pruitts

ere's the Ridiculous Spin Conservatives Want You to Believe About Scott Pruitt's Scandalous Resignation

The scandalous EPA administrator is the subject of more than a dozen investigations.

By Cody Fenwick / AlterNet July 5, 2018, 12:50 PM GMT

As conservative darling and EPA administrator Scott Pruitt collapsed under the weight of his own mountain of corruption and scandals Thursday, conservative media figures were already working to spin the Cabinet member's long-overdue resignation as some kind of nefarious liberal plot.

"Well funded and media coordinated #bootpruitt movement finally gets its scalp," tweeted Mollie Hemmingway, an editor at The Federalist. "Would have taken hours, not months, in a typical GOP admin but now that it has had its success, expect it to be repeated with other Trump cabinet officials."

Kimberley Strassel, the relentless defender of President Donald Trump at the Wall Street Journal, wrote: "Lesson to other Trump officials from Pruitt resignation: Give the left/media/organized greens any molehill and they will turn it into K2. Most of the accusations were overwrought, but the barrage was overwhelming. Let's hope an equally reformist successor denies them a repeat."

Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt agreed with Strassel.

"Scott Pruitt is a good friend and a very good man, caricatured by left and MSM. I hope he sets to work on a memoir ASAP and deals out a tenth of what he took. He’s a man of great faith and perseverance so he probably won’t, but the attacks on his family were unconscionable," he wrote.

The spin was preposterous. News agencies did what they're supposed to do: uncover wrongdoing by people in power. When they investigated Pruitt, they found a lot — so much that he's the subject of at least 12 different investigations.

Trump and White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who are typically vociferous critics of the media, never actually called the reports of his abuses and corruption "fake news." Sanders repeatedly said that the White House was looking into the charges against Pruitt.

When even Trump and Sanders think the accusations against a Cabinet member are credible, we know it's bad.

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Mollie Hemingway, Author at The Federalist

https://thefederalist.com/author/mzhemingway/

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. A longtime journalist, her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los ...

Mollie Hemingway - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollie_Hemingway

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (b. circa 1974) is an American political commentator. She is currently a senior editor at the online magazine The Federalist, and a ...

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Political commentary · ?Views

Mollie (@MZHemingway) | Twitter

https://twitter.com/mzhemingway?lang=en

The latest Tweets from Mollie (@MZHemingway). I don't share your ... Have a great day. Senior Editor, @FDRLST. ... Senior Editor, @FDRLST. thefederalist.com.

Articles by Mollie Hemingway | The Federalist Journalist | Muck Rack ...

https://muckrack.com/mollie-hemingway/articles

Articles by Mollie Hemingway on Muck Rack. Find Mollie Hemingway's email address, contact information, LinkedIn, Twitter, ... Senior Editor — The Federalist.

Mollie Hemingway Husband, Age, Bio, Wiki, FOX News, Federalist ...

https://www.marathi.tv/political-analyst/mollie-hemingway/

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist and is often described as a “lightning rod” in the debates about feminism and religious liberty.

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lots of video

I wasn't a Trump supporter. I am now. - The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../58abd43a-fca2-11e7-a46b-a3614530bd87_story.ht...

Jan 19, 2018 - (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post). by Mollie Ziegler Hemingway January 19. MollieZiegler Hemingway is a senior editor at the Federalist.

Mollie Hemingway: The American People Need To Find Out What ...

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/.../mollie_hemingway_the_american_people_need_t...

May 23, 2018 - 'The Federalist' senior editor Mollie Hemingway joined Wednesday's edition of 'Fox & Friends' to comment on the questions surrounding the ...

Mollie Hemingway | Author | PBS NewsHour

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/author/mollie-hemingway-the-federalist

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. A longtime journalist, her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los ...

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Mark Hemingway - The Weekly Standard

https://www.weeklystandard.com/author/mark-hemingway

Mark Hemingway is a Senior Writer for The Weekly Standard. ... he now lives in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife Mollie Ziegler Hemingway and two daughters.

Mollie Hemingway - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollie_Hemingway

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (b. circa 1974) is an American political commentator. She is currently ... Ziegler married Mark Hemingway, a senior writer for The Weekly Standard who also worked as a freelance writer, contributing to many ...

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Political commentary · ?Views

Mark Hemingway, Author at The Federalist

https://thefederalist.com/author/mark-hemingway/

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and a senior writer at The ... What MollyRingwald's New Yorker Essay Gets Wrong About Filmmaker John ...

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