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Trump’s Truth Social account shares more links to John Solomon’s Just the News than any other news site

mma grpx

trump’s Truth Social account shares more links to John Solomon’s Just the News than any other news site

Written by Matt Gertz

Research contributions from Kayla Gogarty, John Whitehouse & Gideon Taaffe

Published 10/21/26

President Donald Trump has shared links to Just the News, the right-wing agitprop site helmed by White House staffer John Solomon, in at least 367 Truth Social posts or reposts since he returned to the White House last January — more than any other news outlet over that time period.

Trump’s manic social media posting provides a window into his information diet. The president regularly responds in real time to Fox News segments that strike his interest, a phenomenon I’ve described as the Fox-Trump feedback loop. His zealous White House aide Natalie Harp, nicknamed “the human printer” because her role includes providing the president with printouts of articles, also helps him generate posts promoting MAGA online content.

Using a machine-learning model, Media Matters designed a script that researchers deployed to search an _{archive}_ of Trump’s Truth Social feed since January 20, 2025, and found that the president produced more posts and reposts with links to Solomon’s website than any other single news outlet, totaling at least 367 instances. Fox News accounted for the second-most linked outlet in these posts and reposts, with 257.

Such posts became more frequent in the leadup to and since June, when Solomon announced he was joining the Trump administration as a special government employee.

Chart

Trump often simply shares the headline and link to Just the News articles in his posts. But the president has also, in response to that reporting, accused Democrats of “TREASON!!!” over his 2019 impeachment; said that the “thugs” involved in the Justice Department’s investigation of the Trumpian election subversion plot which culminated in the January 6 insurrection “should all be investigated and put in prison”; and claimed of former special counsel Jack Smith, who oversaw that probe: “He is a CRIMINAL AND SHOULD BE IN JAIL. A MAJOR LOWLIFE AND FAILURE. An ugly person, both inside and out! I beat him badly, and love watching him squirm now.”

Solomon once worked for mainstream outlets like The Washington Post and The Associated Press, but carved out a niche over the last decade by generating “phantom scandals” that spread through the right-wing propaganda apparatus. Solomon’s work — and that of Just the News, where he is editor in chief — provides journalistic scaffolding for pro-Trump counternarratives and conspiracy theories.

Just the News does not attract a massive audience — the website is not among the 50 biggest news sites in the United States. But Solomon’s fans include Sean Hannity and Steve Bannon, who regularly host him on their programs, and he “gained President Trump’s favor through his work questioning the federal investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russians who meddled in the 2016 election,” The New York Times reported in May.

Solomon joined the administration the following month as “chairman of the newly formed and vaguely defined Government Transparency Task Force,” and now plays an unprecedented dual role in the MAGA information system. Solomon manufactures pro-Trump narratives by using his position at the White House to select and release government documents on topics like past investigations into Trump or election security, and briefing reporters at other outlets on those documents often without including key context. He then writes up his own version for Just the News based on that spin and tours other right-wing media outlets to discuss the narrative he manufactured.

Trump’s news diet, as reflected by the articles whose links he shares on Truth Social, overwhelmingly comes from right-wing outlets like Just the News, Fox News, and Newsmax.

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machIne reboot gop steAL CLETA

AN 8 26

Cleta Mitchell: “We had three networks that didn't cover the president's speech. I want to know what their relationship is with China.”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published 08/28/26

Video

Citation

From the August 27, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's Just the News No Noise

JOHN SOLOMON (HOST): I want to turn to something that is now sort of a repeat theme and just what the White House Transparency Task Force is getting out there. We knew in 2020 that Venezuela hacked the machine. We knew that there were five foreign powers who could hack our machines, that had the capability in 2020. We knew that China took 220 million of our voter files, and we knew that illegal aliens were getting on the voter rolls. And we knew now, in 2020 we knew that these foreign-made parts were there. That's the first time that the intelligence community learned that there were foreign parts, the Chinese parts, in our machines. Six years passed with almost no action until President Trump jumps into the breach this last month. How did we go six years with an intelligence community knowing all these threats and almost no action?

CLETA MITCHELL (GUEST): You know, John, that is such a good question, because let me add to that. And you referenced it today in the Just the News article. In 2019, Sen. Wyden and Sen. Klobuchar introduced a bill. They had 40 co-sponsors and many of the — most Democrats — and that would have strengthened the oversight of the voting machines, the voting technology. And Sen. Wyden gave a floor speech on the Senate floor in July 2019, where he was castigating his Republican colleagues for not paying attention to the intelligence reports and the threats that had been conveyed to the intelligence committee, to the Senate Intelligence Committee, about the vulnerability of the voting systems.

Now, as soon as Biden gets elected, and when President Trump, who is looking at the 2020 election and saying, gee, there seems to be a lot wrong here, the Democrats completely went silent. Not only that, they wanted to silence anyone who was criticizing the voting technology. Don't forget all the things that they have done, that they did, and continue to try to silence those of us who ask questions.

So my question is, how is it that the Democrats were so concerned about it? Look at the videos of Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. The movie that they made, Kill Chain, about the vulnerabilities of the voting machines. And suddenly after 2020, they forgot all of that. And now they say that we're crazy people because now we see that the intelligence community knew things and they didn't tell anybody. And they particularly kept it from President Trump and then subsequently President Biden. I mean, John, we wouldn't know any of this if you hadn't gone into the administration temporarily as a special government employee to get all of this out in the public. But my question is, it's still going on, this gaslighting, this disregarding.

We had three networks that didn't cover the president's speech. I want to know what their relationship is with China, why they wouldn't want to have covered the president's speech in which he told the truth about China's interference. And I want to know where those Democrats are today who were so concerned in 2019. Now we have the proof of it, and there's nowhere to be heard. And in fact, all they want to do is tell us to be quiet.

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2X GOOD OVERVIEW

BULWARK SOMMER 7 26

TRUMP’S PRIMETIME ADDRESS Thursday is shaping up to be a grab bag of conspiracy theories, all of them intended to help Republicans take control of the midterms. He might declare that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are somehow fake senators; or announce a national emergency on voter fraud. The latest reporting suggests Trump will claim China tried to steal the 2020 election.

Whatever Trump does, it’ll be because of John Solomon—a star conservative reporter who is, somehow, also a White House staffer. For nearly a decade, Solomon has had a hand in the creation of nearly every major MAGA grievance narrative, from the Russia investigation to Ukraine to 2020 election fraud. Solomon has a pretty clear M.O.: He’ll spin a story that seems like a massive exposé, getting it trumpeted on Fox News and throughout the right-wing media ecosystem before it has a chance to deflate under scrutiny, as it usually does.

Now in his gig as a short-term White House staffer, Solomon has been digging up the raw material necessary for both prosecuting Trump’s enemies and the expected attempt at electoral chicanery.

Yet this narrative impresario and his brand of quasi-journalism remain largely unknown outside the world of right-wing media.

In 2007, when Solomon was an investigative reporter at the Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review was already complaining that his stories amounted to the “John Solomon special”: front-page revelations that, when scrutinized, turned out to be little more than a “steady stream of mediocrity.”

Now, thanks to his role in the Trump administration, Solomon has a chance to work that magic on a much larger scale.

Typically, MAGA muckrakers are liars or crackpots, like Mike Lindell, or that one rogue falconer (but not the one you’re thinking of). Compared to these folks, Solomon is a veritable Walter Cronkite. He has a serious journalistic background after working for Post and the Associated Press, and he dresses in ties and navy suits. His veneer of seriousness provides a valuable service for the MAGAverse. Watching him can almost feel like watching a grizzled mainstream investigative journalist who just happens to validate Trump’s obsessions.

A story from the final days of the first Trump administration shows how much Solomon lives in the Trumpworld pocket. The day before Joe Biden’s inauguration, then-Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows called Solomon to the White House to review a binder of newly declassified files from the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump and Russia—just the kind of document handout Solomon loves.

Meadows wanted Solomon to publish the contents of the binder on Inauguration Day. Solomon’s staffers at his website, Just The News, scrambled to scan them all. Then a new envelope arrived for Solomon, with new files “he was permitted to write about,” according to a lawsuit Solomon later filed against the Justice Department.

Unfortunately for Solomon, the whole plan got botched when a White House staffer recalled the files for further redaction. The binder disappeared back into the new Biden administration. Solomon’s fervor for getting access to them again led to a special favor from Trump, who named Solomon as one of his personal representatives at the National Archives, where he would have the freedom to again pursue the story (to give you a sense of Solomon’s perceived reliability to the ex-president, the only other person designated as Trump’s representative at the time was Kash Patel). It was a decision intended to redound to mutual benefit, and sure enough, Solomon eventually published the files in April 2025.

HOW DID SOLOMON WIND UP as Trump’s favorite journo? After leaving the Post in 2008, Solomon moved between journalism nonprofits and conservative media for a while, powered by a personality once described as “charming and garrulous and brimming with swagger.”

He reached a new level of prominence on the right when he became an executive at The Hill in 2017. His portfolio there was superhuman: simultaneously launching a TV channel, drumming up ad business, and filing news and opinion articles. As you might expect, it was a situation rife with conflicts of interest, with one staffer warning that Solomon was up to “reputation-killing stuff.”1

Solomon’s first big moment at The Hill came with his coverage of the Uranium One faux-scandal, during which he heavily insinuated—but did not come close to proving—that Hillary Clinton had approved the sale of rights to a key American uranium reserve to Russia in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. At the time, Republican anxieties about Trump’s own Russia ties were in overdrive, so Solomon’s articles gave them the tantalizing feeling that the “real” Russia scandal was that Clinton was the true Putin patsy.

In March 2019, Solomon waded into even murkier waters: the bizarre series of events that led to Trump’s impeachment over efforts to pressure Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. Solomon inexplicably began to target American ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch in articles for The Hill, portraying her as disloyal to Trump and weak on corruption. A month after Solomon’s series began, Trump fired Yovanovitch.

House Democrats later alleged that Solomon’s columns were part of a smear campaign run by Rudy Giuliani and a web of right-leaning Ukrainians and Americans, in a complex deal meant to convince Ukrainian officials to investigate the Bidens.

Solomon met regularly with figures involved in digging up dirt on the Bidens. The group became known as the BLT Team, named after the BLT Prime restaurant in the Trump International Hotel in Washington where they met. The gang included Giuliani, the prolific Ukrainian-American schemer Lev Parnas, and husband-and-wife legal team Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova. He even shared a draft of a story with the group before publication—a major journalistic taboo.

DiGenova and Toensing seem to have made something of a cottage industry out of this. They represented at least one Ukrainian involved in the scheme. They had also, perhaps not coincidentally, represented a key Uranium One “whistleblower.” And they were also Solomon’s own lawyers, even though he used them and their clients as sources in his articles without disclosing that relationship. Once again, all of this flies in the face of journalistic standards.

Conflicts of interest aside, much of Solomon’s reporting on Ukraine was simply wrong, according to experts on the byzantine world of Ukrainian politics. Even as Solomon became a regular on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show (and used that relationship to make himself valuable to the BLT Team, according to Parnas), an internal Fox News research document I reported on at the time acknowledged that Solomon was involved in a Ukrainian “disinformation campaign.”

“It was primarily non-truths and non-sequiturs,” one State Department noted of Solomon’s reporting during the first Trump impeachment investigation.

Solomon left The Hill in October 2019. The newspaper skewered him in an internal review, with some of the editor’s notes added to his Ukraine’s articles running nearly as long as the articles themselves.

DESPITE QUESTIONS ABOUT SOLOMON’S credibility during his run at the Hill, his star on the right continued to rise. In 2020, he launched Just The News, a conservative news outlet where he has run pro-Trump stories without even the thin layers of editorial oversight he faced at prior media outlets.

Solomon is also becoming a right-wing media mogul, adding minor conservative brands The Post Millennial and (the historically significant) Human Events to his holdings in November. In June 2025, the publisher of RealClearPolitics accused Solomon of convincing some of that website’s donors to withdraw their support in an attempt to soften it up for a takeover, too.

IAF

Solomon also helped launch and continues to provide office space to a foundation that doles out millions of dollars to a network of conservative media outlets and think tanks, including his own site. As Mother Jones reported, few if any of those funding connections are disclosed in Solomon’s journalism when he cites groups that have benefited from the nonprofit’s largesse. Mother Jones describes the sort of ideologically driven news sites in the foundation’s network as “pink slime,” a name that comes from “by-products added as filler to ground beef.”

But Solomon’s biggest honor came this summer, when Trump made him a special government employee tasked with helping “identify some documents, some secrets” to be declassified and released to the public. He is eligible to serve in the role for up to 130 days. Solomon, who said he’s not being paid for the White House declassification work, announced in June that he was stepping down as Just The News’s editor-in-chief, although he continues to host his show and publish articles on the Just The News website.

Solomon isn’t the only member of the BLT Team joining the administration. In April, diGenova was sworn in as a counselor to the Justice Department operating out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, where he’s reportedly working with a grand jury to indict Trump critics like former CIA director John Brennan. The judge overseeing the proceedings—and making decisions on whether to approve things like subpoenas for witness testimony or documents—is infamous Trump loyalist Aileen Cannon, who ran interference for the president during special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents investigation between Trump’s terms in office. Earlier this spring, Cannon blocked the release of Smith’s final report on his investigation’s findings.

Toensing came out of retirement in May to be sworn in as a “deputy chief for civil rights in the criminal section” in the same prosecutor’s office, according to a statement filed in court by District of Columbia U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro.

“Ms. Toensing has extensive obligations in that [Florida] District related to a grand jury proceeding,” Pirro wrote, suggesting that Toensing too is working on some kind of urgent grand jury case against perceived Trump enemies.

Solomon has openly admitted that his role declassifying government documents is central to helping that same grand jury, suggesting the once-ridiculed group involved in crafting the anti-Biden Ukraine narrative is now helping Trump pursue his enemies through the Justice Department.

Referring to the administration’s push to declassify files about investigations into the president, Solomon told Benny Johnson in April that “those documents will help this prosecutorial team in Miami” by taking away the need for the sorts of secret and time-intensive processes that would otherwise be needed to make use of them in court.

But Solomon’s decades-old reputation for letting down his audience is starting to reach conservatives, too. Popular conspiracy theory blog Conservative Treehouse has grown skeptical of Solomon’s promises, even adding a bolded warning label of sorts to a preview of Trump’s Thursday speech so readers wouldn’t get too excited.

“Caution should be noted as newly appointed Special Government Employee John Solomon is responsible for the content,” the post read.

Emerald Robinson, an anchor at Mike Lindell’s online channel, wasn’t excited either.

“LOL why would anybody trust John Solomon based on his record?” she wrote on X.

When you’ve lost Lindell’s crew…

~ disinfo bs

justthe news

...ng further than the Treasury Department's tacit support for debanking alleged "hate groups" after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, a State Department component that "strengthen[s] resilient democratic societies" developed a more sweeping plan for financially choking off disfavored narratives a month later.

The U.S. Agency for International Development wrote a "Disinformation Primer" that appears to have been started in "late 2020," judging by a reference to the most up-to-date "social media initiatives" by Facebook and Twitter "to address disinformation and misinformation."

It was still being written at least 10 days into the Biden administration, referring twice to the Jan. 31, 2021 Myanmar military coup, which the primer says "underlined issues of internet freedom and disinformation."

State turned over the 88-page document, dated February 2021 and marked "internal use only," as part of a 102-page production in response to Freedom of Information Act litigation by America First Legal.

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The primer was "conceived and developed by Joshua Machleder and Shannon Maguire at USAID, together with" the University of Chicago organization formerly known as the National Opinion Research Center, the introduction says.

It thanks dozens of individuals at universities and government institutions including the National Endowment for Democracy and U.S. Institute for Peace "for sharing their time, opinions, and expertise," and current and former USAID staff for "opinions and feedback."

USAID didn't respond to requests for comment on its view of the primer now.

"Just as human rights advocates have argued that internet access is a human right and that there is a fundamental right to access of information, there is also a right not to be disinformed," the primer says in a section laying out 10 steps for USAID and partners to take in "countering and preventing disinformation."

These include partnering with other governments, supporting "media monitoring and fact-checking initiatives," and "form[ing] synergies" with "civil society, media, social media platforms, internet governance forums, and other donors" to prevent disinformation, especially working with "data scientists, social scientists, and journalists."

miller?

AFL gave the FOIA production to the Foundation for Freedom Online, which published an analysis Thursday by executive director and former State communications official Mike Benz, managing director Allum Bokhari and graduate student Oscar Buynevich.

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The primer mentions "advertising" 19 times and advertisers or advertisements a dozen times, showing USAID support for the "well-established tactic of the censorship industry – financial blacklisting," FFO's analysis says.

While much of the report promotes the more-speech-is-better approach, such as funding local journalism, a section on "supply-side responses" – written in the passive tense – implies both governments and activists should pressure advertisers to flee alleged sources of disinformation.

Most advertisers are "unaware of the disinformation risk of the domains featuring their ads due to the automated process of ad placement," the "Advertiser Outreach" subsection says.

"Thus, cutting this financial support found in the ad-tech space would obstruct disinformation actors from spreading messaging online," it says. "Efforts have been made to inform advertisers of their risks, such as the threat to brand safety by being placed next to objectionable content, through conducting research and assessments of online media content."

While the primer says it provides examples of advertiser outreach in an annex on "emerging solutions," none of the examples explicitly mentions advertising. The annex does include the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's public awareness campaign about pineapple on pizza.

FFO highlighted the primer's support for the supply-side "Redirect Method," piloted by Moonshot and Google's Jigsaw in 2016, "an open-source methodology that uses targeted advertising" on platforms such as Google Adwords "to connect people searching online for harmful content with constructive alternative messages."

It was used to "target individuals susceptible to ISIS radicalization via recruiting measures" and "is being adapted in several countries to combat vaccine hesitancy and hate speech," the primer says.

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The Redirect Method is a "precursor" to Google's "prebunking" initiative, which the Alphabet-owned company said last year it was expanding into Germany and India, FFO said. Prebunking is based on inoculation theory, which treats disfavored narratives as a virus.

FFO notes the primer touts the work of former Harvard misinformation researcher and Hunter Biden laptop truther Joan Donovan, who advocates prebunking.

Comedian Jon Stewart publicly challenged Donovan's work and former Facebook policy chief Eliot Schrage reportedly did so privately as a Harvard Kennedy School adviser, both questioning who gets to decide what counts as "disinformation."

USAID separately thanked State's Global Engagement Center staff for "their review and feedback."

GEC has funded and promoted internet games that teach children to view populism as disinformation – a form of prebunking – and promote "social justice."

It also funded the Global Disinformation Index, which pressures advertisers to cut off alleged sources of disinformation, predominantly conservative publishers – drawing the ire of congressional Republicans and a lawsuit by two publishers.

The primer calls for targeting "gaming sites," including Amazon-owned Twitch, because "problematic information more regularly originates from networks of alternative sites and anonymous individuals" than from state actors.

USAID put scare quotes around "mainstream" twice to describe sources outside of gaming communities. While these "conspiracy theories may seem farcical or preposterous to an outsider," the primer warns, mainstream sources covering gaming communities "may unknowingly provide wide coverage of misleading information."

The primer also puts scare quotes around "research" to describe gamers taking the initiative to educate themselves, "collectively reviewing and validating each other to create a populist expertise that justifies, shapes and supports their alternative beliefs."

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-4&features=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%3D%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=true&id=1768691288549855509&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fjustthenews.com%2Fgovernment%2Ffederal-agencies%2Fusaid-disinformation-primer-targets-gamers-advertisers-memes-right-not&sessionId=88677cc03e93834b230fc5bd06d03bd6bce23e9c&siteScreenName=justthenews&siteUserId=1216793092134723586&theme=light&widgetsVersion=6a3ad42b224df%3A1778106238597&width=550px

Malinformation, sometimes described as true but inconvenient, also makes an appearance in the primer. It's defined as "deliberate publication of private information for personal or private interest" that is "taken out of context," as well as the "deliberate manipulation of genuine content" and "hate speech."

Memes are "a common means" for malinformation to spread, the primer warns. "[T]he most effective are humorous or critical of society ... but researchers note they also can be dangerous."

The supply-side section acknowledges the "inherent contradiction between the democratic ideal of free speech and the regulation of online content" and warns that democracies that pass anti-disinformation laws can embolden "authoritarians" to do the same.

One way to have their cake and eat it too is for democracies to adopt "co-regulatory models" such as the "industry-led Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) and the government-led Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs)," the primer says.

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RWW 11 25

Mark Meckler reports that he is now the CEO of the right-wing Just The News network.

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Marc Morano

Weekly update ⋅ November 14, 2025

Brazil culls thousands of trees to make highway for climate COP30 meeting

Sky News Australia

... Marc Morano joined My Kenny to detail the events unfolding in the leadup to the summit.

Brazil Carves Through Amazon Rainforest for New Highway to Ferry Global Climate ...

AMAC

... Marc Morano, Director of Communications for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, told the Just the News, No Noise TV show. CFACT promotes a ...

Tens of thousands of trees in the Amazon rainforest have been wiped out to prepare for a global summit on saving the environment, the latest in seeming climate-change hypocrisy.

In northern Brazil, near the city of Belém, a strip of rainforest about eight miles long was cleared to build a four-lane highway in advance of the COP30 climate summit that began on Monday. The highway, dubbed Avenida Liberdade, is intended to handle the surge of delegates and dignitaries expected for the gathering, but has drawn sharp rebuke from climate activists and fueled perceptions of hypocrisy about climate change concerns.

“But It’s Sustainable,” Say Defenders

Defenders of the project say it includes “sustainable” features like solar-powered lighting, bike lanes, and wildlife crossings that will provide a climate-friendly example for future projects. However, critics are pointing out the blatant irony of cutting down a protected rainforest for a climate conference that is itself aimed, among other things, at halting deforestation.

“They ripped the hell out of the Rainforest of Brazil to build a four-lane highway for Environmentalists to travel. It’s become a big scandal!” U.S. President Donald Trump, who has long been a critic of climate change activism, posted to Truth Social on Sunday.

Unlike his predecessor, Trump’s administration is not sending an official delegation to the United Nations-backed conference. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told the *Daily Mail* that the president would “not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.”

The clearing of the forest has raised the ire of both climate change activists and skeptics alike.

Eight Miles of Rainforest Chopped Away

“We’re looking at eight miles of a virgin tropical Amazon rainforest were clear cut there, so that they could put in this highway to allow the private jets and to allow all the SUVs and limousines of all the world leaders and celebrities that are pumping in here the next two weeks, they could have a freer time getting around the city,” Marc Morano, Director of Communications for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, told the Just the News, No Noise TV show.

CFACT promotes a “positive, alternative voice” on the environment and advocates for market forces and technological innovation to overcome environmental challenges. “So they had to cut, in other words, they had to cut the forest down so they could bring more people to show…you can’t make these kinds of absurdities up,” he added.

Even those on the other side of the climate debate spectrum slammed the move. A Canadian climate activist who advocates for a Green New Deal pointed out that “A new four-lane highway that cuts through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest was cut for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém,” Mike Hudema posted to X. “You can’t be a climate leader if you’re cutting down one of the world’s greatest climate solutions to do it.”

“Do as I Say, Not as I Do”

This is not the first time that climate leaders have drawn criticism for failing to live up to their own standards. For example, former Biden administration climate czar, failed presidential candidate, and former Secretary of State John Kerry, has frequently come under fire for his family’s heavy use of a fuel-guzzling private jet while he attended climate conferences aimed at reducing carbon emissions.

A Fox News investigation found that Kerry’s family jet had released more than 300 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere just a year into the Biden administration. President Biden had appointed Kerry as his administration’s climate czar shortly after he took office in January 2021.

At the same time, Kerry called the “climate crisis” an “urgent national security threat” and proposed shutting down power plants and implementing a carbon credit system to limit emissions.

Most famously, former Vice President Al Gore, who made millions on global warming hysteria, like Kerry and so many liberal media figures, doesn’t practice what he preaches. The National Center for Public Policy Research, a 501(c)3, nonpartisan, independent conservative think tank, reported that “Al Gore’s Nashville home consumed 20 times more electricity than the average American household” and that “Gore guzzles more electricity in one year than the average American family uses in 21 years.”

Locals Left Without Compensation for Losses

Local residents say the damage is immediate. One acai berry harvester, Claudio Verequete, told the BBC that trees he relied on for income “have already been cut down” and he has “no compensation.”

Conservationists also warn about the “fish-bone effect” of the road: once the main corridor is carved through the forest, new access routes follow, fragmenting the ecosystem and increasing deforestation risks, the BBC reported.

The Brazilian state government of Pará, where the conference is being held, has floated such a highway since at least 2012. However, prior attempts were shelved primarily due to environmental concerns.

The infrastructure project only overcame the backlog after Belém was chosen as the site of the climate conference. In addition to the new highway, the government is expanding airport capacity and building a new city park.

Steven Richards joined Just the News in August 2023 after previously working as a Research Analyst for the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) in Tallahassee, Florida.*}:

Reprinted with Permission from Just The News – By Steven Richards

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.*

Robert Kennedy III: Dr. Fauci's Final Confession Connecting Metabiota, USAID & Hunter ...

drdrew.com

Robert Kennedy III: Dr. Fauci's Final Confession Connecting Metabiota, USAID & Hunter Biden To Pandemic Outbreak + Marc Morano From UN's COP30 ...

Watch: "Just the News, No Noise" with Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Judge Jim Troupis

Just The News

Tonight's featured guest will be Iowa GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks.

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MMA

Why the right-wing media apparatus is suddenly yelling about Jack Smith supposedly spying on GOP senators

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 10/07/25

Republicans and their right-wing media allies yesterday spun out frothy allegations about former special counsel Jack Smith purportedly “spying on Republican senators” in order to forestall tough questions about the state of the Justice Department. But their dark conspiracy theory immediately collapses under scrutiny.

Attorney General Pam Bondi was slated to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday for what seemed fated to be a grueling hearing. Potential avenues for congressional oversight could include the unprecedented weaponization of her department as an extension of President Donald Trump’s will; the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein saga, including the location of the Epstein “client list” she once claimed to possess and a potential presidential pardon for the notorious sex offender’s chief accomplice; and the legal authority for the deployment of the U.S. military on American streets.

But FBI Director Kash Patel, his deputy Dan Bongino, and the stenographers at Fox News were happy to try to help her out of that tough spot. On the afternoon before the hearing, Fox News Digital reported that “former Special Counsel Jack Smith was allegedly tracking the private communications and phone calls of nearly a dozen Republican Senators as part of his investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots.” The October 6 article was based on a document “recently discovered by FBI Director Kash Patel and exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital,” which states that an FBI special agent “‘conducted preliminary toll analysis’ on the toll records associated with” eight senators and one member of the House as part of Smith’s probe, which at the time was called Arctic Frost. The story also included quotes from Bongino, whom the report said would be meeting with the affected members of Congress that day.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, subsequently posted the document on social media, saying that it “shows the Biden FBI spied on 8 of my Republican Senate colleagues.” He added, “BIDEN FBI WEAPONIZATION = WORSE THAN WATERGATE.”

Their allegations were quickly promoted by MAGA media outlets and on Tuesday morning were highlighted by Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee as they sought to shield Bondi from criticism.

But legal reporters explained that there’s not much to the story — the FBI needed to review the toll records of senators in order to establish who Trump and his alleged co-conspirators were trying to contact before and during the January 6 insurrection.

Smith’s final report cites such toll records in a footnote for its statement that “at around the same time as he issued his 6:01 p.m. Tweet [telling his supporters occupying the U.S. Capitol to leave], Mr. Trump tried to reach two U.S. Senators, and he also directed Co-Conspirator 1 to call Members of Congress and attempt to enlist them to further delay the certification” of the electoral votes, as MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian reported.

“It actually seems sort of obvious that if you’re investigating a former president of the United States for trying to subvert an election, you’d probe some of contacts he and alleged co-conspirators had with people he was trying to enlist/pressure to overturn the results,” Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted.

“In other words, if you start from the premise that the entire probe was political, then seeking lawmakers’ toll records would be inherently bad,” Cheney added. “But if you view the probe as righteous or justified, then it’s not hard to see why those records would be pertinent.”

You won’t have trouble guessing which side the MAGAsphere came down on. Trump gave clemency to all the January 6 defendants, including those convicted of assaulting police and seditious conspiracy, still falsely claims to have won the 2020 election, and clearly believes that the only thing wrong with his election subversion plot was that it was unsuccessful. On Monday, his loyal propagandists at Fox and Newsmax leaped into action to promote the purported FBI bombshell.

On Fox, Newsmax, “stunning” story shows Smith conducted an “enemies list investigation,” is “going to go to jail

Just minutes after Fox News Digital published its story, Fox host Will Cain declared it “pretty stunning.” He went on to claim that Democrats had engaged in “projection when it comes to authoritarianism. But if this doesn't fit the bill, this doesn't fit the definition, what is the definition of authoritarianism?”

His guest, Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX), replied, “This is the quintessential definition of it.”

Later that night, Fox host Jesse Watters claimed that the story shows that “Biden's FBI was spying on Republican senators.”

His prime-time colleague Sean Hannity hosted right-wing journalist John Solomon, who declared that “Arctic Frost is starting to look like an enemies list investigation” and “a really troubling diagram of how the deep state was working under Joe Biden. The FBI, the DOJ working hand and glove to spy, pry, into the lives, the conversations, and the data of Republicans.”

Solomon went on — somehow maintaining a straight face — to accuse the FBI of potentially “intruding on a constitutionally protected event” because, in the time period for which the bureau sought the toll records, Congress had been certifying the election (except when they were evacuated in the face of a violent mob of Trumpists).

Video

Citation

From the October 6, 2025, edition of Fox News' Hannity

The rhetoric was similarly over-the-top in the prime-time hours of Fox competitor Newsmax.

“Jack Smith, bad guy, and I think he's just been busted in something really bad,” host Greg Kelly said at the top of his segment on the report. He described the FBI’s actions as “illegal,” adding, “Jack Smith, I think you’re going to go to jail.”

Fellow host Rob Schmitt didn’t seem to understand what the story was actually about, even as he promoted it to his audience. He told Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), “You had your phone tapped by Jack Smith,” and asked the senator to “illustrate to us how big a deal this is.” Johnson gently corrected Schmitt, saying that investigators had only obtained “metadata,” before claiming that the report “should shock and outrage every American.”

(Newsmax quickly updated its chyron from “FBI: JACK SMITH TAPPED PHONES OF GOP SENATORS” to “FBI: JACK SMITH SNOOPED ON GOP PHONES.”)

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MMA

January 6 “false flag” claim made it to the president

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 09/29/25

The right-wing conspiracy theory that hundreds of plainclothes FBI agents who were deployed to respond to the riotous mob at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, had actually incited the crowd in a “Fedsurrection” spread through the right-wing conspiracy echo chamber over the weekend and reached President Donald Trump in just over 36 hours after its inception.

Elements of the right-wing media, led by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, spent years concocting an alternate narrative of January 6 in which the rioters were heroes, any violence was actually caused by federal agents, and the resulting prosecutions of perpetrators constituted a brutal campaign of government repression.

Following Trump’s return to office, his pardoning of the rioters, and the firings and demotions of prosecutors and FBI agents who handled their cases, this is effectively the position of the United States government.

Given those dynamics — and the president’s willingness to promote any lie, no matter how far-fetched, as long as it fits his biases — false claims supporting the narrative of January 6 as an “inside job” can spread with alarming speed.

Late on September 25, right-wing journalist John Solomon’s Just the News outlet published a story with the headline “FBI Bombshell: 274 agents sent to Capitol for J6, many later complained they were political ‘pawns.’”

“The FBI secretly deployed more than 250 plainclothes agents to the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, an operation so disorganized it unleashed searing frustrations among many of the FBI's rank-and-file that the bureau had lost its core competencies to ‘wokeness’ and allowed its employees to become ‘pawns in a political war,’ according to an after-action report kept from the public for more than four years,” Solomon and Steven Richards wrote in the article’s first paragraph.

Solomon and Richards did not reveal until the story’s 11th paragraph that the agents had been deployed “after the violence started.” The pair lifted up complaints from FBI agents that in an emergency situation — in which thousands of people had laid siege to the U.S. Capitol, assaulting scores of law enforcement officers and threatening the safety of the entirety of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, as well as Vice President Mike Pence, who were assembled to count the electoral votes — those agents had been hurriedly assigned riot control duties even if they lacked training and gear for that purpose.

Solomon and JustTheNews both shared the story on X using the text of the headline. And right-wing conspiracy theorists quickly responded by assuming that the report fit their assumption that January 6 was a false flag operation.

Retired Gen. Mike Flynn, who served briefly as Trump’s national security adviser during his first term, said of the story: “The question this begs is; was there sedition or conspiracy committed on the part of the DOJ & FBI at the time?”

“You don’t just have 274 FBI agents or employees show up to execute this massive of a ‘fedsurrection.’ This required foreknowledge (intent),” he added.

MAGA poster Bill Mitchell likewise claimed that the FBI agents had been “infiltrators.”

Trump himself quickly adopted this misreading of the JustTheNews report. He posted to a Truth Social midday on September 27 that “it was just revealed that the FBI had secretly placed… 274 FBI Agents into the Crowd just prior to, and during, the January 6th Hoax.” He added that the reporting showed that “FBI Agents were at, and in, the January 6th Protest, probably acting as Agitators and Insurrectionists, but certainly not as ‘Law Enforcement Officials,’” and demanded the identities of the FBI agents involved.

Trump’s post brought a new wave of right-wing conspiracymongering over the report, with various MAGA figures claiming that it showed there had been a “Fedsurrection” in which FBI agents acted as “provocateurs.”

FBI Director Kash Patel stepped in to try to tamp down the situation. Without admitting that Trump was wrong, he said in a statement to Fox News Digital that “Agents were sent into a crowd control mission after the riot was declared by Metro Police – something that goes against FBI standards,” for which he blamed “corrupt leadership.”

Faced with the same situation, presumably Patel would have allowed the January 6 insurrection to proceed, rather than violating standards by sending FBI agents to quell it?

By Sunday morning, the false claim about the FBI agents had been thoroughly baked into mainstream GOP discourse.

When CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) whether rule of law applies “to people who stormed the Capitol on January 6,” Johnson replied, “I’m glad you brought that up,” citing “new information over the last couple of days” about how “there were 274 FBI agents in the crowd on January 6.”

Tapper quickly cut him off, saying that according to Patel, “They were sent there to do crowd control because of everything that was going on. They weren’t — it wasn't a false flag operation, as President Trump suggested.”

But Johnson, who was among the members of Congress evacuated to a secure location during the riots, replied, “Well, Jake, wait a minute. Hold on, Jake. How do you know that? Right? There's a lot of questions.”

He added: “There's videos, and it's always been disputed, what involvement some of those persons engaged in, what involvement they had. Did they spur on the crowd? Did they open the gates to allow them in? I don't know. These are questions. But they should be answered.”

Johnson went on to say that a House subcommittee newly established to reinvestigate the attack would get to the bottom of the situation.

The campaign by the Trump administration and MAGA media in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination to depict political violence as purely a phenomenon of the left raises some obvious questions, among them, “What about January 6?” A pro-Trump mob, summoned to Washington, D.C., by the president and incited by his calls for them to “fight,” descending on the U.S. Capitol and assaulting numerous law enforcement officers while sending Congress into hiding would surely seem to qualify.

The answer is that on the right, the January 6 rioters have been reimagined as the good guys.

//

  1. ### January 6 and the people who knew better

01/06/25 2:12 PM EST

  1. ### The right’s propaganda machine gets its Jan. 6 pardons

01/20/25 7:59 PM EST

  1. ### Sean Hannity once celebrated the FBI “rank and file.” Now he’s touting Trump’s purge.

02/05/2

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9 25 just the news

Also appearing will be Darin Selnick, former Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Dan Caldwell, former Senior Adviser to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth; Adam Guillette, President, Accuracy in Media; and Marc Morano, Publisher, ClimateDepot.com

The show runs weekdays at 6 p.m. EST and may be live-streamed on the Real America's Voice Network.

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gmail 8 25

Marc Morano says Trump admin has made lasting changes to energy regulations

Just The News

Trump 2.0 has blown Trump 1.0 out of the water when it comes to climate, energy, and environment regulations!”: Marc Morano details how the Trump ...

Biden's Green Energy Darlings Fear Getting Walloped By The Weather – IJR

Independent Journal Review

Marc Morano, author and the head of Climate Depot told the DCNF. “What do these formerly heavily subsidized tax dollars 'green' energy sources ...

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RWW

04/23/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

President Trump’s nominee for D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, and Donald Trump’s Department of Justice more broadly, are taking cues from right-wing influencers — allowing some of the loudest media figures on the right to influence significant decisions, including who gets fired from the DOJ and who and what gets investigated.

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Trump’s nominee for D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, and Donald Trump’s Department of Justice more broadly, are taking cues from right-wing influencers — allowing some of the loudest media figures on the right to influence significant decisions, including who gets fired from the DOJ and who and what gets investigated.

It’s the latest way in which Trump’s DOJ has shirked its duty to uphold even the appearance of independence from the White House, and from Trump’s allies and friends in the right-wing social media sphere who have their own political agendas.

“It’s unprecedented for government officials to take direction or suggestions from highly polarized people and act on it within our government, especially when we’re talking about the DOJ,” Wendy Via, president and co-founder of The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said in an interview with TPM. “It eradicates all the DOJ is supposed to be — independent, for justice.”

Most recently, Martin — who has been serving in the role to which he was nominated in an acting capacity since January — targeted a former DOJ prosecutor who was a part of Special Counsel Robert Muller’s team, Aaron Zelinsky, with a letter alleging Zelinsky had somehow intentionally “sent an innocent man to jail.” The most striking part of the letter, though, was that a section of it was pulled directly, without attribution, from an old article on a website run by investigative journalist-turned-MAGA-aligned conspiracy theorist John Solomon.

As Mother Jones points out in a recent report on the letter of inquiry to Zelinsky, Martin’s letter includes a portion that appears to be fully lifted from a 2020 article from “Just the News,” a right-wing outlet started by Solomon.

Solomon started Just the News in 2020 after publishing a series of articles for The Hill highlighting claims by Trump allies who, at the time, were attempting to conjure up allegations of a corruption scheme involving Joe Biden and Ukraine — an effort that eventually led to Trump’s first impeachment in the House during his previous administration.

The April 14 letter accuses Zelinksky of making “false statements” that aided in sending “an innocent man to jail in an attempt to advance the false narrative that the campaign of a serving President had colluded with Russia to win the presidency,” according to Mother Jones‘ reporting. This is a reference to right-wing conspiracy theories that emerged around Trump ally George Papadopoulos’s prosecution.

Just The News did not respond to TPM’s request for comment.

Then in March, the White House appears to have taken a cue from right-wing political activist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, firing a career federal prosecutor in Los Angeles without reason.

The prosecutor, Adam Schleifer, had been working on a case against the founder of Fatburger, Andrew Wiederhorn, who, according to the New York Times, was a donor to political action committees that have supported Trump.

Right before Schleifer’s dismissal, though, Loomer posted on X, sharing screenshots of old posts where Schleifer had been critical of Trump. “Why is Biden holdover @AdamSchleiferNY Adam Schleifer still working for the US Attorney’s office under the new Trump administration? He is a Trump hater who has been working at the US Attorney’s office since 2021,” she wrote. “Fire him. He supported the impeachment of President Trump and said he wanted to repeal Trump’s tax plan.”

And in February of this year, Denise Cheung, who was in charge of the criminal division of the Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, resigned from her post after refusing to comply with an order from Martin to open a grand jury investigation into Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency grants. The only known evidence that Martin had to support this order for both an investigation and a potential asset freeze was a 5-minute video clip from a right-wing conspiracy theory website, Project Veritas.

The Project Veritas video clip purported to show a former Biden-era EPA employee talking about distributing climate specific funding to non-profit organizations ahead of the start of the Trump administration.

“When I explained that the quantum of evidence did not support that action, you stated that you believed that there was sufficient evidence,” wrote Cheung in her resignation letter to Martin. “As I shared with you, at this juncture, based upon the evidence I have reviewed, I still do not believe that there is sufficient evidence to issue the letter you described, including sufficient evidence to tell the bank that there is probable cause to seize the particular accounts identified.”

Via, from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, called the DOJ’s reliance on right-wing influencers and conspiracy theorists “incredibly bizarre.”

“Of all of our agencies, the DOJ, and then of course under that the FBI, are supposed to be the most independent, the least affected by politics,” she added. “When I say it’s unprecedented, I don’t even know what other words to use, because it is so antithetical to who America is.”

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YouTube let right-wing figures undermine the 2024 election results even before any votes were cast

Media Matters found at least 22 right-wing channels on YouTube that pushed election misinformation from May through August, such as baselessly claiming the 2024 contest would be “rigged” against Trump

Written by Payton Armstrong, Jack Winstanley, Noah Dowe, Ben Van Bloem & Kayla Gogarty

Published 10/31/24 mma

After rolling back its election misinformation policy last year, YouTube allowed right-wing media figures to undermine confidence in the 2024 election results even before any votes were cast, with streamers asserting that “the only way this election can be won from the left is if it's stolen,” suggesting that “illegal ballots” might be “slipped in” in Pennsylvania, and claiming that Democrats are trying “to rig and steal the election” including with an “illegal alien push.”

In December 2020, after states certified their election results, YouTube began removing content with false claims that widespread fraud had changed the outcome of the election, but the platform reversed that policy in June 2023, saying that it would “stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections.” (The decision was cheered by right-wing media.)

Over the last year, right-wing creators have exploited YouTube’s policy rollback, especially in the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election. In July, for instance, Media Matters reported that after becoming co-chair of the Republican National Committee in March, Lara Trump repeatedly engaged in election denial on her show that streams on YouTube.

Right-wing podcaster Steven Crowder even acknowledged the policy change during an August stream on the platform, saying, “Here’s another way that they try to steal this election from you. And we’re allowed to say that on YouTube now, which is great.”

New Media Matters study finds hundreds of videos on YouTube with election misinformation

According to our study, former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was the most prolific election misinformer, accounting for 77 of the 286 videos, and right-wing streamer Benny Johnson had the most videos that we observed with preroll ads.

We found that in the two months after WABC canceled Giuliani’s radio shows (May 10 through July 12), he relentlessly claimed on YouTube that the 2020 election was “stolen” and Democrats were “going to cheat” in the 2024 election. More details on these findings can be found here.

We also found Johnson pushed election misinformation in dozens of monetized YouTube videos from May through August. These videos — which each included preroll ads, paid promotions, and/or Super Chats — have earned millions of views. More details on these findings can be found here.

These claims included that the election process is “rigged” against Trump, that the legal cases against him constitute “election interference,” that Democrats want and are enabling noncitizens to vote in order to win the election, and that Kamala Harris was “illegally installed” as the Democratic nominee in a “coup” against Joe Biden.

Some examples Media Matters identified include:

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CitationFrom the June 20, 2024, video streamed on YouTube by Benny Johnson

* Donald Trump Jr.: “Democrats to me today could show up on the evening of November 5 with five billion ballots … and with a straight face, tell us it was a landslide in the freest and fairest election in the history of the world.” In an interview conducted at the Republican National Convention, Trump Jr. argued “there’s nothing they won’t do.” YouTube, [7/18/24]

CitationFrom a July 23, 2024, video uploaded to YouTube by Just the News

CitationFrom a July 18, 2024, video streamed on YouTube by StevenCrowder

Trump has faced four criminal cases. In May, a jury found Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records after the presentation of extensive dockets of evidence detailing many of his violations of New York law. In the federal election subversion case, special counsel Jack Smith recently released documents revealing some of the evidence against Trump. In the other cases, the evidence related to the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago has been well documented, and the Georgia indictment against Trump relied at least partially on public accounts of Trump asking Gov. Brian Kemp to “find 11,780 votes.”

Some examples Media Matters identified include:

CitationFrom a May 22, 2024, video uploaded to YouTube by The Article III Project

CitationFrom a June 14, 2024, video uploaded to YouTube by The Article III Project

Some examples Media Matters identified include:

CitationFrom an August 19, 2024, video streamed on YouTube by Benny Johnson

John Solomon, editor-in-chief for Just the News, claimed that “the strategy and motive of the Democrats and liberals” was to “stack the decks in blue cities and blue states and, too, of course to open the door to noncitizen voting.” YouTube, [5/15/24; Media Matters, 10/17/19]|}:

CitationFrom a July 11, 2024, video streamed on YouTube by Just the News

Video

CitationFrom a June 5, 2024, video uploaded to YouTube by The Right View with Lara Trump

CitationFrom a July 25, 2024, video uploaded to YouTube by Tucker Carlson

Some examples Media Matters identified include:

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https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/dhs-knew-5-assassination-teams-after-trump-2nd-attempt-gaetz

rep . Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., said Thursday that a senior Homeland Security Department official approached him as a whistleblower shortly before the second assassination attempt on Donald Trump's life and alleged U.S. officials are aware that five different "assassination teams" are pursuing the former president.

Gaetz told Just the NewsEditor in Chief John Solomon during an interview on the Human Events Daily television show on Real America's Voice network that he believes three of the teams are foreign inspired and two are domestic based.

Trump was the subject of a second assassination attempt over the weekend while golfing at his Palm Beach course. Secret Service engaged with an armed suspect after one agent noticed the barrel of an AK-47 protruding from the bushes where he was hiding. The suspect fled and was later apprehended. Authorities have arrested Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, and charged him with firearms violations in connection with the incident.

"I had a senior official from the Department of Homeland Security in my office before the second assassination attempt, saying that what he has assessed is that there are five known assassination teams in the United States, three inspired by other governments, two that are here, that are known domestic assassination teams," Gaetz said on "Human Events Daily."

"And with that, this individual was coming to me, concerned that the force protection around President Trump, even prior to that second assassination attempt, was not sufficient for what it needed to be, and the coordination at that level, at the dignitary protection level is like the bare minimum that we have to do to keep our presidents, our presidential candidates, safe while they're on the trail," he went on.

"Five teams that we know are targeting Trump," he clarified. "And so that raises real questions about why certain teams were being pulled off of the Trump deal detail and put on, for example, the Jill Biden detail."

"Now we don't want anything bad to happen to Jill Biden, but at the same time, the threat envelope for her was substantially different than the threat envelope around President Trump, and it would not have necessitated pulling assets away from the Trump detail for the Joe Biden detail or the John Bolton detail or any other details that were beefed up at the same time, the requests from the Trump detail and from the Trump campaign for more security, were going unanswered, frankly," he concluded.

U.S. authorities have charged a Pakistani man, Asif Merchant, with working with Iran to attempt to hire a gunman to kill Trump before Merchant was arrested on July 12, one day before the first assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pa. They have not disclosed any other plots publicly involving the former president.

Several Senate and House members who have been briefed on the two assassination attempts against Trump told Just the News on Thursday afternoon they have not been told during their briefings about five teams or plots but they are aware there are multiple Iran-inspired plots targeting multiple U.S. officials.

One senior federal law enforcement officials and one intelligence official, both speaking on condition of anonymity confirmed to Just the News that U.S. authorities have been aware of multiple plots tied to Iran or other terrorists seeking to assassinate current or former U.S. officials.

The intelligence spans several years and has led to significantly enhanced protections for figures like Trump, former President George W. Bush, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former national security advisers John Bolton and Robert O'Brien, the officials said. Most, the sources said, involve retribution for the assassination of a former top Iranian general during the Trump years.

In addition to the Merchant charges, Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab was arrested by federal agents in 2022 and later pleaded guilty to charges of exchanging money as part of an attempt to illegally smuggle Iraqi foreign nationals via the Mexican border into the U.S. to assassinate Bush, America's 43rd president.

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rww 7 24

In an interview promoting the mandate with Just the News, Walters claimed that :“the radical left” has “weaponized the school system against the Bible” and “turned our schools into state-sponsored atheist centers.”Walters also vowed that “there will be a Bible being taught from in every classroom here in the state,” and @@host John Solomon said that Oklahoma is “a test bed for what future education is going to look like.” Just the News, [7/2/24; Real America’s Voice, Just the News No Noise, 7/2/24]}:}:

Video

CitationOn the July 2, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's *Just the News No Noise

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Fulton-County-GA-Complaint_FILED

COMPLAINT TO ENFORCE COMPLIANCE WITH THE GEORGIA OPEN RECORDS ACT Plaintiff Bentley Media Group files this Complaint to ensure that the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office provides public access to documents in accordance with the Georgia Open Records Act, O.C.G.A. §§ 50-18-70 et seq. PARTIES 1. The Plaintiff, Bentley Media Group, operates “Just The News” (“JTN”), a web-based news organization with adjacent television and podcast operations. John Solomon is JTN’s Chief Executive Officer and Editor in Chief. He is an award-winning investigative journalist, author, and digital media entrepreneur who has reported for The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, and The Hill. JTN’s website may be found at https://justthenews.com. JTN has consistently reported on criminal investigations and trials of national significance.

...

iii. Order the Defendant to comply with the Plaintiff’s request pursuant to the Georgia Open Records Act and to provide any applicable records; iv. Grant the Plaintiff reasonable attorney’s fees and costs incurred in filing this action; and v. Provide such further relief as this Court deems just and proper. Dated: February 21, 2024

Respectfully submitted, /s/ Gene P. Hamilton Gene P. Hamilton Georgia Bar No. 516201 Michael Ding* DC Bar No. 1027252 AMERICA FIRST LEGAL FOUNDATION 611 Pennsylvania Avenue SE #231 Washington, DC 20003 Email: gene.hamilton@aflegal.org Attorneys for Plaintiff *Application for admission pro hac vice forthcoming

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On Steve Bannon's show John Solomon calls the Republican National Committee “a cancer” | Media Matters for America

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The Heritage Foundation uses fringe right-wing media to promote itself as it struggles to stave off competitors

The conservative think tank once defined conservative politics. Now Heritage is turning to the right-wing fringe in an attempt to recapture its glory days.

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 11/03/23

The right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation has increasingly used fringe, extremist media outlets to spread its message as it struggles to maintain its central position in the conservative movement. Its staff and fellows have appeared on the conspiracy theory network Infowars, on the show of a Hitler-praising antisemite, and on MAGA-aligned fringe programs defined by their nativism and commitment to spreading disinformation — all while Heritage fights to keep its spot atop the conservative policy world.

Founded in 1973, Heritage took center stage in the conservative movement in the following decade during the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Since then it has consistently been one of the most cited think tanks in the country. It also has a long history of pushing right-wing ideas, including denying the reality of climate change, opposing LGBTQ rights, and promoting for-profit prisons and harsher sentences throughout the 1980s and ‘90s.

Heritage’s role in determining policy has historically extended beyond just the Republican Party. It helped to shape what became known as welfare reform under former President Bill Clinton, causing deep and extreme poverty to skyrocket. Heritage also popularized the idea of including an individual mandate in health insurance reform, first during Mitt Romney’s time as governor of Massachusetts and later during debate over the Affordable Care Act.

The think tank saw its stock rise during former President Donald Trump’s time in office, but since his loss in 2020 it has faced stiff competition from new organizations looking to define and control the messaging and policy of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. Still, with revenue of at least $102 million as of 2021 — significantly more than similar organizations like the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute — it's still a major force in conservative politics.

Heritage is a longtime sponsor of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, and it’s organizing a massive effort to staff the next Republican administration. Its more than 115 fellows and employees are often cited as subject experts in mainstream media outlets, and they show up acrosscablenewschannels as well. Heritage also acts as a publisher of faux-intellectualpolicy papers — the thrust of which are often later debunked — as well as more broadly targeted op-eds and social media content.

For as much as Heritage attempts to present itself as respectable, the presidency of Joe Biden appears to have ushered in a new era at the organization as its personnel increasingly appear on fringe, extreme right-wing programs. As Media Matters has previously reported, Tom Homan — a Heritage visiting fellow and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — appeared on a Hitler-praising antisemite’s show and pushed the racist “great replacement” theory. Media Matters also reported that Heritage research fellow Peter St Onge recently appeared on Alex Jones’ Infowars network and repeated a debunked conspiracy theory that falsely claims the Department of Justice designated conservative parents at school board meetings as domestic terrorists.

One recent example shows how Heritage seeds radical ideas in far-right media, creating its own content to further amplify its messages. On October 18, Lora Ries, the director of Heritage’s Border Security and Immigration Center, published an op-ed at The Daily Signal (a media outlet run by Heritage) opposing Palestinian refugee resettlement to the United States. This issue is largely a moot point, as Israel — with the help of Egypt — has maintained a complete siege of Gaza. Even if Palestinians in Gaza were allowed to leave in large numbers, many are reasonably fearful that they will never be allowed to return and would face the prospect of a second Nakba, the term for the forced dislocation of roughly 750,000 Palestinians in 1948.

“To import a population of pro-Hamas Palestinians would be certain suicide for Americans,” Ries wrote, adding, “This population has no interest in assimilating into American culture and governance, or in expressing loyalty to America or American allies.”

Heritage then turned the piece into avideo for X (formerly known as Twitter), which was subsequently roundly criticized. (Heritage later removed the video from X.)

Ries has spread anti-immigrant messaging more generally on Just the News, hosted by John Solomon, a conservative writer with a history of spreading false information; One America News, a far-right Fox News competitor; and No Spin News, hosted by disgraced former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly.

The immigration center Ries runs at Heritage also lists Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, as a visiting fellow. Like Ries, Morgan has been a guest on Solomon’s show — he went on to implicitly demonize Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities by suggesting they are harboring terrorists — and fearmongered about migration levels with Sebastian Gorka. (In addition to his perch at Heritage, Morgan is also a senior fellow at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as a hate group.)

Morgan has also appeared on War Room, the podcast of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and a hotbed of anti-migrant demonization and election denialism — and Heritage personnel. In addition to Morgan, Bannon has also hosted Heritage President Kevin Roberts; distinguished fellow in economics Stephen Moore (for an episode titled “Stolen Elections Have Consequences”); and research fellow E.J. Antoni, among others.

Where Bannon is the standard-bearer for Trump-style nativism, Heritage fellows have found a receptive audience among the more explicitly Christian right as well (Bannon’s occasional ecclesiastical rants notwithstanding). Roberts and Antoni have both also been guests on The Charlie Kirk Show, whose host has increasingly embraced Christian fundamentalism. Moore — the economics fellow — has been on Huckabee on TBN, and Heritage senior legal fellow Sarah Parshall Perry has appeared on Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, both of which are televangelist programs.

One of Heritage’s most active figures is Hans von Spakovsky, who manages the think tank’s election law reform initiative, which in reality means he spreads myths about voter fraud that have been debunked and discredited. He has appeared numerous times on Fox News, One America News, and streaming programs including The Dan Bongino Show, Just the News, and America First with Sebastian Gorka. On April 28, 2022, Von Spakovsky appeared on the The Jenna Ellis Show “to discuss election litigation”; on October 24, 2023, Ellis pleaded guilty to one felony count for her role in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Heritage no longer dominates the conservative policy world the way it once did, but its deep pockets and long history means it still wields considerable influence. Yet by all appearances, Heritage has fully embraced the far-right fringe of the movement it attempts to define, further delegitimizing itself in the process.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/anatomy-smear-campaign-how-right-wing-media-neutralized-pentagon-effort-address-white

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Anatomy of a smear campaign: How right-wing media neutralized a Pentagon effort to address white supremacy in the military

Right-wing media smeared the Pentagon official mitigating white supremacy in the military. Now his unit has been abandoned.

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 05/25/23

Right-wing media outlets and personalities leveled repeated attacks against a modest Pentagon initiative created in 2021 to address high levels of white supremacy in the military, ultimately neutralizing the effort and leading to the unit’s abandonment. The conservative campaign was directed atmilitary veteran Bishop Garrison, who led the Countering Extremism Working Group, which has now “vanished virtually without a trace,” according to a recent report from CNN.

Garrison was tasked with identifying and addressing the type of extremist views that would be later espoused by Jack Teixeira, who recently stole and leaked a trove of classified information to impress his private online community. Teixeira, currently in custody and potentially facing a 25-year sentence, reportedly believed that the United States was heading toward a “race war” that would pit white people against racial and ethnic minorities and LGBTQ people.

CNN reports:

As the Pentagon grapples with the aftermath of the leak, the working group’s stated objectives look eerily prescient, and, in some cases, tailor-made to zero-in on the sort of anti-government, White supremacist behavior and views espoused by Teixeira.

CNN interviews with multiple sources familiar with the working group reveal that the Pentagon largely abandoned the effort to combat extremism in its ranks, as senior officials folded under political pressure from Republicans who lashed out at the initiative as an example of so-called wokeism in the military.

The U.S. military has a long history of white supremacism in the ranks, including among veterans who have started or joined far-right terrorist groups after their service. More than 80 people charged with participating in the January 6 insurrection had ties to the military, primarily as former service members, according to CBS News.

The apparently successful right-wing effort to sideline Bishop’s group follows the standard conservative playbook of smearing Democratic government officials who are Black, LGBTQ, Muslim, or from other marginalized groups as internal enemies, and it will also likely serve as a template for future, similar campaigns. Right-wing media outlets have spent months convincing their consumers that the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the IRS are persecuting conservatives, with the clear aim of operationalizing these federal agencies against these media figures’ opponents — exactly what they wrongly accuse the Biden administration of doing. This programming dovetails exactly with Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, which claims to be exposing a governmentwide conspiracy to throttle conservative activists and ideas. The committee has so far failed on its own terms, but Jordan remains undeterred.

Anatomy of a smear campaign

On February 16, 2021, Garrison was appointed to a newly created role to advise Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on how to reduce and mitigate the threat of white supremacy in the U.S. military. The announcement went largely unremarked upon in both mainstream and conservative media for several weeks.

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Then on May 5, conservative website Revolver published a story headlined “Meet Bishop Garrison: The Pentagon’s Hatchet Man in Charge of Purging MAGA Patriots and Installing Race Theory in The Military.” The site's founder, Darren Beattie, tweeted the piece out, highlighting the quote “​​The Biden administration has just put the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi in charge of vetting the entire U.S. military." (Beattie was fired from the Trump administration in 2018 after CNN discovered that he had attended a white nationalist conference two years prior.)

The following day, Fox News Primetime’s host Pete Hegseth devoted a segment to Garrison’s appointment,describing Garrison’s effort as “a purge, a purge of the Defense Department led by a new, and now powerful, radical leftist, a 1619 Project activist, a hardcore social justice Democrat, a man who believes all Trump supporters are racist and extremists."

Video

CitationFrom the May 6, 2021, edition of Fox News' Fox News Primetime

Hegseth then referred to Garrison as “the Pentagon's newly minted MAGA purge man” and cribbed Revolver’s line nearly verbatim but without attribution.

“How do I put this?” Hegseth asked. “The White House just put the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, in charge of vetting the entire U.S. military, past, present, and future."

A day later, Beattie appeared on Hegseth’s program to discuss Revolver’s piece, which largely consisted of Garrison’s tweets and other writings and social media posts.

Video

CitationFrom the May 7, 2021, edition of Fox News' Fox News Primetime

Beattie framed the issue by calling Garrison’s working group an example of “the most disturbing trend in American politics,” which is “that increasing swathes of our own national security apparatus have been repurposed and redeployed domestically against American citizens.”

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Days later, conservative media websiteJust the News published a story that highlighted Hegseth’s comments from his initial segment.

On May 13, Revolver published another piece on Garrison with the factually incorrect headline “‘Free Speech Is A Digital Black Plague’: Bishop Garrison is Key Mercenary in Biden’s Dark War Against The First Amendment.”

Despite the quotation marks in the headline, the piece doesn’t include any evidence that Garrison wrote or spoke that exact phrase. Instead, the piece links to an op-ed Garrison published about the dangers of ideological polarization in news consumption leading to the spread of bad information, a fitting if ironic topic given Revolver’s mischaracterization of his stance. It’s true he described what he characterized as partisan echo chambers as a “digital black plague” that poses a danger to social cohesion, a relatively pedestrian observation common among mainstream commentators.   

The next day, Beattie appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast to discuss Garrison’s purview more broadly.

Video

CitationFrom the May 14, 2021, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Underscoring the siloed, self-perpetuating conservative media echo chamber, Bannon introduced the topic by claiming, “I’m seeing it everywhere — Just the News has got it, the great Pete Hegseth had it, then he had a second night with you on it,” before asking Beattie for an update.

Beattie then recycled his website’s misleading framing with a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, substituting Garrison’s actual point about information silos with the false claim that he opposed free speech protections more broadly.

Beattie described Garrison’s purported role “in the Biden administration’s dark war on the First Amendment. We’ve uncovered a article of his calling, basically, the free speech digital environment that would include War Room, that would include Revolver, but also in his words includes the Sinclair Network and Fox, as a ‘digital black plague’ — those are his words to describe the digital free speech environment that enables the American people to see narratives that oppose the official narratives on COVID, on the election, and now on [the insurrection of] 1/6.”

One day later, Fox News’ Jesse Watters picked up the story, interviewing Hegsethabout Beattie’s reporting, adding another link in the human-centipede-esque food chain of bad information.

Video

CitationFrom the May 15, 2021, edition of Fox News' Watters' World

Watters introduced Garrison as being “in charge of bringing critical race theory into our Armed Forces,” adding, “They’re calling him the Pentagon's hatchet man because his job is to purge patriots from the ranks.”

“This is about, Jesse, as scary as it gets,” Hegseth responded. “I mean, really this is, this truly is a purge of patriots. They're using January 6 as the ultimate justification.”

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Two days later, former Fox News marquee star Tucker Carlsondiscussed Garrison on his prime-time show. 

Video

CitationFrom the May 17, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Carlson referenced Revolver’s posts before characterizing Garrison as “an activist type” and “a lunatic.”

“Now — and this is the point — he is one of the most powerful officials in the U.S. military,” Carlson added. “Democrats in Congress are thrilled as they watch this. Their party now has all the tanks and drones.”

The campaign against Garrison continued at that pace for weeks, misleading framing and bad information congealing into an impenetrable narrative of conservative persecution. Beattie returned to War Room, right-wing Epoch TV covered the story, Carlson aired another segment on it, and Hegseth continued to beat the drum on Fox News.

As late as October 2022, Beattie referenced Garrison on War Room as an antecedent to a supposedly even more “outrageous” Pentagon commission on recommending changes to military bases named after members of the Confederacy. 

Taken as a whole, this process clearly demonstrates how right-wing media will vigorously oppose efforts to mitigate widespread white supremacy and later defend the subsequent, predictable outcomes that ideology and set of power relations produces. As but one example, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson defended Teixeira’s actions by misleadingly casting him as a whistleblower when in fact there is no reporting to suggest he ever meant for the information he stole to be made publicly available. The fact that Teixeira’s bigoted beliefs went unnoticed and undisciplined by the military is a feature, not a bug, of this dynamic.   

There are fair criticisms to be made about the larger White House initiative, such as asking what it would mean to root out white supremacy from an institution that has been at the forefront of U.S. empire expansion, directed primarily at nonwhite populations, since at least the Mexican-American War. Needless to say, conservatives were making the exact opposite critique, arguing that attempts to decrease the spread of white supremacist beliefs among service members are inherently illegitimate.

That the boilerplate backlash was successful despite being led by such mediocrities as Pete Hegseth and Darren Beattie — whom Bannon recently derided as a man-child— does not speak particularly well of the Biden administration. It also suggests that these demonization campaigns can potentially succeed absent any shimmering talent leading the charge, instead relying on mid-level functionaries in the larger conservative ecosystem repeatedly hammering the point home.

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Right-wing media outlets and personalities leveled repeated attacks against a modest Pentagon initiative created in 2021 to address high levels of white supremacy in the military, ultimately neutralizing the effort and leading to the unit’s abandonment. The conservative campaign was directed at military veteran Bishop Garrison, who led the Countering Extremism Working Group, which has now “vanished virtually without a trace,” according to a recent report from CNN.

Garrison was tasked with identifying and addressing the type of extremist views that would be later espoused by Jack Teixeira, who recently stole and leaked a trove of classified information to impress his private online community. Teixeira, currently in custody and potentially facing a 25-year sentence, reportedly believed that the United States was heading toward a “race war” that would pit white people against racial and ethnic minorities and LGBTQ people.

CNN reports:

As the Pentagon grapples with the aftermath of the leak, the working group’s stated objectives look eerily prescient, and, in some cases, tailor-made to zero-in on the sort of anti-government, White supremacist behavior and views espoused by Teixeira.

CNN interviews with multiple sources familiar with the working group reveal that the Pentagon largely abandoned the effort to combat extremism in its ranks, as senior officials folded under political pressure from Republicans who lashed out at the initiative as an example of so-called wokeism in the military.

The U.S. military has a long history of white supremacism in the ranks, including among veterans who have started or joined far-right terrorist groups after their service. More than 80 people charged with participating in the January 6 insurrection had ties to the military, primarily as former service members, according to CBS News.

The apparently successful right-wing effort to sideline Bishop’s group follows the standard conservative playbook of smearing Democratic government officials who are Black, LGBTQ, Muslim, or from other marginalized groups as internal enemies, and it will also likely serve as a template for future, similar campaigns. Right-wing media outlets have spent months convincing their consumers that the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the IRS are persecuting conservatives, with the clear aim of operationalizing these federal agencies against these media figures’ opponents — exactly what they wrongly accuse the Biden administration of doing. This programming dovetails exactly with Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, which claims to be exposing a governmentwide conspiracy to throttle conservative activists and ideas. The committee has so far failed on its own terms, but Jordan remains undeterred.

Anatomy of a smear campaign

On February 16, 2021, Garrison was appointed to a newly created role to advise Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on how to reduce and mitigate the threat of white supremacy in the U.S. military. The announcement went largely unremarked upon in both mainstream and conservative media for several weeks.

Then on May 5, conservative website Revolver published a story headlined “Meet Bishop Garrison: The Pentagon’s Hatchet Man in Charge of Purging MAGA Patriots and Installing Race Theory in The Military.” The site's founder, Darren Beattie, tweeted the piece out, highlighting the quote “​​The Biden administration has just put the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi in charge of vetting the entire U.S. military." (Beattie was fired from the Trump administration in 2018 after CNN discovered that he had attended a white nationalist conference two years prior.)

The following day, Fox News Primetime’s host Pete Hegseth devoted a segment to Garrison’s appointment, describing Garrison’s effort as “a purge, a purge of the Defense Department led by a new, and now powerful, radical leftist, a 1619 Project activist, a hardcore social justice Democrat, a man who believes all Trump supporters are racist and extremists."...

beattie framed the issue by calling Garrison’s working group an example of “the most disturbing trend in American politics,” which is “that increasing swathes of our own national security apparatus have been repurposed and redeployed domestically against American citizens.”

Days later, conservative media website Just the News published a story that highlighted Hegseth’s comments from his initial segment.

On May 13, Revolver published another piece on Garrison with the factually incorrect headline “‘Free Speech Is A Digital Black Plague’: Bishop Garrison is Key Mercenary in Biden’s Dark War Against The First Amendment.”

Despite the quotation marks in the headline, the piece doesn’t include any evidence that Garrison wrote or spoke that exact phrase. Instead, the piece links to an op-ed Garrison published about the dangers of ideological polarization in news consumption leading to the spread of bad information, a fitting if ironic topic given Revolver’s mischaracterization of his stance. It’s true he described what he characterized as partisan echo chambers as a “digital black plague” that poses a danger to social cohesion, a relatively pedestrian observation common among mainstream commentators.

The next day, Beattie appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast to discuss Garrison’s purview more broadly...

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The week between Christmas and New Year’s tends to be a somewhat quiet news cycle, as people celebrate and rest through the holidays. But the conservative audience’s hunger for outrage demands feeding, leaving right-wing media desperate for scraps as several outlets harped on a singular tweet from theCenters for Disease Controland Prevention to manufacture a scandal over LGBTQ-inclusive education policies.

On December 27, the Twitter account for the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health promoted a document titled “LGBTQ Inclusivity in Schools: A Self-Assessment Tool.” Published in October 2020, it is a voluntary guide for school administrators, educators and health staff to scope out their own strengths and weaknesses in serving their LGBTQ students.

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several right-wing outlets took offense to this message, consistent with the ongoing conservative campaign to demonize LGBTQ students, teachers, and allies. An article from Blaze Media took a swipe at the CDC’s role in promoting the assessment, with language that echoed harmful and debunked social contagion rhetoric suggesting youth are being pressured by their peers into becoming transgender.

“As its name suggests, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is tasked with preventing the spread of diseases,” the December 29, 2022 article noted. “One CDC division is, however, working to help facilitate the spread of LGBT activists' radical social agenda in schools.”

All too eager to dogpile over a single tweet promoting the two-year-old guide, a few right-wing outlets incorrectly reported the document as new.

The Daily Wire’s December 31 article was headlined “CDC Promotes New Tool To Increase Schools’ Acceptance Of Gender Ideology,” while PJ Media’s December 30 headline warned of “The CDC's Radical Plans for Your Children.” While both outlets were incorrect about the timing of the document, PJ Media made perhaps the most egregious error by outright claiming the guidance was “released mere days after Christmas.”

The outlet also went on to say the tool was really for “assessing how brainwashed educators are by the transgender cult.”

The Published Reporter,a South Florida-based outlet known for having its Facebook ads about the “Plandemic” documentary removed, repeatedly called the guidance a “new tool” developed by the Biden administration, despite the document being published before the 2020 election.

Breitbart and Just the News did not address the age of the document at all, leading readers to assume this guidance was new.

Worse yet, American Greatness combined its vagueness about the original publication date with doubt about whether the CDC’s guidance is really optional, playing into the idea that the guide’s inclusive policy suggestions could soon be federally enforced — a notion with little to stand on if the original publication date of the document was explained.

Citing Breitbart, the article claimed the CDC “has been forcing teachers across the country to follow certain guidelines demonstrating their commitment to ‘LGBTQ inclusivity’ in their classroom instructions.”

The Breitbart article used the same fearmongering tactic, saying, “While the CDC says the guide is not mandatory at a national level, it appears entirely possible that a school administrator could make it mandatory for their school.”

Right-wing organizations are picking up on this false narrative, too.

The Herzog Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to “the development of quality Christ-centered K-12 education,” published an article on January 4 titled “CDC announces new disease: conservatism.” The piece, which also incorrectly dated the document, bemoaned that the guidance did not align with the CDC’s goal of eradicating disease, “unless the disease in question is conservative values. In that case, the CDC is certainly doing its part to eradicate it.”

Moms for Liberty is a conservative “parental rights” group that has been behind campaigns against LGBTQ representation and so-called critical race theory in schools. On Twitter, the group also attacked the CDC guidance:...[libs of]

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